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Yet, some of the most dangerous people in the country live out their sentences here, and the strangest part is that they live them in peace, because killers, it turns out, keep a certain professional courtesy among their own kind.

There’s no glory in murdering a peer who could murder you back. Being assigned a place this gentle reads, to people with histories like ours, as a reward bordering on a miracle—which is precisely why it should be regarded with suspicion, but I keep that thought to myself for now.

No one, they tell me, has ever escaped Arch Hollow without dying in the attempt.

I watch Riot’s pale eyes light at that particular detail like a boy handed a locked box, and I know—I simply know—that he is already mapping the walls, already itching to be the first, and that he’ll wait with the patience of a wolf for me to give him the nod before he tries. I file that under things to revisit. The fridges are stocked.

There are markets and cafes and, mercifully, a bookstore. We’re permitted to drive the looping roads, to wander thegardens, to stand under the mossy arches and pretend at liberty in a place built to be a beautiful, breathing maze.

A person could get used to peace like this.

That’s the trap of it, and I know it’s a trap, and I find I want to walk into it anyway. The only genuine question—the one humming under everything—is whether I get to. Because peace is a thing offered to people who aren’t actively being hunted, and I am very much being hunted.

I’ve already started cataloguing it anyway, the way I catalogue every cage I’m placed in.

The grid hums at a frequency I can almost feel in my fillings—something deep in the walls and the road and the moss-furred arches, watching, counting, the way Blackthorn watched, only prettier about it. The neighbors are the truly fascinating data.

Somewhere out there, past the bookshop and the bakery, live men and women who have done the kinds of things that get a person filed under irredeemable, and they tend their window boxes and nod good morning and do not, by some unspoken treaty of the damned, lay a finger on one another.

It’s the most civilized arrangement I’ve ever heard of, and the most fragile, and I cannot stop turning over the question of what happens to that fragile civility the day something arrives that doesn’t honor the treaty. Something that came for one specific girl and won’t care who it has to go through to reach her.

“So they fast-tracked this whole charming alternative,” I say, “because?—?”

“Because the dead all share one trait,” Doc says. “One specific commonality. The kind a curious public would assemble in an afternoon.”

“Which is?” I glance between the three of them, and it’s Silas who answers, his amber eyes warming as he leans against the windowframe and hums the truth of it low and sweet—the profile, the shared shape of every girl on his table.

Survivors.

Omegas filed away as violent for the unforgivable crime of fighting back against the men who owned them. Women exactly like me.

My head tilts.

The frown that pulls at my mouth isn’t fear; it’s the deepening focus of a mind sliding a new piece into a half-built frame. Someone is harvesting the women who survived.

And the institution that caged us is so terrified of the optics that it has handed three of its most dangerous men a fourth dangerous woman and called the arrangement a safety measure.

“So,” I summarize, ticking it off, “the CEO decided it’s tidier to have me out here than at Blackthorn—so no more patients keep dropping dead while I’m drooling in a coma three rooms away and ruining his alibi for me. They can’t prove it’s me, they can’t prove it isn’t, and above all they cannot afford the headline. So they exported the problem to a pretty valley and called it clemency.” I shrug. “Accurate. And foolish.”

“Why foolish?” Doc asks, and there’s a glint in it—he knows the answer, he wants to hear me arrive at it.

“Because moving the bait doesn’t un-bait the hook.” I spread my hands. “What, precisely, is stopping whatever’s been hunting me from simply… following me here?”

“Nothing,” the three of them answer. In unison. Flat, certain, and weirdly harmonized, three voices of three very different timbres landing on the same grim syllable, and the sound of it sends a thrill up my spine that has no business being pleasant.

I smirk and roll my shoulders into the cushion. “Fun. We get to play cat and mouse, then.”

“The fact that you’re happy about it,” Riot declares, with the satisfaction of a man confirming a diagnosis, “proves we belong together.”

“That,” Doc says, without looking up from the file in his lap, “is your cock talking.” He slides Riot a flat sidelong stare while the convict only chuckles, entirely unrepentant, the rumble of it warming the room like a second hearth.

I look between the three of them—the planner with his fountain pen and his glasses, the killer sprawled across the loveseat like a panther deciding whether to nap, the undertaker haloed in window-light—and I say the thing I’ve known since the medical bay, since the pole, since three obsessive shadows arranged themselves around me like points of a compass.

“So you three are a pack.”

It isn’t a question.

I don’t do questions I already know the answers to; I only ask the ones whose answers I want to watch a person give.