Semua Bab TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING: Bab 431 - Bab 437

EMBER’S POV“Marjorie,” I say patiently.“I have given this house everything!” She’s not listening. She’s past listening, gripping the bars like she means to tear them out of the stone and rip out my throat. “Everything I had, my whole life, poured into these walls and the people inside them! And I loved those girls. I fed them. I scolded them for their sloppy corners, and I sat up half the night when they cried over some worthless boy in the stables, and they were mine to keep safe, they were mine, and I had them! I had two of them in my own arms! And you took them out of my hands, and you threw me in a box! You’re a bloody killer!”“I found you sneaking around with a knife!” I snap. “In the dark, with your hood up, standing over two girls who weren’t moving, and there was blood on both arms, and when I asked you one question you looked at me like I was the intruder and attacked! What was I supposed to do, Marjorie? Curtsey? Wish you a pleasant evening and go back to bed?”“You were

EMBER’S POVShe sags back against the wall, and for a long moment, I think she isn’t going to respond. I think my entire confession meant absolutely nothing because her mind was already made up. I start to believe this was all completely pointless.But then she finally meets my eyes, and something solidifies in them.“Off the estate,” she says. “There is a healer in the town. A proper old one. Not one of the Alpha’s modern, fancy doctors. I didn’t care where we went, in truth. I only cared that it was outside these walls. I was convinced whatever was killing them was inside this house, so they could not stay here.”My eyes narrow, refusing to let her off the hook.“But that does not explain why they were unconscious. Did they consent to your actions, Marjorie, or did you drug them?”“Course I drugged them.” She says it like I’m slow. “They were half out of their minds with fever, crying, thrashing. You don’t move two grown girls through the servant tunnels at that hour without them ma

EMBER’S POVIda. So that was her name.Hale’s grandmother, whom Knox had told me all about.The woman with the sprawling library and the endless books. The woman who commanded Hale’s absolute, eternal adoration even long after she was gone.I could only lean closer just as Marjorie continued.“I was much younger when Ida lived here—well, lived is an exaggeration, but she frequented this house enough times to have her own room in it. At the time, I was being mentored under my mother’s supervision. And my mother, who feared nothing on this earth, warned me off that woman with a stern face. Keep clear of Lady Ida. Don’t take her sweets. Don’t ever be alone with her.” She shook her head slowly. “And that was the very thing that made everyone sure my mother had gone mad. Because Ida, despite all her strange ways and the lavish oddities she brought back from her travels, was kind. Truly, famously kind. A trader, forever off on some long road to the far places—eastern, southern, and even the

EMBER’S POV“I’ve heard her talk through the wall,” Marjorie says, her voice stripped of all its trembling. “She chants the same ugly words over and over, and it is in no tongue I have ever heard. She recites it for hours from strange, ancient books she guards like gold.”The chill runs all the way up the back of my neck.“And I have seen what she does when she is done reading,” she goes on, lower and lower, and I don’t stop her. I couldn’t if I tried. “I have watched her slide out of the hidden servant passages long after midnight, creeping into those girls’ rooms to stand over them in the pitch black whilst they slept. And then she goes straight to Celeste’s rooms. Three, four in the morning, without a single candle lit.”Her voice thins, dropping to an octave that spikes goosebumps across my skin.“I’ve watched her through the gap in the door, dressed in Celeste’s own gowns, turning slow across the floor. Swaying. Like she was being held. And there was no one there, Ember. I could