Page 68 of The Last Stitch

Elias would be waiting.

The wind shifted. A prickle of unease ran down my spine before I heard it—hoofbeats.

I turned just as the clearing came into view.

Elias was already there.

He sat atop his black stallion, his posture straight, his expression unreadable as his eyes swept over the scene before him. His presence commanded silence, and even the men who had been whispering among themselves stiffened.

He dismounted and strode forward.

“We caught one,” I said. “The others scattered.”

He eyed the prisoner coldly. “One will suffice.”

The Weaver stared him down, jaw set. “You won’t find what you seek in me.”

“We shall see,” Elias replied.

And I knew what came next.

Unraveling.

I’d watched it happen before—way the light left their eyes thread by thread. It was precise. Clean. Irrevocable.

Justice.

But as my father stepped closer, unease wrapped around my spine like a noose.

Lily’s voice echoed in my mind—I don’t belong here. She hadn’t been lying. She was different.

If she really had come from another time, then unraveling her wouldn’t be justice. It was erasure.

I stood taller, schooling my face into careful neutrality as Elias moved past me.

I didn’t flinch. Didn’t speak.

But something inside me shifted—a thread pulled taut. And for the first time, I wasn’t sure I wanted it to stop.

“Let’s start the Unraveling,” Elias said, folding his gloves with surgical precision. “One less Weaver is a step closer to a cleansed world.”

The clearing was silent, save for the rustling of wind through the trees. The kind of silence that settled before something inevitable. Something final.

The Weaver knelt in the dirt, her hands bound behind her, shoulders squared beneath the weight. She wasn’t trembling, wasn’t begging. She wasn’t even looking at Elias anymore. Instead, her gaze flickered toward the treetops, as if searching for something beyond this moment.

I should have been used to this by now.

I’d seen Weavers brought to their knees, stripped of everything that made them whole—reduced to frayed threads in the weave of existence.

Elias had perfected it, the methodical unraveling of their kind, and we had all been raised to believe it was necessary.

I had never questioned it.

Until now.

Elias stood over the prisoner, his cloak shifting slightly in the wind, the scent of damp earth and decaying leaves heavy in the air. His green eyes gleamed with the cold certainty of a man who had never doubted his purpose.

The Weaver exhaled slowly, lifting their chin, though her expression remained unreadable. “You don’t understand what you destroy,” she said with force.