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And every passport in the party—every passport but Lucien’s, the one credentialed and trusted name among us—to be surrendered into the CEO’s own office before a single boot leaves Blackthorn.

“Acceptable,” Lucien says, because he expected every line of it. “Are there further questions?”

The CEO studies us for a long moment from behind his glass, and when he speaks again, something more honest has surfaced in the embalmed flat of his voice.

“Why,” he says slowly, “does it feel as though the three of you have developed some sort of… fascination with this particular Omega?”

None of us answers.

It’s the easiest question of the afternoon and the only one we won’t touch, because the truthful answer would frighten him out of his approval and a lie would be beneath the three of us. So we sit in our triptych and let the silence speak for itself, three predators wearing the patience of men with nothing to confess.

If he knew the half of it, he’d void the paperwork and have us removed from the premises in irons. He thinks the fascination is the problem. He has it precisely backward.

The fascination is the only thing keeping his three dead girls from becoming thirty—because the three of us are the only people in this entire credentialed circus who actually intend to find the hand behind the killings, as opposed to closing a file and selling a press release. And here is the part I would never say at this table, the suspicion I keep with my sweetest secrets: I do not think our peony is merely a victim of this.

I have read too many bodies and too many people to mistake the shape of an accident, and there is no accident in her. A woman does not burn her way into the single most secure asylum in the country, endure four years of it with that mind intact behind the lunacy, and arrive at the exact moment the killings begin, by chance.

She is playing a longer game than any of us, and I find—God help the careful, ordered man I used to be—that I do not want to stop her. I want a front-row seat. I want to hand her the scalpel when she’s ready for it.

The high commissioner laughs—a short, dry, oblivious sound—and saves us the trouble.

“Oh, someone in this business is certainly obsessed,” he says, “going to all this trouble to ruin a good institution’s name and hang it round one girl’s neck. Sounds to me as though the poor creature’s got herself a stalker. And three obsessive men of herown to stand guard—” he chuckles, pleased with his own wit, “well. That might just be her saving grace, mightn’t it.”

He has no notion how precisely he’s named it. He thinks he’s made a joke. I let him keep the comfort of thinking so.

Saving grace.

The phrase is almost too apt to bear. He means it as a man means a witticism—the sort of thing that gets a chuckle in a boardroom and is forgotten by lunch. But he has stumbled, blind and pleased with himself, onto the exact truth the three of us would never speak: that an obsession, the right obsession, the kind that does not waver and cannot be bought and will not be reasoned out of its course, is the single most protective force a hunted woman can have at her back.

The world taught her that wanting is a leash. We intend to teach her it can be a wall. Three walls, in point of fact, arranged on every side of her, with the only gaps left for the light to get in. The commissioner laughs at his saving grace and reaches for his folders. He will never know how literally he prophesied.

The CEO sighs, the long-suffering exhale of a man choosing the least ruinous of several ruinous roads.

“I’ll sign the paperwork,” he says. “Don’t make me regret this, gentlemen.”

The screen goes dark. The little glass window closes on his scentless face, and the room feels cleaner for his absence.

Pryce gathers his folders and rises, brisk now that the unpleasantness is concluded.

“We’ll have the house and the town readied before the week is out,” he says. “If another body turns up at Blackthorn before then, the arrangement escalates and the timeline collapses—so be on standby.”

We all nod, grave and agreeable, three reasonable men who have just talked an institution into handing them the one thing they came for and calling it a security measure.

Be on standby, he says, as though we have ever been anything else.

As though we have not been standing by—circling, waiting, arranging—since the first afternoon she walked into Lucien’s office and refused to be afraid of him. Standby is our native condition.

We are patient men.

Patience is simply appetite that has learned to wear a watch.

But in the quiet back gallery of my mind, where I keep the things too sweet to say aloud, I am gleaming.

The outside world. Sunlight and stone arches and a market square. A real bed, a real door, a whole pretty cage of liberty—and our precious peony loosed into the middle of it, watched over by the three of us, drawn at last out of the asylum that never deserved her and into a town where, one way or another, the hunt finally turns and the prey becomes ours.

What a delight.

CHAPTER 13