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The other—leather, private, locked in the drawer that appears on no inventory because I declined to list it—is already three pages deep, and the ink is barely dry.

Asymmetry of the eyes deliberately weaponized.

Steals to test boundaries, not from need.

Scent escalates under scrutiny rather than threat—arousal, not fear.

My hand wrote that last line before my judgment could intervene, and I have not crossed it out…

That is the detail that should concern me.

It does not, which concerns me more.

I came to Blackthorn to understand the monsters here.

The CEO assured me I was uniquely equipped for it, and the man was correct, though not in the manner he intended. I understand them because I recognize them.

I have simply chosen, every ordered day of my life, never to become one.

That was not the only reason I came, and I am honest enough with myself to admit the others, even if I would admit them to no one living.

This chair I occupy is a haunted one.

Director of Behavioral Research—a title Blackthorn has handed out and reclaimed with the regularity of a turnstile.

The man before me, Voss, lasted fourteen months before he resigned into a private clinic that now treats him rather than employs him; his successor, a brilliant and brittle woman named Eames, broke her contract at week nine and will not say why,will not say anything, returns my letters unopened. There were others before them.

The institute has an appetite, and it has been fed a long parade of credentialed, ambitious, capable people, and it has digested every one.

Blackthorn’s wrath is quiet, patient, and it does not leave marks the coroner can name.

I read their files before I signed mine.

A reasonable man would have read them and declined. I read them and felt the first faint stirring of something I had presumed long dead in me—interest. Because every one of them, in their final coherent notes, in the last entries before the resignations, the breakdowns, and the unexplained silences, had written about the same patient.

Subject Valentine.

Level Red.

Genevieve.

They came to study the monsters of Blackthorn, and one by one they were unmade by a single one of them, and not one of them ever laid the blame where it belonged, because to name her would have been to admit they had been beaten by a girl in a pink jumpsuit who steals pudding cups.

So they called it stress.

They called it burnout.

They left, the seat stayed warm, and the CEO went looking for the next intelligent, unstable, obsessive Alpha foolish enough to believe he was the exception.

I know precisely what I am, sitting in this chair.

I am the next piece set down on a board I did not design, by a man who believes he is arranging me. I find I do not mind.

A piece that understands it is being played has already stopped being only a piece.

Her perfume is still in the room after the orderly walked her back to the pink wing. Strawberries and burnt sugar and something beneath it like a cake cut open while it’s still warm. It has settled into the fibers of my coat, into the margins of the file, into the breath I keep taking too slowly on purpose to hold it a moment longer—a behavior I would flag without hesitation as fixation in any patient, any colleague, any man who was not me.

And I am thinking about her face, which is its own kind of professional failure.