Reborn to Dodge the Bad Marriage novel Chapter 10

Chapter 10 She Dares Anything

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Finished

Nora stood, crossed to where Julian sat, and laid her fingers against his wrist.

“What are you doing?” Julian came up hard, and his hand closed over hers on pure instinct.

One more second and he would have snapped her wrist.

Nora pinned his hand down with her free one and said something that stopped him where he

sat.

She read his pulse carefully. “This is a poison you were born carrying. Short fuse, no sleep, bad dreams when you do get any. Food has no taste and you can’t get it down.”

A faint sweetness came off her skin, and the thing that lived snarling at the bottom of him went quiet for a moment.

Nora took her hand back and looked down at him. “You’re much further along than you’re letting anyone see. Seven days without sleep. Water hurts going down at this point. You’ve been on IV nutrition for a month, and you’re planning to get through tonight on sedation, aren’t you? In this shape, I doubt you have three days left.”

The first time through, Mandy never laid eyes on her groom. He went into the ICU on the wedding day and she was a widow a month later.

Julian’s interest sharpened all at once. “You practice?”

Every word out of her mouth had landed on something true.

He had not eaten or slept properly since he was 10, and the last few years had made it far worse.

Seven days had gone by without sleep. Sleeping pills worked for a while, then stopped working, and eventually he moved on to sedation.

Sour, sweet, bitter, salt, all of it went out one sense at a time until everything he put in his mouth tasted like candle wax, and he forced it down anyway because the alternative was dying faster.

By now, it had gotten bad enough that eating anything, even swallowing water, felt like swallowing broken glass.

Nora dropped her eyes. “A little.”

Her grandmother had been remarkable with herbal medicine, and for reasons Nora never understood, she refused to teach her a single thing and kept her away from the subject entirely, no matter how badly she wanted to learn.

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10:52 Thu, Sep 17

Chapter 10 She Dares Anything

She picked up the edges of it on her own, and the edges turned out to be enough.

7

Finished

In her last life, it was only after she married Adrian that her grandmother handed over everything she knew, along with a warning delivered dead serious that Nora was never to use any of it lightly.

She finished learning it and her grandmother died soon after, and Nora only discovered at the very end of her own life that Mandy had been paid to arrange it.

Julian caught the grief coming off her and frowned slightly. “Can you treat this, then?”

He never noticed that the cold had gone out of his voice.

Nora shut it down. “No. You’re too far gone.”

For one thing, she did what her grandmother told her. She did not practice unless there was no other road left, and even when she saved someone, she never did it under her own name.

For another, she badly wanted a dead husband and everything he would leave behind.

Julian studied her a moment longer. Not a trace of that grief remained on her face, and something playful and sly had moved in to replace it.

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