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“I follow the parlor trick. You took my saliva to confirm there’s no match on the body—clearing my DNA, lovely, thorough.” Her brow creases, prettily, dangerously. “But I distinctly heard someone whisper strangulation when they hauled me in. So which is it? Because those bruises on her throat and a swab of her mouth are telling two very different bedtime stories.”

All eyes swing to her.

She looks semi-bored and faintly intrigued, and adds, conversationally, “And for the record—I’m not especially inclined toward the woman-on-woman persuasion. Nothing against it; a wonderful time for those it suits. Simply not my particular flavor of sin. So the notion that I’d put my mouth on the subject before killing her is, frankly, a bit insulting to my taste.”

I could kiss her.

I settle for a smirk and the pleasure of confirming she’s already raced ahead to the answer.

“You heard strangulation,” I tell her, “because you were meant to. Everyone was. It’s a generous lie—violent, visible, the sort of death a frightened administration can hang on a violent, visible patient without straining itself. The truth is quieter and far more interesting.”

“Mm.” Vex’s eyes have gone bright and fixed, all the boredom burned off, the lunatic mask slipping to show the cold clean intelligence beneath. “A quiet death dressed up loud. Whoever did this wanted two stories told at once—the loud one for the cameras and the cheap seats, and the quiet one for whoever was clever enough to taste the difference.” She tilts her head at the corpse, almost approving. “That’s not panic. That’s composition. I do admire a tidy hand.”

“Don’t admire it too loudly,” Doc murmurs from the wall. “They’re trying to hang it on you.”

“Oh, I know.” She beams. “That’s the rudest part. Stealing my whole aesthetic.”

“The throat is theatre,” I tell the room, rising, stripping the gloves with a snap. “The bruising is a decoy, applied with care, postmortem or near enough that the distinction won’t survive a real autopsy. She wasn’t strangled. She was poisoned—something delivered orally, something that reacts with the enzymes in saliva, which is exactly why the violet bloomed in her swab and not in our charming volunteer’s.” I tap the card. “Which tells you the most important thing in this room. The agent had to be passed mouth to mouth, or placed directly on the tongue. It cannot be handled by fingers and left behind, because?—”

“Why not the fingers?” Hale interrupts. “Why go to the trouble of the mouth at all?”

“Because this institution keeps every patient’s prints on file,” I say, with the gentle patience one extends to a slow but earnest student. “She died three hours ago. Your own team will have lifted every print from the scene and run it against the internal database before they so much as photographed the walls—standard procedure, the first reflex of any competent unit. And it came back negative. No patient prints where they shouldn’t be. Which is the only reason you’re reduced to dragging a questionable, convenient, beautiful suspect to the crime scene to coax a reaction out of her she has no reason to give—because the evidence already cleared everyone it could point at, and somebody upstairs would still very much prefer a villain in pink.”

Hale’s jaw works. The granite groans.

I turn to my swan.

“And what,” I ask her, sweet as a hymn, “were you doing three hours ago, my Sweet Peony?”

“Pole dancing,” she beams, with the unrepentant pride of a saint announcing a miracle.

I arch a single brow.

From the wall, Doc supplies, dry as a struck match, “She has a pole. In her cell. It’s monitored.”

I nod, slow and satisfied, and turn to face the held breath of the entire room.

“Then there it is. She didn’t do it. The chemistry confirms what her alibi already shouts. Go find yourselves another monster.” I let the smile turn, just slightly, toward the grave. “Your killer used the mouth precisely because the mouth cleans itself. Food, water, time…any of them flush the trace and break the chain. And…” I check my watch with theatrical leisure. “lunch was served an hour ago, across every wing. Whoever carried that drug between their teeth has eaten it away by now. The trail isn’t cold. The trail has been digested.”

Hale’s frown carves deep.

Behind her, a few of the forensic techs have gone quiet and thoughtful in the specific way of professionals realizing the loud stranger is entirely, infuriatingly correct.

“That’s—” one of them starts, then stops, glancing at his colleagues for permission to agree out loud. “The oral route would account for the negative print sweep. And the postmortem bruising pattern, if he’s right about the lividity—” He trails off under Hale’s glare, but the damage is done; the theory has found its second believer, and theories, like rot, spread fastest once the first soft spot gives.

And then—clapping. Bright, gleeful, unhurried applause, and every head turns to find its source already known:Vex, beaming, applauding me like I’ve closed the third act of her favorite play.

“Okay, that was genuinely incredible,” she declares. “When are we doing a crime-night marathon? I have theories aboutevery unsolved case ever televised and absolutely no one worthy to share them with.”

“Anytime you’d like, Sweet,” I tell her, and I mean it down to the marrow.

“Should you,” Hale says acidly, “be flirting with your patient?”

“Last I checked,” I muse, “she isn’t my patient.” I gesture, fond, toward the body on the floor. “That one is. She’s mine now. I have a funeral to design and a floral arrangement to agonize over. So flirting with Genevieve?—”

“Vex,” she sing-songs.

“—with Vex,” I amend smoothly, “isn’t harmful in the slightest.”