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There’s no sport in watching a powerful man break a capable woman over the fact of her father, and the CEO did it not because Hale was wrong—she wasn’t, she’s the only person in this entire institution who has correctly intuited that Vex sits at the center of everything—but precisely because she was getting too close to a truth Blackthorn would rather bury with its bodies.

I tuck that observation away beside the matter of Bishop. The institution wanted competent investigators, and then went pale and twitchy the moment the competent investigators began to investigate competently. Men do not flinch from the light unless they’ve arranged something in the dark.

“Women,” Riot observes, to the ceiling.

I let a smile finally surface, small and private, and I pitch my voice low—beneath the screen’s pickup, I’m fairly certain, and threaded with just enough of an old accent I keep buried that the words come out difficult to parse for anyone not meant to parse them.

“Says the man,” I murmur, “who threatened a federal agent off the continent because our Omega wrinkled her nose at him.”

Riot laughs—a real one, short and rough—and the sound visibly startles both men watching us, who have clearly not yet adjusted to the idea that the convict can be amused. He spreads his scarred hands, unrepentant. “You got me,” he says. “Whatever. Good fucking riddance.”

Pryce, who caught the laugh but not the cause of it, makes the only assumption available to him—that we’re disparaging the detective who just stormed out—and decides, with the ponderous confidence of a man who believes he’s steering, to validate it.

“Detective Hale is a capable woman,” he says, “with a great deal of professional experience. But this—” he gestures, taking in the table, the screen, the gravity of it all, “this is a serious conversation. The kind better handled among men.”

I know bullshit when it’s served to me, and I recognize this particular vintage—the comfortable, ambient contempt of men who mistake a closed door for competence.

The same contempt, I note without saying, that has left this institution unable to catch a killer operating in its own corridors for the better part of a month.

I don’t argue.

There’s nothing to be gained by arguing with a man you’re in the process of robbing, and everything to be lost by reminding him to count his silver.

I simply incline my head, gracious, agreeable, the reasonable physician they’ve decided to trust because he wears the better suit and keeps the calmer voice.

It’s a useful thing, being underestimated in the correct direction.

They look at me and see the safe one—the credentialed counterweight to the convict and the undertaker, the man whose presence makes the other two tolerable. They have no idea that of the three of us, I am the one they should fear most, becauseRiot will only ever hurt what’s in front of him and Silas will only ever wait, whereas I plan.

I have been planning since the afternoon she said woof and sat.

Every move since—the gift in her cell, the pole, the pack assignment Riot blurted out like it was his own idea, this very meeting—has been a single long sentence building toward one clause: her, out of this building, in a space we control, where the thing hunting her will have to come out of the institution’s walls and into ours. And we are so very much better at our walls than Blackthorn has ever been at its.

“Then let me retrieve the files on the deceased,” I say, rising smoothly to my feet, “and we can walk through it together. I think, once you see the pattern laid out, you’ll find the clemency proposal far less preposterous than it sounds.”

It’s the truest thing I’ll say all afternoon, and the most misleading.

They believe they’re about to be persuaded. They have no notion that the persuasion concluded days ago, in a private notebook and a cold workroom and a guarded medical bay, and that everything from here is theatre staged for their benefit—a careful, patient performance designed to make three obsessed men carrying a sedated woman out of this building look like the institute’s own clever idea.

The pattern I’m about to show them is real. The conclusions I’ll let them draw are the ones I planted for them to find. By the time we’re done, they’ll be grateful to hand her to us, and they’ll believe the gratitude was theirs.

Somewhere three floors below, our girl is breathing slow and steady in a borrowed bed, healing toward the storm I can feel gathering on every horizon. She’d approve of this, I think.

The maneuver. The misdirection.

The quiet theft conducted in plain sight with the victim’s signature on the receipt. It’s precisely the kind of move she’d make—has made, will make again—and the thought that I’m playing her game now, by her rules, on her behalf, is far more pleasant than it has any right to be.

I further lean into my chair, fighting hard to smile, because their plan is about to get into session.

CHAPTER 12

~Silas~

“So you’re concerned that keeping Genevieve here as a clear prime target will put your other patients at risk and ruin Blackthorn’s reputation.”

The CEO says it from his little glass window at the head of the room—a face beamed in from some distant, climate-controlled elsewhere, scrubbed clean of the one detail I trust most in a man.

A man with no scent is a man I cannot read, and I read everyone, it’s the only manners I keep.