8. Poison in the Veins

The workshop became Eamon's sanctuary and his prison.

For the first two weeks at Ashgrove, he kept his head down and his hands busy. The French mantel clock was disassembled into its constituent parts—gears and springs and plates and screws, each one cleaned and examined and laid out on the velvet mat in the order of its removal. The work was painstaking and repetitive, exactly the kind of work that Ephraim had taught him to use as camouflage.

No one questioned a clockmaker who spent twelve hours a day in his workshop. No one wondered why he kept to himself, why he ate his meals alone, why he spoke only when spoken to. He was a craftsman, and craftsmen were expected to be eccentric.

But at night, when the mansion settled into its nocturnal rhythms and the staff retreated to their quarters, Elias Crane became Eamon Graves again.

He had learned the house's schedule within the first week. The security guards changed shifts at midnight and eight in the morning. The kitchen staff arrived at five. The maids began their rounds at seven. Eleanor Blackwood took breakfast in her morning room at eight-thirty, lunch in the conservatory at one, and dinner in the formal dining room at seven. Reginald Blackwood was less predictable—he spent most of his time in the study or at the Blackwood Industries headquarters in Ironhaven—but he rarely returned to the residential wing before ten at night.

Julian Blackwood VI was the wild card. He came and went at odd hours, often drunk, sometimes accompanied by people Eamon did not recognize. His wing of the mansion was on the second floor, at the opposite end from his parents' suites, and the staff had learned to avoid it after dark.

And somewhere in that wing, Celeste Vane Blackwood lived in a state of suspended grief, mourning a daughter she believed was dead and raising a son she was afraid to love too much.

Eamon had not yet seen her. He had not yet seen Julian. But he had heard them—the distant slam of doors, the raised voices that cut through the quiet of the house like knives through silk. The Blackwood family was not at peace. They were at war, and the war had been going on for a very long time.

---

The first listening device was planted on a Tuesday night, fifteen days after Eamon arrived.

He chose the library—the two-story room with its rolling ladders and leather-bound books that smelled of dust and old secrets. Reginald Blackwood conducted much of his business here, according to the staff gossip that Eamon had carefully cultivated. The housekeeper, a woman named Mrs. Pembroke, had a weakness for conversation and a dislike for her employers that she was not as discreet about as she believed.

"They're vultures," she had said once, catching Eamon in the kitchen late at night. "All of them. You'd do well to stay out of their way."

Eamon had nodded, his expression carefully neutral. "I'm just here for the clocks."

"The clocks are the only honest things in this house." She had poured him tea and told him, in rambling detail, about the affairs and the arguments and the whispers that ran through Ashgrove like currents in a river. Julian's drinking. Reginald's rages. Eleanor's cold, cutting dismissals. And the thing that no one spoke of directly—the child who had been born and then disappeared, the mother who still lit candles on a birthday that no one else acknowledged.

"Celeste thinks no one knows," Mrs. Pembroke had said. "But the staff sees everything. Every year, on February third, she locks herself in her rooms and won't come out. She's been doing it for seven years."

Iris's birthday. The day Julian's daughter had been born and stolen away.

Now, in the darkness of the library at two in the morning, Eamon stood on a rolling ladder and pressed the first listening device into the space behind a leather-bound volume of Veridian legal statutes that looked as if it had not been opened in decades. The device was tiny—barely larger than a coat button—and the microphone was sensitive enough to pick up a whisper from thirty feet away.

Malachi had tested them in the apartment above the laundromat. If Reginald Blackwood conducted business in this room, they would hear it.

Eamon climbed down from the ladder and surveyed the room. The device was invisible. The ladder had been returned to its original position. There was no sign that anyone had been here.

He slipped out of the library and back toward the servants' stairs. The house was silent except for the distant ticking of the clocks that Eleanor collected—dozens of them, scattered throughout the mansion, their rhythms overlapping in a quiet symphony that Eamon had learned to navigate by.

One device down. Five to go.

---

The second device went into the morning room, hidden inside the case of a mahogany bracket clock that Eleanor had acquired from an estate sale in the Sylvan Isles. The third went into the study, tucked behind a framed photograph of Reginald shaking hands with a governor whose name Eamon did not recognize. The fourth went into the conservatory, where Eleanor took her lunch and, apparently, conducted her own form of business—conversations with the wives of other wealthy families, the kind of conversations that seemed innocuous but were, according to Mrs. Pembroke, "where the real deals get made."

The fifth device was intended for Julian's wing. But Julian's wing was more heavily trafficked than the rest of the house, even at night, and Eamon had not yet found an opportunity to gain access.

The sixth device remained in his tool case, waiting.

---

It was in the third week that Eamon finally saw Celeste Vane Blackwood.

He was working in the conservatory, adjusting the mechanism of a Vienna regulator that hung on the wall near the orchids, when she walked in. She was tall and slender, her dark hair pulled back in a loose knot, her face pale and unadorned. She wore a simple dress of gray wool, and her hands were empty, as if she had come into the conservatory for no other reason than to be somewhere that was not her rooms.

She did not notice Eamon at first. She walked to the window and stood looking out at the snow-covered garden, her reflection ghostly in the glass.

"Mrs. Blackwood," Eamon said quietly. "I'm sorry. I can leave."

She turned, startled. "No. Stay. I didn't realize anyone was working in here."

"Eleanor asked me to look at the Vienna regulator. It's been losing time."

"Everything in this house loses time eventually." Celeste's voice was soft, almost distant. "The clocks, the people, the memories. It all runs down."

Eamon set down his screwdriver. "I can restore the clocks. The rest is beyond my expertise."

She smiled, a thin expression that held no joy. "You're the new clockmaker. Elias Crane."

"Yes."

"Eleanor mentioned you. She said you have a gift." Celeste walked closer, examining the regulator's open face. "Do you enjoy it? Working with dead things, bringing them back to life?"

"I enjoy understanding how things work. The restoration is simply the result of that understanding."

"That's a very careful answer."

"I'm a careful person, Mrs. Blackwood."

She looked at him then, really looked, and Eamon had the uncomfortable feeling that she saw more than he intended. "Yes," she said. "I think you are. The careful ones always have the most to hide."

She turned and walked out of the conservatory, leaving behind the faint scent of lavender and the echo of words that had landed closer to the truth than she could possibly have known.

---

The following week, Reginald Blackwood summoned him.

The summons came through the assistant, delivered to the workshop in an envelope sealed with the Blackwood crest. *Mr. Blackwood requests your presence in the study at four o'clock.* No explanation. No pleasantries. Just the command.

Eamon arrived at the appointed time, his tool case in hand, though he had not been asked to bring it. It was a prop, a reminder that he was a craftsman and nothing more.

Reginald Blackwood was larger than Eamon had expected. The photographs had not captured the physical presence of the man—the broad shoulders, the hands that looked capable of crushing bone, the pale eyes that had been passed down through three generations of Blackwood patriarchs. He sat behind a mahogany desk that was bare except for a single folder and a glass of scotch.

"Mr. Crane. Sit down."

Eamon sat.

"My wife tells me you have been making progress with her clocks. She is pleased." Reginald's voice was a low rumble, the voice of a man accustomed to being obeyed. "That is a rare thing. Eleanor is not easily pleased."

"I'm glad to be of service."

"But I didn't ask you here to discuss clocks." Reginald opened the folder and withdrew a sheet of paper. Eamon recognized it immediately—it was the background check that Malachi had prepared for Elias Crane, the fictional history that had been planted in the databases and public records that the Blackwood fixers would have searched.

"You have an interesting history, Mr. Crane. Apprenticed to a clockmaker in the Sylvan Isles. Worked in Geneva for three years. Returned to Veridia six months ago. No family. No debts. No criminal record." Reginald looked up from the paper. "You are a ghost. The kind of man who leaves no trace."

Eamon kept his expression neutral. "I prefer to think of myself as a private person."

"Privacy is a luxury that the wealthy purchase and the poor cannot afford. Which are you, Mr. Crane?"

"Neither. I'm a craftsman. Craftsmen exist outside the categories you're describing."

Reginald smiled, but the smile did not reach his eyes. "I've been a businessman for forty-five years. I've learned to read people the way my wife reads clocks. I can tell you exactly what makes a person tick, what motivates them, what they're hiding. And you, Mr. Crane, are hiding something."

Eamon said nothing. The silence stretched between them, taut and dangerous.

"However," Reginald continued, leaning back in his chair, "I have also learned that everyone who works for me is hiding something. The maids hide their contempt. The cooks hide their resentment. The security guards hide their boredom. Hiding is human nature. What matters is not what you hide, but whether your secrets are a threat to my family."

"I'm not a threat to anyone, Mr. Blackwood. I'm here to fix clocks."

"So you've said. And for now, I will take you at your word." Reginald closed the folder. "But know this. I have eyes everywhere in this house. I have staff who report to me on everything that happens, everything that's said, everyone who comes and goes. If you are anything other than what you claim to be, I will know. And you will regret it."

Eamon met the pale eyes. "Is that all, Mr. Blackwood?"

"For now. But I will be watching you, Mr. Crane. Closely."

---

That night, Eamon retrieved the recording from the listening device in the study.

He sat in his workshop, the door locked, the earbud pressed to his ear, listening to the conversation that had taken place after he left.

"There's something off about him," Reginald's voice said. "The background check is too clean. No debts, no family, no history before the apprenticeship. That's not a person. That's a construct."

Another voice answered—one Eamon recognized from the recordings Cora Vale had made. Lionel Morrow. "Everyone has a past. Some people are simply better at burying it."

"I want you to dig deeper. The Sylvan Isles apprenticeship. The Geneva job. Verify everything. If he's a journalist or an investigator, I want to know before he gets any closer to the family."

"And if he is?"

There was a pause. Then Reginald's voice, colder than before. "Then he will join the others. Thornwood has room for one more."

Eamon removed the earbud and sat in the silence of the workshop, the French mantel clock ticking on the bench beside him.

They were suspicious. Not yet certain, but suspicious enough to investigate. The background that Malachi had constructed was thorough, but it was not perfect—no fictional history could withstand the kind of scrutiny that the Blackwood fixers could bring to bear.

He needed to move faster. He needed to find what he was looking for before they found him.

---

The fifth listening device went into Julian's study, planted during a rare afternoon when the heir was in Ironhaven and the staff had retreated to the servants' quarters. The room was a mess—empty bottles, discarded clothing, a mirror with a crack running down its center. Eamon tucked the device behind a bookcase that was mostly filled with volumes that had never been opened, their spines uncreased.

The sixth device remained in his case. He was saving it for somewhere special.

---

Three days later, he heard Julian for the first time.

He was working in the upstairs hallway, repairing a bracket clock that hung near the entrance to the east wing, when the door to Julian's suite burst open and the heir himself staggered out.

Julian Blackwood VI was thinner than in the photographs Eamon had studied, his face haggard and unshaven, his eyes bloodshot and rimmed with red. He wore a silk robe that hung open over a stained undershirt, and he carried a bottle of whiskey in one hand.

"You," Julian said, spotting Eamon. "What are you doing?"

"Repairing a clock, Mr. Blackwood. Your mother requested it."

"My mother." Julian laughed, a harsh, hollow sound. "She cares more about her clocks than she cares about anything else in this house. More than me. More than my sister." He paused, blinking as if trying to focus. "You know I had a sister? No, you wouldn't. No one does. She died. They all die eventually."

Eamon said nothing. Julian took a step closer, and the smell of whiskey was overwhelming.

"I had a daughter, too. Did you know that? A daughter. She died in childbirth. My wife won't talk about it. My father pretends it never happened. But she existed. She was real." Julian's voice cracked. "And now she's gone, just like everything else."

He turned away and stumbled down the hall, the bottle swinging from his hand.

Eamon stood motionless, watching him go. Julian did not know. He genuinely believed his daughter was dead. The lie that Reginald and Morrow had constructed had been told so thoroughly that even the heir himself had been deceived.

What did that mean? What else did Julian not know?

Eamon returned to his workshop and retrieved the audio recorder Cora Vale had given him. He listened again to the recordings from Thornwood—the conversations between the administrator and the guards, the phone calls with Ashgrove. And he realized that Julian's voice was absent from all of them.

The heir was not part of the cover-up. He was another victim of it.

That changed things. Julian was not a co-conspirator. He was a broken man who had been lied to by his own family. And broken men, Eamon knew from experience, could be manipulated.

---

The next morning, he called Malachi on the burner phone.

"Julian doesn't know his daughter is alive," Eamon said. "He thinks she died in childbirth. Reginald and Morrow have been lying to him for seven years."

Malachi was silent for a moment. "That's unexpected. Are you certain?"

"I heard him talking to himself in the hallway. He was drunk, but he was sincere. He believes Iris is dead."

"Then Julian is not our target. He's a potential ally. If he learns the truth, he could turn against his father."

"Or he could fall apart completely. He's barely functional. The drinking, the drugs—he's self-destructing."

"Then we need to reach him before he self-destructs. But carefully. If Reginald suspects that Julian is wavering, he'll isolate him the same way he isolated Iris." Malachi paused. "There's something else. I've been going through the Thornwood ledgers that Samuel Marsh gave you. I found a name."

"What name?"

"Victor Renfield. The Thornwood administrator that Cora Vale mentioned. Before he worked at Thornwood, he was a mid-level executive at Blackwood Industries. He was transferred to the asylum five years ago. His personnel file says it was a lateral move."

"But it wasn't."

"No. It was a demotion. Renfield was caught embezzling from the company. Rather than fire him or prosecute him, the Blackwoods moved him to Thornwood and buried him there. He's not an administrator. He's a prisoner, just like everyone else in that building."

Eamon thought about Cora Vale's words—that Renfield was a coward, looking for a way out. "Can we use him?"

"We can try. But we need leverage. Cora mentioned that he had an offshore account. If we can find it, if we can trace the money he's been siphoning, we can force him to cooperate."

"Do it. I'll focus on Ashgrove. There are more secrets here, Malachi. I can feel them. The family is rotting from the inside, and no one is talking about it."

"They never do. That's how families like the Blackwoods survive—by never speaking of the rot until it's too late to cut it out." Malachi's voice was grim. "Be careful, Eamon. Reginald is already suspicious. If he decides you're a threat, he won't hesitate."

"I know. But he's not the only one who can make threats."

Eamon ended the call and looked at the sixth listening device, still waiting in his tool case. He had been saving it for a special location. Now he knew where it needed to go.

Eleanor Blackwood's private sitting room. The room where she met with Lionel Morrow on the third Thursday of every month, according to the staff gossip. The room where, if the patterns held, the real decisions were made.

He would plant it tonight.

---

The sitting room was on the third floor, at the end of a corridor that the staff called the Gallery—a long hallway lined with portraits of Blackwood ancestors, their painted eyes following anyone who walked past. Eleanor's private rooms were at the far end, behind a heavy oak door that was always locked when she was not in residence.

Tonight, she was in residence. But she was also seventy-five years old and took a sleeping draught at nine o'clock every evening. The housekeeper had mentioned it in passing, a casual comment about Eleanor's habits that Eamon had filed away for future use.

At midnight, he climbed the servants' stairs to the third floor and walked the length of the Gallery, his footsteps silent on the thick carpet. The portraits watched him pass—Reginald's grandfather, the steel magnate who had founded the family fortune. Reginald's father, the politician who had served three terms in the Veridia Senate. Reginald himself, painted in his prime, his pale eyes already cold with the ambition that would consume the rest of his life.

The door to the sitting room was locked. Eamon had expected this. He withdrew his picks from his pocket—the same set that Ephraim had given him, worn smooth from months of practice—and set to work on the lock.

It yielded in ninety seconds.

The sitting room was smaller than the public rooms downstairs, furnished with a feminine touch that the rest of the house lacked. Chintz curtains. A velvet settee. A writing desk near the window, its surface cluttered with correspondence. And, in the corner, a grandfather clock that Eleanor had purchased from an auction house in the Sylvan Isles three years ago.

Eamon moved to the clock and opened its case. The movement was a standard English design, nothing remarkable, but the space behind the dial was generous. He pressed the sixth listening device into the gap between the case and the wall, where it would be invisible even if the clock was opened for repair.

Then he turned to the writing desk.

He knew he should not linger. Every moment in this room increased the risk of discovery. But the correspondence on the desk was too tempting to ignore.

He flipped through the letters quickly, his eyes scanning for names he recognized. Reginald. Julian. Lionel Morrow. Victor Renfield. And one name that appeared more often than any of the others: Thaddeus Vane.

Celeste's father. The shipping magnate from the coast.

The letters between Eleanor and Thaddeus Vane were cryptic, full of references to "the arrangement" and "the obligation" and "the asset that must be protected." But one letter, dated two years earlier, was clearer than the rest.

*Thaddeus,*

*I share your concerns about the girl. She is a liability that grows more dangerous with each passing year. But Morrow insists that she remain at Thornwood until she reaches her majority. He claims it is for her protection. I suspect it is for his conscience.*

*Rest assured, however, that the situation will be resolved before Julian's inheritance is finalized. We cannot allow a bastard child to threaten the succession. The boy is the heir. The girl is nothing.*

*Reginald has made his position clear. If Morrow will not act, we will find someone who will.*

*E.*

Eamon read the letter twice, his blood running cold. Eleanor had been plotting the murder of her own granddaughter. Thaddeus Vane, Celeste's father, was part of the conspiracy. And Lionel Morrow—the fixer who had been buying Iris books and telling her stories for seven years—was the only thing standing between her and the family that wanted her dead.

The abyss was deeper than he had imagined.

Eamon folded the letter and tucked it into his jacket. Then he slipped out of the sitting room, relocked the door behind him, and disappeared into the shadows of Ashgrove.

He had come here seeking revenge for his sister and for Clara Mayfield. But what he had found was a crime that dwarfed his own grievances—a conspiracy that stretched across generations and families, a web of murder and greed that had been spinning for so long that no one alive could see its full shape.

And at the center of the web was a seven-year-old girl who was not supposed to exist.

Eamon returned to his workshop and sat in the darkness, the grandfather clock ticking beside him. The fire in his chest was burning brighter than ever, but it had changed. It was no longer just his fire. It belonged to Iris now. To Lyra. To Clara. To every person who had ever been sacrificed to the Blackwood name.

He pulled out the burner phone and dialed Malachi.

"I found something," he said. "We need to move faster. Iris is in more danger than we thought."

"Tell me everything."

Eamon told him. When he finished, there was a long silence on the other end of the line.

"I'll contact Cora Vale," Malachi said finally. "We need to accelerate the timeline. If Eleanor and Thaddeus Vane are planning to eliminate Iris, we may have less time than we thought."

"How much less?"

"I don't know. But I suspect Lionel Morrow's death will be the trigger. When he dies, the last restraint on the family will be gone. Iris will have no protection except us."

Eamon looked at the letter on his workbench, the elegant handwriting of Eleanor Blackwood condemning her granddaughter to death. "Then we make sure we're ready before Morrow dies. We make sure that when the time comes, we have everything in place."

"And what about Julian? If he learns the truth, he could become unpredictable."

"Julian is already unpredictable. But he's also a father who doesn't know he's a father. If we can tell him the truth before his parents eliminate his daughter, he might become our most powerful weapon."

"Or our greatest liability. A broken man can break in either direction."

Eamon thought about Julian standing in the hallway, bottle in hand, grieving for a daughter he believed was dead. "I'll take that risk."

He ended the call and sat alone in the workshop, the pieces of the French mantel clock spread before him. He had been reassembling it for weeks, and it was nearly complete. Soon it would chime again, and Eleanor would be pleased, and the clockmaker would continue his quiet work in the basement of Ashgrove.

But the clockmaker was not who he appeared to be. And the clock he was really building—the mechanism of revenge that he had been assembling for seven years—was almost ready to strike.