TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 472

CHAPTER 395 HER LIFE OR MINE

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CHAPTER 395: HER LIFE OR MINE

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, Devika,” Silas whispers, his voice shaking with pure, unadulterated revulsion.” Our mother was dying.”

Silas’s massive hands grip the edge of the table.

“You were mad at me? Fine! Make me the demon! Make me the monster who drove you out of our home!” His whisper snaps, breaking into a roar that shakes the gold fixtures on the walls. “But why Mother? Why do that to her when she was already in so much agonising pain? Why make her spend the very last days of her life sobbing over a missing child? Why would you do that to your own family, Devika?!”

“I’d do it a million times over,” my mother sneers, the venom dripping from every word. “I’d do it without a single second of hesitation. I did it because it was the first thing I had ever done for myself in that cursed mountain! So you can cry me a river, Silas. Goddess knows I loved our mother, but it was going to be either her life or mine. And I chose mine. I would choose myself a million times over without breaking a single fucking sweat.”

A stunned silence crashes over the room. Silas stares at her, his eyes wide and completely hollowed out, while my mother’s chest heaves with exertion.

She blinks rapidly, her furious gaze snapping to me–only to meet my cold, amused stare.

I am not horrified. I am just deeply, darkly entertained by the sheer confirmation of it. My mother really is a snake down to her absolute, rotten core.

And she was quickly losing out on the only family who has ever stayed by her side.

“By all means, Mother,” I say smoothly, gesturing to the silver scale. “Please, carry on.”

She curls her lip into a vicious sneer, trying to bite back her words.

But the magic of the house pulls at her jaw. Unable to hold back the truth, the next words are violently forced out of her mouth: “When we arrived at the east, they eventually found me,” Devika spits out. “They dragged me out of the wagons and threatened to throw me back, I wept. Quite dramatically. I threw

CCHAPTER HER LIFE OR MINE

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myself at the feet of the madam who ran the eastern serving girls. I told her my family was cruel. I told her Tny monster of a brother wanted me dead>”

“I what?” Silas breathes, his voice hollowing out into pure horror.

“-and she pitied me. She fed me, housed me, and made me one of her girls.” Devika’s smile goes feral, a predator baring its teeth. “And I repaid her by climbing over her corpse the very first chance the world gave

me.”

“H–Her corpse?”

She laughs now. “Yes, her rotten corpse. My madame was no saint, you see. I crossed the whole world to escape being nothing in the North, and I became a glorified call girl in the East. They dressed us up and sent us into the great houses and the galas to pour the wine and smile at the lords and let their hands wander, and while everyone was busy looking at our mouths and our hands-” her eyes glitter “–we were emptying their pockets. Their letters. Their secrets. Our madam didn’t run serving girls. She ran an army of elegant thieves. Every gala we worked, we came home with something that wasn’t ours, and she sold it, and we saw none of it.”

“You were stealing for her,” I say.

“I was learning for her, though I didn’t know it then.” Her chin lifts, and there’s a terrible pride in it. Everything you’re watching me do right now, Ember, every clever, cunning, ruthless thing you hate about me–I learned it in that house. Our madam made me sharp. She made me a knife.” A thin smile. “And then I used everything she taught me to cut her throat. There’s a kind of justice in that, if you look at it right.”

“There isn’t,” I say.

She ignores me. “And the whole time, through all of it, I was looking for him. Rhovan. Every eastern face at every gala, every lord who came through, I searched, I asked. I listened at doors I had no business near. Because I was still that stupid girl in the mud, certain that if I could just find him again, he’d remember, and it would all be worth it.”

Her voice hardens. “And when I finally learned who he was, it was already too late for me. I’d built my whole hope on him. Only then did I hear the gossip–that the beautiful man dripping in gold who’d taken a rogue girl to bed in a mountain wasn’t some rich merchant lord I could dream of catching. He was of the royal line. Caelora blood. And worse than that-” her jaw works–he was already owned. The Queen’s consort. Her favourite toy, in fact. A married man so far above me that I’d have been executed just for saying his name in the wrong room.”

Her face knots. “But by then it didn’t matter that I knew better. I wanted him anyway. I’d wanted him for two years. So when the madam told us we’d be serving a gala at the royal palace, and only the best girls were chosen-”

“You made sure you were one of them,” I say, reading the wicked shift in her eyes.