Fetching a needle he’d tucked behind his ear, Fate stuck it through the second tapestry to see what might happen when he tried to weave in the final black thread of death. To his surprise, the tapestry spit the needle back into his palm. He clenched his fist around it.
Whatever these monstrosities were, he had not created them. The sight of them soured his stomach, and he yanked both tapestries from their lines. Even as Fate hauled them over his shoulder, they continued to grow, black and white stitches waterfalling down his back, brushing over each lip of the stairs he stomped up while trying not to trip. He hurried to a crackling stone hearth that cast an amber glow across yet another bare room, this one dressed with nothing more than a single leather armchair that faced the roaring flames.
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.