Cover reveal! In this heart-pounding, much-anticipated sequel to Threads That Bind, Io will face threats even more dangerous and players even more powerful as she discovers what it will mean to follow—or defy—her fate. Coming to shelves June 4, 2024!

It’s been five weeks since Io left Alante to follow the golden thread, and she’s no closer to finding the god on the other end. She spends her days in constant, grueling travel and her nights worrying over the fate-thread she shares with Edei—which seems to be fraying. Making matters worse, she and Bianca soon realize that their only lead has shaken them off, snapped the golden thread, and disappeared.

But not before Io gathers some crucial clues. Her investigation leads her to a new mystery, a rash of sibling disappearances across the Wastelands that seems to be connected to the murders in Alante. And all signs point to Nanzy, the golden city, as the center of the whole conspiracy.

As Io and Bianca make their way to Nanzy, they make powerful enemies, find allies new and old, and uncover a horrifying plot that traces back centuries. The more Io learns, the more she begins to suspect that the future of the world may truly rest on her shoulders. But she will have to determine how much of the future is her choice—and how much is simply her fate.

Scroll down to see the cover and read a sneak peek, and remember to preorder your copy!

Illustration: Corey Brickley, Design: Kristie Radwilowicz

The thread shimmered like liquid flames on Io’s palm, a razor of silver-and-gold twine. It was woven twice around each finger of her left hand, forming a misshapen mesh of fear and purpose. At night, before she dropped into whatever sad excuse for a bed she and Bianca had procured, Io would bind her left fist with cloth, then secure it in a sling across her chest.

It was a god’s thread, her only clue to the heart of the blasted conspiracy she had unearthed in Alante—she would rather cut off circulation to her hand than risk it slipping free.

She flexed her tired fingers, watching the raindrops scuttle over her knuckles. The thunderstorm had tailed them from Alante like a stray dog: five weeks of a relentless cycle of dust-stained rain, thundering blizzards, and infuriating drizzle. Bianca had pinched two waterproof boater hats from canal drivers back in Poleon, but despite that, they were constantly drenched to the bone, so much so that Io’s leather jacket currently smelled like a dead rat dipped in moldy cheese. Five weeks of sloshing through rain and mud from one Wastelands town to another, of haggling for food and shelter, of bickering with the mob queen, of jerking awake, drenched in cold sweat, fumbling to check the knotted thread on her left hand.

Five whole weeks, and the thread had led them to this: the shack across the street and the figure inside it.

“It’s been six hours,” Bianca Rossi said. The mob queen was crouching on the slanted tin roof next to Io, eyes hooded beneath her wide-brimmed leopard-print hat and locked on the block of shanty houses. “I think we’ve waited long enough, cutter.”

Io was still cutter to Bianca: sharp, lethal, a threat. It didn’t matter that Io had broken her out of police headquarters, plotted the betrayal and punishment of Io’s sister with her, forsaken everything she knew so they could track down whoever had masterminded the mob queen’s fall. It didn’t matter that they had prowled through the Wastelands together, huddled close for warmth, fought back to back, cooked and ate over the same fire. In Bianca’s eyes, Io was and would always be a moira-born, the youngest of three sisters descended from the goddesses of fate, able to see and cut the threads of life and love. Io would always be the girl who handed her over to the wolves who severed her life-thread and transformed her into an unwilling fury-born.

A lifeless wraith and a heartless cutter, what a pair they made.