Foxglove （Belladonna, #2）
Adalyn Grace
I have a friend who was asked, “What gets you out of bed in the morning?” during a job interview.
She answered: “My alarm clock.”
This book is for her—for always being my first reader, the best travel partner, an A+ stalker, and for making me laugh even when she doesn’t mean to.
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PROLOGUE
IT HAD TAKEN FATE A MILLENNIUM TO LEARN THE SONGS OF THE threads, and even longer to discover how to weave them.
He sat on the floor of a cellar lit by a waning candle, hunched over a bare tapestry draped across his lap. Above it, a needle glinted between nimble fingers, the color threaded through it ever changing as Fate crafted yet another lifetime.
The first color was always the same—a hymn of white that signified new life. He promptly followed it with a calming hum of blue threaded across the canvas, fueled by the music that thrummed in his veins. Passionate riffs of red and a wailing of yellow came next, the colors exploding over the tapestry like a sunburst as Fate allowed himself to be consumed by the life of a wealthy aristocrat who would one day become so devastatingly beautiful that she’d inspire the most wondrous art. Paintings and sculptures, music and poetry—none of which would ever fully capture her beauty. Her life was a series of torrid affairs, each of them spun from gossamer threads as fragile as they were exquisite. With each new lover she took and every twist he foretold, Fate grew more frantic, tearing through her life as he followed a crescendo only he could hear.
Anyone who saw him work would assume Fate was more a musician than an artist—the needle his bow and the tapestry his violin as he strummed life across a canvas. With every slice of his needle, he hurried to capture an entire lifetime that came to him in seconds, spinning songs into colors. He wove with such haste that he did not think. Did not breathe. So lost was he to the story that when the strike of a minor chord sounded and the thread of his needle turned black to mark the end of the tapestry, there came a second where Fate did not remember who he was, let alone what he was crafting.
Fate remembered himself eventually, though, when he looked about the empty room with its bare gray walls and recalled that such vibrant colors no longer belonged to him but to those whose stories he foretold. For while Fate’s tapestry had once shone a brilliant and pure gold, the final thread had been marred by a new color for centuries—a quiet, perfect silver that he couldn’t bring himself to look upon, for it signified all that had been taken from him. All that Death had taken from him.
As he blew out the candle, the walls surrounding him morphed into rows of tapestries that hung from moving lines stretched endlessly ahead. The moment a clear space revealed itself, Fate stilled the line long enough to hang the newest addition. He brushed his finger across its whorls of rich crimson—his favorite of all the colors, for love and passion that strong always made the most gripping stories. The tapestry continued onward as he drew back his hand, and onward it would continue until all the threads had unwoven and it returned on the next line, blank and ready to craft a new tale.
Golden eyes had slid to his next canvas when a sound from behind drew his attention. It was unlike any he’d heard before, one as soft as harp song and yet as arresting as Death’s minor chord. It drowned out all other noise, and while Fate made it a rule to never revisit the tapestries he’d already hung—for why alter a masterpiece?—he could not resist its call.
Fate moved between the rows, ducking and sidestepping as he made his way toward it. The line stilled as he approached, and Fate saw that the song did not come from one tapestry but two.
The first was perhaps the ugliest that Fate had ever woven, for too much of it was gray, and purpled like a bruise. And yet it was one that Fate had taken his time with, every thread sewed with precision as he crafted this cruel gift for his brother: a woman Death would love but could never have. Only now, Fate frowned as he looked upon the tapestry, for somehow his creation had been altered. The gray shifted into lines of black that merged into red and gold. Yellow. Blue. And then more black—not just a single line of it but thousands of threads that continued to stitch themselves even as Fate took the marred creation in his fists.
The second tapestry was no better than the first. Swirls of faded rose and icy blues were struck out by thick lines of black and white, over and over like the keys of a piano. He bent to listen to its song—the darkest, quietest hymn in which each note struck like a punch—and drew away with a sharp breath. Its beauty was undeniable, and yet it was wrong.