Page 29 of The Unweaver (Unwoven Fates #1)

A girl was crying.

Dreamlike, Cora followed the muffled cries through the abandoned Limehouse hotel with a sinking sensation in her stomach. She knew what she’d find before she kicked open Felix’s door. A young girl pinned down on the dirty mattress while he stole her innocence.

You didn’t say no enough .

But this time the girl wasn’t her. Felix hadn’t touched her since she’d used her devilry on him years ago. At sixteen, she was a head taller than him now, and he preferred his victims young and defenseless. Like this girl, the freshest recruit to his gang. As young as Cora had been.

Without thinking, she rushed into his bedroom and tore him off of the girl. Awful energy poured from her fingertips. She flung Felix onto the floor, her hand rotting through to his skin.

The anger came then. Years of rage boiled out of her throat and hands.

Screaming, they wrestled and struck blows, hurtling through the grimy window. Glass pelted them in a slicing rain as they crashed onto the dead lawn outside. They grunted and grappled, clothes and flesh ripped apart in the sea of broken glass.

Felix landed a punch on her jaw, a kick to her sternum. She felt eerily calm as she grabbed a jagged spike of glass and raised it over her head. It caught the fading sun in a kaleidoscope of light.

Pinned to the ground beneath her, Felix looked up in a suspended moment of raw terror. “M-monster,” he gasped.

“You’re the monster.” She stabbed him through the heart. Again. And again. “You’re the monster!”

Glass cut her hands into ribbons, slick with blood and nerveless, but her aim never faltered. Not when his veins drained of blood. Not when his eyes drained of life.

Overflowing with awful energy, she planted her hands on the pulpy remains of his chest and pumped his body full of it. He jerked up like a marionette on strings. His eyes emptied of life and filled again with less, dulling into a shell of himself.

Darkness, devoid of emotion, encroached her senses.

An arm clamped around her neck and dragged her back. One of the boys in the gang stared wide-eyed at the empty shell of their leader bleeding out on the ground. Eyes glazed, mouth gaping, and features slack, Felix was alive in only the most basic sense of the word.

The boy’s frightened eyes turned from the monster on the lawn to the monster plastered with Felix’s blood. Screaming, he fled.

The girl, cowering on the dirty mattress, eyed Cora like the abomination she was. She wasn’t afraid of her rapist, but his killer. A bloodcurdling scream tore out of her throat. She scrambled to her feet and ran.

Cora fell back on her haunches, looking at the blood dripping from her shredded hands to the husk of Felix Rabin. Murder. She’d committed murder. And all she felt was numb.

Felix’s blood seeped into her skin and coursed through her veins, rotting her from the inside out. No, the rot wasn’t from his blood, but from within her. Deep in her marrow, spreading since the day she was born and contaminating everything near her. She was the disease.

A voice in a far corner of her mind told her it was only a matter of time before more witnesses or the coppers showed up. Told her to move, flee the squat, duck into the sewers until the dust settled.

But word would spread like plague. Chased by rumors of her monstrosity, Cora would be a pariah in London. Maybe all of England. She’d spend the rest of her days trying to outrun this. Destitute. Starving. Hopeless.

Surviving another miserable day wasn’t a reward anymore. It was a punishment.

She rose onto unsteady feet. The silhouette of a tall man in a black coat filled the broken window. His blue eyes were fastened on her with rapt attention. He reached out, saying words she didn’t hear as she stumbled away into the shadows.

Winding down alleys, she lost herself in darkness so deep not even the rats would scurry through it. When she hit a dead end, she sank to her knees and crawled across wet garbage into a rotted-out alcove in the fence. Whatever fate chased her, she wouldn’t fight it.

She had hit rock bottom and continued to sink.

So much of her life had been steeped in death, reliving and ruminating about the hell of it. Yet she hadn’t anticipated what her own death would be like. She had fantasized about the means of death in darker hours. Swallow the pills . Slash the wrists . Hang the body from the high branch . Refrains she couldn’t always shake from her thoughts.

She had longed for the release yet feared the possibility of failure. What if she couldn’t even get that right? What if she were only to awaken again to repeat the endless loop of years? Waking up day after day to her own mediocrity. A torture of her own creation.

A prism of light speared the gloom. A broken shard of glass had snagged onto her patched rags. She pried the shard free. It glinted in her bloody hand, beckoning her. The simple promise of its jagged edges. The inevitability of its sharp point.

Her body was a prison she could escape from. She could put an end to this sick farce once and for all. Was it really death if she’d never been alive? The glass pierced into the flesh of her wrist. With a weakening grip, she pressed deeper, deeper . A sting of pain, a stream of blood. Her life dripped into the muck.

Darkness slid over her vision, dimming her mind, slowing her heart. Enfolding her, sinking her down, down, down. She was tired of treading water while others swam laps around her. Treading water was just a slower way to drown.

She stopped struggling and surrendered. The bondages of life slipped as she sank into the inevitable embrace of death and fell through the black veil.

Death, like Hell, was only a matter of perspective.

She had experienced countless deaths and none of them had prepared her for her own. Death wasn’t teeming with her living memories, or fraught with the unexpended energies of her incomplete existence. Her death was not like dreaming an endless dream. Surrounding her was only nothingness. Silent, peaceful nothingness.

The sweet relief of no longer having to be overcame her. An end to the suffering, at last. The final release. She felt tranquil, then nothing at all.

There was a ripple through the void. The ripple grew into a wave, lapping at her feet and tugging her like an undertow out to sea. It swelled into a riptide and wrenched her into dark waters without beginning or end. She fought against it, but it was like fighting fate. Futile.

A life for a life , the tide seemed to say as it swallowed her whole. The black tide of death, brimming with awful energy, buoyed her. The threads of life unwoven by her own hand were rewoven by the void’s formless fingers.

No, not again.

The black tide receded, and she washed up on unwanted shores. Her eyes flew open to a searing shaft of light. There were bandages over her wrists and handcuffs over the bandages. She was trapped in a hell worse than death.

“Oh, good,” said the old woman beside her hospital bed. “You’re finally awake, my pet.”

Cor-a , taunted a disembodied voice. Cor-a …

In a flurry of feathers and ugly jumpers, the old woman transformed into a magpie. A bloodred berry gleamed in its sharp beak. The magpie contorted and deformed, bones and feathers bursting into a vulture with rotten flesh hanging from its grizzled beak. With a screech, it extended its massive wings and descended upon her, pecking and tearing and gouging.

Handcuffed to the hospital bed, Cora screamed and thrashed until her wrists were bloody. She rusted the cuffs off and ran through the hospital wards, pursued by flapping wings, snapping beaks, and a taunting voice. The bleached hallways gave way to wallpapered corridors. Nightmares chased her through the dark Gothic house.

Cor-a …

She ran up and up the spiral staircase but went nowhere as it stretched endlessly overhead. The wrought iron railing became shimmering scales under her hand, coiling like a massive serpent rearing its head to strike. She slipped off the writhing serpent, falling and falling until she crashed into a dark hallway.

Above her own frenzied pulse, a rhythmic thumping called out to her. Guiding her to safety. She ran towards it, to a room at the end of the hallway, grabbing the door with sweat-slickened hands.

Locked. It was locked.

Nightmares darkened the periphery of her vision and filled the hallway like a sulfurous vapor, taking the shape of magpies and monsters. The nightmares, alive and dead, real and imagined, closed in on her.

Frantic, she banged her fists on the door. She had no keys or picks or magic to open it. A locked door stood between safety and the nightmares. Through the fear floated a memory. The Intentions Lock . Only the right intention would unlock the door.

Safety . That’s all she wanted inside the room. Safety and nothing more.

The door swung open into darkness. She threw herself inside, flung the door shut, and willed the lock to keep the nightmares on the other side. Light spilled under the door, casting long, pirouetting shadows on the hideous wallpaper. For breathless moments, she stared at the door as claws and beaks tried to tear it down.

“Dora,” came Felix’s voice. Nails scratched down the wood with splintering force. “Why do you make me do this to you?”

“Cora,” came the saccharine poison of Mother’s voice. A beak rapped on the door. “Let me in, pet.”

Cor-a , came the voice like liquid darkness from everywhere and nowhere.

“Cora?” said a man with a deep, lilting voice.

A lamp turned on behind her and flooded the room with light. She spun, heart in her throat.

Malachy stood amongst the forbidden treasures, his blue eyes filled with concern. In three strides he closed the distance between them and enfolded her in his arms. “It’s all right,” he said, low and soothing. “It’s me. You’re safe.”

Throwing her arms around him, she burrowed into the solace of his embrace. He murmured calm words in a melodious burr, and the crushing pressure of panic eased in her chest, slowly abating.

“Th-they were chasing me.” Her trembling hands grasped his shirt, clinging tighter to the solid warmth of his body. “Mother and Felix and— They were— He was—”

“You’re safe. You’re with me now.” Malachy smoothed his hands over her hair, down her back, holding her closer. “Breathe. Just breathe.”

Gradually, her breathing steadied. She pulled back and blinked at him. “How did you get in here?”

“I could ask you the same question.” With heartbreaking tenderness, he brushed her hair out of her tear-streaked face. “But after all those terrible things that happened to you, I won’t.”

She stiffened. “What are you talking about?”

“I didn’t know,” he said, soft, tortured. “I knew what had happened to you was bad. I didn’t know how bad until now. I’m so sorry, Cora.”

Realization struck her. The darkest moments of her life had played out like a movie for his morbid entertainment. Malachy had seen everything. Every drop of blood on her hands. Every death staining her spirit.

His arms only tightened when she shoved him away. She shoved harder and he relented. She pressed back against the door, feeling for the handle. Now a monster was trying to get out instead of in.

His gaze drew hers. She searched his blue eyes for judgment or condemnation but found only compassion. He came to stand before her, close enough to touch.

“You are more than the sum of your worst moments, Cora. Felix deserved to die. I would’ve killed him myself if you hadn’t already done the world the favor.” Cupping her face, he swiped away her tears away. “Thank you for showing me.”

She leaned into his touch with a half-sob and let the tears fall, let his nearness wash over her senses as he held her close. She wrapped her arms around his waist and nestled against him. For a long moment, silence churned with the weight of secrets revealed.

“I think I truly killed myself that day,” she whispered into the crook of his neck. “I killed the only parts of myself I liked. The parts that could feel joy. That girl died. I came back, but something in me stayed dead. I am a husk.”

Lifting her wrists, Malachy pressed his lips with aching gentleness on the thorny white scars. “You’re not a husk.”

She tugged her hands away. “A reanimated abomination.”

“You are neither of those things.” He trailed soft kisses down her cheeks, along her jaw, his lips feathering the corner of her mouth. “You are reborn.”

When she met his heated gaze, her muscles tautened with a different kind of tension. A different kind of ache. His gaze dropped to her lips. Leaning in, he paused a breath away. She wanted to be consumed by anything except the sorrow echoing inside her. Her fingers skated down his back, pressing him nearer.

He dipped his head at the last moment. “You’re upset,” he rasped against her throat. “I shouldn’t kiss you.”

Her hands tunneled through his dark hair, drawing his face up. Their gazes tangled.

“Make me forget,” she said, and claimed his mouth in a possessive kiss.

Their tongues and hands feasted, fraught without longing and desperate with hunger. Her body grew pliant under the dance of his fingers down her back and around her hips. Cupping her arse, he lifted her until she straddled him, pressing her against the door, molding their bodies together.

She moaned into his mouth and tore off his shirt in a pinging hailstorm of buttons. Raking her nails along his scarred muscles, she ground against his tantalizing hardness, seeking reprieve from the delicious tension coiling inside her.

His mouth painted beauty on her skin as he kissed down her throat. He captured her dress strap with his teeth and dragged it down, exposing her breasts to the laving of his tongue and the soft bites of his teeth on their hardening peaks.

She arched into his touch, writhing against him, desperate for more friction in the slow ministrations of his mouth and hands.

A rhythmic thumping filled her ears, drowning out the ballad of their labored breathing and aching flesh. “God, is that my heartbeat?” she panted.

“It’s mine.” He sucked her nipple into his mouth.

Gasping, her palms flattened on the bunching muscles of his bare chest. She couldn’t feel his heart beating, but she heard it pulsing in the room, calling out to her. Malachy captured her lips, slanting his mouth and deepening the kiss. She forgot about everything except the feel of his body.

Her hand glided down the sculpted planes of his abdomen and grasped his rigid cock through his trousers. He groaned low, hardening more under her touch.

Impatient, she unbuttoned his trousers, and they both sucked in a breath when her fingers gripped the base of his thick length. Relishing his groan, she stroked him from root to tip, silken steel her fingers couldn’t close around. Her thumb over the weeping head, smearing his desire.

His fingers dug into the flesh of her hips. He pulled her closer until she wasn’t sure where she ended and he began. Those clever fingers slid between them, trailing up her dress and along her slick folds to stroke her swollen clit. He swallowed her moan, ripping away her reservations with each agonizing caress.

She met him, stroke for stroke. Tension coiled in her core, tighter and tighter. Their bodies found a tantric rhythm, a delicious friction, winding the anticipation higher.

Pulling back, he studied the nuances of her pleasure. A long finger slid into her wet heat, teasing her, filling her, driving her faster towards the edge.

She wanted—needed—more. Breathless, she guided his hard cock to her entrance. His gaze captured hers. His pupils were blown wide, his blue eyes wild with a question she answered with the slightest shift of her hips. The tip of his cock found her core.

Neither moved in a moment of stark stillness. More than one threshold had been crossed, if only just. But she didn’t want hesitation. She wanted friction . The coiling tension inside her was ready to snap. She was on the verge of splintering into a thousand euphoric pieces.

“Cora—”

“Malachy.” Her legs tightened around him, urging him nearer. They groaned as his cock slid along her slick folds, the flared head teasing her clit.

“Sweet Jesus,” he murmured against her lips. “I’m dreaming.”

His words pierced the heavy haze of desire. Brow furrowing, she tilted her head back. “ I’m dreaming.” She caught his puzzled look before the door opened at her back and she tumbled into darkness.

Cor-a , find me the needle within the egg . Cor-a…