Page 58 of The Threads Between

“Yes,” I said. “I'm ready.”

CHAPTER 18

LILY

The sitting room held only the four of us. Mira stood beside Beatrice, ready to feed her magic in if Beatrice ran low. August sat motionless in his chair, pendant glowing cold. And I knelt before him, our hands joined.

“The suppression will create a window,” Beatrice said from behind August, her hands hovering over the pendant. “But his consciousness is fragmented. You won’t find him whole. You’ll need to follow your connection deep into his mind and reach him where the corruption has buried him.”

“What if I can’t find him?”

“Then you come back before the suppression fails.” Beatrice’s voice was steady. “Five minutes. Maybe less. If you’re still inside when the pendant’s hold reasserts, the backlash could cause you great harm.”

Five minutes to save the man I loved.

I looked at August’s face and tried to see past the emptiness to the person underneath. The man who’d looked at me across a library like I was the most fascinating thing in the world. Who’d kissed me like I was his last breath.

I missed him so much it hurt.

“I’m ready,” I said.

Mira’s hands glowed gold as she touched Beatrice’s shoulder. Power flowed between them—healer sustaining suppressor, magic working in concert.

Beatrice’s hands moved over the pendant without touching it. Her magic manifested, dozens of threads, thin and precise, weaving through the air like a spider spinning a web. They wrapped around the pendant, seeking the binding woven through it.

The pendant's magic surfaced. Grey threads shot through with black, wound tight—holding, controlling, waiting.

Beatrice’s threads found the grey ones and began to wrap around them, layer upon layer, creating a cage of suppression. The binding magic couldn’t break free through the containment—couldn’t maintain its hold on August’s consciousness.

The pendant’s glow dimmed as the binding weakened.

“Now, Lily,” Beatrice grunted out.

I found the thread that had been pulling on me for months and pulled hard right back. I closed my eyes and followed it inward.

The world dropped away.

Darkness swallowed me whole—not the absence of light but the presence of nothing. The absence pressed against her consciousness. But there, in all that emptiness, a single golden thread. Thin and glowing like captured sunlight.

Our bond.

I wrapped myself around it and let it pull me deeper.

The tunnel wasn’t carved. It was made of negative space, of all the places August used to be. No walls because there was nothing to hold. No floor because I wasn’t walking. Just falling forward through the dark, following that golden lifeline into the ruins of his mind.

Then—

A memory surfaced.

August as a child. Seven, maybe eight. Laughing as his mother spun him through a garden that smelled of roses and summer rain. Sunlight in her dark hair. Joy bright on his small face.

Beautiful and dying.

The edges curled inward—paper held too close to flame. Colors bled to grey. His mother’s face blurred. The sound of his laughter faded like an echo down a well, growing distant, muffled, until⁠—

Nothing.

The memory dissolved into ash.