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With that, she turned on her sensibly clad heels and disappeared into a neighboring room.

Damian looked at me, nodded once, then opened the door.

The smell of lemon blossom, orchids, and beeswax hit me first. Damp earth.

The room was warmer than the corridor, the air humid and soft against my skin. For one absurd second, I wanted to relax.

I couldn’t tell you exactly what the room was, and that was probably the point. There were blush chesterfield sofas, plum velvet wingback chairs, and a low table set with porcelain cups. A glass ceiling rose overhead, and lemon trees stood in enormous blue-and-white planters along the walls. Large French doors led to a patio where jasmine climbed a pergola. It was a garden, a salon, a chapel. A trap.

The Mothers were already seated. Waiting and arranged, poised and quietly regal.

Seven women sat in a loose crescent beneath the glass roof, their precisely angled chairs arranged so that there was nowhere I could stand without being seen. They were as effortlessly coordinated as the interiors. They wore cream, plum, navy, and pale rose, some in cashmere, others in silk. Fine threads of gold and silver gleamed from around their wrists and necks. Their hair ranged from silver to honey to black, and not a single strand was out of place.

But all of that washed out to a blur when my eyes landed on their faces. They were all impossibly beautiful, preserved just beyond nature, as if they’d decided that time would only touch them where it added grace.

The first woman I recognized was one I should have noticed as soon as I walked in the room, but she looked entirely different from the last time I’d seen her.

Aurora.

The boho silver and turquoise stones and strappy leather sandals were gone. Instead, a woman in dusky pink cashmere and cream silk pants looked at me with thinly veiled contempt, her feet in gold and navy smoking loafers, her hair in a sleek French twist.

The first word that popped into my head was bitch.

The second two were stay calm.

And then the rest of the faces resolved, one by one, into the names taped above my desk. Seraphine Varley, whose serum sat on Vivienne’s vanity. Marguerite Ollier, in person still somewhere between thirty-nine and sixty. Calliope Webb, looking like the after photo of her own twelve-week intensive. Verena Ardeme, who drained women as they rested. Imogen Blackthorne-Frost, who ran an elite medical spa. For a month they’d been thumbnails in my folder. Now the board was looking back at me.

None of them rose as we entered the room. One of them placed her teacup gently on the table with a little porcelain clink.

I identified Octavia Halcyon immediately. She sat at the center in formidable tailoring. I saw the blue of Damian’s eyes in her careful, quiet scrutiny. His near-black hair in her delicate chignon. The warm undertones of his skin, but paler, as if she’d spent a lifetime avoiding the sun.

“Marlowe,” she said. It sounded like a gentle correction.

The floral display on the table between us was decadently arranged with orchids, black calla lilies, blush roses, hellebore, lemon leaves, and dark fern, all rising from a bed of moss and twisted branches.

At first, I didn’t notice the small songbirds.

They were tucked among the flowers like they’d landed there, their bodies preserved so perfectly. Perfectly and beautifully horrifying.

I’d never seen Damian so still. I thought about my feet on the ground, the breath in my lungs, just as he’d taught me. I knew he was doing the same.

Octavia smiled with a curl of her mouth that didn’t reach her face.

“Please, sit down,” she said, motioning at the empty chairs opposite them.

I settled into a chair that wasn’t as comfortable as it looked. Damian sat beside me, his eyes on his mother.

Octavia looked at me, her head inclined in mock affection. “You’ve made quite an impression.”

I cleared my throat. I knew she wanted me to respond with a question.

“I see,” I said.

The faintest whisper of indignation crossed her face.

“Aurora speaks highly of you,” she said.

Aurora didn’t smile. She just watched me like I was curious prey.