Page 13 of The Unweaver (Unwoven Fates #1)

A Sister was screaming.

The nightmare from Cora’s childhood flashed across her sleeping mind’s eye with the disjointed surrealism of a dream.

The nun’s screams echoed through the drafty, stone corridors of the Sacred Heart orphanage, rousing children from their slumber. Cora cracked open the door and saw Sister Jessica, eyes wild and habit askew, running down the corridor.

“Help!” the nun cried. “For the love of God, help !”

The orphans exchanged whispers in the hectic uncertainty of the Sister’s wake. Nightgown-clad nuns appeared, hefting a body-shaped lump wrapped in a sheet down the corridor. Rosary beads clutched in a man’s fist peeked from underneath.

Something about the body beckoned Cora. Without thinking, she reached out as it passed. Darkness reached back.

Hands of unfeeling shadow enveloped and consumed her, and she sank into their embrace. Her sense of self was severed like a broken spine. She felt nothing. She had no body to feel with.

Slap, slap, slap , echoed a wet sound, followed by grunts and moans.

With a disembodied weightlessness, she drifted towards the noises. The horror unfolded slowly. In the center of a crimson room writhed a fleshy mass of bodies pulsating like a maggot.

Through the tangle of limbs, she saw vulgarities her nine-year-old mind couldn’t begin to comprehend. Women atop men. Men mounting other men. And children—

This must be Hell , she thought with mute terror. But if they warned me so much about it, why are they all here? For there in the mass was Father Hoyt, and Sister Jessica, and priests and orphans she’d dined with only hours before.

Slap, slap, slap .

Sister Jessica was astride Father Hoyt. Naked and gyrating, her saggy breasts bounced like empty wineskins. The priest’s cry of pleasure crunched into a shout of pain. He clutched his hands over his heart, tearing off the rosary beads, and Cora could feel the crushing pain in his chest like an elephant on her own sternum. He gasped for air and—

She was wrenched out of Hell as the priest’s body continued down the corridor. Baffled, she stared at her hand and the retreating web of black veins.

The briefest touch for the briefest moment and she had glimpsed into Hell, revealing a morbid insight she struggled to comprehend.

“How’d he croak?” asked an orphan.

“A heart attack,” Sister Jessica sniffled, bringing up the rear of the nun’s grave procession. “Father Hoyt, Lord bless him, has died peacefully in his sleep.”

A lie. He’d died not in his sleep, but in the saddle with Sister Jessica. The same nun who had lashed Cora raw for lying last week.

She dared not speak the truth. They already thought her eternally damned, and this descent into Hell, however brief, would remove all doubt. She’d heard the nun’s whispers from dark alcoves.

Abomination , they called her.

Sister Joan had labeled her so from the moment Cora was born at the Catholic charitable hospital. The nun had helped deliver twins to a mother little more than a child herself. The girl hadn’t given her name, the father’s name, or the babies’ names. She died before the younger twin was born.

A mercy , Sister Joan declared it. Cora hadn’t understood then, how death could be the merciful end of a tragedy. A girl that young hadn’t chosen motherhood for herself.

The first twin, a healthy boy, was delivered before the mother bled out. After an hour, the nurse deemed the second twin a stillborn. How could it not be? Breech, strangled by the umbilical cord, and bleeding its own mother out from within.

A dead baby in a dead womb.

They cut it out as an adornment for the mother’s arms when they buried her in a nameless grave. Better than a coffin birth, they told themselves.

Sister Joan nearly dropped the baby when it let out an ear-piercing cry. The little girl, purple and wriggling, was alive. Not by a miracle, Sister Joan whispered to the others, but by the Devil himself, for the girl surely bore the mark of Satan—a scar over her navel, white flesh puckered in a whorl of thorns, where she’d drained the life from her mother.

After glimpsing into Hell, Cora now knew the nuns had been right. Abomination might as well be branded on her forehead.

Cora wished Teddy was still there. But they’d sent him away months ago, after he’d told them what Father Hoyt did behind the pews when the church doors closed, and the votive candles were extinguished overnight to save money. She had written letters to Teddy’s new foster home without reply. As the silence lengthened, her thoughts often strayed to him. Was he warm, safe, fed? Did he suffer these same hellish visions? Had he found their father yet?

Teddy’s fanciful imagination styled their unknown father as a lovesick Lord, set to whisk his children away from London’s soot to places they only saw in Sister Frances’s atlas. Cora daydreamed along with Teddy but never believed it. She knew the truth without being told. Their parents were just the first people not to want them.

“Father Hoyt had a heart attack?” asked the boy beside her.

Warning bells clamored in her ears, yet Cora blurted the words before reason could stop her. A mistake she would regret for the rest of her life. “Sister Jessica was on top of Father Hoyt when he died.”

Everyone became very still. A pregnant hush fell. Their eyes widened on Cora, then the flushed, stammering Sister. The orphans tittered behind their hands.

Sister Frances narrowed her eyes on a flustered Sister Jessica before turning to Cora. “How would you know that, child?”

“I saw ‘em. She was riding him like a horse. Then Father Hoyt grabbed his chest and keeled over.”

Sister Jessica gasped. Her eyes bounced over the shocked nuns. “Wh-why would anyone believe her? The girl is an abomination!”

“I saw that mole on your back,” Cora said. “Near your right shoulder. Kinda looks like a heart. Or a kidney.”

Gaping mouths and stares were the only response. Cora realized her mistake then. Her awful mistake.

The priest’s stark chambers were windowless, with a heavy slab of wood for a door. The only way she could have witnessed his death was if she’d been standing right beside the bed. While she was good at hiding in shadows, she wasn’t that good. Her window into the priest’s torrid end hadn’t been gifted from God.

“W-witch!” Sister Jessica cried. “The child tries to beguile you with lies! Do not believe her. Abomination . Abomination!”

The mortified nuns joined in, screaming as they chased her onto the pitiless streets of London.

She wrapped herself in the garbage she couldn’t eat to keep warm. There was no dignity when you were starving. There was no pride when you were freezing.

She roamed across the city on bleeding feet like a ghost. Beaten by corseted matrons. Harassed by men, young and old. Batted away by the coppers like flies on shit.

Those years of suffering reinforced the Sacred Heart’s most important lessons: those who should care for her would hurt her, and those who should love her would leave her.

But Hell followed her everywhere. Again and again she returned to its unfeeling embrace.

Cor-a , came an eerie voice. Cor-a …

The nightmares began, of reliving deaths not her own. The rictus grin of corpses. The crushing pain in Father Hoyt’s chest. The vise-like fist squeezing Teddy’s heart. Her heart. Ripping it out of the jagged cage of their sternum. A disintegrated face reforming with the reversing path of a bullet.

A rustic cottage sprung up around her. The door swung open, beckoning her outside into rolling green hills that stretched to the horizon, dotted by cottages with thatched roofs and puffing chimneys.

Through a sea of tall grass, rippling like waves in the rain-kissed breeze, she waded. Amber stalks whisked against her knees. The warm summer drizzle misted her face.

Over the song of swaying grass and birds came the cry of a boy, unseen. She followed the cries until she saw him huddled amongst the waist-high maze. A boy near ten, his copper hair caught the stubborn sunlight peeking through the clouds. Patched hand-me-downs from a bygone era hung off his thin body like pauper’s rags on a scarecrow.

He glanced up when she neared and his tears cut off like a faucet. One eye was as blue as a summer sky, the other swollen shut. Blood trickled from his quivering lips. Beneath the rags was a collage of multi-hued discoloration—bruises new and old, fresh welts and whitened scars.

“Are you all right, boy? Why are you out here all alone?”

He swiped his cheeks with a filthy sleeve, and she strained to understand him through his hiccupping breaths and thick accent that rolled like the green hills. “I-I dunno. One moment, Da was wallopin’ me—he’s deep in his cups, mind ye. Next I’m here, out in the middle o’ the back field. Ach, Da will be furious with me. Muckin’ me trousers when I should be workin’. I’m the oldest, don’t ye know? Da says I’m supposed to take care o’ them.”

“But who takes care of you?” She reached to help him up. But he was no longer there. Straightening, she shielded her eyes from the drizzle to see where he could’ve gone. A dark shadow loomed in the sea of grass. She froze.

She could see the boy in the man standing a few paces away. Dark copper hair fell across his brow and his damp shirt clung to his tall, lean frame. His features clouded with uncertainty then brightened into surprised recognition.

“Cora?”

Malachy took a step forward, and another. The eyes that drank her in were not unrelenting obsidian, but blue as an azure sky. Not cruel or cold but radiating warmth. There was no bite behind the smile curving his lips.

She was mesmerized. With blue eyes and a warm smile, Malachy Bane was beautiful.

He strode across the sea of grass and embraced her. An arm curled around her waist, hauling her against the solid wall of his body, fitting them together. His fingers threaded through her hair and tilted her face to his. He leaned down, a breath away.

She could lose herself in the blue pools of his eyes and find herself again in the tender promise of his lips.

“Cora,” he murmured and crushed his mouth to hers.

Malachy kissed her with the hunger of a starving man. Tongues feasted and hands explored in a primal dance, angling for a deeper taste, awakening dormant desires.

Bathed in his warmth, she melted against him. Her nails raked across his shoulders and down his back, fisting in his shirt and pressing him closer. An exquisite ache built between her thighs.

It was a baptism in the summer rain. A sanctuary in his embrace as his hands and lips worshiped her. A benediction in his low groan. A salvation in his kiss.

Their breaths were fast and shallow when his lips left hers. “You’ll be the death of me,” he whispered, holding her tight.

“You’ll love me to death,” she whispered back. He kissed her again, heartbreakingly gentle.

Cor-a , came a faint voice on the wind. Cor-a …

Malachy drew back and frowned. His eyes blackened, pupils swelling to engulf the blue irises. Darkness seeped into white until, black on black, his cold eyes leered down at her and—

Cora startled awake.

She was curled on the library couch with a blanket that hadn’t been there when she fell asleep and a weight on her chest. She glanced down and screamed. The Persian cat stared at her with unblinking eyes.

“Damnit, Kevin.” She knocked him onto the floor. “Bloody creep.”

With a peeved swish of his tail, the cat sauntered to the fireplace and settled upon a cushion before the dying embers, his gaze not leaving her. She rolled away from him, pulling the blanket tighter, and tried to slow her rapid heartbeat.

In her dreams, she often relived memories, her own and the dead’s. But this dream hadn’t been full of corpses. This dream had been new and vivid and didn’t fade upon waking.

She touched her lips where the imprint of his kiss lingered. Somehow, she sensed Bane’s presence in the quiet night. Somehow, she knew he was not only in the house, but awake.

Sleep was slow to reclaim her as the same thought milled about her mind: This has to be the Binding Agreement. Right?