Page 18 of A Fate Everlasting

Cold hands found my back. I braced. I knew what was coming, and I wasn’t going down without a fight. I willed my thoughts to steady, my mind sharpening. If I was going down, I was taking him with me.

At the last second, my nails found the silk of Dorian’s robes, twisting hard enough to tear. He was going to remember me, even if it was the last thing either of us did.

The wind howled through the night, a furious lament that swallowed my scream. Rain sliced through the air, the length of the fall stretching endlessly. The world rushed up to meet me—closer, closer, closer.

Suddenly,impossibly, everything fractured. The air wrenched, bending around me with an unseen force, and suddenly, I was not falling but caught.

Heat coiled tight around my ribs, something vast and unfathomable curling through my spine like a second pulse, likea thread being drawn taut. My breath stalled, stolen by a presence I couldn’t see but could feel, like the restless energy in the sky before a storm.

And then, in a voice as familiar as my own thoughts, the Thread murmured,“The heavens would weep if you fell like this, Nocturne.”

8

The world reassembled in fragments. Blurred edges pulled into focus, the damp grass beneath my back and the dizzying pulse of my heart rattling in my ribs. Somewhere beyond the haze, voices murmured, and bodies shifted. But I was still here. Still breathing.

I wasn’t dead.

I turned my head, vision swimming as I tried to make sense of the space around me. The courtyard’s willow tree loomed above, its silvered branches trembling in the wind. My body was slow to believe what my mind already knew. I had survived.How?

More importantly, if the upperclassmen were capable of something like this, survival would be short-lived. There was a commotion above, shouting. Then Oscar and another prefect took off into the night, chasing after the twins.They’d escaped.

I shivered, terror lancing through me.What the hell was this?How had I survived a fall like that?

The Thread curled through the corners of my mind, a ribbon of silk slipping through my thoughts.“You’re asking the wrong questions.”

Whatever warmth held me had long since unspooled as I blinked up at the night sky. Panic clawed up my spine as I pushed onto my elbows, lungs burning. My back met the willow tree’s trunk, rough bark pressing against my shoulders as my attention darted across the courtyard.

And then I saw her. A spill of blonde hair across the grass, limbs twisted at wrong angles.She wasn’t moving. A choked sound lodged in my throat, but before I could make sense of the horror pooling in my stomach, a laugh cut through the silence.

Laughter.

I turned sharply. Dorian leaned against the base of the tower, arms folded, the very picture of careless elegance. Hair spilled over his brow like an artist had placed it there with careful deliberation. He looked like something out of a dream.

But I knew now that he was a nightmare. He was not a man, not a human. He was something else entirely.

Dorian’s voice unfurled through the night, edged with amusement.“Well, well.”He tilted his head, violet eyes glinting like cut glass. “Didn’t take you for the desperate sort, Davenant. Clawing onto a prefect mid-fall?”

I couldn’t speak. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I barely registered the dampness seeping into my uniform, the wind biting at my skin. My focus was on the body crumpled next to me.

A slow exhale ghosted through the space between us, and when Dorian spoke again, his voice was quieter. “She wasn’t chosen.”

He stood there, composed, arms folded against the velvet of his robes, his posture so insufferably unbothered that something vicious took root in my chest.

I loosed a breath. “You’re a monster.”

Dorian barely blinked. “She didn’t belong here.” The words were as weightless as the branches of the willow tree, unbothered.I surged to my feet. “What is wrong with you?” My voice cracked, as a slow smile smoothed across his face.

“Relax,” he said as if this were a minor inconvenience rather than a girl’s life. “You survived. You should be thanking me.”

I recoiled. A breath of silence stretched between us, thin as a knife’s edge.

“Thankingyou?”

Dorian inclined his head, as if indulging the conversation. “You survived,” he repeated. “That’s all that matters.”

Something inside me snapped. I launched myself at him. I didn’t care that I wasn’t strong enough, that my body still screamed from the impact that never came. I just wanted to hurt him.

Dorian barely moved. He didn’t flinch, didn’t brace for impact. He only let out a quiet, almost amused sigh as I gave up, and my hands curled into useless fists at my sides. “It had to be done,” he said simply.

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