Semua Bab TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING: Bab 391 - Bab 400

EMBER’S POVHe crosses to his sister, slow and enormous, and he leans down until his scarred face is inches from hers, and when he speaks it’s soft, and it’s the most frightening thing I’ve heard all night.“You’ll tell her.” His dark eyes bore into her. “You’ll tell her every last thing she wants to know. Because if you don’t, sister — if you sit there and spite a girl who’s done nothing but be born to you — then you and I are finished, do you understand me? Finished for good.” His voice drops lower. “I will strip your silks. I will empty your rooms. I will put you out of this mountain with the clothes on your back and nothing else, and I will tell every rogue on this continent that Devika Black is dead to the Black line, and you will spend the rest of your miserable grasping life with no name, no house, no floor, and no family — completely, utterly alone. Which is, I think, the one thing in this world you’ve always been most afraid of.” He straightens. “So. Do you tell her willingly

EMBER’S POVI reach deep into my mind, past Knox, past Gale, past a great many memories, and I find something that brings a familiar ache back to my chest. I force my voice to remain steady when I speak.“I wager a grey afternoon with clouds gathered, and rain on the hot pavement. I was ten years old in a blue dress. The first time I’d ever worn a dress that pretty.”The scale glows bright, but does not move yet.Across the table, my mother watches it carefully, and I can see her doing the math she’s done her whole life, weighing what my truth is worth against what it costs her to bury it.Her chin comes up.She’s going to block me.“I wager my first designer dress,” my mother says, her voice hard and defensive. “The exact moment I put it on in the dressing room, and felt more alive than I had in years.”I almost smile to myself.She took the bait.I had disguised my own wager to sound like a simple, innocent memory of waiting on the porch in a pretty dress.But the house must know the

EMBER’S POVI blink up at him, entirely disoriented. I swipe a stray tear from my cheek, staring at the moisture on my fingertips in pure confusion.I try to recall what I just asked to forget. I reach into my mind, searching for the reason my face is wet, trying to grasp the edges of whatever just happened.Nothing.There is just a blank, smooth wall in my head. The images are gone. The words are gone. All that is left is an ache in the centre of my chest that I can no longer explain.“I’m fine,” I whisper, my voice shaky but solidifying as the fog clears. I gently pull Knox’s hands from my face, giving him a tight nod. “At least, I will be. Once she gives me the truth I just paid for.”I turn straight ahead, meeting Devika’s waiting, exhausted eyes.Something soft pours into her features, something dreamy and terrible, and for a breath the years fall off her, and she is not the woman who sold me to a monster.She’s a girl I have never met.“It all began,” she says, eyes drifting up

EMBER’S POV“That was when the fight happened,” Silas says now, in slow realisation.“That was the fight.” She finally meets his eyes, devoid of any mercy. “I told you everything I felt that night. That I hated this mountain. That I hated our family. That I hated the filthy legacy you loved so much. That I hated you. And you told me to fuck off, brother. You told me the mountain would run better without me wearing everyone down with my nagging.” A thin, razor-sharp smile touches her lips. “So I took you at your word.”She turns back to me. The dreaminess is entirely gone now, replaced by that cold, monstrous pride.“That night, when the mountain had gone to bed, I swept through everything my brother had saved. Every piece of gold and jewellery my mother owned. Every last coin. And when the eastern caravan rolled out at dawn, I buried myself in it, hiding under luggage and contraband all the way across the border to the Great East. The land of my dreams.”“She was on her sickbed, Devik

EMBER’S POV“Oh, but it was a trophy, Ember.” She looks at me with genuine, baffled frustration, like I’m a slow child failing an obvious sum. “I survived, did I not? That is the only trophy there has ever been. My survival. The world will teach you the way it taught me, and the world is a far crueller tutor than I ever was.”Not once have the men broken their stunned silence, watching this foul woman gloat over her own atrocities.She will burn anyone, sacrifice anything, as long as it guarantees her survival.“They saved your life!” I snap, the disgust finally boiling over into pure rage. I lean forward. “That woman pulled you out of the dirt when you had absolutely nothing! She fed you. She housed you. And you slaughtered her—and every single girl in that house—just so you could play mistress to a married man. How could you possibly live happily knowing their blood bought your bed?”Devika’s jaw hardens, but I don’t give her a second to speak.“And you call yourself clever?” I laug