Page 52 of The Threads Between

She stared at me, tears streaming down her face. Then turned and ran up the stairs, toward her room, away from all of us.

I let her go. What else could I do?

From the bedroom, Adeline screamed again.

I sank into a chair across from August.

We’d come so close. For thirty seconds in that opera house, it had been working. The fire perfect, the suppression holding, everyone in position. We’d been doing it.

Then Elias had channeled his power through August, and everything had collapsed.

Five Weavers erased. Syra dead. Adeline permanently scarred. Beatrice unconscious. Marigold upstairs, crying for a woman who'd been the closest thing she had to family.

The cost kept mounting.

My eyes found August, still sitting motionless by the window. I pushed myself up and crossed to him, sinking to my knees. His hands lay slack in his lap. I took them in mine—cold, lifeless. The pendant still glowed at his chest—cold and steady and beautiful.

“August,” I whispered.

Nothing.

“I know you’re in there,” I said. “I can feel you through the ghost-thread. You’re not gone. Just . . . buried. Trapped.”

His eyes stared past me at nothing.

“Syra died to save you.” My voice cracked. “And Marigold is upstairs crying because she thinks it was for nothing.”

Still nothing.

“Please.” I pressed his hands to my chest, right where the thread burned. “Please come back. I can’t—I can’t do this alone. I can’t fix this. I need you. I need⁠—“

The words dissolved into tears.

I knelt there, holding August’s lifeless hands, listening to Adeline scream in the next room, and let myself break.

I don’t know how long I stayed like that. Minutes, maybe hours. Time had gone strange again.

Eventually, the screaming from the bedroom stopped.