TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 371

CHAPTER 297: WHO ARE YOU?

EMBER’S POV

I shuffle back without meaning to, staring at the room now, really seeing it – the sheeted furniture, the clouded vanity mirror, the record player in the corner, all of it kept and dusted – and then I snap my eyes back to Hale.

“What the hell are you doing bringing me here?” My voice shakes. “Does Knox know you come in here? Are you even allowed to be in this room?”

Hale tilts her head, slow, almost amused.

“I’m allowed everywhere in this house.” Light, like it’s obvious. “You forget – I’m the lady of the house.” A small pause, a smaller smile. “Well. Not anymore, I suppose. But you catch my drift.” Her head tips the other way. “Is something wrong?”

My heart is slamming now, and the questions spill out faster than I can hold them.

“How do you know about this?” I push myself up off the floor, ignoring the spin. “This meditation, this – this thing you taught me, the way down into – what is your connection to any of it? How do you know how to do this?” I look at her, really look – the bright wrong eyes, the too-still face, the way she didn’t leave when she swore she’d leave. “Who are you, Hale?”

For just a second her expression stills. It goes flat and blank, the giggle draining out of it entirely.

And then the wind picks up.

In a room with the windows shut, the air moves. A slow stirring lifts the corner of one sheet and lays it

back down, and the smell thickens, and the back of my neck goes to ice.

Hale leans in. Closer than the question warrants.

“I think,” she says softly, “I must ask you the very same thing, Lady Ember.” Her eyes travel my face, careful and hungry. “What exactly are you?”

And before I understand what she’s doing, she lifts her free hand to my cheek, and her fingers come away wet, and I realize she’s wiped a streak of my blood from my skin.

And she looks at it on her fingertips with bright fascination, and touches it to her tongue, and tastes it.

Everything in me revolts.

Urgently, I knock the cup out of her other hand; it doesn’t matter, it falls, and I shove past her and out the door and into the cold dark hall before I’ve pulled a full breath.

The room and the smell and the bright tasting eyes all behind me and nowhere near far enough behind

ine.

She doesn’t chase.

• 25 Pants

That’s almost the worst part

She doesn’t chase, doesn’t call after me, and somehow that’s worse than chasing, because it means she

doesn’t need to.

I make it down the hall and around the corner and stop, my back against the cold wall, chest heaving – and even here, even away from it, I can feel the room clinging to rne.

The murk. The stillness. The heaviness that walked out with me. Hale’s eyes, watching me go, tasting my blood off her own fingers.

How does she know anything about this? About that room?

What could she possibly have been searching for, all this time, to bring her to the point of leading a stranger down into the rot?

What was it about Hale Volkov that rattled even Sapphire – Sapphire, who fears nothing, who looks down

her nose at the whole turning world?

Sapphire called it a dead woman’s room.

And I know exactly which dead woman. I just don’t know what Hale wants with her.

Who is Hale Volkov really under all that brightness?

I don’t have a single answer.

Only the questions, and the blood drying on my face, and the bone-deep certainty that I needed to get my

shit together, fast.

I go looking for Knox.

I don’t even decide to. My feet just take me there, down through the house to the south offices, because I’m shaking and bleeding and terrified and the fight doesn’t matter anymore, none of it matters.

I just need to be near the one solid thing in this whole rotten beautiful house.

I need to tell him about the room, the smell, Sapphire, and the thing about her precious cousin.

I need him to put his arms around me and be furious and immovable and mine.

The study door is shut. I lift my hand te knock, and through it I hear his voice – low, hard, clipped, the voice he uses when something has gone wrong and he’s keeping it from showing.

“I don’t care what it costs, I want eyes on every car that left that hospital that night.”

And I understand he’s on the call, the Rafael call, the cockroach call, the thing that’s been eating him since

before dawil.

I stand there with my hand raised and my face crusted with blood and my whole body still shaking from being thrown out of my own soul, and I can’t do it. I can’t add this to that.

He’s drowning already; he’s been drowning since I mentioned Rafael. I can’t walk in there bleeding and

-25 Points

frightened and pile the dead woman’s room and the rotten ground and the Carrion Maiden on top of it.

1 lower my hand.

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