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Lucien’s blood-orange and old paper. Riot’s woodsmoke and warm iron. Pryce’s nervous, sweating wool. But the screen gives me nothing—a flat, sealed, embalmed sort of nothing—and I find I dislike negotiating with a corpse that hasn’t had the decency to die yet.

We turn, the three of us, to Lucien.

He nods, unhurried, and lays two long fingers on the open files fanned across the table between us—three folders, three photographs, three of my clients. I knew them before any of these men did, you understand. I knew them on my table, under my hands, in the honest stillness where the dead stop performing. Wren Halloway who apologized to vendingmachines. Giselle Mercier, who hummed off-key when she was happy. Della Hartwell, our latest victim of circumstance. I have washed them…or will. I have begun, in the private gallery of my head, to choose their flowers. And I have noticed, because noticing is the whole of my art, the thing they share—the thing Lucien is about to make these living men see for the first time.

“Let me show you what your dead girls have in common,” Lucien says, in the mild voice that has talked harder men than these off cliffs, “because the moment the public sees it, you will have a great deal more than a reputation to protect.”

I should explain how I love them, my clients, since the living so rarely understand it and the dead never need it explained. I do not love them the way a man loves a meal or a conquest.

I love them the way a translator loves a difficult, beautiful text—the way you love a thing that has finally stopped lying to you.

The living are exhausting precisely because they perform; every face a curtain, every word a small negotiation. The dead have laid all that down. Wren, Della, Giselle—they told me the truth of their endings without a single coy evasion, because the dead are the only honest company left in a dishonest world, and I have spent a decade in their honest company learning to read what the loud, lying living refuse to.

It’s why I see the pattern these credentialed men have missed for a month. The dead showed it to me themselves.

They were very insistent.

And there is a fourth name they don’t know I’m thinking of, three floors below us, breathing slow through a clear mask. The one client I have already decided I will never, ever take delivery of, no matter what the universe charges me to keep her off my table. I’ve handled the dying and the dead my whole adult life with the same unbothered, tender remove.

She is the first living thing in years to make me afraid of an ending.

I find the fear novel. Like most things, delightful.

He turns the photographs so the screen can drink them in.

“Wren Halloway. Institutionalized at nineteen for putting a kitchen knife through the hand of the foster-uncle who’d been visiting her room since she was twelve. Della Hartwell, committed after she set fire to the man who bought and sold her. Giselle Mercier, declared a danger to society for breaking the jaw of the Alpha who kept her on a chemical leash for three years.” Lucien lets each name land like a stone into a still pond. “Three violent Omegas, by the paperwork. Three girls who fought back against the men who owned them, by any honest reading. Society called the fighting back the crime, and filed them here, behind your discreet limestone, where the public could forget them in peace.”

“And now,” he continues, “someone is killing them. One at a time. Quietly, cleverly, signed for anyone with the wit to read the signature. The pattern is not subtle once you stop refusing to see it: someone is hunting the women who survived their abusers, inside the very institution that was supposed to be the end of their story.”

Think on what that pattern implies about the hand behind it, I want to say, though I let Lucien keep the floor.

A person does not select for this—does not move down a list of Omegas defined entirely by the men they refused to keep belonging to—without a reason that lives very close to the bone. This is not a killer harvesting at random for the thrill. This is a killer with a thesis. Someone who looked at a building full of women who fought back and decided the fighting back was the offense that needed correcting.

I have met that particular conviction before, in the cold honest aftermath where I do my reading, and it almost neverwears a stranger’s face. It wears the face of a man who feels he’s been robbed of something he was owed. A man, in other words, exactly like the sort our Vex is famous for setting on fire.

I watch Pryce’s colour change, and I savour it the way one savours the first crocus through snow.

Lucien has reached the part of the argument I helped him sharpen, and it is a beautiful, surgical thing. He explains it the way a man defuses a bomb—slowly, naming each wire.

The instant a single detail of this slips past the limestone, he says, the outside world will do what the outside world now does with everything: it will dig. A profile here. A thread there.

Three dead survivors and one notorious arsonist Omega at the center of every scene. He reminds them what Vex’s arrest alone did—the social plague of it, the speculation, the strange tide of sympathy for the beautiful lunatic who torched the man who’d owned her. Multiply that, he says.

Multiply it by three fresh bodies and a hashtag.

“Picture the two stories the public could be handed,” Lucien murmurs. “Story one: a vulnerable Omega is being murdered behind closed doors inside a reputable institution, and that institution is covering it. Story two: that same Omega is herself slaughtering patients within those reputable walls, unchecked, for weeks. There is no third story that does not end with Blackthorn’s name in every feed in the country.”

“And it won’t stay online,” I add, because I cannot help myself and because this part delights me. “It never does, these days. It starts as a video filmed in a parked car at midnight and it ends as a crowd at your gates. Women, mostly. The ones who’ve decided that the empowerment they were promised is worth marching for. They will not wait politely for you to investigate, gentlemen. They will adopt your dead girls as martyrs and your living one as a saint, and they will come.”

I have watched it happen, you understand, from the quiet vantage of a man who has spent a career cleaning up after the powerful and learning exactly how their downfalls are shaped. It is never the crime that finishes an institution.

It is the cover.

A girl films thirty seconds in the dark, voice shaking, and names a thing no one wanted named, and by morning the algorithm has decided her grief is the story of the week. Then come the threads, the timelines pinned together by strangers with too much time and an unkillable sense of justice, the candle she lights becoming ten thousand candles, the hashtag becoming a verb. Your three hundred forgotten Omegas stop being a budget line and become a cause. And causes, unlike patients, cannot be sedated, counted, or filed. I rather hope it does leak, in the small private way I hope for most beautiful disasters.

But I’d never say so to a man I’m presently robbing.

“Consider your own Detective Hale,” Lucien says, and I admire the cruelty of using her so soon after she’s been broken out the door. “Driven into a field built to keep her out, reminded daily that she does not belong, propelled forward anyway by a fury she’s mistaken for ambition. Multiply Hale by ten thousand. That is the weather you invite the moment this leaks. And Genevieve—locked away for the crime of killing an abusive, controlling man who pimped her on his father’s money—is precisely the face that weather organizes itself around.”