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Because she didn’t do it.

The matter isn’t in question. It isn’t a hunch, a clinician’s instinct, a soft spot I’m refusing to examine. It’s arithmetic, and arithmetic doesn’t care how anyone feels about the woman in the pink jumpsuit.

Wren Halloway died three hours ago; that case is a slow, cold thing, and the evidence around it is thin enough to read print through. But the body these people are presently rushing toward—the fresh one, the second, the escalation no one has had thespine to call an escalation—that one has been dead some three hours.

I know, because I read the preliminary the moment it crossed a desk, the way I read everything before anyone decides what I’m permitted to read.

And for the entirety of those three hours, and two more besides, Genevieve Valentine has been on a steel pole in a monitored cell, climbing, spinning, and sweating before an unblinking camera I personally positioned.

Five hours, continuous, time-stamped, witnessed by the very surveillance this institute worships.

A woman cannot be in two places. Cannot strangle a patient in the east wing while inverting herself forty feet of footage away. It is the most ironclad alibi I have encountered in twenty years of testimony, and the beautiful, vicious joke of it is that the killer handed it to her—struck precisely when she was at her most watched, to bury her under a second body, and never once accounted for the toy in the corner of her cell that kept a camera trained on her the entire time.

Someone is framing her.

Someone competent, patient, and a half-step behind the one variable they couldn’t have predicted: us.

And the administration, predictably, has reached for the nearest convenient throat.

I understand the logic, if you can dignify it with the word.

Blackthorn has a corpse problem and a reputation to protect and a roster of patients no jury would weep over; pin it on the celebrated lunatic with the arson conviction and the mismatched eyes, and the institute gets a tidy villain, a sealed file, and a press release that uses the word contained.

The CEO would sign it before lunch.

It’s the same reflex that’s burned through three directors before me—the deep institutional preference for a comfortablelie over an inconvenient investigation—and it tells me something the timeline already hinted at. Whoever is doing this knows the building’s appetites. They’re not only killing. They’re feeding the institute exactly the suspect it most wants to swallow.

I could say all of this now. I could lay the timeline on the table and watch the case against her evaporate.

But I’ve learned that a truth delivered too eagerly looks like a thumb on the scale, and the word for a director who clears his most dangerous patient inside seventy-two hours of meeting her is favoritism, and favoritism is a leash I won’t hand these people. So I do what I do best in a room full of lesser minds convinced they’re the cleverest present.

I leave it to the professionals.

Which means the next move is to walk the accused through the scene of the crime and read her reaction against it—standard procedure, defensible, the sort of thing a thorough investigation requires—and reading reactions is precisely the lane I was built to occupy.

So that is where I insert myself. Not as her defender.

As the instrument best calibrated to study her in the one place she’s expected to flinch.

The detective runs the room, or believes she does, and I let her believe it because her belief is useful to me.

Hale is a Beta—I’d have guessed it from her bearing even without the manufactured nothing where her scent should be—and she carries a hard ego inside an even harder exterior, the particular armor of a woman who clawed up through a profession that never wanted her and decided somewhere along the way that the only safe posture is superior.

She thinks she occupies the power seat.

In a building where men rule and Alphas would sooner chew glass than take an order from anyone they can’t out-muscle, she has installed herself at the head of the table by sheer force ofcontempt, and I find it almost admirable and entirely beside the point.

Let her have the high seat; a moment of command.

Her authority is the door that keeps me in this room—this cell, this space I quietly confiscated for myself days ago under the bland fiction of a temporary observation suite, the better to oversee the installation of a certain gift and ensure it was laced precisely to our obsession’s liking.

Mine and the other two’s.

Ours.

And she likes it.

That’s the thing worth the whole maneuver. She likes it, and she’s standing in the middle of liking it right now, and it is taking a quantity of my discipline I did not know I still kept in reserve.