TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 394

CHAPTER 320: BOWING DOWN

EMBER’S POV

She takes both my hands in her small dry ink-stained ones, and grips them hard, and looks up into my face with something burning in her pale eyes that was not there a minute ago. Awe. Plain, naked awe.

“The first thing,” she says quietly. “The first thing you learn in this trade is the detail. Two leaves can look exactly the same to the whole world. One of them heals you. The other stops your heart. And the only difference between them is a single vein on the underside, so small you’d never find it unless someone taught you where to look.” Her grip tightens. “To an outsider, my husband’s three cups were one and the same. Three black rims, all alike. But a true alchemist does not simply see what a thing looks like. She sees the one difference that matters. And that difference, girl, is the whole of it. It is everything. It is the entire distance between living and dying, and you walked straight to it with no one in this world to teach you the way.”

She steps back. And then Penelope Pennyworth, who told me she closes by 2pm for strangers, inclines

her head, and bows. A small one. But a bow.

“I’ve not done that,” she says, straightening, “in a very long while. Penny. Get the girl her herbs.”

I nod to her in reverence as well.

Behind me, Queenie sits down hard on a stool and puts her face in both her hands.

“I have aged,” she says, muffled and shaking, “forty years. In a beetle shop. Watching my best friend play dice with poison for fun. I’m telling Knox. I’m telling Knox the second we’re in the car, and then I am never, ever coming anywhere with you again.”

“You’ll come everywhere with me,” I say, light-headed, the adrenaline finally draining out of me in a long unsteady rush. “You love me too much.”

“I love you and I am furious about it,” she says into her hands

The old man is already moving along the shelves, pulling down what I need, wrapping each in waxed paper with those quick clever hands.

I watch the small pile grow and feel my chest go tight, because this is it, this is the thing I came for, the time I can buy, earned and not bought, not borrowed, earned.

“That’s the bulk of it,” he says, sliding the parcels across the counter. “The bitter root, the binding agent, the lung-clear, the silvercap. You’ll brew it the way you said and not the way my wife said.” A dry glint. “Off the flame. After the heat.”

“After the heat,” I agree, and gather them in.

“There’s one more.” I unfold the cracked recipe and lay my finger on the last line, the one written in the deepest cipher, the ingredient I could read just enough of to know I needed and not enough to name or

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CHAPTER 300BOWING DOWN

find. “This. I can’t source it anywhere, and I can’t read all of the name. I was hoping-

The old man goes still.

Both of them do.

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