TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 395

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CHAPTER 321: SOMEONE EASTERN

EMBER’S POV

The warmth that flooded the shop a moment ago thins, just slightly, and the two of them lean over the cracked page together, and that silent forty–one–year conversation passes between them again, except this time there’s no delight in it.

This time it’s careful. Almost wary.

“We don’t carry that,” Penelope says.

“You don’t carry it, or you can’t get it?”

“We don’t carry it.” She straightens, and her pale eyes have changed, studying me now in a different way, a way that lifts the hair on my arms. “That’s not a Western herb, girl. That’s not anything compounded this side of the world. It’s old. It’s eastern. The sort of thing that doesn’t grow where people can reach it, and isn’t sold where people can buy it, and isn’t spoken of, mostly, by the ones who know what it is.” She

glances at her husband. “We know what it is. We don’t touch it. And I’ll give you this with your herbs, free of charge, because you earned it: whoever set down this recipe knew things they’d no business knowing. That ingredient isn’t for slowing a sickness. It’s for suppressing something. For holding something down.

For keeping a thing asleep that would very much rather be awake.”

And deep in my chest, in the place where she lives, something stirs.

Sapphire.

Silent since she threw me out of the dark, silent the whole day.

But at the naming of that thing, the eastern thing, the suppressant, the something–kept–asleep, I feel her shift, a low cold ripple that isn’t quite words and isn’t quite a growl, recognition and warning braided tight,

together, the wolf turning over in her sleep at a name she knows far, far too well.

I don’t tell the Pennys any of that.

“Where would I even find it?” I ask. “If you don’t carry it. If no one this side of the world does.”

“That’s the trouble.” Penelope folds the recipe and presses it back into my hand, and her eyes hold mine, steady and serious. “An ingredient like that, in the West, you don’t buy. Someone would have had to bring it over. Someone eastern, or someone who’d been east.” She lets go of my hand. “Find the one who’s dabbled with eastern drugs and narcotics. They’ll have your last ingredient, or they’ll know who does.”

“Thank you,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I am. “For the herbs. And the test. And the-“I gesture vaguely at the smashed cup, the spilled brew, the whole near–death of it. “The everything.”

“Come back,” Penelope says, and it isn’t a pleasantry, it’s an instruction. She presses something extra into my hand as I gather the parcels, a small twist of paper I’ll find later holds a pinch of something I didn’t ask for and didn’t pay for. “Whatever you are, girl. Come back. The world’s going to be very hard on you, I think.”

OME EASTERN

That naked awe again, just for a second. “It’s always hard on the rare ones. Always has been.”

The bell janyles as we step back out into the grey afternoon, into the cobbles and the cold and the two guards peeling off the wall where they’ve been glowering at the moths for the better part of an hour.

Queenie pulls in a huge ragged breath of free air like a woman surfacing from deep water.

“Never,” she says. “Never again. My heart cannot take it. You played dice with poison against two thousand–year–old goblins and you won and you did it for sport–”

“I did it for Rayana.”

“You did it for Rayana and a little bit for sport, I saw your face when you smashed that cup, you enjoyed

that-”

“Okay,” I admit. “A little for sport.”

“A little for-” Queenie throws both hands at the sky. Then she grabs my arm, and the brightness comes flooding back into her, deliberate, a woman choosing to leave the beetle shop and all its horrors firmly behind her. “No. No. We are done with that. My nerves are in ribbons, I need something frivolous and obscenely expensive immediately or I am going to lie down on these cobbles and simply stay there.” She loops her arm through mine and steers me off down the street, the guards falling in behind. “We have the medicine. We’ve nearly died. We’ve been bowed to by a goblin. That is more than enough plot for one morning. The rest of this day is officially frivolous, and you are going to help me spend a truly offensive amount of your fiancé’s money, and we are not going to think about poison or kings or anything else until I feel like a person again.”

I clutch the parcels that might buy Rayana another month, and under the warm dizzy relief of it I feel the cold weight of that last ingredient settling into my chest.

But Queenie needs the brightness, and honestly so do I, so I let her pull me down the street, and I make myself smile.

“Lead the way,” I say.

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