//CLARA//
The cold had sunk into my bones so thoroughly I couldn’t feel my own skin. The small fire crackled sowhere to my left, blurry at the edges. The warmth didn’t reach . Nothing reached .
"Clara." Gary crouched beside , his hand on my shoulder. "What is it? You’re scaring ."
I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even feel the draft cutting through the broken windowpane behind , though it whistled its low, miserable tune right into the small tenent room.
I was aware, distantly, that my body should be shivering. That the blood still wet and tacky on my collar from the guard’s knife and should be stinging like hell. But my body had gone completely numb.
"Miss Eleanor? You’re soaked through."
Hattie’s voice cut through the fog settling over my brain. She’s back and had gathered wood from sowhere and piled it high. The flas leaped higher now, casting jagged shadows across the grey wall.
The words didn’t register as language. Just a hollow noise... like carriage wheels rattling over wet cobblestones blocks away.
"Here, let help you out of this dress."
Her small hands found my shoulders, pulling at the sodden wool of my coat. I let her work. My fingers stayed locked around the ledger’s edges.
"Mr. Russell, sir, will you give us so privacy?" Hattie directed Gary at the doorway. "She’s perishing in these wet things. Please wait out in the passageway."
Gary didn’t argue. His heavy boots shifted against the grit on the floorboards, leaving us alone in the firelight.
"Up you get."
This ti, her tone carried the edge of soone repeating herself. Maybe the third ti. Maybe the fifth.
"Found you a dress at the market down the way. Cost three pennies and slls of old starch, but it’s dry. You need to get out of those clothes before you catch your death."
She was talking to fill the silence. Her small body still held the tremors of what had happened, but she was braving it up anyway.
My body moved because she pulled it. The dress was draped over a broken chair. Faded gray. Patched at the elbow. Beside it, lay a shawl.
She worked at my buttons. The wet fabric peeled away, leaving gooseflesh everywhere the air touched.
"Your skin felt like ice," Hattie muttered, rubbing a rough cloth over my arms until my skin pinked beneath the friction. The motion should have stung. It didn’t.
The gray dress ca next, pulled over my head. It was entirely too big in the shoulders, the sleeves hanging limply past my wrists. Hattie worked quickly, rolling the cuffs twice, trembling as she muttered soft, hurried apologies for the inadequacy of it all.
"Miss..."
She stopped fussing with the sleeve and looked up. The firelight catching the fear in her wide eyes.
"Is... is everything alright? You’ve gone unusually quiet."
The question hung there. Absurd. Impossible.
"I don’t know."
The words coming out like they’d been dragged over miles of broken gravel.
"I don’t know if anything is alright, Hattie. I don’t know if it’s ever been alright."
She stared at with deep, innocent confusion, seeing her mistress suddenly shattering into pieces without explanation. Slowly, she reached up and smoothed a wet strand of hair from my forehead.
"Everything will be fine, miss. Once we find Mr. Guggenheim. He’ll fix everything. He always does."
My gaze drifted to the ledger where it lay open on the floorboards. I hadn’t noticed dropping it. The pages splayed like sothing gutted. Casimir’s na stared back at , written in the sa careful hand as all the others, positioned at the top of the final page as if he’d always belonged there.
"Can I turn around now?" Gary’s voice drifted in from the threshold.
Hattie glanced at .
"Yes, Mr. Russell. She’s decent."
Gary’s shadow fell across the firelight again, breaking the spell. His eyes went imdiately to the ledger, then to my face, then to the ledger again. He stepped closer and crouched to retrieve it.
"Let see."
I didn’t stop him. His eyes tracked across the pages. The silence stretched until it felt loud.
"Holy crap," Gary breathed.
Hattie’s fingers clutched my elbows.
"What? What’s in it, Mr. Russell? What does it say?"
Gary didn’t answer her imdiately. He stood up, his thumb traced the edge of the page, touching Casimir’s na as if to confirm it was real ink.
"Just... just his na?"
"Whose na?" Hattie quipped, her voice rising in a frantic spiral. "I can’t read, Mr. Russell. What’s in the ledger? Surely nas in ledgers don’t an anything bad, do they?"
His eyes lifted from the page and locked onto . He read the rigid stillness in my spine, the emptiness in my eyes, the way I had gone hollow without moving. I watched him put it together, the exact mont my silence had finally made sense.
He swallowed hard, turning his attention back through the pages.
"Look, the ledger lists syndicate assets, okay?"
Gary was thinking out loud, steamrolling right over Hattie’s rambling.
"So maybe he’s a target. Soone they want to get their hooks into. Debt, blackmail—take your pick. His na could be in there because they’re trying to control him. Not because he’s on their team."
I turned to face him, the motion so sudden the room swayed on its axis.
"Look at the formatting. Everyone else has debts listed next to them. Dates. Specific obligations. Legal loopholes. Casimir’s na just sits there entirely alone, right at the top of the page, like..."
I couldn’t finish the sentence. The words choked . Like what? Like the man who wrote the damn thing?
"Mr. Guggenheim... he’s mixed up with a syndicate?" Hattie whispered, the gravity of the word finally breaking through her innocence. "Aren’t those... aren’t those the people who do awful things in the dark, miss?"
Gary’s jaw tightened. He closed the ledger with a violent snap that made Hattie jump, then pressed his fingers to his temples. Probably forcing his mind backward, digging desperately through the stolen recesses of Elias’s mories.
"I have no mories of him," Gary muttered, opening his eyes.
Hattie watched him, her confusion slowly hardening into fear as she stared back at .
"Oh, miss—oh!"
Her gaze caught the dark sar on my collar, completely overriding her confusion about the ledger.
"You’re bleeding!"
I hadn’t felt it. I didn’t feel it now.
"The cut isn’t deep, thank the Lord, but it needs cleaning."
She bit down on her lower lip and forced herself to take a breath. Then, she pressed the rag to my throat with too much force, then imdiately gentled her touch.
Gary set the ledger aside on the broken chair, his fingers drumming a nervous pattern against the old leather.
"He’ll have an explanation, I am sure of it." Gary’s words ca out hollow, like he was trying to convince himself more than . "If his na’s in that book, there’s a reason. A purpose. We’re just... we’re missing sothing. We don’t have the full picture."
His gaze fell on , taking in the oversized, drab gray dress, the pale skin. He let out a long, heavy sigh.
"You look like a widow."
He was trying for humor. A sad, desperate attempt to break the tension. It fell completely flat.
"I feel like one," I replied, my voice dead.
He’s not dead. No, he can’t be dead. I told myself fiercely, my mind fighting a war against my own gut. He’s fine. Gary’s right. Whatever is written in this book, he must have a reason for it. He has to.
But then, Mr. Cromwell’s voice resurfaced in my head. Cold and clear as crystal. "Your uncle’s power has reached beyond what the eyes can see, Miss Thorne."
"No," I whispered to the empty air.
"What?" Gary raised his brows.
"I refuse to sit here in a dingy room and let a piece of paper tell who he is," I snapped, my chest heaving. "I don’t care about the ledger. I don’t care about the syndicate’s vague, terrifying lists."
"Don’t you dare do anything stupid again," Gary warned, glaring at . "We have to think this through. If he’s involved with these people, walking straight into their den isn’t just dangerous—it’s flat-out suicidal."
"I don’t care!" I yelled, looking Gary dead in the eye. "I’ve spent too much ti playing the part of the fragile damsel. I’m not letting a misunderstanding ruin the only person in this godforsaken tiline who makes feel alive."
"It’s dangerous," Gary continued, shaking his head vehently as he gathered his argunts. "They don’t just let strangers walk through the front door. And they certainly don’t let won—"
I didn’t listen to the rest. I grabbed the shawl resting on the broken chair and wrapped it tightly around my shoulders.
"I need to find him." My voice steady, and entirely unyielding. "Even if I have to drag him out of the mouth of hell itself."
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