Page 37 of The Threads Between

“Was,” Elias repeated with satisfaction. “Past tense. Good. You’re finally accepting that she’s gone.”

I didn’t correct him. Couldn’t let him know. The one piece of information I still had control over—that she’d survived, that she was alive somewhere—I’d guard that with whatever was left of me.

“What if I kill someone tomorrow?” I asked instead. “Someone innocent. Someone who doesn't deserve⁠—“

“They're all guilty by virtue of what they are.” Elias turned from the window, and his face was perfectly calm. Perfectly certain. “August. You're thinking about this wrong. Tomorrow isn't about punishment. It's about purification. About removing corruption from the world.”

“They’re people.”

“They’re aberrations.” He moved closer, and there was no hesitation in his steps. No wavering in his voice. “Unnatural. Dangerous.”

He stopped a few feet away, studying me with that clinical interest I’d learned to hate.

“Your mother saw things in the Weave,” he continued, his voice flat, factual. Like discussing a scientific specimen. “Futures. Possibilities. She was brilliant. The most talented Weaver I’d ever encountered.”

But his hand—the one not clasped behind his back—had curled into a fist at his side.

“She saw her people being hunted. Killed. Erased from existence. And she couldn’t bear it. Couldn’t accept it.” His voice remained steady. Even. “So she tried to change it, reached into the Weave and pulled at threads that were never meant to be touched. Tried to rewrite what was coming.”

Grief moved across his face—naked, unguarded, decades old. Then his jaw set, and it was gone.

“Her magic went wrong. Catastrophically wrong.” His voice dropped, steadier now. “It didn’t change the future. It created the very thing she’d seen. The Unraveler. The weapon that would hunt her people.”

His eyes met mine.

“It created me. Her meddling with fate, with futures that shouldn’t be altered—it transformed me. Hollowed out something inside me and replaced it with this power. This hunger to unmake.” He laughed—a dry, contained sound that never reached his body. “She tried to save her people and turned her own husband into their destroyer.”

I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move.

“And then the magic took her anyway. Consumed her from the inside out because what she’d done—changing the Weave itself—it was too much. Too powerful. The price was everything she was.” He moved back to the window. His reflection stared at something beyond the glass that wasn’t London. “I watched her disappear. Watched the woman I loved vanish.”

The grief in his voice was real and raw. The kind that had festered for decades until it became indistinguishable from the man carrying it.

“So yes, August. I know exactly what magic does. What it costs. What it takes from the people foolish enough to wield it.” He moved toward the door. “Your mother tried to save her people and doomed them instead. She created the weapon that would hunt them and destroyed herself in the process.”

He held one hand on the doorknob. His knuckles white.

“I loved her more than anything in this world. And magic killed her.” His voice went cold again—the grief sealed back beneath ice. “So when I say they’re aberrations—when I say every Weaver needs to be eliminated—I’m not being cruel. I’m fulfilling what was inevitable when she reached too far.”

“She was trying to protect them,” I whispered.

“And instead she doomed them all.” Elias opened the door. “Magic always does. It promises power, control, and the ability to change fate itself. But it takes everything. Your mother learned that. You’re learning it now.”

He stepped into the hallway, paused, looked back at me, still collapsed on the floor.

“The pendant is mercy, August. It’s keeping you from the same fate. From reaching too far and destroying yourself the way she did.” His expression was perfectly composed. Perfectly calm. “Tomorrow, you’ll channel my power through that opera house and eliminate the magical corruption inside. And you’ll do it with perfect control.”

He was still for a moment and his blue eyes glistened.

“Because I won’t lose you the way I lost her.”

Then he closed the door behind him.

But I heard it. The pause on the other side of the door. The sound of his breathing—just for a moment, just long enough for me to notice—before his footsteps moved down the hallway with their usual measured precision.

And I understood, finally, why he’d never stop. Why nothing I said or did would ever change his mind.

He wasn’t trying to save England from magic.