TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 385

CHAPTER 344-THE APOTHECARY

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CHAPTER 311: THE APOTHECARY

EMBER’S POV

The apothecary is the kind of place you’d walk past a hundred times and never see.

It’s wedged between a shuttered tailor and a shop that seems to sell nothing but buttons, with a crooked green door and a hand-painted sign so faded.I have to tilt my head to read it. Pennywort & Co.

There’s a little brass bell, and a window full of dusty jars, and a general air of a place that has not had a customer since the invention of electricity and would prefer to keep it that way.

“This is it?” Queenie stops dead on the cobbles, looking from the address on her phone to the sad green door and back. “This is the place that won’t sell to strangers? It looks like it sells dead moths and regret.”

“That’s probably the point.” I’m already reaching for the handle. “Nobody guards a place that looks worth

robbing.”

Behind us, a throat clears. Daxon. Or Reyes. I genuinely cannot tell them apart yet, two slabs of muscle in

dark coats who’ve been three steps behind me all morning like a pair of very polite thunderclouds, and one

of them does the throat-clear thing he’s been doing every time I get near a door.

“His Majesty said-”

“His Majesty said two guards and a check-in every hour and don’t split up.” I’ve memorized the rules. I recite them back at him sweetly. “It’s been fifty minutes, I’ve called him twice, and there are two of you and one tiny shop. You can stand inside the door and glower. You cannot come browse with me, because nobody is going to sell a dying woman’s medicine to a girl flanked by men who look like they bury people for a living.” I pat his enormous arm. “Glower from the doorway. You’re very good at it.”

The guard looks at Queenie, as though she might overrule me. Queenie shrugs. “She’s not wrong. You two are extremely murder-y. Stand by the moths.”

The bell jangles as I push the door open.

Inside, it’s bigger than it has any right to be, and it smells like a thousand years of dried things. Shelves climb up into the gloom, packed with jars and bundles and little drawers labeled in a cramped hand, and the air is thick and green and strange, the kind of air that makes the back of your throat tingle. Somewhere a kettle is hissing. And behind the counter, not looking up, are two of the oldest people I have ever seen.

A man and a woman. Both small, both silver-haired, both dressed in the same dark practical clothes, and both radiating the specific energy of people who have been interrupted and resent it deeply. The man is grinding something with a pestle. The woman is writing in a ledger. Neither acknowledges us.

“Good morning,” I try.

Nothing.

“We’re looking for-

CHAPTER 34 THE APOTHECARY

“We close at six,” the woman says, to her ledger.

1 glance at Queenie. Queenie glances at the clock on the wall, which reads a quarter past two.

“It’s two,” Queenie says.

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“We close at six,” the woman repeats, unbothered, “for people we like. For people we haven’t decided about, we’ve been closed since this morning.” She dots a line with a small flourish, and then, without the faintest change in tone, “Pumpkin, is the kettle on?”

“On and warm for you, my heart,” says the old man at the back, without breaking the rhythm of his pestle, and then, in the exact same gentle voice, to us: “Don’t touch anything or I’ll have to hurt you.”

“He will,” the woman says fondly, turning a page. “He’s frightfully strong for his age. Show them, dove.”

The old man flexes one arm without looking up. It is not, by any measure, impressive. They both regard it

like it personally holds up the sky.

“Magnificent,” the woman murmurs.

“I do my best for you,” he says.

Beside me, Queenie has gone very still, the way you go still watching something you can’t quite categorise, and I know exactly how she feels, because I cannot tell if I’ve walked into a den of murderers

yes. or a fifty-year honeymoon, and the answer appears to be

I try again. “We won’t keep you, I’m looking for something specific, and I was told this is the only place in the city that-”

“No,” says the woman.

I stop. “You haven’t heard what it is.”

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