TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 251 - チャプター 260

KNOX’S POVEmber sleeps for an hour in the hospital chair beside Maurice’s bed with her hand wrapped around his on the blanket and her face finally, mercifully slack in a way that tells me her body has overruled her brain and forced a shutdown.I watch her for a while. The rise and fall of her breathing, the way her fingers stay curled around Maurice’s even in sleep, the smudge of dried blood she missed on her jaw.She sleeps the way she does everything — completely, without half-measures, surrendered to it in a way that makes me want to build a wall around this room and post guards and let her stay here until her body decides it’s had enough rest, which, based on the last seventy-two hours, would be approximately next week.But the flash drive is still waiting, and every hour it exists is an hour I spend carrying a weight I’m ready to put down.I almost leave alone.I consider letting her sleep in that chair with Maurice’s hand in hers, knowing Queenie is curled up safely down the ha

KNOX’S POVI press my lips to her knuckles again because once wasn’t enough.“So no, I’m not going to stop loving you when life gets easier. I’m going to love you when it’s boring and quiet, and nothing is on fire, and I’m going to love you when you’re annoyed with me because I’ve left my shoes in the hallway AGAIN, and I’m going to love you on Tuesday nights on the couch when neither of us has anything to say and the silence is just silence and not a crisis. I’m going to love you in every version of our life that exists, including the ones where absolutely nothing interesting is happening, and you’re going to get sick of hearing it, and I’m going to say it anyway.”She doesn’t respond immediately.Her mouth opens and closes and opens again, and nothing comes out, which is a first for a woman who has had a comeback for everything I’ve thrown at her since the day we met.Her eyes are filling, and her chin is doing the trembling thing she hates because she thinks it makes her look weak.

KNOX’S POVThe dead man’s trigger first. I enter Logan’s code into the server interface — the alphanumeric sequence, exactly as he recited it in the storage room with that smile I still can’t decode.The system prompts for confirmation. I confirm. The screen flashes once, a progress bar runs, and then a single line of text:DISTRIBUTION PROTOCOL DEACTIVATED. TRIGGER OFFLINE.The kill switch is dead.Ember exhales beside me. I didn’t realise she’d been holding her breath.I pull out the diagnostic device Nathaniel gave me.Military-grade, designed for intelligence operations — it scans for duplication signatures, verifies whether data has been copied or transferred to external devices, and confirms whether the physical drive is the original or a clone.I plug it in, and the scan takes four minutes while Ember stands beside me with her arms crossed, tracking the progress bar with sharp, untrusting focus.She has been burned by half-measures before, and she refuses to look away until it

EMBER’S POVThe hot spring is exactly where the sign said it would be — a natural thermal pool set into a rocky clearing off the highway, steam rising from the surface into the frozen air, the water glowing faintly blue-green from the mineral content.It’s deserted because it’s two in the morning and sane people are sleeping, and we are not sane people and have not been sane people for some time.I strip off Knox’s jacket and the borrowed hospital scrubs and walk into the water in my underwear, and the sound I make when the heat hits my body is embarrassing and involuntary, and I don’t care.The warmth wraps around my legs and my hips and my waist and crawls up my ribs, and every muscle I’ve been clenching since the first arrow hit Maurice’s wall releases simultaneously.My body has been holding its breath for twelve hours, and this is the exhale.Knox follows me in. I watch the dark water rise over the heavy, carved muscle of his chest, sliding down the hard ridges of his abs to swal

EMBER’S POVMy stomach drops, flips, and catches fire simultaneously.I KNOW those words.I know them in my body before my brain catches up, and the memory hits me with the force of a freight train.The hotel room, the black lace, the garter belt I’d never worn before, Knox on his knees between my legs with the styling team locked on the other side of the door and my back against the wall and the count falling apart in my mouth because his tongue was doing things that made numbers feel like a foreign language.I was a different woman then. Terrified, exhilarated, wearing borrowed confidence and someone else’s lingerie.I counted down from sixty and didn’t make it past twenty-six.“You cannot be serious right now.”“I’ve never lost this game.” His thumb is tracing circles on my hip under the water, and the casual, distracted quality of the motion contrasts violently with the intensity in his eyes. “Flawless record.”“We’ve played it ONCE, Knox. One time does not constitute a record.”“