TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 387

CHAPTER 313: THE PENNYS

EMBER’S POV

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I don’t tell them this was my idea and my recipe and my stubbornness that carried it to their door. His name is the only thing in this shop that’s made either of them set down what they were holding.

The two old people look at each other.

It’s a long look, and a strange one, a whole conversation passing between them without a single word, years of marriage compressed into the tilt of two heads.

And when it ends, the woman exhales through her nose and pushes the ledger an inch to the side, which I sense is, for her, an enormous concession.

“Well,” she says. “You might have opened with that, and saved us both the recital.”

“You told me there was nothing I could say.”

“I told you you didn’t know the thing to say. And you didn’t. You stumbled onto it at the end like a clueless toddler.” But something has shifted at the corner of her mouth, not exactly a smile, but a relative of one.” Sit your friend down before she falls down, she’s gone the colour of a fish. And tell me your names, since it seems we’re going to be in each other’s company a little longer than I’d planned my afternoon for.”

“Ember,” I say. “And this is Queenie.”

“I have been so patient,” Queenie announces, with the wounded dignity of a woman who has held her tongue through a near-eviction. “I have so many things I could have said, and I said none of them, and I would like that recognized.”

“It’s been coming off you in waves,” the woman says. “It’s given me sets a hand flat on her chest. “I’m Penny. He’s Penny.”

A beat.

“I am sorry,” Queenie says slowly. “You are both Penny?”

headache since you walked in.” She

“Penelope and Pennard Pennyworth. We are the Pennys. Our mothers possessed zero imagination, and now that is entirely your burden to untangle.”

“The Pennys,” Queenie repeats softly. She stares at the floor. She stares at the ceiling.

I watch the exact, horrifying moment the phonetic math clicks in her brain. Her eyes go wide.

She bites her lower lip, physically vibrating with the effort of holding the thought inside her skull.

I reach out, digging my fingers hard into her arm. I step heavily on her foot, trying to ground her. Don’t fucking say it, I project desperately with my mind.

She completely fails.

< CHAPTER 34 THE PENNYS

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The Pennys, Queenie blurts out, her voice cracking as she points between the two of them with an awful, hysterical laugh. “I mean, come on, you have to hear it. It is literally right there. The Pennys. The Pennis. That is just a p***s. You operate a mystical business as Mr. and Mrs. Penis.”

Both Pennys turn.

In perfect, glacial unison, two pairs of pale grey eyes fix on Queenie with a flat, withering, profoundly unamused stare.

The kind of look that has buried husbands and outlasted dynasties, and the temperature in the shop drops a clean ten degrees.

Queenie’s grin dies on her face. She makes a small, strangled sound. She coughs, her confidence evaporating instantly.

“Peninsulas,” she says weakly, drawing a frantic shape in the air. “I meant peninsulas. The landmass. Surrounded by water on three sides. Because… you are an island of knowledge in a sea of ignorance. It

was a metaphor. And… anatomically-geographically! Geographically, a peninsula is a very strong landmass. It just… it juts out. Very prominently. Just… thrusting out into the wetness. A firm, rocky protrusion just… hanging out there…”

She stops.

She stares at the air where her hands are still drawing the shape. She realizes exactly what she is

describing.

The horrific circle of her own logic closes tightly around her throat.

The Pennys do not blink. They just ign

continue to stare at her.

Queenie slowly lowers her hands, physically folding in on herself.

“…sorry.”

The two old people hold the stare exactly one beat longer than is survivable, then turn away from her in the same instant, as one, and decide she no longer exists.

Γ

I press my knuckles to my mouth and look very hard at a jar of dried beetles. I’d rather pee my pants than laugh right now.

“As I was saying,” Penelope continues, smooth as if nothing happened, “you’ll address one of us and mean the other, constantly, and we won’t correct you, and he-” she tips her head at her husband without looking at him “–will find your confusion the funniest thing that’s happened to him all week. He’s easily amused.*

“It is one of my best qualities,” the old man agrees, and crosses back behind her, and as he passes, he sets his hand against the back of her neck for half a second, light, absent, the gesture of a man who’s done it ten thousand times and would stop breathing before he stopped doing it.

She leans back into the touch without pausing, without looking up, and for one full second the two of them go quiet and soft and so completely married that I have to glance away, like I’ve walked in on something

CHAPTER 343 THE PENNYS

private.

Then it’s gone.

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The hand lifts, the warmth snaps off, and the two of them turn their pale stern eyes back on me in unison, and the temperature drops fight back down to stranger.

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