TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 367

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CHAPTER 294: MURKY DARKNESS

EMBER’S POV

I picture her, despite the hairs raising on my arm and the strangest shift in the air, like wind picking up in a window-shut room.

But I remind myself to keep my eyes fixed on chasing Sapphire, pulling at the thread between us, centring the one person that could answer my questions.

And it works.

That’s the thing.

It works, and it works fast, faster than anything has worked before, and I have one bright cold second to think ‘that’s wrong, it shouldn’t work this fast’ before the room behind my eyes goes dark.

And Sapphire’s face hangs in the dark like a candle, and I’m walking toward it.

The floor of the room drops away under me, and suddenly, I’m somewhere else entirely.

I’ve been to the still place once before, the night I first felt Sapphire stir.

It started as a silver dream and opened into a kitchen warm morning light, yellow curtains moving in a breeze I couldn’t feel, everywhere that impossible clean sunlight.

Somewhere safe. Somewhere that felt like the inside of a good memory.

This is not that place.

This is dark.

The light here is wrong, soured, a grey-green murk like light coming through dirty water, and the ground underfoot is soft and giving in a way ground shouldn’t be.

There’s that smell again, the sweet-old-wrong smell, except here it’s everywhere, here it’s the whole world.

[ Things move at the edges of it that I can’t see directly. The air is thick.

Something about this place is rotten down to its roots, infested, and every part of me that kept me alive in Rafael’s lodge is screaming the same single note: you should not be here.

“Hello?” My voice doesn’t echo. The dark eats it, and returns it as a thousand whispers. “Sapphire?”

For a moment, nothing.

Then the murk in front of me parts, and she’s there, and she is not the way I remember her either. The last time I saw Sapphire, she was magnificent, vast and calm and unbearably beautiful. Now she’s the same, but she’s bristling, hackles up, silver eyes gone sharp and cold and furious. “How,” she says, and her voice goes through me, “did you get HERE?”

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< CHAPTER ZUURKY DARKNESS

meditated. I found the still place,

This is not the still place.” She prowls a half-circle around me, silver eyes raking the rotten murk, and there’s something in the set of her I’ve never seen from her before. Almost fear. “This is nothing like the still place. You did not find this. You were LED here. Who taught you the path you walked to reach this place? WHO.”

“A – a woman. A technique, her grandmother’s, she said-”

“Her grandmother’s.” Sapphire’s lip pulls back. “Do you smell it? The rot in the air. The thing crawling under everything here. This is corrupt ground, Ember. This is the kind of place that darkness goes to feed, when the core of the one wielding it is rotten through. You should not be able to reach it. You should not WANT to. And someone has built you a clean little staircase straight down into it, and I don’t like it one bit.”

The cold of that lands in me even here, even with no body to feel it in. No matter what the room does.

The smell. The wrongness. Hale crouched in front of me, chanting in a voice that wasn’t her bright voice at

all.

“Thén get me out,” I say. “If it’s so bad, get me out.”

“That is not why you came.” And just like that, the fear disappears, and what comes up in its place is something I like even less. “You came because you want something. You mortals. You always want something. Say it.”

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