Chapter 34
LILY
The instant the pendant touched my skin the Weave startled awake.
Heat poured from the hourglass—no bigger than a wish—and spilled up my arm in quicksilver filaments only I could feel.
My lungs full of night air vanished; the world narrowed to gold, glass, and the thunder of two matching heartbeats.
It was identical to the necklace that had broken the night I tore through centuries: the same cage-fine filigree, the same grains of sparkling sand. Mine had shattered and bled light; his lay whole, latent, as if waiting for its missing twin to speak its true name.
I curled my fingers round it before he could think to stop me.
The Weave answered—threads whipping from the dark corners of the terrace, fizzing across my knuckles like live wire. The balustrade thrummed beneath my bracing palm, stone shivering as though it remembered being sand and longed—just for a heartbeat—to flow again.
Elowen’s necklace.
I looked up. “Where did you get this?” The question rasped out half-prayer, half-accusation.
For the first time his certainty sounded brittle, like ice thin over running water. “It was my mother’s.”
“I found it after she—” A ragged swallow. “After the Weavers killed her.”
Wind off the gardens could not match the cold that slid down my spine. The pendant pulsed between us, tethered to its chain, tethered to every choice we’d made.
“She never took it off,” he went on, softer, staring at the hourglass as though it might begin to breathe. “Father called it rubbish jewelry. Garrick thought it odd—glass, sand that never moved. But the first time it touched me. . .” His jaw flexed. “It felt. . . important.”
I drew a shaking breath. There would be no going back from this.
“August, your mother wasn’t killed by Weavers—she was a Weaver. She was trying to stop the Unravelling before it ever started. Her magic brought me back to this moment.”
The mask slammed across his face but the Weave bucked at the force of it: grief, denial, fury stitched into one brutal knot.
“Stop.” The word struck like a gauntlet. “Do not rewrite my mother to fit your tale. She was innocent. She was murdered. I will not let you twist that into—”
“Into what? The truth?” My breath snagged. “You never questioned any of it. Your father turned his grief into a weapon. He's been hunting the very thing your mother was.”
The pendant pulsed between us, proof of all his father’s lies.
The terrace doors banged open; Garrick’s easy drawl sliced the tension.
“There you are. Speech is starting—your father wants you front-and-center.”
“It will wait,” August barked, not looking away from me.
Garrick lifted both brows. “Tell him yourself, then. I’m not volunteering.”
A curse tangled behind August’s teeth. He closed his fist around the pendant’s chain, the hourglass burning a mark into my palm until I let go. His other hand wrapped, unrelenting, around my forearm.
“This isn’t finished,” he said, low and lethal. “You’re going to tell me everything you know about my mother.”
Threads snapped bright between our joined skins—promise or warning, I couldn’t tell. But I knew this: the hourglass had chosen its moment, and neither of us would leave this night unchanged.
August pushed us through the crowd. By the time he slammed me into the chair, the soup course had chilled to a gelatinous skin. The hum of conversation blended with the clinking of silverware against fine porcelain.
The murmur of conversation quieted as a man at the head of the room clinked his glass. The polished wood of his chair scraped softly against the floor as he pushed back from the table. His presence commanded immediate attention.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great honor to introduce tonight’s esteemed guest. A man without whom this city and our world—would be far less secure.
A man who has dedicated his life to ridding us of those who would threaten our order.
” The speaker turned, gesturing toward the figure beside him.
“Please, raise your glasses in honor of the Unraveler himself.
The room lifted their glasses in eerie unison.
But I couldn’t breathe.
He stood at the head of the room like a relic cast in iron—tall, silver at the temples, polished and precise down to the set of his shoulders.
And now that I looked closely, I saw it: the echo of August in the set of his jaw, the cut of his gaze.
The weight of his authority pressed on the room like gravity, and when his eyes swept the table, people stilled as if fearing they might be unmade by the glance.
August sat down next to me but didn’t move.
“This evening,” the Unraveler said, patient as rot, “we celebrate not only progress, but preservation. A city safeguarded. Order restored. And the continued triumph of truth over treachery.”
A hush fell like dust.
“Which is why I am delighted to share with you tonight a rare and sacred act. An Unraveling.”
A cold bloom unfurled in my chest.
“Bring her in.”
The words slid across the room, unhurried. Two men stepped through a side door—dragging a girl between them.
Marigold.
Her dress was torn. Her lip split. Blood trailed down her temple.
My chair scraped back—I was standing before I realized I'd moved. Raw power flashed down my wrist—threads hissing to life, white-hot—then guttered, strangled by the spike of panic. It stung like my skin was being seared from the inside.
Garrick caught my arm. “Don’t,” he whispered.
She was barely conscious, but her eyes—god, her eyes—found mine pleading not for help but forgiveness.
“Tonight,” the Unraveler continued, “we rid the world of one more infection. One more thread corrupted.”
My blood roared in my ears.
August stood rigid beside me, his jaw locked, watching his father with an expression carved from stone. Whatever he was thinking—about what I'd just told him, about his mother, about the girl being dragged to her death—he gave nothing away.
He was a hunter's son. And hunters didn't flinch.
“This child is a Weaver. That alone is crime enough.” He paused, letting the words settle. “There is no age at which corruption becomes acceptable. No innocence that magic cannot taint.”
He turned slowly, gaze settling like a knife on Marigold’s broken form.
“They forget what we do to Weavers.”
August still hadn’t moved. Not an inch.
“She’s a child.” The words tore from me.
No one blinked. No one dared. Fans stilled, whispers spider-webbed behind gloved hands; the chandeliers seemed to lean in, hungry for scandal. Every head turned.
I just destroyed weeks of careful performance. The meek country cousin wouldn't have dared speak. Wouldn't have challenged the Unraveler himself.
The Unraveler looked down the table—at me, at August, at our joined table settings like they were proof of contagion. “And who,” he said slowly, “are you to speak during judgment?”
August stood.
Finally.
He placed a hand flat on the table. His mouth opened, then closed again.
I saw it then—the boy behind the soldier. The son behind the sword. And the war inside him that had never truly ended.
He knew.
Not everything. Not yet.
But enough.
The hourglass between us was still pulsing.
Still choosing.
And I knew, as surely as the Weave knew, that this was the moment our fates would either fracture—or bind.