《TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING》全部章節：第 291 章 - 第 300 章

EMBER’S POVThat’s the thought I leave the medical wing with. It follows me through the great, cold halls of a house I still don’t know my way around.More or less by accident, I find a set of glass doors and push through them, stepping out into a grey morning and a wide frozen lawn that drops away toward the tree line.I need air. I need to think.I need to figure out how a woman reaches a thing that lives inside her own chest and refuses to come when called, and I’m so deep in it that I’m halfway across the lawn before I register the sound.The sharp, unmistakable blast of a gunshot rings out.Then another.Hale is standing at the edge of the lawn where it meets the trees. An open shotgun rests across her forearm.She loads the shells with the unbothered competence of a woman who’s done it ten thousand times. At her feet is a small heap of something I don’t let myself look at directly yet.“There you are,” she calls, bright as anything. “Come keep me company. It’s dull, shooting alo

EMBER’S POVThe dove’s beak snaps open, and it lets out a painful, hawking shriek—a wet, bubbling rasp of pure agony that no bird should be able to make.I try to drop it, but I can’t let go. My fingers are paralysed, locked around it by the sheer force of the gold.The air scorches, thick with the smell of burnt ozone and roasting feathers. The dead grass around my knees bursts into smoking flames.I am pouring my life out into a dead thing, and the pressure is literally shaking it apart, its hollow bones cracking and pulverising as it twists into a shape that should not exist.“EMBER.”The roar of the world crashes back over me.Knox hits me from behind, his large hands clamping over my glowing ones.He flinches violently at the blistering heat of my skin, but he refuses to let go. He crushes his chest against my back, grounding me just like he did in the storage room.“Let it go. Ember, drop it. Drop it right now. Come back to me. Follow me back—”He uses the bond.It’s a desperate

EMBER’S POVI don’t trust the tea.That is the first thing I want on record. A woman who shoots fragile things out of the air for sport, who looks at a dying animal and feels absolutely nothing, is not someone I am ever going to trust.Hale presses a warm cup into my hands and steers me to a chair by the fire, clucking over the blood on my face like a woman who actually cares. I sit, and I hold the cup, and I watch her over the rim of it the way you watch a snake.“You don’t have to drink it,” she says. “I can see you looking at it like it’ll bite you. It’s only chamomile and a few things my grandmother swore by. Smell it, if you don’t believe me.” She settles into the chair across from me, unbothered, tucking her feet up. “I’m not offended. People have always been suspicious of me. I’m used to it. It’s the face, I think. I’ve got a face that makes people feel watched.”It is exactly the kind of disarming thing a dangerous person says. It is a flawless, calculated piece of manipulatio

EMBER’S POVI picture her, despite the hairs raising on my arm and the strangest shift in the air, like wind picking up in a window-shut room.But I remind myself to keep my eyes fixed on chasing Sapphire, pulling at the thread between us, centring the one person that could answer my questions.And it works.That’s the thing.It works, and it works fast, faster than anything has worked before, and I have one bright cold second to think ‘that’s wrong, it shouldn’t work this fast’ before the room behind my eyes goes dark.And Sapphire’s face hangs in the dark like a candle, and I’m walking toward it.The floor of the room drops away under me, and suddenly, I’m somewhere else entirely.I’ve been to the still place once before, the night I first felt Sapphire stir.It started as a silver dream and opened into a kitchen — warm morning light, yellow curtains moving in a breeze I couldn’t feel, everywhere that impossible clean sunlight.Somewhere safe. Somewhere that felt like the inside of

EMBER’S POVIt hits the oldest wound I have, the one that says you are nothing on your own, you have always been nothing on your own, you survive only by attaching yourself to someone stronger.And the fact that it’s true- the fact that the only reason I’m not dead in that storage room is that Knox reached through the bond and pulled me back- makes it so much worse.“That’s not fair,” I say, and my voice shakes.“Fair.” She laughs, and it’s a terrible sound, all edges. “You are the second person in my lifetime to say that word to me, through that same trembling little mouth. I have no use for fair. I have use for STRONG. Harden your mind. Harden your body. Stop reaching for me with your grief and your panic and your bleeding-heart need to save every dying thing you trip over. Become a vessel worth the wine, and perhaps — PERHAPS — I will consider pouring myself into you for something other than your own survival. Until then? Stop calling. I am tired of being summoned by a girl who wee