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I am wearing pink today.

The jumpsuits are color-coded, a thoughtful little system, and I’ve made an art of wielding it. Pink is playful. Flirtatious. The shade that lets the orderlies unclench half an inch and forget, for a blessed moment, the incident report with my name across the top. Purple is for my quiet days, my reading days, the days I let Genevieve sit at the window in the thin grey light and grieve a life that ended before it ever got to begin.

And green?—

Well. Green is the color I wear when I’ve had an idea.

They removed green from my rotation around the same time as the poles. I never asked for it back.

A girl should keep some weapons in reserve.

“Miss Valentine.”

Nurse Ofori has the long-suffering patience of a woman who has watched me pick three of her locks and return the bobby pins with a folded thank-you note. She doesn’t flinch when I turn from the window. That’s rare, here, and it’s why I’ve decided to keep her alive in all my private contingency plans.

“Intake wants you. New consulting director. Try not to…”

She gestures—a small circular motion that somehow encompasses the entire history of my personality.

“I’ll be an angel,” I promise, and steal a pudding cup off her tray on the way past.

She lets me.

Glad she did.

The office is wrong before I cross the threshold, and it’s the scent that tells me so.

Blackthorn has a smell the way a morgue has a smell—institutional, defeated, scrubbed of anything resembling a person who chose to be here. This room has been colonized. Someone has moved in and planted a flag, and the flag is made of pheromone and old wealth.

Blood orange and honeyed pear ride the top of it, bright, almost playful, a top note that wants you to relax. Breathe deeper, the way I always breathe deeper, and the rest unfolds beneath like a book opening to its spine—old paper, vanilla tobacco, a long slow pour of black tea. And under all of it, holding it up, the expensive burn of mahogany and amber and a cologne that costs more than the orderlies make in a month.

It is the scent of a private library in some house that has a name. The kind of room where men in good chairs decide other men’s fates over forty-year scotch and never once raise their voices.

It does something to me I did not authorize and would not, given a ballot.

A bright, traitorous flicker low in my belly. A tightening that has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with the part of my design I keep on the shortest possible leash.

My own scent answers before I can stop it, sweetening at the edges, reaching—and an Omega’s body reaching for an Alpha’s is the most ancient and humiliating tell there is. My designation lifts its head like a cat that’s scented cream.

I tell it to sit down.

It does not entirely obey.

Interesting.

The man behind the desk does not look up.

He’s writing—with a fountain pen, of all the deliberate anachronisms, the nib whispering across actual paper in unhurried strokes—and he lets me stand framed in the doorway long enough to turn the silence into a sentence.

It’s a good move. It’s the move I would make.

So I do what I do best, which is the thing no one ever expects of the girl in the pink jumpsuit:I hold still, and read him.

I trained for this once, in a life with a different name.

Before the institutes, before the fire, there was a clever girl who studied the architecture of the human animal—the microexpressions, the tells, the gap between what a body says and what a mouth permits. They thought they were building a psychologist. They were building me. So I catalogue him the way I used to catalogue marks, the way I still catalogue blades, by what they’re built to do and how badly they’ll hurt you doing it.

Big.