Trading My Cheating Husband For The Lycan King

The shopping bag crinkles every time I shift my grip on the steering wheel, and I hate it.

I hate the sound of it. I hate what's inside it. I hate that I spent four hundred dollars on a scrap of red lace that I've been too terrified to show anyone, least of all my own husband.

Eight months. Eight months since Damien last looked at me the way a man is supposed to look at his wife. Eight months of separate sides of the bed, of I'm tired and not tonight and the particular silence that settles over a marriage like snow , quiet, and cold, and suffocating. I've catalogued every excuse. I've replayed every argument. I've done what every woman in my position does, which is find a way to make it my fault.

He's stressed. Pack business has been brutal this year. You know how Alphas get when the council pushes back.

My wolf, Luna, makes a sound in the back of my mind. It isn't quite a growl. It's more like the way she goes quiet when she doesn't trust herself to speak.

The city rolls past my windows, strings of Christmas lights bleeding through the rain-slicked glass. Christmas Eve. I chose tonight deliberately. Something about the holiday felt like permission , permission to try, to want, to hope. I even asked Damien's assistant, Petra, to let me know when he'd be home. The look on Petra's face when she told me around seven, Mrs. Vance was something I filed away without fully examining. A flicker of something. Sympathy, maybe. Or pity.

I didn't let myself examine it then. I'm not going to examine it now.

The red lingerie cost half a month's personal allowance. I stood in the boutique for forty minutes, holding two different sets, and eventually chose the one that felt most like armor , structured cups, a high-cut waist, a shade of red so deep it was almost violent. The salesgirl wrapped it in tissue paper without a word, and I carried it to my car feeling simultaneously ridiculous and desperate and more like myself than I had in months.

We don't need his approval, Luna says quietly. We never did.

"Speak for yourself," I tell her.

She doesn't answer. She rarely does, when she knows I won't hear her.

The house is lit up when I pull into the drive. Every window blazing, music drifting through the walls , something loud and low, bass-heavy, the kind of music Damien plays when he's entertaining. My hand tightens on the bag.

He said he'd be alone tonight. He said it. I heard him say it.

I let myself in through the side entrance, the one I always use when I don't want to make noise in the foyer. Old habit. Eight months of making myself smaller, quieter, less. The sound hits me before I even reach the hallway , laughter, low and male, the clink of glasses.

And then the smell.

I stop walking.

Every werewolf knows their own mate's scent the way they know their own heartbeat. And beneath that , beneath Damien's familiar cedar and amber , there is something else entirely. Something raw and animal and unmistakable. The air is thick with it, saturated.

Luna makes that sound again, the one that isn't quite a growl. This time, I understand what it means.

Don't go in there.

I go in anyway.

The living room opens wide from the hallway, all glass and pale marble and the white leather sectional Damien spent three weeks choosing. I don't process the scene all at once. My brain protects me from that, parceling out the details one at a time, as though it understands that the full image, received whole, would break something in me that couldn't be repaired.

Julian Croft first. I know his face from Pack meetings , Damien's business associate, broad-shouldered, always slightly too comfortable in whatever room he occupies. He's on the sectional with two men I don't recognize.

And Damien.

My husband.

On his knees.

The bag slips in my grip. I catch it. My fingers have gone numb.

Walk away, Luna says. Her voice is very steady. Elara. Walk away right now.

I don't walk away. I stand in the shadow of the hallway doorway, and I watch, and I feel the holiday hope I carried in from the car drain out of me like water from a cracked glass, slow at first, then all at once, until there's nothing left but the cold.

"She's completely oblivious." Damien's voice, languid, pleased with itself. "You should've seen her face last week when I said I was too tired again. Damien, are you still attracted to me?"

Julian laughs. The sound fills up the room.

"What did you tell her?"

"What I always tell her." A pause. A smirk I can hear without seeing. "That she's imagining things. That I'm just stressed." He does something with his voice then , pitches it up, softens it, turns it into a parody of a woman's voice. Damien, please. Just tell me what I'm doing wrong. Just tell me how to fix it. He laughs at his own impression. "God, she's pathetic. She bought lingerie last week, did I tell you that? I found the receipt. Four hundred dollars."

"No."

"Four hundred dollars for a body her own Alpha doesn't want to look at." He says Alpha with a particular weight, like a period at the end of a sentence. Like that settles something.

The shopping bag hits the floor.

The tissue paper tears open. Red lace spills across the marble.

Every head in the room turns.

I don't remember the drive to the airport. I remember the cold air hitting my face when I push through the front door. I remember the sound of my own breathing, ragged and loud in my ears. I remember my hands on the steering wheel, shaking so badly I have to grip it with both fists just to hold the car in its lane.

My phone starts vibrating at the first traffic light.

Damien: Elara where are you going. Let me explain.

Damien: It's not what you think. Stop being dramatic.

Damien: You're embarrassing yourself.

Damien: Do you have any idea what you're doing? If you leave tonight you're not just leaving me. You're breaking the treaty between our packs. Do you understand that? You'll be responsible for everything that follows. EVERYTHING.

I set the phone face-down on the passenger seat. Luna presses close against the walls of my chest, not speaking, just present , warm and furious and barely contained.

I drive to the airport. I don't know where I'm going. I book the first flight with available seats and I go through security with nothing but my phone and my wallet and the four hundred dollar bag that somehow ended up in my hand when I ran.

'Where are we going?' Luna asks, somewhere over the runway lights.

"Anywhere," I tell her. "Anywhere else."

The first-class bathroom is the size of a generous closet, and I've been in it for eleven minutes.

I know because I've been watching the time on my phone, convincing myself that if I can just get to fifteen minutes, I'll be calm enough to go back to my seat. I'll be able to sit down and breathe and figure out what comes next without my hands shaking or my eyes burning or the sound of Damien's voice looping through my head on a reel I can't shut off.

Four hundred dollars for a body her own Alpha doesn't want to look at.

I press the heels of my palms against my eyes. The crying started somewhere over the city and hasn't entirely stopped. I don't make sounds , Luna and I learned a long time ago to do this quietly, in the way of women who've had to grieve in places where grief was inconvenient.

The door opens.

I spin around fast enough to knock my elbow against the sink, and my first thought is confused and irrational , locked, I locked it , and my second thought doesn't form at all because the man filling the doorway takes up too much space in my vision for anything else to fit.

He's tall. Not just tall , tall in a way that reorganizes the dimensions of the room, broad through the shoulders, dark hair slightly disordered, a jaw cut sharp enough to cast shadows. His eyes, when they land on me, are the kind of blue that has no warmth in it at all. Ice, maybe. Winter sky.

He looks at me the way people look at things they find surprising and don't intend to show it.

"Occupied," I say, which is obvious.

"I noticed." His voice is low, unhurried, carrying the slight roughness of a man who chooses his words carefully and resents being pushed to choose them faster. He doesn't move. "You've been in here a while."

"That's not your concern."

"Someone thought it was worth sending me to check."

I wipe my face with the back of my hand, which accomplishes nothing except showing him exactly how much I've been crying. "I'm fine."

His gaze travels over my face with the particular focus of someone who is very good at determining when people are lying. His nostrils flare , a small motion, almost imperceptible, the kind of instinctive scenting that werewolves do without meaning to.

Something shifts in his expression. Something subtle, and careful, and interested.

"You're not fine," he says.

"Thank you for the assessment. You can go."

He doesn't go. He steps further into the bathroom instead, one shoulder leaning against the wall, watching me with those winter eyes like he has nowhere else to be and no particular opinion about that.

"You want to tell me what happened?" he asks.

"No."

"You're going to tell me anyway."

I stare at him. "I don't know you."

"That's usually when it's easiest." He tilts his head slightly. The overhead light catches the line of his cheekbone. There is a stillness to him that doesn't feel passive , it feels coiled, deliberate, the stillness of something that has decided not to move and could move very fast if it chose to. "Go ahead. I won't remember any of it."

Luna, silent for the past hour, stirs in my chest.

He smells like pine, she says quietly. And winter. And something under that ,

"My husband," I say, and then stop, because I've never said the words out loud before and they land in the air between us with more weight than I expected. "My husband is , was ," My throat closes. I push past it. "I came home tonight with lingerie I spent four hundred dollars on and I found him on his knees in our living room with his business partner and two men I've never seen before and then I stood in the hallway and listened to him mock me to their faces."

The silence that follows is very quiet.

The man's eyes don't change. They stay on my face, attentive, without the wince or the discomfort that most people show when handed information this raw.

"I'm sorry," he says finally.

"I don't want your apology. I don't want anything from you." My voice cracks on the last word, which I hate. "I just want ,"

I don't finish the sentence. I don't know how to finish it. I want to feel like a person. I want someone to look at me and see something worth wanting. I want to stop hearing my own voice coming back at me in Damien's mockery.

The man is watching me. Something has changed in those ice-blue eyes , not warmth, exactly. But an attention that feels different from pity. Focused. Evaluating.

"He's a fool," he says. His voice carries no inflection, no performance. He says it the way someone states an observable fact. "Whoever he is."

I laugh, which surprises me , a short, broken sound. "That's all you have?"

"It's the most useful thing I can offer you." He pushes off the wall slightly. The motion brings him a half-step closer, and the scent Luna noticed , pine and winter and something older beneath , fills the small space between us. My pulse does something I don't give it permission to do. "The rest of it is noise."

Luna is not being quiet anymore. She's pressing forward against my ribs, alert in a way she hasn't been in months, her attention fixed on this stranger with an intensity that makes me slightly uneasy.

Ask him his name, she says.

"What's your name?" I ask.

He looks at me for a long moment. The corner of his mouth moves , not quite a smile.

"Asher," he says.