“The task would have driven us mad,” Lachesis tsked, her amber gaze distant. “We tend only to the threads of those who are significant. The masses follow patterns we designed long ago. Even so, the work is never done. We are trapped here. For eons, we have not left this cave physically.”
“We can only appear in dreams and visions,” Clotho added, her fingers never stilling. They moved in patterns I recognized—patterns I used when I wove my own threads.
The realization settled cold and clear. I had something in common with them.
That was likely why their power did not blind me. Why my mind remained my own. Why I could stand here, seeing what nomortal or immortal was meant to see, and walk away with my sight intact.
I’d felt their probes the moment I entered their territory—three distinct presences trying to slip past my defenses, searching for weaknesses, looking for secrets. Each one had met my mental defenses and returned empty. I’d caught the slight flinch in Atropos when her attempt failed. She was the most aggressive of them. The cutter.
My gaze located the threads Clotho was weaving with unwavering skills. This section of the harp held not one strand but many—an elaborate tapestry telling a story across time.
The threads of my life.Lives, plural.
Not one lifetime, but ninety-nine. Ninety-nine reincarnations displayed before me.
To another, it might have been an indecipherable knot of light and color. But I was a weaver. Their secrets could not hide from me.
The realization struck like lightning. Images began to bleed from the threads, streaming forward in a relentless sequence—my past lives, rendered in devastating clarity.
All of them centered on Hades. Different versions of him. Different eras. Different red-haired women who wore my face, my gray eyes, dressed in the garments of their time: Greek chitons, medieval gowns, Victorian silks, modern linens. My face, again and again.
The images shifted faster, and a cold horror gathered in my chest. They were not showing me lives.
They were showing me deaths.
My deaths.
And Hades was there every time.
Darkly gorgeous and utterly devastated, he held my corpse, rage and grief warring across his features. In one life, I lay stabbed through the heart, blood soaking a Renaissance gown.In another, I was drowned, my hair streaming wet over his arms as he lifted me from the water. Always, he arrived one moment too late.
In one thread, poison scorched my veins. Hades begged me to hold on. In another, he had to breathe death into me himself—the only mercy left—to spare me the agony as my body was torn apart.
The God of Death could not save me.
Because of the curse.
A curse woven into the fabric of our very souls.
By the Fates.
By the twelve Olympian gods.
Including my mother.
I saw the truth in the one long, central thread amidst the others that were severed and knotted into a chain of endless rebirth. The ancient blood curse was an unbearable weight in my veins, the fog that had clouded my mind for lifetimes. It had stolen my awareness, my memories, forced me into cycle after cycle of death before I could fully wake.
Now, the Fates’ own threads laid it bare.
Wrath tore through me, a white-hot inferno.
“She can see them!” Clotho gasped, her hands stuttering on the spindle.
All three sisters fixed their predatory gazes on me, reassessing the threat.
“Of course she can see them,” Atropos said, her voice a low blade. “We watched her weave with blood magic.”
“Twice,” Lachesis added, cold admiration in her tone. “After he finally woke her power.”
