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Only in being right.

I had let the meeting end before she expected it to, because the only way to study a creature that controls every exit is to take one she didn’t plan for. I closed the folder. I rose to the considerable height I keep folded inside good tailoring, and I watched the recalculation move through her like weather.

“We’re finished for today, Miss Valentine.” I had told her as I retrieved the fountain pen, capped it, slid it into my breast pocket. “I’ll return soon enough. We have a great deal to discuss, you and I.”

Most patients give me relief at those words, or dread, the two cheap currencies of this place. She gave me neither.

For a single unguarded instant her face did something genuine—a flare of pure, delighted appetite, the look of a chess player who lifts her eyes mid-game and discovers, against all evidence, that the person across the board might actually be worth beating.

Then the mask resettled, smooth and sweet and unbothered, and she let the orderly draw her up by the elbow without resistance.

At the door she glanced back.

Once.

The lavender eye and the emerald one, both of them, fixed on me with frank assessment, the way a buyer looks at a thing she has decided to acquire.

“See you soon, Professor Pretty Boy,” she said, smiled, and was gone.

She names things she means to keep.

Her dolls, each with a name and a history. The hamster, dead these many years, still spoken of by name. She has been in my presence for eleven minutes and she has already named me twice.

I am aware of what that means. I am aware, too, that I let her.

I uncap the fountain pen and add a fourth page.

She believes she walked into a cage.

She has no idea she just walked into the only place built to keep something like her.

Or that I intend to be the one holding the key.

The nurses’ station sits at the throat of the pink wing, a horseshoe of monitors and locked drawers presided over by Nurse Ofori and a broad, unhurried woman named Delacroix who has worked Blackthorn long enough to have stopped being surprised by anything except, perhaps, by me asking questions instead of issuing instructions.

“Tell me about her,” I say. “Not the file. The truth the file is too frightened to write down.”

They exchange a glance, the wordless arithmetic of staff deciding how candid they’re permitted to be with the new director. Delacroix decides first.

“Six rooms,” she says. “She’s opened six rooms we swore couldn’t be opened. Three restraint rigs. Walked clean out of the secure wing one time in somebody else’s cardigan and turned up at the commissary asking for strawberry milk.” A dry pause. “Never ran. Not once. That’s the part that puts the staff off their dinner. They could handle a runner. A runner wants out. She opens the door, has a look round, and sits back down like she’s decided the room’s not done with her yet.”

“And between performances?”

“Sweet as anything,” Ofori says, and means it, and is unsettled that she means it. “Steals the pudding. Returns your hairpins with a thank-you note. Knows every birthday on the ward. The other patients would walk through a wall for her—to them she’s a legend, the one who can’t be held. Half of them only get through the night because they believe she could leave any time she liked and stays out of choice.” Ofori’s mouth thins. “It’s the dolls that get me. Makes them herself. Names them. Says a few are wanted by Interpol. You laugh, and then it’s three in the morning and one of them’s looking at you from a shelf and you stop laughing.”

I let them talk.

I am cataloguing the way they talk—the lowered voices, the glances toward the corridor that leads to her, the particular cocktail of exasperation and protectiveness and fear they have brewed for her over the years.

They are not describing a patient.

They are describing a sovereign they have not yet admitted they serve.

It is the same affliction blooming in my own chest, three pages of leather notebook deep. I recognize the symptom. I have simply decided not to treat it.

I gather the file under my arm and turn to go. At the mouth of the corridor a question I have been saving comes loose.

“The recreation room,” I say, without turning. “There are anchor plates in the ceiling and the floor, four sets, capped over. Something was mounted there and taken out. What were they?”