Page 9

I have interviewed beautiful people before.

Beauty is a tool, like any other, and the clever ones wield it and the foolish ones are wielded by it, and I had assumed I was beyond being moved by either kind. I was mistaken, and the mistake has a name:Heterochromia.

One eye a soft, impossible lavender.

The other a bright surgical emerald.

The file says an experimental adolescent treatment did it to her, that the procedure meant to stabilize her left her instead with mismatched eyes and a lifelong hatred of doctors, and I cannot decide whether that last detail is a warning or an invitation, and I dislike that I want it to be the second.

When she looks at you, the two colors do not agree, and the disagreement is the point—you spend a half-second too long trying to reconcile them, and in that half-second she has already finished reading you and moved on, bored.

Her hair is a stitched argument.

Honey at the root, then pink down one side—the loud, sugared pink of mischief—and a deep bruised violet down the other, the color of the days she goes quiet. The two halves meet at the back in a clean seam, chaos sewn to melancholy, a personality file diagrammed in dye.

She did that to herself on purpose.

People who advertise their fractures so prettily are never as broken as the advertisement claims.

And the body the shapeless jumpsuit failed to hide.

A dancer’s carriage, long-spined and weightless, the kind of posture that doesn’t slump even in a place engineered to make people slump. Scars, where the sleeve rode up—old acrobatic insults, the silvered ghost of a restraint that once held too tight, and one near the wrist with the unmistakable geometry of human teeth, hers or someone else’s, the report was unclear and I find I want to ask.

A velvet ribbon at her throat with a small charm winking against the pulse, worn voluntarily, a collar she chose, in a building that spends its days fitting people with things they did not.

She is, in the clinical and the entirely nonclinical sense, the most arresting thing I have encountered in years.

And I sat across from her with my pulse declining as it always declines and felt, beneath the calm, a single hot wire pull taut.

My own scent must have shifted. She would have caught it; she seems to catch everything. The thought should mortify me.

Instead, I am cataloguing the color of her eyes from memory and getting it right.

The file wants me to believe in a story, and the story is as old as the species.

Volatile Omega.

Devoted to her Alpha past all reason.

A girl who loved a glittering, dangerous man so completely that when he betrayed her she put a match to the life they shared and laughed in the smoke—the classic tragedy, the harlequin to her partner’s grinning clown, devotion curdled into arson. Every assessor who has touched her case reached for the samecomfortable shape. The prosecutor sold it to a jury. The intake psychiatrist drew it in clean diagnostic lines.

Bipolar, they wrote.

Obsessive fixation.

A Harley, undone by her Joker.

It is a tidy story…yet, it is wrong, and the proof is a man named Dorian Sinclair.

I pulled his record this morning, before she ever walked through my door, because the partner is always the keystone and the assessors never bothered to lift it.

Sinclair. Inherited money, a face built for yacht photographs, and a mind that never once troubled the world with an original thought.

Charming in the frictionless way of men who have never had to be anything else. Mediocre to the marrow. The single genius of his life was being born into the correct family, and he spent it the way such men do—badly, and on himself.

That is the loose thread the entire official story hangs from, and not one of them tugged it.

A woman with a measured intelligence in the upper fractions of a percent does not lose her mind over a beautiful idiot. The arithmetic refuses to balance. You cannot be consumed by a man who bores you, and Dorian Sinclair would have bored her by the second date and confirmed it by the second month.