Page 7

Then he picks up the knife and slides it in without changing his expression at all.

“You didn’t burn down that penthouse in a manic break. You planned it for months. You wanted in here.”

The bottom drops out of the room.

Three years, seven months, thirteen days, and not one soul in this entire watching, counting, scenting machine of a building has come within a county of that sentence.

I have buried it.

Under pudding cups and palmed pills and picked locks and the wide unmatched eyes that everyone is so relieved to call insane, because insane is a thing they have a syringe for and clever is a thing they don’t.

And this man read it off me in under four minutes, between fountain-pen strokes, as casually as another man reads the weather.

My pulse does something undignified.

My scent blooms—I feel it go, sweet and warm and helplessly pleased, the cake cut open, and I watch his nostrils register it and his pupils do the smallest expensive thing.

I file that away with vicious satisfaction, because if I’ve been read, then so help me he’s been read right back.

So I do the only sensible thing.

I beam at him.

“Ooh.” I breathe it out, delighted, sliding to the very edge of my chair like a child at a magic show who has just spotted the trick and adored it anyway. “You’re going to be a problem.”

And there—finally—the corner of Dr. Lucien Graves’s mouth lifts.

A fraction of a degree.

The smallest crack in all that still, deep, fathomless water.

“Yes,” he agrees, and reaches for his pen again, as though I’ve already been entered into evidence. “I rather think I am.”

CHAPTER 2

~Lucien~

Ihave spent my career taking the worst minds humanity produces and turning them over in my hands like cold stones, looking for the seam:the place where the fracture started.

Sat across from men who collected fingers.

I have never once lost sleep.

They wrote books about me before I had finished writing my own. Prodigy, the journals said, then prodigy grown dangerous, then—after I put my name to the report that closed two facilities and ended the careers of the men who ran them—a liability with a conscience.

I have lectured on three continents about the precise mechanics of attachment, obsession, and the elegant little engine of the psychopathic mind.

I can sit across a table from the unspeakable and feel my pulse decline.

It is not a gift.

It is an absence shaped like one, and I have spent thirty-four years dressing it in good wool and calling it composure.

She has been gone from my office for eleven minutes, and I am already taking notes I will not file.

The first notebook is for the institute.

Clinical, dated, defensible—the kind of document that survives a subpoena.