Anguish slammed through me, hollowing out my soul.
“I brought this on him,” I whispered, tears welling and drying and welling again. “I chose wrong. If I had just gone away?—”
“It’s not your fault,” Dante bit out. “Never your fault!”
“Don’t watch,” Orren said, his eyes burning with helpless fury.
“I will not look away,” I said through clenched teeth. “I want to remember every second. I won’t forget, and I’ll never forgive.”
My fingernails sank into my palms. Blood welled, hot and swift.
And I began to weave.
Chapter
Six
Bloom
Blood Thread and Memory
Iwove the first blood thread.
My nails had broken skin, blood welling hot in my palms. The red drops fell—but instead of striking stone, they hung before me, twisting into a humming crimson strand.
A voice rising from within whispered a line I’d never heard but somehow knew:
Three crowns lost, two kingdoms torn, one queen reborn where death was sworn.
My fingers moved frantically, pulling at the blood thread, weaving patterns I didn’t understand but felt in my bones. My heart pounded in my throat. Each second stretched into an eternity. I was terrified he wouldn’t survive the next strike.
“Twenty-one…”
The first thread formed—a line of pure crimson that pulsed with my heartbeat.
Another crack of the whip. Another stripe of flesh torn from Nero’s back. I bit back a scream as I forced my trembling hands to keep moving.
As the second line came, the second blood thread began to weave:
The dead remember what the living forget, the hundredth thread shall break the net.
The redheads who had died. They remembered what I’d forgotten.
Pain bloomed in my head, sudden and vicious, as if my skull were splitting. Images flooded in. A woman drowning in a river, red hair fanning around her face. Another burning at a stake, flames consuming pale skin. Another with a blade slashing through her throat, blood spreading across white stone.
All of them had my face.
Beyond dreams and fractured flashes, I’d never truly reached the past. But the song was showing me how. I had to reach for it, to open myself completely, no matter the cost.
“Pain is the price, and I’ll pay it.” My words tore from my parched throat, a promise to the magic, to the dead, to whatever stirred awake inside me. “I accept nothing but the truth.”
Pain only intensified. Every death hit me at once—breaking, bleeding out, suffocating, falling. I gasped, my vision bleaching white, then red, then black.
All the redheads from the pictures overlapped with me. Their pasts became mine. Their memories flooded in—their lives, their losses, their final moments of terror.
Tears flowed down my face.
They were all me.
