TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 391

CHAPTER 34

25 Points

CHAPTER 317: TWO CUPS

EMBER’S POV

Burn. No stop. Breath.

“Two each,” the old man says quietly from the back, and I glance at him, and he’s not amused anymore, he’s watching the cups with his arms folded too tight across his chest.

“Four left.” Penelope reaches for the next, and her hand is as steady as mine, steadier, a woman who has done this so many times it doesn’t reach her pulse at all. “You want to know the truth, girl? Most of them have wept by now. Got down on the floor of my shop and begged. The grand ones are the worst for it, the ones with the big names and the big purses, they think the begging will move me.” She drinks., sets it

down, lives. “It never does.”

“Maybe they beg,” I say, and my voice comes out level, “because you’ve built a thing designed to make

people beg.”

Something flickers in her pale eyes.

“Maybe we have. Drink.”

And I drink, and it’s down to the last two cups now, and this is where the air changes.

Because the old man has gone still.

I catch it over the rim as I swallow, the burn going down, my eyes watering, and through the sting I see

him, and he’s not standing back amused anymore.

He’s leaned forward, his hands unclasped, and his eyes are going from his wife to the two cups and back to his wife, and there’s a sheen on his forehead now, fear coming off him in waves, real fear.

Penelope reaches for one of the last two cups and his whole body twitches toward her, toward stopping her, and for one bright cold second I read it exactly the way lam meant to.

He’s terrified for her. He’d never let his Penny drink the deadly one.

So the cup he’s frightened of, the one his eyes, keep snapping to, that’s the killer, and she mustn’t take it,

which means I take the other-

And my hand actually moves toward the other cup.

And then I stop.

Because something is wrong.

I can’t put words to it yet.

It’s just a cold that climbs the back of my neck and roots me where I stand, the same cold that used to wake me at three in the morning in Gale’s house with no sound and no reason, only the animalistic

certainty that something close to me was not what it pretended to be.

Ta

Every reasonable thing in me is shouting to take the other cup. Loudly. It’s obvious. He’s terrified for her,

take the safe one, take it-

And I don’t move.

Because the last time everything was this obvious, this reasonable, this loud, I nearly married my way into

an early grave.

“Come on, girl.” Penelope clicks her tongue. “Even a coward picks eventually.”

My mouth has gone dry.

“Give me a moment.”

“You’ve had several.”

“Then give me one more.”

I pick up one of the last two cups.

My hands aren’t steady, and I don’t have to feign that, because they simply aren’t.

I turn it over, hunting for some difference between this one and its twin, and there’s nothing, they’re

identical, black-rimmed and plain.

I set it down.

I pick up the other. My thumb drags along the rim as I turn it, the small useless fidget of a frightened woman with nothing left to do but handle the thing that might kill her-

And it catches.

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