Page 19 of The Unweaver

Feeling the draw of his gaze, she looked into obsidian eyes alight with a grave understanding. For an unguarded moment, fear flashed across the Realmwalker’s face. There and gone in a moment. A dark omen.

“Cora Walcott.” Her eyes widened at the shock of her name rolling on his tongue, the lyrical cadence heavy with morbid fascination. “You’re the Unweaver.”

Abomination.

She recoiled as if he’d struck her. Her thoughts ground to a halt, replaced by a roaring panic. A hundred fractured fears clambered for a foothold in her mind. One overpowered them all.

He knows.

Denial died on her lips. The devastating truth was written on his face. The devil knew her name. All of them.

Her overwrought nerves, already toeing the edge of hysteria, plummeted over in freefall. Coming here had been a series of fatal lapses in judgment. If she listened over the frantic drumbeat of her heart, the rattle of her own death might be heard at last. She only hoped Bane made it quick. A small mercy, to have her worst day also be her last.

Yet it wasn’t revulsion on his face, nor condemnation in his tone. He was looking not at her, but through her, into the truth buried in her rotten heart, as if he found her at once horrifying and entrancing.

“No one can know,” she said in a low tone. A warning. A plea.

It fell on deaf ears. She may as well have implored a slab of stone. His eyes remained on her, but his gaze turned inward. Through the cracks of his composure, a storm roiled. He fell back and sank onto the edge of his desk, running a hand through his hair. “Jesus fuckin’ Christ.”

“No one can know.”

“Twin mages,” he muttered as if she hadn’t spoken, pouring himself a full glass of whiskey. “To fate,” he toasted bitterly and tossed the drink back.

A curious detail to toast to in light of other revelations, came a fleeting thought.

The man who had stripped Cora of her brother and now her identity was bloodytoastingher. Through her fear and heartache burst an anger she clung to. “Let me go. Now. I-I’m harmless.”

His gaze sliced to her. “That’s the last thing you are, Unweaver.”

She could see the cogs of his mind turning. After agonizing moments, the floor spat out her feet. She shook out her stiff legs, sensation prickling back. Her eyes darted around. The only door was several paces away and locked. Her lock picks were lost to the emerald rugs, and the revolver was out of sight. Some of her knives were a lunge away, but even if she made it out of his office, there was the rest of the club, staffed with his lethally efficient gang, to deal with.

Death magic dripped from her fingers. If Bane got close enough, she could rot his heart out. The Realmwalker’s impossible reflexes would be a problem for future Cora.

First, she needed answers. “For the last time. Did you kill Teddy?”

He studied her over his whiskey. “Unfortunately, I did not have the pleasure of killing your twin.”

“You— You didn’t kill him?”

“That’s what I fuckin’ said. If I’d wanted him dead, I would’ve taken my time killing him in those tunnels. And you, for that matter. Corpses beaten so unrecognizable, only your teeth would identify you.”

“That’s…” She tried to swallow but her throat was bone dry. “Oddly specific.”

Her mind and heart raced. Bane was blunt, but was he also a liar? Bluntness itself wasn’t exonerating. After years indentured to Mother, she knew lies could be told many ways. She searched his features for some sign of guile or deceit. He gazed steadily back. Other than a momentary slip, he’d taken getting confronted by a gun-wielding Necromancer in stride.

Her thoughts spun like leaves in a windstorm. The memory of the slowly disemboweled man she’d communed with leapt to the forefront. Her gut—thankfully still intact—churned with doubt. If he’d wanted retribution for Moriarty’s death, why hadn’t he killed Verek and his thugs? Or her? She had given him ample opportunities to do so, including the present one.

Instead of snapping the neck of the prey he’d caught, he merely contemplated her in the trap. But he wouldn’t let the Unweaver, his attempted murderer, just waltz out of his office. With only emptiness awaiting her, Cora didn’t anticipate surviving much longer anyways.

Though, if Bane was telling the truth, that opened a deeper, darker pit of possibilities, slithering and fanged like serpents. If not the Realmwalker, then who had cursed Teddy?

Any tentative confidence she might have had in him evaporated when he said, “After Moriarty, can’t say I’m displeased someone’s removed the Teddy-shaped thorn in my side for me.”

She opened her mouth to retort, and clamped it shut. Hurling insults at the Realmwalker would only incite further violence between the gangs. “Moriarty was dead before we arrived. Verek’s gang had him.”

“Can you prove they killed him?”

Ah, that was why she was still breathing. A Necromancer’s testimony to the Tribunal would provide Bane with ampleleverage against the conspiring Verek and Mother. Rather than clinging to her potential usefulness, she threw it away with both hands. “Moriarty killed himself. He swallowed a bullet rather than let them finish their interrogation.”

---