"Oh, but I do!" I clapped my hands, delighted. "I want to mess with everyone who touches Institute girls. It's basically my whole thing now. Well, that and finding Gabriel, but the two are definitely related projects."
"Gabriel?" His confusion seemed genuine. "Gabriel Mire? He's dead."
The world tilted. My hands stilled. The basement's fluorescent buzz became deafening.
"What?"
"Dead. Over a year ago. Car accident, they said, though..." He trailed off, maybe realizing he'd just become infinitely more interesting.
"Though what?" My voice came out wrong. Too high. Too desperate. Not the bright bubble I'd cultivated so carefully. "Tell me exactly what you heard."
"Rumor was it wasn't an accident. That someone wanted the Institute's secrets buried with him. But that's just—"
The soldering iron was in my hand before I decided to move, pressing against his shoulder through the expensive fabric. The smell of burning wool and flesh filled the basement as he screamed.
"Everything." I heard myself say from very far away. "Tell me everything about Gabriel's death. Every rumor. Every theory. Every single word you've heard."
What followed was less interrogation than excavation. I dug through Gregory's knowledge with increasing desperation, each tool extracting another fragment of information. Gabriel's car had gone off a cliff. No body recovered. The Institute had been "discontinued" shortly after. Assets liquidated. Girls scattered to the wind.
Some said he'd faked his death. Others insisted they'd seen the crash site, the burnt wreckage. One particularly awful theory suggested a buyer had tortured him to death, wanting to understand how the conditioning worked.
I extracted each story with careful precision, but my usual joy in the process had evaporated. This was necessity now, not pleasure. By the time Gregory passed out for the third time, I'd filled six pages with notes about Gabriel's maybe-death.
The clock showed 2:47. My shift started in thirteen minutes.
"Fuck." The word felt strange in my mouth. Good girls didn't swear. But good girls also believed their Daddies were alive somewhere, waiting to be found.
I looked at Gregory, unconscious and significantly less symmetrical than when we'd started. His breathing was shallow but steady. The smart thing would be finishing him now, adding him to the tunnel system before my shift.
Instead, I found myself cleaning up in a daze. Tools sanitized and stored. Blood mopped with mechanical precision. Gregory would keep until after my shift. Or maybe Matt would handle it. I couldn't seem to care about proper disposal protocols when my entire world had shifted off its axis.
Gabriel might be dead.
The thought followed me up the stairs, into the employee bathroom where I washed and changed with autopilot efficiency. Fresh dress—blue today, with white daisies. Hair re-styled. Makeup touched up. The mirror showed a perfect doll, empty-eyed and smiling.
"He's not dead," I told my reflection. "Daddy wouldn't just die. Not in something as mundane as a car accident. Not when I haven't found him yet."
The bar was already half-full when I emerged. Matt took one look at me and frowned.
"You okay?"
"Perfect!" The word came out exactly as trained. "Just a very educational afternoon. Did you know there's a doctor in Prague who fixes broken dolls?"
His frown deepened, but customers were waiting. I slipped into the familiar rhythm of service, mixing drinks and deflecting flirtation with practiced ease. The trafficking phone buzzed in my pocket—more sellers, more buyers, more pieces of a network that might lead to a dead man.
That's when he walked in.
The door chime barely registered over the bar noise, but something made me look up from the martini I was mixing. He paused in the doorway, backlit by afternoon sun, and my hands stilled on the shaker.
Tall. Lean but solid, like someone who'd earned their muscles through use rather than gyms. Dark hair that looked professionally cut but had started to rebel against styling. He wore a charcoal suit without a tie, the top two buttons of his white shirt undone, and moved with the kind of controlled grace that suggested either dancer or fighter.
But it was his eyes that made my pulse skip. Dark green like forest shadows, scanning the room with an intensity that catalogued exits, evaluated threats, and dismissed most of the patrons as background noise. When they landed on me, I felt pinned like one of the butterfly specimens Daddy used to show me.
He took the empty seat at the far end of the bar, away from the chattering happy hour crowd. I finished the martini with hands that wanted to tremble, delivered it to its owner, then made my way down to the new arrival.
"Welcome to The Lost Hours!" My voice came out perfectly bright despite the strange flutter in my chest. "What can I get for you?"
He studied me for a moment before answering, and I got the unsettling feeling he was reading more than just my name tag. His eyes tracked the faint scars on my wrists from old restraints, noticed the way I kept my back to the wall, caught the slight bulge in my pocket where the trafficking phone lived.
