They’d bled through. She hung her head, weeping because she didn’t have anything sterile to replace them with. She fell asleep like that, kneeling on the hard wooden floor, head resting against the mattress beside Bram.
When she finally stirred, it was dark outside again. No phantom had come to possess her body; perhaps the demon world was bereft of ghosts. The only light came from the low-burning candle. She would need to replace it soon.
Leena’s breath hitched when she saw that Bram had also woken.
He was lucid.
She wondered briefly if he remembered their kiss—the way his fingers had laced through her hair or the way his lips had dragged across her skin.
There was no recognition of it when his eyes met hers, and she felt an odd squeezing in her chest.
Bram’s forehead was cool to the touch, but she didn’t know how long it would be before the fever ravaged him again. Perhaps it was better that way, she thought to herself—that Bram became too lost to hallucinations to notice death’s long shadow darkening his doorway.
Somehow, he didn’t seem as burdened by those grim thoughts as she was.
Instead, he looked at her oddly, as if she was something otherworldly and he’d been trapped in unholy reality his entire life.
“You stayed with me,” he rasped, his voice almost reverent. One calloused finger moved to touch her, as if to confirm his own words—as if to dispel any fears of her being an apparition. He traced her cheek. “Whydid you remain?”
She didn’t have an answer for him. At least, nothing that would have sufficed.
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 sameas 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.
