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“Ooh,” Vex says, the first word she’s spoken since the blood gave up its secret, and her whole face has lit with the unholy joy of a woman who has finally been offered a conversation worth having. “He planned my funeral before he said hello. Doc, I think I’m in love.”

“You’re in something,” I murmur, and decline to name it, because the naming would obligate me to feel the matchingthing in my own chest, and I am, as I keep insisting to no one who believes me, working.

The holy trinity, complete at last, standing over a body in a building that has no idea what it’s just allowed through its doors.

Vex looks from Silas to me, the slow delighted dawning of a predator who’s realized the hunting ground has gotten interesting, and I feel the floor of the whole investigation shift beneath us into something else entirely.

This is where the real games begin.

CHAPTER 7

~Silas~

What a stunning beauty she is.

Not the corpse—though the corpse is lovely too, in the particular way the freshly arrived always are, the face slackened past all its performances into the honest, dreaming stillness I’ve devoted my life to honoring.

That is one definition of beauty.

The peace at the peak of eternal salvation, the moment a body stops being a battlefield and becomes, at last, a still life.

I’ll make her gorgeous. I always do.

But the other beauty in this room—the living one, the sweet-scented one looking at me with those mismatched eyes and a glee so genuine and unspoiled it could make a man weep—she is a different definition entirely.

And I have already, in the handful of seconds since I glided through that door, begun the delicious private work of deciding which blooms would best flatter that pale complexion on the inevitable day she ascends from all this earthly suffering.

Ranunculus, perhaps.

Layered and secret, a flower pretending to be simpler than it is. Or anemones, for the bruise-dark centers. Nothing so vulgar as a rose.

She is not a rose woman; roses are for people who want to be understood at a glance, and there is nothing about her meant to be understood at a glance.

Most people recoil from the way I think.

I stopped minding around the time I stopped being able to help it. To me a body is the most honest document a person ever produces—truer than a diary, truer than a confession wrung out under lights, because the dead have finally surrendered the exhausting business of lying.

I read them the way Doc reads the living and Riot reads a threat:fluently, helplessly, with love.

And the freshly dead are loveliest of all, because the struggle has only just left them and the peace hasn’t yet hardened into absence. There’s a window. A few hours where they’re still almost here, still warm with the story of how they left.

I do my finest listening in that window. I’m listening to Wren Halloway right now, even as I drink the living woman’s perfume, and the dead girl is already whispering that her story is a lie someone wrote over the truth.

I breathe her in, and the breath nearly undoes my composure.

Strawberries warmed past ripeness. Spun sugar. A deep cocoa richness beneath, like the heart of a cake split open, and threaded through all of it a powdered sweetness I cannot name and immediately resent for being unnameable.

I take her apart the way I take everything apart—the top note, the heart, the long sugared base—and I find myself doing the impossible arithmetic of the florist:which living thing, cut and arranged, could replicate an aroma this singular?

Tuberose comes closest to the sweetness, and falls miles short of the menace. There is no flower that smells like her. She is, distressingly, her own genus. And the scent of her winds into me and lights a heat low and insistent in my belly, a wanting so immediate it borders on rude, and I have to physically still the urge to lean closer and simply breathe.

No. Discipline.

If I sink any further into the cathedral of her scent I’ll lose the thread of the actual task, which—tedious, necessary—is proving that this exquisite creature did not kill the woman cooling on the floor.

It’s an unfamiliar problem, the losing of threads.

I do not, as a rule, want things. I curate, I arrange, I admire from the cool remove of a man who has made his peace with endings; desire is a hunger of the living and I have spent so long in the company of the finished that I’d half forgotten its weather.