Chapter 13 - "The Broken Hand"

Eloise spins further out of control, while the killer prepares to snap her loose from the clock.

Every machine has a moment when it begins to fail.

You don't hear the failure. You feel it-an irregular beat, a whisper behind the tick, Something misaligned.

That's what Eloise had become.

She used to move in time.

Now she cuts in rhythm of her own.

He knelt beside the old grandfather clock in the safehouse, his first, the one he built by hand under his direction. The mentor. The man who taught him precision, silence, and patience.

Tick. Tock.

Tick. Tock.

"You listen long enough," the mentor once said, "and time will teach you what pain never could."

That man was gone now. Mason didn't know it yet, but they'd already walked past the grave.

Karen B. had found him first, before the killings, before the clocks. She had tried to expose the mentor when she saw what he was teaching the boy to do. No one believed her. No one listened.

So she stopped talking.

Until the boy came back.

And carved 4:07 into her thigh.

The mentor, his mentor, had been caught years later. A fraud charge. A technicality. He didn't last long in prison. No one found the boy again.

Until now.

Eloise had spoiled the machine.

She carved the second hand wrong.

She let them see her.

And for that, she had to be stopped.

No-reset.

Tick.

Tock.

"Karen B. was a mandated reporter in the '90s," Vega said, spreading the scanned documents across the table. "She filed an anonymous report about abuse-ritualistic stuff. A child under the care of a private therapist."

"No name?" Mason asked.

"Redacted. But the therapist was later arrested; his name was Thomas Everin. Charges unrelated, but in the same timeframe. He died in prison."

Mason's eyes narrowed. "And the clock?"

"Right," Vega nodded. "There was a confiscated box of journals found in Everin's apartment. Full of diagrams, mechanical parts, and-get this-excerpts from a kind of 'clockwork gospel'. He called it The Law of Precision."

Mason flipped open the scanned copy of one journal.

"All gears serve the center. When one turns against the rhythm, the machine suffers. When it halts, the machine dies."

Vega added, "Karen B. shows up dead twenty years later with a carved clock."

They didn't say it out loud, but both thought it:

He came back.

And he was trying to rebuild the machine.

Tick.

Tock.

The walls in the room were covered with drawn clock faces-some elegant, some fractured. Blood and charcoal smudged between them.

Eloise stood in the center, arms spread, tracing the second hand of an invisible timepiece in the air. Her lips moved, counting off seconds, but the numbers were wrong. The beat was off.

She didn't care.

He was coming.

She could feel it.

And she wasn't going to run.

No. She would kill again, faster this time. More violently. She'd make it impossible for him to control the narrative. She would be louder than his silence.

She had her next mark already. Not a teacher. Not a therapist. A cop.

Someone who didn't believe her. Someone who called her "unstable" on record.

9:06. That would be the time.

The second hand would stretch across the whole wrist, long, deep, unmistakable.

And maybe this time, she wouldn't carve it clean at all.

Tick.

Tock.

He walked the perimeter of her new hideout.

She thought she was invisible.

She had left her door unlocked.

The gears no longer turned smoothly. Her kills were noisy. Passionate. Unscripted.

The kind of kills that made people look twice.

The kind that brought in Federal Cops.

He hadn't built her for chaos.

She was a timepiece gone to rust.

And rust doesn't belong inside a clock.

He turned the brass gear in his hand-a gift from his mentor, taken from the old man's workshop after his death. Smooth, balanced, perfect.

He whispered to it.

"I'll make it right again."

He slipped it into his pocket and walked into the night.

Reviews

[Rebecca hall]

You are such a great and talented writer. Thank you so much for taking the time to write stories and for creating such interesting ones for us. As an artist, I’d love to share some cover art ideas for your upcoming story, and I also have plenty of ideas in mind for the one I’ve already read. If you use any other platform like Discord, please share it with me so we can chat more comfortably there.