Page 124 of The Threads Between

"Constance." His voice was low and careful. The voice of a man negotiating with a lit fuse. "You don't have to do this."

"Don't I?" She laughed, a broken sound, jagged at the edges. "You were supposed to be mine, August. We were supposed to be married. I was supposed to be Lady Hawthorne, mistress of this house, mother of your children. That was the plan. That was my life."

Her arm tightened around me. The knife trembled against my throat.

"And then she appeared. Out of nowhere. Out of nothing. And suddenly you looked at her the way you were supposed to look at me. Suddenly everything I had waited for, everything I had earned⁠—"

"You earned nothing." August's voice hardened. "I was never a prize to be won, Constance. I was never yours to claim."

"You were promised to me!"

"By my father." August's eyes flicked to Elias, who stood watching with that cold, amused smile. "By the man who destroyed everything he touched. His promises were poison, Constance. You should be grateful I never kept them."

Elias laughed.

"How touching," he said. "They really do care about you. Both of you." He stepped closer, his shadow falling across us. "It's almost a shame they won't see what happens next."

He gestured toward the drawing room. The double doors still stood open, spilling candlelight into the shadowed hall.

"Shall we? I believe we have family matters to discuss."

Constance shoved me forward. The knife stayed, pressed to my throat, never giving me room to breathe. August walked beside me, close enough to touch but unable to reach for me. His helplessness bled into me through the bond.

We crossed the threshold into Elowen's drawing room.

And the doors swung shut behind us.

CHAPTER 34

AUGUST

The room was a shrine. I understood that the moment the candlelight hit my eyes.

The preserved settee, still positioned by the window. The embroidery frame with its half-finished work. The books left open on side tables as though their reader had merely stepped out for tea. Candles burned in silver holders, dozens of them, casting warm light over a space that had been kept exactly as it was the night this all began.

My father had kept his dead wife's drawing room precisely as she had left it.

The memories hit before I could brace for them. Her voice. Her perfume, faint beneath the dust. The way she used to sit at that window and watch me play in the gardens. The last time I had seen her alive. The moment the little boy understood his mother would never return.

Constance stood behind Lily, the knife still pressed to her throat, positioning them both near the center of the room. Lily's hands hung at her sides, palms open, forced into stillness. Through the bond, her heart hammered against mine.

I couldn't go to her. Couldn't touch her. Couldn't check the wound or hold her hand or do any of the things my body screamed to do, because Constance's blade was the only thing in this room I could not unpick without killing the woman I loved.

"How touching." My father's voice cut through the moment. "Truly. My son, the monster I crafted with my own hands, brought low by something as common as love."

I turned to face him. Pushed down the grief, the fear, the love. Became something harder. Something that could survive what came next.

"You wanted me here," I said. "In this room. In her room. Why?"

His smile was the coldest thing I had ever seen.

"Because this is where it all began," he said. "And this is where it will end."

He spread his hands wide, encompassing the room, the preserved settee, the half-finished embroidery, the shrine to a dead woman.

"Your mother stood in this very spot when she tried to save them," he said. "The Weavers. Her people. She thought she could protect them from the future. Thought she could create something that would shield them from the hunts." His voice hardened. "Instead, she created the Unraveling and poured it into me by accident. And then she burned herself to nothing."

My hands clenched into fists.