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As if I hadn’t read it in a requisition log at two o’clock this morning, in the office I’d been transferred into hours before I’d met her, the way a man reads the obituary of someone he hasn’t finished falling for.

We watch her be escorted out, the sugar of her scent thinning from the room degree by degree until the bleach and the blood have it back.

Then I turn to the body.

Wren Halloway, who apologized to vending machines and will never again, gazes up at the ceiling with the patient blankness of the truly finished. I narrow my eyes at her ruined, beautiful stillness and I ask her the only two questions that matter.

Not who.

Who is for the slow and the official.

What killed you, sweet girl—which precise compound bloomed violet in your throat?

And, far more troubling:how did anyone in a sealed and searched and endlessly counted fortress like this one ever get their hands on it?

Doc drifts up beside me, hands in his pockets, gaze on the corpse.

“Should I ask?”

I say nothing.

There is nothing to say that he doesn’t already know, has known since the moment the card bloomed violet and I didn’t look surprised. He exhales through his nose, slow, and lifts twofingers to settle his glasses—the small ritual he performs when he’s decided to let a thing lie.

“Get to work, then,” he says. “I’ll review the rest of the cameras. See if anything turns up.”

I nod and let him go.

Crouching beside the lovely, ruined girl and begin, with gloved and gentle hands, the work I was actually brought here to do—knowing, with the serene certainty of a man who has spent a decade arranging exactly such things, that Doc will comb every frame of every camera in this building and find nothing he can use.

Not because he isn’t thorough.

Because the footage was never going to hold an answer, and because the three of us would prefer it that way.

A killer the institution can name is a killer the institution can close the file on—and a closed file means a sealed wing, a tidied scandal, a Blackthorn that no longer needs the dangerous, brilliant patient it dragged to this scene in handcuffs.

We are not in the business of helping this place find its monster.

We are in the business of finding it first, quietly, on our own terms, for reasons each of us guards as closely as a throat—and of keeping a certain sugar-scented swan exactly where we can watch over her until we do.

So let Doc review his cameras.

Allow Hale to file her frustrated reports.

Encourage this body to tell me, in the patient language of the dead, the secrets the living are too frightened to read.

Whoever is killing the harmless ones of Blackthorn has made one catastrophic miscalculation, and it isn’t the violet in a dead girl’s throat.

It’s that they did it in a house that now contains the three of us. And they will be found, dealt with, and what’s left of them,when we’re finished, will require a very small and very private arrangement of flowers.

Which is exactly what they want.

CHAPTER 8

~Vex~

“FIGHT!”

The word goes up like a flare, and the cafeteria answers the way dry tinder answers a spark.