9. The Second Thread Snaps #2
“That may already be known.”
“Not all of them.” My voice thins. “Not the private ones.”
Dorian’s expression changes at that.
Private ones.
I have said too much. Or not enough.
Mina moves closer to me, close enough that her sleeve brushes mine. “Fate, we can’t protect people we don’t warn.”
“And we can’t un-warn them once the words are out.” I press my ink-stained palm to my skirt. “Words matter.”
Dorian goes very still.
Kelly notices.
Even the wards give a low hum, as if the cottage has leaned closer.
I force a smile. “Which is why I suggest we develop a very boring, very non-magical safety message about community concern and suspicious deliveries. No curse language. No fated-mate language. No emotional apocalypse phrasing. No giving away who is most at risk.”
Mina gives me a look. “You say that like emotional apocalypse phrasing isn’t your entire brand.”
I don’t acknowledge her.
Dorian does not smile. His attention is fixed on me, too sharp and too quiet.
“What are you not saying?” he asks.
Everything.
The answer fills my mouth.
Everything that might feed the curse. Everything that might make you pull farther away. Everything that might prove my mother was right and love is safest when strangled…before it grows teeth.
I open my mouth to deflect.
Then the world yanks.
Not metaphorically.
My thread-sight jerks so hard toward the west that I stagger into the table.
Mina catches my elbow. “Fate?”
The sunroom vanishes at the edges.
Red light slices through my vision, one thread pulled taut across distance, vibrating with panic.
Lilissa.
Rafe.
Their bond flares bright, then shudders.
My hand flies to my chest.
“Oh no,” I whisper.
Dorian is already moving. “What is it?”
The thread darkens at the edges. Not broken. Darkening. Just like with Mara and Caleb.
My breath disappears. “It’s them,” I say, and the room tilts around the words. “Lilissa and Rafe.”
The sunroom falls away.
One second, I am gripping the edge of my worktable with Mina’s hand clamped around my elbow and Dorian’s voice cutting through the room.
The next, I am somewhere else.
Lilissa and Rafe’s kitchen.
I know it instantly.
The blue tile backsplash Lilissa installed herself because she said the original beige one “felt emotionally resigned.” The wide oak table Rafe built after insisting store-bought furniture had “weak knees.” The hanging bundles of rosemary, sea lavender, and dried kelp over the sink.
Warmth fills the room. Domestic warmth. The worst kind, apparently, because there is no stage here. No audience. No public tragedy.
Just dinner.
Two plates. A loaf of crusty bread. A pot of mussels steaming with garlic and white wine. Candles flickering on the table because Lilissa believes overhead lighting is “an attack on intimacy.”
Rafe stands at the stove, enormous shoulders hunched with absurd care as he spoons broth over the mussels. Lilissa sits on the counter, barefoot, laughing at him.
My heart cracks.
“No,” I whisper, but I do not know whether I say it in the vision or back in my sunroom.
Rafe holds out a spoon.
She leans forward and tastes the broth.
Her eyes close.
I cannot hear her voice exactly, but I feel the shape of the words through the thread.
Needs lemon.
Rafe makes a wounded face.
Lilissa laughs again, hops down from the counter, and presses a kiss to his cheek.
Their red thread flares. Bright. Beautiful. Alive.
It stretches between them in a thick, glowing line wrapped with gold and sea-blue, strong enough to make my breath catch. This is what I matched. This is what I blessed. Two lonely, guarded people who found a way to let tenderness in without calling it surrender.
Alright. Everything is alright so far.
My magic reaches toward them instinctively.
I yank it back.
No touching. No witnessing. No feeding anything that might already be watching.
Rafe pours wine into two glasses. Lilissa takes hers and lifts it in a small toast. He touches his glass to hers, smiling in that quiet way of his, the one that says she is the only storm he has ever wanted to stand inside.
They drink.
My stomach drops.
“No. Don’t.”
The thread shivers.
Lilissa sets down her glass and reaches for Rafe’s hand. Their fingers lace together on the table.
The red thread pulses. Once. Twice.
Then dark veins begin to creep through it. Like ink in water. Like rot under silk.
Rafe frowns. His hand tightens around Lilissa’s. Her smile falters.
The candles flicker.
Lilissa lifts her free hand to her throat.
Rafe rises too fast, chair scraping backward, but his knees buckle before he reaches her.
“No!”
This time I know I scream in the sunroom because I feel my throat tear around it.
Lilissa slides from her chair. Rafe catches the edge of the table, sending one wineglass tipping onto its side. Dark red spills across the wood, running toward the bread, the plates, their joined hands.
Not blood. Wine.
Still, my mind cannot tell the difference.
Their thread flares one last time, wild and desperate.
Then it darkens at the edges. Not snapped. Not yet. But tightening. Knotting. Exactly like Mara and Caleb.
The vision releases me with the brutality of a hook torn from flesh. I slam back into my body gasping.
The sunroom is chaos. Mina is holding me upright. Kelly has one hand on her radio, pale but steady. Dorian is in front of me, both hands on my shoulders, his face carved from control and fear.
“Fate,” he says. “Talk to me.”
I grab his wrist.
For once, I do not care who sees. “Lilissa and Rafe,” I choke. “Dinner. Wine. Kitchen.”
His eyes sharpen.
“They’re alive?” Kelly asks, hesitant.
I swallow hard, still seeing the wine spread across the table.
“For now.”
Dorian changes before anyone else moves.
Not physically. Not entirely. His eyes do something first—gray sharpening to steel, warmth shuttering behind command. Then his shoulders square, his hands leave me, and the detective steps forward so fast I almost miss the wolf beneath him rising with a snarl.
Kelly is already moving. “I’ll drive.”
Dorian points once. “Keys.”
She grabs them from the table without question.
For half a second, I stare at her. Kelly Hart, human officer, face pale and jaw set, choosing the impossible so cleanly it makes something in my chest twist. Yesterday, the weird was something she stood beside. Today, she steps straight into it.
Mina bolts toward the kitchen. “Protective charms. Salt. Iron. Maybe biscuits.”
“Mina,” Dorian says.
“What? We don’t know what we’re walking into. Emergency carbohydrates have saved lives.”
“Charms. Not biscuits.”
“Fine, but if someone faints from low blood sugar, I’m making a note.”
The absurdity should help.
It does not.
My hands shake so hard I have to press them against the table. The murder board swims in front of me. Mara and Caleb at the center. Lilissa and Rafe under possible next targets. Red thread, black ink, every note turning into accusation.
I did this. The thought lands with the calm brutality of a judge. I matched them. I celebrated them. I put their names in announcements and ceremony plans and private ledgers. I told Lilissa love did not have to mean surrender. I told Rafe tenderness would not make him weak.
I made them visible.
“Fate.”
Dorian is in front of me again. Too close. Not close enough.
“I painted targets on them,” I whisper.
His expression tightens. “No.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know we do not have time for this right now.”
The words should offend me. Instead, they give me a ledge. Panic later. Move now.
It is not comfort. It is a command. A mission. Something my body can understand while my heart tries to tear itself into useful pieces.
I nod once.
Dorian’s voice lowers. “Good. Tasks. You keep reading the thread. Tell us if it changes. Mina brings charms and anything that blocks ingestion or contact magic. Kelly drives. I call for medics and Mercer.”
“Why Mercer?” I ask.
“Because if they ingested something, we need a coroner who is not yet required to act as one.”
My stomach turns.
But he is right.
I hate that he is right.
Kelly appears at the sunroom entrance, keys in hand. “Who’s coming?”
Mina returns with a canvas bag slung across her body, charms rattling inside it. “I have salt packets, ward stones, blessed charcoal, nettle thread, two anti-glamour lenses, and one biscuit because I am not a monster.”
Dorian does not argue.
That is how I know things are terrible.
We move toward the door.
The cottage seems to resist me, just for a breath. Warm air, herbs, the murder board behind us, the unfinished notes, the names I have not yet protected. My gaze snags on the red thread between Lilissa and Rafe’s names.
It trembles.
Dorian’s hand closes around my wrist. Not hard. Not restraining. Anchoring. “Still with us?”
I swallow. “Mostly.”
“Good enough.” His thumb presses once against my pulse, and every instinct in me wants to lean into him.
No.
No wanting. No visible bond. No giving the curse more of me to use.
I pull my wrist free.
Dorian lets me.
That hurts too.
Outside, rain slicks the stone path. Kelly’s car waits at the curb, lights flashing once as she unlocks it. The sky hangs low and bruised over Everwilde Bay.
We run.
Kelly drives like a woman who has decided traffic laws are useful suggestions written by people with less urgent poisoning emergencies.
The car cuts through Everwilde’s rain-slick streets, tires hissing over wet pavement, windshield wipers snapping back and forth with frantic little clicks.
Gray storefronts blur past. The Siren’s Cup.
The closed flower shop. A row of cottages with smoke curling from chimneys like nothing in the world is wrong.
Everything in the world is wrong.
The thread in my chest pulls west, tight enough to hurt.
Lilissa and Rafe.
Lilissa laughing in my office, pretending she did not care whether the wolf shifter with the gentle hands called again. Rafe standing in my doorway two days later with a bouquet so large it looked like he was apologizing to an entire garden.