Page 136 of The Threads Between

I bent down. Pressed my lips to her forehead. Felt the heat of her, the light of her, the impossible radiance of a woman who had loved me enough to die for what we believed in.

“Find your way back to me,” I whispered against her skin. “Whatever happens. However long it takes. Find your way back.”

Through the bond, faint, so faint, she answered. Not words. Just love. Just warmth. Just the shape of a promise neither of us knew how to keep.

I closed my eyes.

And I cut.

The light blazed white.

For one endless moment, nothing. Only the severing, the release, the impossible sensation of cutting someone loose from time itself. Death. Birth. The sun exploding, and me, the one who lit the fuse.

And then silence.

The light faded. The heat vanished. The terrible weight of a thousand souls finding their way home lifted, and in its place was nothing.

My arms were empty.

Lily was gone.

I knelt on the floor of my mother's drawing room, my hands still raised as if to hold someone who was no longer there. The candles had blown out. The room was dark. And the bond, the golden thread that had connected me to Lily, that had made us us, was silent.

The thread held. Stretched into darkness toward something I couldn't see, somewhere I couldn't follow. She was alive. But her magic, the golden warmth of it, had snarled and gone quiet. I had saved her life. But I had damaged her magic.

I told myself it didn't matter. Whatever I had broken, time would heal. She would heal.

She was alive.

The sound started somewhere beneath my ribs and tore its way out. My hands found the place on the carpet where she had been, still warm, and I pressed my palms flat against it like I could hold onto the heat before it faded. My chest caved inward, muscles contracting around the emptiness, my body trying to close a wound that had no edges. I couldn't breathe. Couldn't see. The grief was a physical thing, a fist inside my chest squeezing until my vision went white and the only thing left was the sound I was making, over and over, her name in a voice I didn't recognize as mine.

Garrick's hand found my shoulder and gripped hard. Then he pulled me toward him, with the fierce, desperate strength of a man watching his brother break. His forehead pressed against the side of my head. He didn't speak. Didn't need to. He just breathed with me while the grief tore me apart.

And then a gasp.

In the corner where my father had been, Elias Hawthorne lay curled on the floor. He was weeping, broken, empty sobs that shook his entire frame. The Unraveling was gone. The corruption that had consumed him for twenty-seven years had been cut away, and what remained was just a man. A hollow, devastated man who had lost everything.

But beside him⁠—

I stopped breathing.

A woman lay on the floor.

Dark brown hair spread across the carpet. A face I had not seen since I was five years old but would have known anywhere, in dreams, in memory, in the hollow place inside me that had never stopped searching for her.

Her chest rose. Fell. Rose again.

She was breathing.

“No,” I whispered. It wasn't possible. It couldn't be⁠—

Her eyes fluttered open. Hazel, like mine. Like looking into a mirror that showed me who I could have been if I'd never lost her.

She drew a breath like someone surfacing from deep water. Confused. Disoriented. Alive.

My mother. Elowen Hawthorne was alive.

My legs dissolved beneath me. The floor rose, or I fell, or gravity simply stopped making decisions. Every thought in my head went to static, white noise drowning out language, drowning out reason, leaving nothing but the image of her face burning itself into my vision.