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 withtoo 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.”
