He met her accusing stare with stoic eyes. “It’s being mentioned now.”
She turned away from St. Silas in anger, focusing once more on the young ghost. “Can you confirm that you can bring Lord Avon to us if we have the red diary?”
He nodded slowly.
Leena didn’t know if she could trust him; she’d never trusted a ghost before. But she remembered the way that Theo had warded off the other ghosts that haunted her, protecting her while she slept. That he had the power to do so was unique. That he wanted to help Leena was even more novel. She decided that she had no choice but to trust him.
“Do you know where the diary is now, Theodore?” Leena asked eagerly, but she already suspected the answer.
He gestured toward a stray piece of paper on the Saint’s desk. Leena understood, hurriedly followed him to the desk, and began scrawling all the letters of the alphabet. With his tongue pointing out of his mouth in concentration, the ghost carefully pointed at the letters.
B—R—A—M
She turned to St. Silas. “He’s spelled your given name.”
The Saint said nothing.
W—A—V—N—G—S—H—A—W
Then, as if this act of revelation had fatigued him, the ghost nodded once more at her before flickering in and out, finally disappearing entirely. She hoped with all her might that this was not the last time she would see him.
The air felt like it had been extinguished from the room. Even the light from the burning fireplace seemed dim now, the magnitude of what she’d learned dulling it. It was a confirmation of what Leena already knew—it all led back to Weavingshaw.
She turned to St. Silas, eager to see his reaction.
“He spelled out Weavingshaw,” she said. But if she expected the Saint to share in her excitement, she was disappointed. He’d already sat back down behind his desk, his attention not on his work but rather staring blankly at the fire, brows drawn together, the shadows beneath his eyes even more vivid.
He looked suddenly bloodless—bled out—and Leena knew with certainty that the mention of Theodore Daye had opened an old wound.
Slowly, and a little hesitantly, Leena walked around his desk. “How do you know Theodore Daye?”
He didn’t answer, but his eyes jolted away from the fire to meethers. With effort, his expression turned deliberately remote once more.
Because she could not force a response from him, Leena began to think aloud, trying to sort through her thoughts. She’d spent long hours theorizing about why St. Silas was chasing Lord Avon. Was it for an unsettled debt? Hidden treasure? A way to make amends to the dead? A way to take retribution on the dead? None of it seemed plausible. “Were you a servant at Weavingshaw as a child?”
His brows rose faintly, a familiar sardonic lilt to his voice. “Interesting hypothesis, madam.”
“Is that a yes or a no, Mr. St. Silas?”
His gaze fell back to the ledgers encircling the study in another stretch of silence, then to his own timepiece hanging from his waistcoat.
“Will you call me Bram?” he asked instead, his voice uneven, once again bordering on the edge ofsomething.“I’ve rarely heard my own name said back to me. Not since—”
Theodore Daye.
She tried not to rear back in astonishment. There was an intensity of emotion to St. Silas that she had never witnessed before, and there was now no doubt in her mind that the young Theodore Daye was the catalyst for this, dragging behind him a past she had no insight into.
Bram.
The name sounded in her head, and she tested the contours of it, wondering if it would turn into poison if she swallowed it. It felt as foreign to her tongue as some of the Algaraan words she’d practiced from her vocabulary books, the consonants at war with each other.
There was no peace to be had from that name, only invasion.
“I am safe here, sir, on the other side,” Leena finally replied, quietly, eyes not quite meeting his own.
“And what side is that?” His voice was strained.
“Where you are a formidable and uncompromising employer. And I a…” Leena’s gaze did not waver from its focus on the point of his collar. She was not yet ready to acknowledge to herself that here sat before her a man blindly searching for a tourniquet with which to stem his bleeding, much as they did in wartime before they had to amputate.
