“A chance at normalcy,” Lucien answers, “after years of having none. Sunlight she’s permitted to stand in. A door she’s allowed to open. And—clinically—the regulation of a pack bond. She has gone her entire incarceration without one, suppressed and isolated and dosed, and an unpacked Omega’s nervous system frays in ways yours never will. Proximity to a stable pack would settle her. It’s the single most therapeutic thing this institution could prescribe, and it has refused to prescribe it for years out of squeamishness.”
“And the two of you,” the CEO says, the screen-flat eyes moving over Riot and me, “are content to be the guinea pigs in this.”
“I volunteer as tribute,” Riot hums, and folds his scarred arms behind his head, the picture of a man who has never volunteered for anything less gladly in his life.
It’s a joke, and it isn’t.
I’ve watched this man over the last six days refuse to be removed from a sleeping woman’s side by four guards and the threat of a needle. I’ve watched him absorb her delirium—the screaming, the nails, the wild accusing terror of a mind half-poisoned—and emerge each time gentler with her than before, as though every blow she landed only proved her worth the keeping.
Volunteer is a small grey word for what Riot is doing. He would sign over the rest of his life in blood to be one of the three hands on her, and he’d call it nothing, and he’d mean the nothing as the deepest vow he has. I understand him better than he’d like. We are, all three, men who learned to love in the only dialects available to us—mine fluent in endings, his in violence, Lucien’s in the cold mercy of a plan.
None of them are the dialect she deserves. We’re going to teach ourselves a new one anyway, or die trying, which for men like us amounts to the same devotion.
“And what,” the CEO presses, sharper now, “assures me that he, specifically, won’t simply decorate this charming little town with bodies of his own? The man earned his way here by turning a prison into an abattoir.”
Lucien doesn’t flinch, and neither does Riot.
“Let me tell you about that prison,” Lucien says, and he does—spare, unhurried, naming what the men inside it had done and to whom, and what they’d been about to do when Riot’s hands ended the conversation. He doesn’t soften it. He doesn’t excuse it either. “I’m not justifying it. I’m telling you it had a purpose, and a target, and that he has never once in his life raised those hands at something that didn’t earn them first. If it comforts your morals to pretend you wouldn’t have done precisely the same in his place, by all means, pretend. But don’t insult the room by calling him random.”
No one argues.
The silence has the texture of men who recognize a truth they’d rather not have heard.
I watch Lucien defend Riot, and I think, not for the first time, about how unlikely a trinity we are. A doctor who feels nothing and has built a cathedral of control over the absence.
A killer who feels everything and has never once learned to dam it.
And me—something in between, a man who feels precisely as much as he chooses to and chooses, mostly, the dead, because the dead never ask to be felt back.
By every law of nature we should be rivals, three obsessions circling a single flame, snapping at each other’s throats.
We aren’t.
We slotted together around her like we’d been cast for it, and I’ve stopped questioning why, because the answer is simple and I dislike how simple it is: she is large enough for all three of us. Whatever she is—victim, mastermind, lunatic, saint, the thing the dead girls were and survived—there is enough of her to hold a doctor’s mind and a killer’s devotion and an undertaker’s reverence all at once and never run dry. I have arranged a great many things in my life.
I never arranged to belong to something. It is, like the fear, novel.
“We’ll handle the logistics,” Lucien says, sealing it. “Give us two weeks in Arch Hollow, and I’ll tell you exactly what you’re dealing with. A true serial killer, attacking your foundation—or a stalker, fixated on one woman.”
“Or both,” Riot adds.
I give him a look.
He doesn’t take it back. Lucien only nods, as though both is a possibility he’d already filed, and turns his attention to the screen and the silver commissioner alike.
“Your verdict, gentlemen.”
I confess Riot’s addition has lodged in me. Or both.
I’d been treating the question as a fork in a road—serial killer or stalker, the institution’s wound or our girl’s—and the brute, in his blunt unbeautiful way, has reminded me that the most dangerous arrangements are rarely so tidy.
What if the thing hunting Blackthorn’s survivors and the thing fixated on Vex are the same hand wearing two faces? What if the wider slaughter was only ever the soil, and she was always the flower it was grown to reach? I turn it over, and I do not like the shape it makes, and I like even less that liking it isn’t the point.
Some bouquets are arranged from thorns.
You handle them carefully, or not at all.
They confer in the wordless way of powerful men—a glance, a small grim nod—and then Pryce delivers it. The special function is approved. The transfer to take place by the end of the week, the chosen residence to be outfitted first with cameras and security to ensure that wherever our girl wanders in that pretty cage, she wanders under a watchful eye. No attempts at escape will be tolerated.
