Bramwell Avonwasthe north, in all its desolation—its hunger, its jagged edges and endless ferocity, a fortress against the changing seasons. Leena fought a pang of sadness at what his body had been made to withstand and wasstillwithstanding.
“I’ve heard many confessions over the years from every manner of confessor,” Bram said quietly. “Lords, ladies, beggars, cutthroats—Inever cared who sat in the chair in front of me. Every one of them had their own purpose for revealing their secrets.” He swallowed as if he tasted something bitter. “No one—and I meanno one—has ever told a secret for my sake. Not until you.” He kept his head bowed. “Why did you do it?”
“Bram, we—” she started to respond, but caught herself at the last moment. He deserved more than the half lie she’d been preparing to give. “Because we are friends. Because I…”
She couldn’t finish that last thought—she wasn’t even sure what it was—but his eyes seemed to focus on her answer and the unsaid words behindit.
Oh, how Iloatheyou.
Leena was amazed that she had once thought that, when she now felt the very opposite. That she—
She turned away to gather both her materials and herself before kneeling in front of him. “I must change your bandages.”
She reached around to untie the knotted fabric below his shoulder blade, and she was so absorbed by the task that she didn’t notice how close her face was to his bare chest.
His hand formed a fist on the sheets.
She looked up at him, surprised to find his expression taut. “Have I hurt you?”
“No.” His voice was hoarse.
Then, to Leena’s surprise, he leaned in even closer, dropping his forehead to rest on her shoulder. She halted, her hand hovering over his chest with the gauze caught between her thumb and forefinger. She wondered if he could feel the wild beat of the pulse in her neck, pounding against his cheek. “Continue,” he said after a short while, his voice not losing its roughness.
Her hands now slightly shaking, Leena started unwinding the bandages again, partially impeded by their close proximity. But he did not shift, nor did Leena want himto.
“Lavender,” he said suddenly. “You still smell of it.”
Leena remembered how much the perfumed oil she’d worn had irritated him in the past. “I’m sorry—”
“No, don’t be,” he said, tilting his jaw so that his face was burrowed closer into her neck. “I had never before known that I could crave a smell.”
Leena’s eyes snapped away from the bandages and toward him.
The maddening part was that she knewexactlywhat he meant. His scent as he had carried her into the cave—sandalwood and fresh linen—had embedded itself into her waking hours, disturbed her rest. The wanting of him was ceaseless—a constant cacophony, impossible to silence.
Leena slowly pulled away once all the bandages were off and his torso was bare. The black spidery veins creeping from the woundsite had lengthened. The cut was now clearly infected, the edges gaping and weepy, the skin angry and inflamed.
Wordlessly, she reached for the alcohol bottle.
“This will hurt,” she warned, before spilling the entire contents onto the wound. He gasped, eyes widening briefly, before he slumped back, unconscious.
That was easier for Leena. She was inevitably going to hurt him as she cleaned the wound, scrubbing the infection from the edges, and she didn’t want him to remember the pain of it in the way Rami remembered his amputation.
Once that horrid task was finished, she applied the black poultice the innkeeper’s wife had brought, its vinegary smell stinging her nose, then wound the gauze around it. That proved to be difficult under the heavy weight of his body, but she managed to keep the wrappings as tight and as sterile as she could before dressing him in the new shirt the innkeeper’s wife had provided.
As Bram slept, Leena reached into his coat to ensure that the red diary had not fallen out, sighing in relief when she felt the firm outline of the cover. Tugging it out quickly, wondering why this particular book had garnered so much dangerous attention, Leena flipped through the pages.
Bram had said that most of the pages were blank, but they were not.
Elegantly scrawled writing crowded every page, from margin to margin, the entries marked in the darkest of ink. Had Bram been so distracted by thoughts of the duel that he’d not properly investigated the contents of the diary? Surely one of these passages must be the reason why Hargreaves was hunting them.
Before Leena managed to delve further into this, Bram woke up again.
He had descended further into fever, incoherent questions tumbling from his mouth. He rose from the bed several times, restlessly grabbing for his pistol, forcing Leena to hide it within the pocket of her own skirt.
“Where’s the Duke?” he demanded, looking at her without recognition.
“There is no Duke. It’s just me,” she said, trying to coax him back into bed.
