LOGINLast two chapters have been one of my favorites to write.
EMBER'S POVThe apothecary is the kind of place you'd walk past a hundred times and never see.It's wedged between a shuttered tailor and a shop that seems to sell nothing but buttons, with a crooked green door and a hand-painted sign so faded I have to tilt my head to read it. Pennywort & Co.There's a little brass bell, and a window full of dusty jars, and a general air of a place that has not had a customer since the invention of electricity and would prefer to keep it that way."This is it?" Queenie stops dead on the cobbles, looking from the address on her phone to the sad green door and back. "This is the place that won't sell to strangers? It looks like it sells dead moths and regret.""That's probably the point." I'm already reaching for the handle. "Nobody guards a place that looks worth robbing."Behind us, a throat clears. Daxon. Or Reyes. I genuinely cannot tell them apart yet, two slabs of muscle in dark coats who've been three steps behind me all morning like a pair of v
EMBER’S POVQueenie has risen from her chair and is watching this whole exchange with the deeply satisfied expression of a woman who lives for exactly this.“Oh, I will personally see to it,” she announces, hooking her arm through mine and steering me toward the door before Knox can think better of any of it. “Don’t you worry about a thing. She’ll come back so weighed down with bags she won’t fit in the car.” She tosses her hair. “It is officially, as of this moment, hot girl season. We are getting the herbs, yes, fine, we’re saving Rayana, very noble — and then we are getting out of this gorgeous gloomy mausoleum and into some sunlight and some shopping, because frankly we have both earned it.”I laugh. “Hot girl season.”“Hot girl season.” She says it with the gravity of a woman declaring war. “And don’t think I’ve forgotten, by the way.” She levels a finger at me as we walk. “You are engaged. To that.” A flick of the hand back at Knox, who lifts an eyebrow. “Which means somewhere i
EMBER’S POVFor a moment I think Hale’s going to push it.But she just gives a tight little laugh and turns toward the door, and I think that’s the end of it, until she pauses at the threshold and glances back at me, and her eyes drop to the closed book in my hands, and that bright knowing sharpness comes back.“That recipe you found.” She says it lightly, coyly, like she’s offering a sweet. “You won’t be able to finish it, you know. Half of it’s scratched out, and the rest is in grandmother’s cypher.” Her smile widens. “You can’t make it without me. You’ll get the ingredients wrong and poison your friend instead of saving her. So.” She tilts her head. “When you’re done pretending you don’t need me, you know where to find me.”And then she’s gone, the door drifting shut behind her.The three of us sit in the silence she leaves.“…She’s not wrong about the cypher, is she,” Queenie says finally.“No.” I look down at the book. “She’s not. I cracked some of it. Not all. And the scratched-
EMBER’S POV“You’ve been in here for hours,” she says, drifting closer. “Marjorie said you’d holed up with my grandmother’s old things. I did wonder.”I snap the book shut, dragging it off the table and into my lap.“Good for you. Do you usually track guests through the house, or am I just special?”“Prickly.” Hale tilts her head, her bright, unsettling eyes dropping to the leather cover in my lap. “Why the hostility, Ember? I thought we established a rapport yesterday. I helped you, didn’t I?”“You led me straight into a dead woman’s bedroom, Hale.” I hold her gaze, refusing to back down. “That is fucking creepy.”“Creepy.” She tests the word, rolling it around on her tongue, and a slow, entirely unbothered smile stretches across her face. “I get that a lot. But that shouldn’t bother a girl like you, should it? Remember, we are very similar, you and I. If you would just drop that exhausting guard of yours for a single second, we could share so much.” She takes a slow step closer, dro
EMBER’S POVI sit with that. It’s enormous. It’s too big to hold all at once, so I do the thing I always do with things too big to hold — I set it down, gently, and reach for the thing I can do.“Then I should start reading,” I say. “Now. Today. While we wait for Friday.” I look up at him. “And while I’m in there, I might find something for Rayana. Something to buy her time. That’s worth a hundred dead birds, Knox. That’s a thing I can do with my hands and a book, not with the wolf. Let me try.”Something in his face softens, the worry losing to the part of him that, despite everything, can’t help but be a little proud of me.“Go read your terrifying books,” he says. “But two things.” He holds up a finger. “Avoid Hale. I’m going to look into the Celeste’s-room business properly, but until I do, you stay clear of her.”“Hale is unavoidable,” I point out. “She’s everywhere. She was outside my door yesterday morning with her precious muffins.”“Fair.” He concedes it with a tilt of his he
EMBER’S POVKnox sits up properly now, and there’s something almost careful in how he does it, the way you move when you’re about to set something down that might break.“We found Devika.” He says it plain. “Your mother.”The whole world tilts. I’m gripping his arm before I’ve decided to.“You — what? Where? How? Is she—”“Found is a strong word.” He covers my hand with his, steadying. “We haven’t got her. But Nathaniel’s been working it since before we left Alaska, and he turned up a pattern. There’s a place she’s been circling. A casino, in the next city over, big and ugly and exactly the kind of golden trap a woman like your mother can’t stay away from. She’s there every Friday, regular as a tide.” His jaw sets. “I intend to go and collect her.”“I’m coming.”“And that—” Knox drops his head back with a groan, “—is exactly why I didn’t want to tell you yet.”“Knox.”“There’s a plan, Ember. Nathaniel has eyes on the place; he’s got the patterns; we don’t just walk in the front door a
EMBER’S POVMy mother stands in the doorway, draped in designer everything as always.A silk dress in garish emerald that probably cost more than she can actually afford. Jewelry dripping from her neck, her ears, her wrists, every piece fighting for attention.Hair and makeup done to perfection, no
EMBER’S POV“Because I saw you on the news.” His voice cracks again. “During a press conference. I saw you standing up there, speaking to the camera, saying five words they have haunted me every night. You are dead to me. And though it wasn’t directed at me, I felt it so much. I felt it down to my
EMBER’S POVThe mattress dips sometime after three in the morning.I’ve been lying here for hours, staring at the ceiling, my mind running circles around the photo of Queenie still burning a hole in my phone.Sleep feels impossible. Every time I close my eyes, I see Rayana bleeding on the marble. S
EMBER’S POVI nod desperately.“Liar.” He pumps into me slowly, his thumb circling my clit with featherlight pressure that’s nowhere near enough. “You’re never quiet. It’s one of my favorite things about you.”“For goddess sake, Knox, please—”“Please what?” He’s smiling now, the bastard. Enjoying







