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But the thread remained.

Thin as a strand of spider silk, yet unbreakable.

Oxford had proved many things. Among them, that whatever power moved through me that night could not—or would not—touch her. The hesitation. The strange recoil, like a blade striking something harder than itself.

Then the destruction had flowed past her. Around her. As water parts around a stone set too deep to move.

Elias did not know. He did not know she had survived. And he would not learn it from me.

But silence was an easy war. The harder one lived under my skin.

I had tested the binding three weeks ago, in a moment of idiocy I had mistaken for courage. I had pushed against Elias’s control with everything I had left, my Threadbreaker magic straining against the corruption—wild, furious, so close I could taste freedom.

The pendant had answered by nearly stopping my heart.

I woke on the carpet with the world narrowed to a single point of pain, Elias standing over me with that terrible patience in his eyes, as if I were an experiment that had briefly misbehaved.

“The more you fight,” he had said, “the tighter the binding becomes. Eventually, you won’t remember what it feels like to choose anything at all.”

He had not been lying.

Every day it became harder to tell where Elias’s will ended and mine began. Some mornings I looked into the mirror and did not recognize the thing staring back. The shadows under its eyes, the pallor of its skin, those I recognized. It was the absence behind them that I didn't. As if someone had taken my face and hollowed it out.

“I see,” Elias said, and there was something almost like amusement in his voice. “Still nursing that attachment.”

I kept my face blank. The pendant made it easier than it should have been.

“Whoever she was,” Elias continued, settling back, “it would not have lasted. Even if she were not a Weaver—and we both know everyone you ever cared for was tainted with magic. It was always going to end this way.” A small sigh, almost regretful. “You have a weakness for lost causes. Your mother’s influence, I suspect.”

The pendant flared cold at the mention of my mother. A warning, not just pain. Elias watched it with the faintest satisfaction, as though he enjoyed observing which names still wounded.

“Weavers are abominations,” he said, and his voice smoothed into rhetoric. “Corruptions of the natural order. Women, which should tell you everything you need to know about the instability of their magic.”

He took a drink. His hand was not quite as steady as it had been a moment ago.

“Hysterical. Uncontrollable. Dangerous.” The words came faster now, rehearsed. As if repetition might make them true. “Whatever affection you formed for some girl in Oxford—Weaver or not—it was temporary. A distraction from your purpose.”

“My purpose,” I echoed.

“To be useful,” Elias said. “To be controlled. To be wielded.”

The pendant tightened again, anticipating the path of his thoughts like a trained animal.

“The demonstration at the Royal Opera House is in two weeks,” Elias said. “London’s elite will watch as you destroy a Weaver in front of them. They will watch as I prove that no magic—no matter how powerful—can escape proper restraint.”

My stomach turned, slow and sick.

“And after?” I asked, because there were some questions even a condemned man was permitted.

“After, we expand.” Elias set his glass down with more force than necessary. “Manchester. Liverpool. Edinburgh. Systematic eradication. Britain made clean. And you will be the instrument that makes it possible.”

Instrument.

Not son. Not man. Not even monster. It was simpler, something owned.

He stood and moved to the window. For a long moment, he only stared out at the softened skyline, shoulders rigid as though braced against an invisible wind.

“The wedding announcement goes to the news desk this week,” he said at last, still facing away. “Constance Sterling is precisely what this family needs. Old money. Social standing. And not a drop of corrupted blood to taint our line.”