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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.
CHAPTER 35
AUGUST
Father—the Unraveler—still held the room in his immaculate fist, one palm poised above Marigold’s bowed head as if he were blessing her instead of damning her. Candle flames quivered in the draught. A dozen silk fans snapped shut in uneasy silence.
I did not sit.
The chair behind me waited—ornate, gilded, obedient. Exactly what a dutiful son should be.
Instead, I stood at our table, all eyes in the ballroom ricocheting between the condemned girl, the man about to erase her, and me—his heir, suddenly frozen mid-breath.
Lily’s words still rang inside my skull: Your mother wasn’t killed by Weavers—she was a Weaver.
Frost-thin certainty cracked. For the first time in years, I had no script to follow.
A gust smacked the terrace doors—hard—flinging them wide. Every candle in the ballroom guttered in the same breath, flames bleeding sideways before they vanished. For a single, lurching heartbeat I swore I saw it: hair-thin filaments of molten gold snapping off Lily’s hands and shivering through the air like struck harp-strings. Then the world went blind—only the reek of blown-out candles and the ragged hush of two hundred lungs pulling in the dark told me I hadn’t imagined the flash.
