Foxglove (Belladonna, #2)(2)
Fate tossed the striped tapestry into the flames and took a seat in his chair, eager to watch it burn. Yet the flames sizzled out the moment the fire was fed, bringing an all too familiar chill into the room. It felt like ice sinking through his bones, seizing hold of his body and sending tremors down his spine.
Fate lurched to a stand and yanked the tapestry out, scowling as the hearth reignited. Anger stirring, he took the hideously bruised tapestry this time and thrust it into flames that coughed embers up at his face. Fate stumbled back, shielding himself. When he’d glared down at the fire, it was neither red nor orange but a color he thought he’d never see again.
Color leached from his face as he latched trembling fingers around the tapestry, not caring that the heat scorched his palms as he freed it from the flames. He pushed the chair to the edge of the room so that he could spread the tapestry before him on the floor. He fell to his knees, staring, searching—and there they were, glinting like stars: silver threads. Perfect, impossible silver threads. Until he blinked, and they were no more.
His breath grew strained. Likely, what he saw was little more than a product of his loneliness. A delirium brought on by too much work. Because after all this time searching… could he have found her at last?
As delicate as a lover, Fate brushed his hand across the threads to behold exactly who this tapestry belonged to—a girl he’d crafted out of spite, made to tempt Death just enough to ruin the man when it turned out they could no longer be together. And yet her fate had somehow continued to spiral onward, no longer in his control.
The second tapestry was similar, belonging to a girl who had defied Fate not once, not twice, but three times over. Death had often warned him that he was too cavalier with the fates he wove—that there was no such thing as a perfect creation and that, someday, someone would overcome the future he had bestowed upon them and beat Fate at his own game. Until now, he had never believed that could be true.
He needed to know. Needed to see this girl with threads of silver, this Signa Farrow, for himself. And so Fate grabbed his hat and gloves, and he went to crash a party.
ONE
IT’S SAID THAT FOXGLOVE IS MOST LETHAL JUST BEFORE THE SEEDS RIPEN.
Signa Farrow could not help but think of that alluringly toxic flower, and her family’s manor that shared its namesake, as she stared down at the corpse of the once Duke of Berness. Lord Julius Wakefield.
All her life she’d heard the stories of how her parents had died in that manor, their breath stolen by poison. Signa had found wrinkled newspaper clippings detailing the incident buried in her grandmother’s attic when she was a child, and she remembered thinking what a beautifully tragic evening it must have been. She’d envisioned bodies dancing beneath a buttery haze of lights while satin gowns twirled about the ballroom floor, and Signa thought of how lovely it must have been in those final moments before Death arrived. She’d taken comfort knowing that her mother had died in a ball gown, doing what she’d loved most.
Never had Signa allowed herself to imagine the tragedy of such a death or stopped to consider the shattering glasses and earsplitting screams like those that reverberated through Thorn Grove’s ballroom. Until her cousin Blythe stumbled forward as someone shoved past her, Signa hadn’t given any thought to how a person would have to mind their hands and toes to avoid being trampled by those who hurried past the body lying dead at their feet and rushed toward an exit.
This death was not the beautiful, peaceful one that she had dreamed for her parents.
This death was merciless.
Everett Wakefield sank to his knees beside his father. He wilted over the corpse, showing no awareness of the mounting chaos even as his cousin Eliza Wakefield gripped him by one shoulder. Her face was green as lichen. Gathering one long look at her dead uncle, she clutched her stomach and heaved her dinner onto the marble floor. Everett didn’t so much as flinch as her sickness spilled onto his boots.
Moments before, the Duke of Berness had been all smiles as he’d prepared to partner with the Hawthornes on their esteemed business, Grey’s Gentleman’s Club. The arrangement had been the town’s most notable gossip for weeks and a venture that Elijah Hawthorne, Signa’s former guardian, had been preening about for even longer. Yet as he stood behind the corpse of that almost-partner with a flute of water trembling in his hands, Elijah Hawthorne no longer preened. He’d gone so white that his skin was like marble, veins of blue corded beneath his eyes.
“Who did this to me?” Lord Wakefield’s spirit hovered over his body, his translucent feet not quite touching the ground as he twisted to face Death and Signa—the only ones who could see him.
Signa was asking herself the very same question, though with the restless crowd surrounding them, she couldn’t very well answer Lord Wakefield aloud. She waited to see if more bodies would fall, wondering all the while if this was how it had been at Foxglove the night of her parents’ deaths. If it had felt too bright and too glittery for the sickness that marred the air—and if her mother’s sweat-soiled gown and coiled hair had felt as heavy then as Signa’s did now.
So lost in her thoughts and her panic was Signa that she flinched when Death whispered beside her, “Easy, Little Bird. No one else will die tonight.”
If that was meant to reassure her, he’d need to try harder.
Everett held his father’s limp hand, his tears falling in a bone-chilling silence as his father’s spirit sank to his knees before him.