TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 386

CHAPTER 312: BLACKLUNG FEVER

EMBER’S POV

And that’s it. Dismissed, without a glance, the way you’d wave off a fly that hasn’t even had the decency to land on anything.

Beside me, Queenie draws a slow breath, and I know that breath, I know exactly what magnificent and ill-advised thing is loading behind it.

So I catch her wrist before it can launch. Because I’ve spent a great many years being looked through by people who’d already decided I wasn’t worth the air.

And the one thing I learned is that the harder you push a closed door, the harder the person on the other side pushes back.

But I’m not leaving. Rayana doesn’t have somewhere else.

“All right,” I say. “Then let me ask you a question instead of asking you for anything. Is there a single thing a person could say, standing here, that would make you hear them out? Or is no the only thing you sell here, and the jars are just for show?”

The pestle pauses.

Just for a beat, just long enough that I catch it, before it resumes.

And the woman lifts her pen, holds it still over the ledger, and finally turns her head and looks at me.

Properly.

Her eyes are pin-sharp and a pale washed grey, and they don’t warm even slightly, they just land on me, and I have the distinct sensation of being a weighed by an unimpressed professor.

“There’s a thing or two,” she allows. “But you’d have to know it, and you don’t, because if you knew it you’d have led with it instead of standing in my doorway saying good morning like a child at a recital.” She sets the pen down. “So. Last time, and then my husband walks you out, and he isn’t gentle about it. What is it

Γ need, and who told you we’d have it?” you

think you

It’s the opposite of softness.

It’s a stern old woman handing me one more rope to hang myself with, certain I’ll do it. But it’s a question, and a question is more than I had a second ago, so I take it.

“A medicine,” I say, careful, giving her the shape of it. “For a sickness in the lungs. Blacklung rot. Most of

what it needs I can get anywhere. There’s a grade of two ingredients I can’t, and I was told the only ones who compound that grade are here.”

“Told by whom?”

“Does it matter?”

CHAPTER 34 PLACKLUNG FEVER

+25 Points

“Everything matters.” The man this time, not turning around, his voice mild and dry and somehow more unsettling for how pleasant it is. “Where a thing comes from is the whole of what a thing is, in our trade. A leaf off the north face of a hill will mend you and the same leaf off the south face will stop your heart, and the only difference between them is where they stood when they grew.” He taps his pestle clean against the bowl. “So when a stranger won’t say where she heard our name, we assume she heard it somewhere she oughtn’t, and the answer is no twice over.”

“Blacklung’s half the city,” the woman adds, already losing interest, already glancing back down at her

ledger. “Everyone’s dying of something, dear, and they all think theirs is special. It isn’t. It’s the cycle of life. We don’t sell our grade to people we don’t know, and we don’t know you, and I’m tired of looking at you.

Penny. Walk her out.”

The man sets down the pestle.

And I feel it going, the whole thing slipping through my fingers, the one errand I came here certain I could actually do, the time I could buy, the promise I made to a woman sleeping under machines, all of it about to end with a stern old man steering me out a door that sticks.

And I do the thing I swore in the car I wouldn’t do. It’s all I have left, and I hate it, because it means borrowing a power that isn’t mine.

“Knox Volkov.”

The shop goes quiet.

Still.

The particular stillness of two very old people who have heard a great many names in their time and have just heard one that means something.

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