Semua Bab TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING: Bab 311 - Bab 320

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 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 POVAnd that’s it. Dismissed, without a glance, the way you’d wave off a fly that hasn’t even had the decency to land on anything.Beside me, Queenie draws a slow breath, and I know that breath, I know exactly what magnificent and ill-advised thing is loading behind it.So I catch her wrist before it can launch. Because I’ve spent a great many years being looked through by people who’d already decided I wasn’t worth the air.And the one thing I learned is that the harder you push a closed door, the harder the person on the other side pushes back.But I’m not leaving. Rayana doesn’t have somewhere else.“All right,” I say. “Then let me ask you a question instead of asking you for anything. Is there a single thing a person could say, standing here, that would make you hear them out? Or is no the only thing you sell here, and the jars are just for show?”The pestle pauses.Just for a beat, just long enough that I catch it, before it resumes.And the woman lifts her pen, holds it

EMBER’S POVShe reads it the way a judge reads a confession, fast and flat and giving nothing back, and the old man drifts to her shoulder and reads it alongside her, and neither of them makes a sound.I watch their faces for something and get nothing. They’re very good at nothing.“Hm,” she says at last, which could mean anything.“It’s a slowing draught,” I say, because the silence is unbearable and because I want them to know I’m not just a girl holding a paper she can’t read. “Not a cure. There’s nothing in it that could cure what she has. It binds the blackening so it spreads slower through the lungs, and it eases the drowning so she can rest. It buys time. That’s all it does. That’s all I’m asking it to do.”Her eyes flick up to me, then back down.“To bind it, yes,” she says, idle, testing, like she’s asking the weather. “So naturally, you drop that root straight into the boiling water right at the start. To let the extreme heat really pull the strength out before you add the r

EMBER’S POVThe two of them look at each other.And then, slowly, both of them smile, the same smile, and I understand I’ve done the one thing in this shop that could genuinely interest them, which is refuse to play the board the way they laid it.“Tricksters,” Penelope murmurs, almost fond. “She thinks we’re tricksters.”“She’s not wrong,” the old man says.“She’s not wrong at all.” Penelope spreads her ink-stained hands. “Very well, girl. Your game. Your rules. We’re listening.”I reach past them, to a shelf of clean empty cups, and take three more. Eight now, on the counter. And I start to pour.I split each brewed cup in half and I mix them, a little of the first into the fourth, the second into the fifth, the third into the eighth, then back the other way, around and around, until I’ve honestly lost track of which began as what, until all eight cups hold a measure of all three brews.Identical.Whatever poison sat whole in two of the three is now spread thin through every one of