“Ooh.” I press a hand to my chest, delighted. “She reads. Doc, she reads. Wherever did you find her?”
“I didn’t,” Doc murmurs. “She found us.”
That lands somewhere under my ribs and stays there, a small cold splinter, because a man like Doc does not say a thing like that idly, and an investigator does not walk into a private fortress carrying no scent and a face like a verdict unless someone, somewhere, has decided the bodies in this building are no longer an internal matter.
“We’re investigating you.”
The redhead says it plainly, no ceremony, and she uses my real name to say it—the long, dead, dredged-up sound of it, Genevieve, the name that belongs to a girl who doesn’t exist anymore and never really got the chance to.
Something in me goes still.
The grin doesn’t fall, exactly, but the performance behind it falters; my shoulders sink a fraction, and I tilt my head at herlike a confused little bird, the picture of harmless bewilderment, because harmless bewilderment has gotten me out of more rooms than any lockpick ever has.
“Investigating,” I echo. “Investigating what?”
No one answers.
The guards study their boots. Hale studies me. The silence stretches and sours, and I do what I always do when a room decides to withhold from me: I turn to the single person in it I know will crack, because he can’t quite help himself where I’m concerned, because I’ve already proven I can make him react.
I look at Doc.
Hold his gaze and I pour everything into the look—the wide mismatched eyes, the lavender and the emerald both, the silent, seeping, soul-deep plea that has nothing to do with madness and everything to do with the simple animal fact that I have decided he is mine to extract answers from.
I hold it for ten seconds. Twenty. A full, unblinking thirty, long enough that the room forgets to breathe, long enough to watch the certainty in him bend under the weight of whatever it is I do to him that he hasn’t named yet either.
He caves.
“The death of a patient,” Doc says quietly. “Wren Halloway. East wing. They found her three hours ago.”
The bruised-peony girl. The sweet beaten thing two doors down who still flinched.
Gone.
Something genuine moves through me at that, quick and inconvenient—not grief, I retired grief years ago, but a cousin of it, a cold clean anger that someone reached into my building and snuffed out one of the harmless ones.
Wren wouldn’t have hurt a fly.
Wren apologized to doors when she bumped them. And while the inconvenient feeling rises, the other thing rises faster,the part of me that never truly sleeps: the machine. It starts to turn behind my harmless tilted head, sorting, mapping, asking the only questions that matter.
Three hours ago. East wing. A body, and a frame being built around me beam by beam, and a scentless stranger carrying a badge that doesn’t belong to this place.
Someone is playing my own game on my own board.
How rude…yet interesting.
And then he holds my eyes, and he gives me the rest of it, because he’s decided—for reasons I intend to spend a great deal of time unpacking—that I should hear it from him.
“And the prime suspect,” he says, “is you.”
CHAPTER 6
~Lucien~
“And the prime suspect,” I say, “is you.”
I deliver the sentence because she asked me for it, and because she has already proven she’ll prise the truth out of me one way or another, and a man should choose the manner of his own surrenders.
But I want it noted, in the private ledger where I note such things, that I consider this the single most barbaric and witless conclusion the administration of this institute has produced in all its long catalogue of barbaric, witless conclusions—and the field is crowded.
