TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 396

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CHAPTER 322: INSANE SHOPPING

EMBER’S POV

The first thing Queenie does, the very second we’re clear of the moth shop and into a part of the city that has actual sunlight and shops that sell things that won’t kill you, is hold out her hand

“Card.”

“It’s for the herbs-”

“The herbs are bought, the herbs are in the bag, the herbs are handled.” She wiggle’s her fingers. “Knox Volkov looked your two boulders here dead in the eye this morning and said, and I quote, because I was standing right there, ‘she comes back with bags up to her elbows and a smile on her face. His words. A direct order from your future husband. Are you going to disobey a direct order, Ember? in front of the staff?” She tips her head at Daxon and Reyes. “They’ll report you.”

“We will not,” says one of the boulders, with great dignity.

“You absolutely will, you’ve called him four times, don’t pretend you’re not his little snitches.” Queenie snatches the card out of my hand before I’ve decided to give it to her. “Right. First order of business. We bankrupt your fiancé. Not a little. Spiritually. He needs to open his statements next month and feel his soul leave his body.”

“Queenie-”

“I’m doing it for love,” she says, already steering me toward the most aggressively expensive street I’ve ever seen. “His and yours. A man that rich needs to be humbled regularly or he becomes insufferable, and we’ve only got a few hours, so we have to be efficient about the humbling.”

And, Goddess help me, that’s how it starts.

She begins, reasonably enough, with clothes.

She drags me into a boutique where nothing has a price tag, which she informs me is how you know you can’t afford it, and proceeds to pile things into my arms with the speed and ruthlessness of a woman conducting a military operation.

A coat the colour of good wine. Boots i genuinely gasp at.

A dress that, when I look at myself in it in the mirror, makes my throat go tight, because the woman looking back doesn’t look like someone who slept in a cheap coat two nights ago.

She looks like someone who belongs in a house that floats over a gorge.

“That one,” Queenie says quietly, behind me, watching my face in the glass. “We’re getting that one. Don’t argue, I saw your face, that’s the face. Everyone needs the face dress.”

“It’s too much.”

up

We warm up.

By the third shop I’ve stopped fighting it, partly because Queenie is unstoppable and partly because there’s something genuinely loosening in my chest, some knot I’ve carried so long I forgot it was a knot, easing as I laugh in a fitting room and let my furious beautiful friend hand me beautiful things.

The guards trail us from shop to shop, and I start to feel almost sorry for them, two enormous, lethal men standing sentinel outside changing rooms, holding bags, glowering at racks of scarves like the scarves might be assassins.

Almost sorry. Not quite. Because then Queenie discovers the deliveries.

“Wait.” She stops dead in the middle of a home–goods shop, a slow and terrible smile spreading across her face. “Wait. They can deliver. To an address. Of our choosing.”

“…Yes?”

“Ember.” She grips my arm. “We can send things to the house.”

And I watch, helpless and delighted, as Queenie Reid declares war on Knox Volkov’s interior decorating.

It begins with a gargoyle.

An enormous stone gargoyle, hideous, easily four feet tall, crouched and snarling and weeping water from

somewhere structural, the single ugliest object I have ever seen.

“For the front hall,” Queenie tells the saleswoman, with the serene confidence of a woman commissioning a portrait. “He’ll love it. He collects them. Have it placed right where he’ll see it when he walks in, please, the very centre, you can’t miss it.” She pauses. “Actually, can we get two? One for each side of the door.

Symmetry.”

“Queenie.”

“Symmetry is important in a home, Ember.”

The gargoyles are nothing. The gargoyles are an appetizer.

She orders three hundred rubber ducks.

Three hundred, to be delivered and – she’s very specific about this, leaning over the counter to make sure

it’s written down – placed in the master bathtub.

“All of them. Floating. He likes a bath. He’s going to come home, and there’s going to be a bath situation.” She turns to me. “Do you think three hundred is enough to fully cover the surface? It’s a big tub. I saw it once; it’s an obscene tub. Let’s do five hundred. Round number.”

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