Page 1

CHAPTER 1

LILY

Three months, and his magic still burned in my chest.

The rain fell like it had been falling since that night—steady, gray, unremarkable. The rooms we'd taken in a Clerkenwell safe-house smelled of damp wool and old stone. The hearth lay cold. No one had bothered to light a fire. I stood at the narrow window, fingernails picking at a peeling frame, watching water stream down the glass.

My gran used to say that grief was just love with nowhere to go. I'd finally found somewhere. And then I'd lost him too.

I pressed my palm against the cold pane and held it there until my hand ached. I'm still here. I'm still real. But some days it was harder to believe that than others.

My reflection caught in the rain-streaked glass. Thinner than I'd been when I arrived. The softness had gone out of my face—the roundness that came from regular meals and sleep that didn't shatter into nightmares.

Mrs. Hartwick, the lady of this safe house, used to hover. Those first weeks, she'd bring tea I hadn't asked for, blankets I didn't need, gentle questions I couldn't answer. Where are you from, dear? Is there someone I should write to?

I'd given her nothing. And eventually she stopped asking. Now she just left the tea and went.

That was the thing about grief. It made you invisible. People looked away because looking at you meant seeing something they didn't want to feel. After a while, you start to wonder if you were really there at all.

And maybe that was the cruelest part.

Eventually, no one would remember me. And still this life demanded I rise, even when I wanted to fall. That I try again, even when I didn't know what I was trying for anymore.

I carried things no one else could see. August's face in the firelight. The way he'd looked at me in that tent and said my name like it meant something. Ysella's last words. The moment the Weave recognized him for what he was—Threadbreaker—and the world trembled. The sweep of his magic across Oxford, gold turning to ash, beautiful and terrible and his.

I watched fifty-some Weavers vanish in a single night while I stood untouched. August's corrupted magic moved through the city like a tide, and I was left behind in the wreckage—alive, breathing, spared, like I didn't matter enough to destroy.

I closed my eyes. Pressed harder against the glass until the cold ached.

What a strange thing, to disappear slowly while becoming more yourself.

Outside, January 1893 moved on without me—watchmakers hurrying through the rain, women with shawls pulled tight, the rhythmic clang of printing presses down the lane. A cart horse stamped somewhere close, and for a moment the sound pulled me back into the room, into my body, into the ache between my shoulder blades from standing too long in one position.

The floorboard behind me creaked.

“You're at the window again,” Adeline's voice echoes softly behind me. She'd gotten good at that tone—the one that didn't quite ask if I was alright because she already knew the answer.

I opened my eyes. Her reflection appeared behind mine in the glass—golden hair loose around her shoulders, wearing one of the simple day dresses we'd bought with her money. Adeline Wolfe, who'd traded silk and servants for cramped lodgings in Clerkenwell because nowhere else was safe.

“Have you eaten?” she asked.

“I had tea.”

“That's not eating, Lily.”

I turned from the window. Her face was composed, watchful, as if she were measuring how much of me was left each morning and trying not to show the math.

“Marigold and Syra?”

“Out. Following a lead near Whitechapel. They said not to wait up.”

I nodded. They were always out. The others moved like blood through the veins of England, searching, recruiting, surviving. And me, standing at this window, telling myself someone had to coordinate. Someone had to keep notes, keep contacts, keep track of what had already been lost.

The truth was simpler. I couldn't leave. Not while the ghost-thread still pulled me like gravity—faint as spider silk and twice as stubborn—an impossible tether that refused to snap even when everything else had. Not while some irrational part of me believed that if I stayed close enough to where the world had rewritten itself, I might feel him.

“I’m going to the cellar,” I said.

Something shifted in Adeline's expression—a tightening around her mouth that might have been frustration or might have been fear.