Chapter 42 The Timepiece #2
His eyes caught sight of the bruise blooming on her jaw and he furrowed his brows, jolting to a sitting position. “Who—?”
“Orley,” Leena clarified, a knot in her throat. “He’s gone now.”
Fury ignited in his eyes. “I swear, I will kill—”
He stopped suddenly, looking around the room, before stumbling upward. He clutched his left side as he staggered toward the window. He stared outside for a long moment, eyebrows knitted together, before turning to her swiftly.
His voice shook as he stared at her in bewilderment. “What have you done?”
She knelt with her back to the mattress, her voice hushed. “I had no choice.”
He lowered himself slowly into the wooden chair beside the bed. He looked unnerved, clutching his timepiece, the gold chain swinging on a pendulum.
“Leena, I never wanted…” He swallowed. “I never wanted you to come here. I would never wish this place on you.”
She reached for his shoulder and he inhaled sharply from the touch.
There was, Leena thought desperately, no room to play games with each other. She had landed them in the demon world as the only viable option for survival. Bram must now complete the last piece of the puzzle; otherwise their survival would hang on an even thinner thread than it did now.
It was time Leena received a confession from the Saint of Silence.
“Bram, I know your father had something to do with the demons, but Lady Hargreaves could not tell me more.”
There was wreckage in his eyes—a past pain long buried but still felt.
Finally, his response came from a voice that was hoarse, as if dragged from him.
“I was twelve years old when my father and Hargreaves took me here. They indentured me to the Duke of Fray, a powerful demon.” Unevenly, he unclasped the timepiece he always wore from his chest, thrusting it toward her.
“I still do not know what I was traded for, and so I have never been able to break the contract.”
Leena took the timepiece, astonished to see that it was the same as both Margery’s and Lord Avon’s, all three indented with the same elegant scrawl: Fray.
Roughly hand-carved into the lid of the timepiece were five words:
Kill what you cannot survive.
“Open the timepiece.”
She did so. The top number, where the twelve o’clock position should’ve been, was in this case marked as one hundred and twenty.
The rest of the numbers seemed also to increase by a factor of ten.
The one o’clock was written as ten, the two o’clock was twenty, and so on until one hundred and twenty at the top.
The single hand was halted just below the one hundred and ten mark.
“That doesn’t tell time, Leena, it counts down the years.”
One hundred and eight years.
Leena’s eyes fell to his hands: green veins interlacing beneath the skin, strong fingers gripping the seat of the chair with too much force, the firm knuckles white and tense.
He continued, each word a jagged edge. “If I do not find a way to break the contract with the demons, I will be indentured past even the point of death.”
Leena reeled back, jaw clenched so hard she tasted blood on her lips again.
Images of the first day she met him echoed through her mind—how he’d been shrouded in seclusion and cruelty. How little she had understood then of Bram’s motivations…
The reaping of secrets…
The iron-clad contracts…
The misery he collected upon himself from the weight of his confessors…
The hunt for Lord Avon’s ghost…
All in pursuit of breaking his own imprisonment.
Leena felt as if she could choke on these revelations—all that had tried to ruin him.
He was trapped, the timepiece he always wore an incessant reminder that even death was no freedom for him.
Her heart—her entire being—ached for him.
Helplessness concentrated in her throat, suffocating her.
Vessel…
Leena’s mind shifted—the echo of remembrance building in her memory.
“Lord Kilworth spoke of a vessel before I…” She dropped the last words, not allowing her mind to linger on his death. “He called it the Limitless Vessel. He said Percival had hidden it. I wonder…”
At that moment, they both stared at each other in comprehension.
“Lord Hargreaves—”
“The red diary—”
Bram reached for the diary from his pocket, grasping it in his hand and staring down at it with a hard gaze.
“Do you think that is what they traded you for? The Limitless Vessel itself?” When Bram did not respond, still staring intently at the book in his hand, Leena asked another question before giving him a chance to answer the first. “What is the Limitless Vessel?”
It took him a moment to reply.
In that interim of silence, she wanted to steady the grip of his hand on the book, to draw him closer to her, to anchor them both within this unsettling life.
“It is common knowledge here, in Bastmore.” There was a brief narrowing of his eyes, a return to the former Saint of Silence—one whose sharp mind was a blade, cutting and culling.
“It’s a powerful object, one that can open the gate between the human and the demon world indefinitely, ushering an uninhibited flow of demons aboveground.
The person who controls this object would control that gate. ”
Leena nodded slowly. “It would make sense that Hargreaves is hunting for it.” She paused. “Lady Hargreaves did try to warn me.”
His glance fell to her. “Warn you?”
“Yes. Our time on the moor was very limited and I could not tell you more about Lady Hargreaves’s memories.
” Leena brought a hand to her forehead, squeezing her eyes to remember every important detail.
“It was in the last memory she left for me. It was after they had heartlessly sold you; your father and Hargreaves were bitterly fighting over an object. Lady Hargreaves did not know what that object was, but it was evident that Percival had hidden it and Hargreaves had killed him in a futile attempt to find it. That must be it. That hidden object…is the Limitless Vessel.”
His grip on the diary did not loosen. “My father must’ve hidden its whereabouts, knowing such a secret would lead to his murder.
” He flicked through the diary once more, before slamming shut the cover with force.
“I wonder if he left instructions on how to track this object within the Avon diary? It must be read more carefully.”
“First we must find the antidote.” Leena leaned forward, drawing in her brows with determination crossing her face. “Then, if the red diary indeed has the map that will lead us to the Limitless Vessel, we will follow this map and release you from the demons.”
His gaze flashed to her at the word we. For a moment, looking at him—unable to look anywhere but at him—Leena began to understand the depth of his solitude.
Of his loneliness. She remembered the way he had been back in Golborne, separated in his study, surrounded by those ledgers.
All the while he’d been completely isolated, choked with his own secrets.
A hard realization shadowed his face.
“Leena—” He released a staggered breath at her name.
“If this is all for the Limitless Vessel, that means that Hargreaves will send every man, every demon, every trader to hunt me for this diary.” His eyes swallowed every line on her face, the curve of her cheekbones, the shape of her lips, as if desperate to imprint them to memory.
“You are not safe here. Should he get his hands on you, he will torture you, then kill you, to get to me.”
Then he averted his gaze, his voice turned detached, but the hand gripping the diary was still harsh and unyielding. “That means you must leave me. You must leave me immediately.” His throat moved.
“Leena Al-Sayer, I release you from your contract.”