I won’t lose him too.

It’s too easy, feels too right, when I drag him backward until my back is pressed against the cold stone wall.

Something crunches beneath my feet. A piece of furniture jabs me in the side.

I want you to kill me.

I’m a coward. Selfish. The dirty little liar Clarissa has always accused me of being.

Except for the first time in my life, there’s no one to tell me as much.

There’s only fire and ice and pale blue eyes drunk with passion and strong familiar hands climbing up my back.

For a moment, it’s just me and Nox.

For a moment, it feels real.

And when Farin lets out a sigh, I know it feels real for him, too.

Maybe that’s why he doesn’t notice that this is Gunter’s bedroom.

Maybe that’s why he doesn’t notice the object jabbing into our sides as he presses me to the wall.

Maybe that’s why he doesn’t notice when my hand trails away from his back and reaches toward the object.

Something snaps, and he’s so drunk on me, he hardly startles.

It’s not until the spindle pierces his neck that he winces and draws back.

For a moment, his pale-white eyes go wide with confusion, then they lock onto the bone-white spindle in my hand.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper.

“What have you done?” Farin asks, reaching for his neck, rubbing it with his hands.

“I was talking to Nox,” I say, as he slumps to the ground, bound to an indefinite slumber.

There are a multitude of binding agents in this realm, but blood is the strongest of all.

The bead of Nox’s blood glistens on the tip of the bone-white spindle as I hold it upright.

I wonder how many drops of blood Gunter took from Zora over the years.

Enough that he had to constantly burn incense in his room, to mask the scent from Nox.

As I stare at the pale spindle, a passage from one of the grimoires rings in my mind.

Physicians mixed crushed marebone with their patients’ wine to plunge them into deep slumber during procedures, though the use of this method was soon discontinued, as they often found their patients difficult to wake.

Then Nox’s voice, from our first conversation, when he told me he’d be putting me to sleep for the next experiment. Don’t worry. I won’t be feeding you marebone or anything.

Apparently Gunter had discovered that marebone doesn’t have to be crushed to be effective.

There’s still a pile of Rivrean flax stacked next to the spinning wheel. Flax born of the Fabric, soon to be infused with Nox’s blood.

I slide the blood-tipped spindle into its place in the spinning wheel and begin my work.

CHAPTER 58

BLAISE

I wait for days for my friends to arrive.

Even with being forced to wait out the sunlight for a day, I’d made the journey to Mystral castle in a night and a half, propelled by the unnatural energy gifted to my vampire body.

For my fae friends, the journey will take three times as long, and that’s if Evander and Kiran leave Ellie and Asha behind.

I wait, and there’s nothing to do but watch them.

We’re all in Zora’s shrine. Whatever paint coats the windows and sends speckles of light dancing across the floor seems to filter the sunlight, protecting Nox’s and my skin from burning.

I thought the brightness of the room might make it better for both of them, somehow.

Nox and his sister, neither stirring from their slumber.

For Nox, it’s because I keep spinning more thread, weaving it into the last of Gunter’s tapestries, the one left unfinished. I don’t have time to dye the threads before I weave them through the loom, not when I’m too afraid to stop, too afraid that Farin will catch up with my trembling fingers and awaken, but it doesn’t end up mattering. The thread bleeds color on its own, guiding my needle as it weaves a story independent of my will.

So I spin thread, and when I’m not spinning it, I’m weaving it, keeping both him and Farin trapped.

I wonder then where Nox is, and if he’s in another world, another body. Is he trapped inside Farin, or is his consciousness free to walk on its own? Did the beautiful tapestries Gunter weaved for Zora create realms? Now that I think over it, that doesn’t seem likely. It makes more sense that Gunter’s tapestries simply guided Zora’s journey through whatever realm she was in at the time.

I’ve given Nox—given Farin—no such guidance.

Now that I’ve had days to consider, I know that what I’ve done is inherently wrong.

That in sparing myself of Farin, I might have unleashed him upon an unsuspecting world.

I wonder if he’s prowling, still controlling Nox’s every move.

I wonder if he’s found his home, the world he came from.

I’ve dragged two beds up to Zora’s resting place from the abandoned servants’ quarters, one for Nox and the other for Zora.

I won’t have Nox’s sister sleeping on a stone slab, even if the stone happens to be emerald.

They both look so peaceful, their beds side-by-side, and for a moment I can picture them both as children, though I can’t conjure the sounds of either of their laughs.

I miss Nox enough to die, but I can’t do that, of course.