TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 381

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CHAPTER 397 RECUPE

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CHAPTER 307: A RECIPE

EMBER’S POV

I sit with that. It’s enormous. It’s too big to hold all at once, so I do the thing I always do with things too big to hold I set it down, gently, and reach for the thing I can do.

“Then I should start reading,” I say. “Now. Today. While we wait for Friday.” I look up at him. “And while I’m in there, I might find something for Rayana. Something to buy her time. That’s worth a hundred dead birds, Knox. That’s a thing I can do with my hands and a book, not with the wolf. Let me try.””

Something in his face softens, the worry losing to the part of him that, despite everything, can’t help but be a little proud of me.

“Go read your terrifying books,” he says. “But two things.” He holds up a finger. “Avoid Hale. I’m going to look into the Celeste’s-room business properly, but until I do, you stay clear of her.”

“Hale is unavoidable,” I point out. “She’s everywhere. She was outside my door yesterday morning with her

precious muffins.”

“Fair.” He concedes it with a tilt of his head, then his face goes serious in a way that makes my stomach

drop. “Then the second thing, and this one’s not optional, Ember. Do not eat or drink anything she gives you. Anything. A cup of tea, a slice of pie, a glass of water on a hot day – nothing that’s passed through

her hands.”

The cold settles back into me.

“You think she’d-”

“I think she might be a great deal less clueless than she likes to project.” His voice is low. “I know my cousin. She is always harmless, until she finds a reason not to be. Don’t give her one. Her grandmother was one of the finest healers this kingdom ever produced. People came from across the territory to be mended by her. And the same hands that can mend can do the opposite, and Hale grew up at that woman’s knee, learning Goddess knows what.” His eyes hold mine. “I’m not saying she’s done anything. I’m saying I don’t know what she’s done or capable of, and three of my maids have gore quietly sick in the east wing, and I am not willing to find out the hard way with you. Nothing from her hands. Promise me.”

“After yesterday, I already wasn’t going to,” I say. “But I promise.”

The east library is the kind of room that makes you whisper without deciding to.

It’s enormous and dim and cold, three storeys of shelves climbing into shadow, ladders on rails, the air thick with the particular smell of old paper and older secrets.

And tucked into the far corner, behind a low iron gate Knox unlocked for me with a key he keeps on his own ring, is the grandmother’s collection – crates and cases and shelves of books that don’t match anything else in the room, bound in materials I don’t recognize, written in scripts I can’t read, and a few, blessedly, in languages I can.

A

CHAPTER 3075A RECIPE

Hose huurs in there. Genuinely lose them.

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tread until my eyes ache and the light through the high windows goes from grey to gold to grey again, and

most of it is useless to me: history I don’t have the context for, diagrams I can’t parse, references to places and bloodlines and cites that mean nothing yet.

But I write down the words that recur. Caelora. The East. A dozen mentions of silver, of silver-blooded wolves, always spoken of the way you’d speak of a bad omert you survived.

And once, only once, in a brittle handwritten margin note in a language close enough to one I know that I

can almost make it out – the Long War – beside a symbol that makes the back of my neck prickle for

reasons I can’t name.

I don’t find answers. But I find threads. And one thread, near the end, in a cracked leather book of

herbcraft, stops me dead.

It’s a recipe.

Half of it’s been deliberately scratched out, gone over with ink so the words under are lost, and the rest is

written in a cramped coded shorthand that takes me an hour to even start to crack.

But I get enough. Enough to understand exactly what it’s for.

A draught.

For a sudden, aggressive wasting of the body, a sickness that strips the life completely out of the veins-

and my heart slams.

That is it. That is Rayana.

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