There was a dead man, and Tobias had not denied it. He hadn’t explained. He had only told me to stay calm, as if calm could be commanded into existence when the world had just split fucking open.
“You killed him,” I whispered.
Tobias’s face went still in a different way.
Not blank.
Worse.
Accepting.
15
Tobias
The man had been dead for several minutes by then, and his continued existence had already become a matter of disposal rather than consequence. He had been nobody of importance, only a man with poor instincts, worse timing, and the unfortunate decision to appear at my gate pretending confusion when his eyes had been too observant for someone merely lost.
Killing him had been brief; the part afterward was always what irritated me. Wet fabric, dead weight, and the unpleasant logistics of extracting a body from a tank without damaging the animals or disrupting the surrounding environment more than necessary. The cleaning, the cameras, the eventual transport, the careful erasure of every small human inconvenience that turned an impulse into a chore.
Usually, Ben handled the majority of it.
He complained, of course, but was capable of making bodies disappear with fewer questions than most men could manage while ordering dinner.
Tonight should have been no different.
I had wanted the task finished. I had wanted the body removed, the area cleaned, the water tested, and the system restored before the disruption created even more unnecessary stress for the jellies.
But then I heard the sound of something dropping.
Ben’s head whipped toward the source of the sound, his face paling as he whispered, “Oh, fuck.”
A witness, then.
The thought arrived coldly, followed immediately by irritation rather than fear. Another body would complicate the evening with another disappearance, another route, another set of variables to erase before anyone had cause to wonder why someone who entered my property did not leave it. I had already been looking forward to washing the evening from my body, and instead, the night had chosen to multiply its inconveniences.
But when I turned to face this new inconvenience, the world stopped.
Cove stood at the entrance to the predator corridor with his bag crumpled at his feet, damp hair falling around his face, and his eyes wide and fixed on me.
His fear struck me with such physical force that I thought I was having a heart attack. His face had gone stark white beneath his freckles, his mouth parted around a breath he could not seem to take, and he looked smaller than he was, younger than he was, all those long limbs held too still by shock.
He looked at me as if he no longer knew me.
No. Perhaps he finally did, and that was the problem.
All the time I had spent acclimating him, all the painstaking adjustments, the office, the food, the books, the questions askedin measured increments, the distance maintained after my mistake in the guest room, and the trust he had begun extending one delicate, cautious step at a time—it all stood in that corridor with him now, ruined by one disastrous accident of timing.
“Tobias?” he whispered cautiously, my name leaving his mouth like a plea for contradiction, as if he were giving me one last opportunity to remain the version of myself he had almost learned how to trust.
I could have lied.
The impulse presented itself as cleanly as any other option. The man stumbled. The man broke in. The man was already dead. The man threatened the collection. The man threatened me. The man threatened you.
Some of those might even have been useful if delivered correctly.
But Cove was intelligent. Frightened, yes, but not stupid, and he had already seen too much. A lie would not preserve his trust.
It would only insult it.
