TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 416

CHAPTER 34 A LOSING PROMISE

25 F

CHAPTER 341: A LOSING PROMISE

EMBER’S POV

The recipe is winning, and am losing, and I have been losing for three hours.

It’s spread across the desk in the east library, the cracked page and the apothecary’s neat waxed parc and my own notes, which have gone from tidy to unhinged somewhere around hour two.

And I have gotten precisely nowhere, because the last ingredient is still just a smear of coded shortha and a word I can almost read and never land, and every time I think I’ve caught the shape of it, it slides

the page like a fish off a hook.

Eastern. Restricted.

I know what the Pennys told me. It’s not an herb from around here. Someone would’ve had to carry it o It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t grow where people can reach it and isn’t sold where people can buy it.

But knowing all of that doesn’t tell me what it is.

The what is sitting right here on this page, mocking me in a dead woman’s cramped hand.

And Rayana is running out of time. She doesn’t have three days. She barely has three hours. And I am no

closer than I was this morning.

I press the heels of my hands into my eyes until I see sparks.

Then I gather the small brew I have managed – the partial one, the sure one, the one that does a little an

nothing more – and I go to see her.

Rayana’s room is worse than yesterday.

I feel it the second the door opens, the wrongness in the air, too still, the machines doing more of the

breathing than she is.

She’s propped against the pillows, and she’s grey, greyer than yesterday, the colour drained out of her hips, her platinum hair gone dull against the white pillowcase, and she’s so thin now that the shape of her under the blanket is barely there.

The winter light comes through the window and falls across her, and she looks like something the light could pass straight through and out the other side

“Hey,” I say softly “Brought you something”

She turns her head toward me, and that small motion costs her, and her eyes find mine, and they’re sti

hers.

Suli sharp, still bright, still all the way in there behind the sickness, and that’s the worst part that she hasn’t gone anywhere, she’s just trapped in a body that’s quitting on her

I sit on the edge of the bed

CHAPTER 34 A LOSING PROMISE

Lease an arm behind her thin shoulders and hold the cup to her lips, and she drinks, slowly, a few s

I watch it go into her.

–

I watch the tiny thing it does a fraction of ease across her face, the smallest loosening of the ter tightness, a breath that comes a hair easier than the last.

A little. It does a little. It does nothing that matters.

“It’s not the real one,” I tell her, because she’d smell a lie on me from here. “It’s not the one that turn: around. I’m still working on it, Ray. I’m so close. There’s one thing left, and I’m going to get it, and I’n to walk in here with the real thing, and you are going to be so furious at how long it took me-”

She lifts her hand.

It takes everything she has.

I watch it take everything she has, her fingers trembling with the effort of it, and she gets her hand to wrist and wraps it there, light as a bird landing, no strength in it at all.

And she looks at me. She can’t speak – I understand it all at once; the coughing has taken her voice to nothing; she’s telling me the only way she has left – but she doesn’t need the words. It’s all right th

her face.

I know. I know you are. It’s all right.

And her eyes fill.

The tears stand there bright, and one slips loose and slides down into the grey of her cheek, and she’s smiling at me, small and broken and luminous, the smile of a woman saying goodbye and thank you an don’t-you-dare-blame-yourself all at once, with the only thing she’s got left to say it with.

“No,” I say, and my voice cracks straight down the middle. “No. Don’t – don’t do the face. Don’t you dare do the goodbye face. I haven’t lost yet, Rayana. I have not lost yet.”

She just keeps smiling. Her thumb moves against my wrist, comforting me, which feels closer to railure

than I’d admit.

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