11. ~Lucien~
~Lucien~
“So let me get this straight.”
We are seated in the high commissary chamber of Blackthorn—a long, cold, expensively panelled room built to make people feel small, with a wall-mounted screen at its head on which the CEO’s face hovers, beamed in from wherever men like him keep themselves when the dirty work is being done.
Commissioner Pryce occupies the head of the table in the flesh, all silver hair and institutional disapproval. And I sit at the room’s center, flanked—arranged, really, like a triptych—by Silas on my left and Riot on my right.
The only person standing is Hale.
No one offered her a chair.
She knows precisely why no one offered her a chair, and the reason is the sort of thing she would never lower herself to name aloud, and the three of us are far too unbothered to do her the courtesy of naming it for her.
So she stands at the room’s edge with her arms crossed and her scentless calm fraying at the seams, and we let the elephant graze undisturbed.
“You’re requesting,” Pryce continues, reading from the document as though it personally offends him, “that this patient—Genevieve Celeste Valentine—be granted temporary clemency. That she be permitted back into the outside world, into a gated and controlled space, for the express purpose of determining whether some party is specifically targeting her, or is instead focused on dismantling the reputation of the Blackthorn Institute itself.” He lowers the page. “Have I understood the proposal?”
I nod, slow and unhurried, the picture of a reasonable man making a reasonable request.
“Do you have any conception,” Pryce says, “of how insanely preposterous that proposal sounds, coming from the only logical physician in the room—while he sits flanked by a convicted killer, and a…” He pauses, and I watch him reach for the word with the fastidious distaste of a man handling something he’d rather use tongs for. “A mortician.”
Silas brightens like a candle at a wake.
“The finest one available,” he says warmly, “which Blackthorn rather conspicuously requires, given there are presently three bodies in your morgue awaiting decoration.” He sighs, a small artist’s sigh of overwork.
“Four, technically, though I’ll need to reassemble the one your cafeteria divided before I can do anything elegant with her.
I do the stitching myself—it’s delicate work, the kind most won’t touch.
There’s an additional fee. But for a valued institutional partner, I’m prepared to extend a discount. ”
I pinch the bridge of my nose between two fingers and breathe, slowly, through the urge to lose what remains of my mind.
The room, I should note, smells like a war between three weather systems.
My own scent—old books, blood orange, the slow burn of amber—holds the center, where I keep everything.
To my left, Silas pours off cold lilies and beeswax and graveyard cedar, the hush of a chapel after the mourners have gone.
To my right, Riot smells of a building actively on fire, woodsmoke and gun-oil and warm iron, a scent that has made two of the standing guards relocate by half a meter without quite realizing they’ve done it.
We are not a comfortable trio to share an enclosed space with.
We are, I have come to understand, considerably worse than the sum of our parts—and the men across this table have not yet done the arithmetic that would tell them how badly outmatched they are by people they believe they are interviewing.
It has been a long week.
The longest, by some measure, since I made the considered decision never to let anything matter to me again, a policy a woman in an orange jumpsuit has comprehensively repealed without consulting the board.
The single good thing—the only thing keeping me civil at this table—is that Vex’s condition has, as of this morning, been declared officially stable.
It was not stable for most of the week. She surfaced and submerged on a tide no one could chart, lucid one hour and lost the next, cycling from glassy-eyed hallucination into screaming fits violent enough to clear a ward.
The fits, mercifully, all aimed themselves at the same target—Riot, who weathered them with a patience I would not have credited him with, absorbing her thrashing and her nails and her shrieking accusations and emerging each time with negligible damage.
Unless, by his own cheerful accounting, one counts the persistent erection.
I have declined to count it.
To be fair, I don’t want to think about it at all, with mixed success.
In the end the physicians induced a temporary coma, to grant her ravaged nervous system the stillness it needed to knit itself back together while the compound bled out of her.
Half a dose of something that should have killed her outright, and didn’t, because a clumsy strangle interrupted the delivery and three men happened to be standing close enough to drag her back across the line.
She lies now in a guarded medical bay, sedated and breathing and watched around the clock—which is the entire reason for this meeting, this ultimatum, this absurd tribunal.
Blackthorn cannot keep a patient under permanent armed guard indefinitely without admitting, on some record somewhere, that it has utterly failed to keep her safe.
And Blackthorn would sooner do almost anything than admit a failure.
Riot has not left her side once in six days.
They tried, the first morning, to walk him back to his chamber; it took four men and the threat of a needle to relocate him as far as the corridor, where he simply folded down against the wall outside her door and stayed until they surrendered and let him back in.
He sits at this table now only because Silas swore to him, on something the two of them hold sacred, that he’d keep the vigil in his place for the duration of this meeting.
That is the entire leash on the most dangerous man in the building—a sleeping woman, and a promise about who watches her breathe.
Which is the lever.
I built the entire proposal around that single institutional terror, the way you build a trap around the one bait the animal cannot refuse.
I went to see her this morning, before this circus convened. I tell myself it was clinical—a director checking on a stabilizing patient, perfectly defensible, the kind of visit that lives comfortably in the official notebook.
It was not clinical.
I stood at the foot of a guarded bed and looked at her drained, sleeping face for far longer than any defensible visit requires, cataloguing the colour slowly returning to her lips, the steadiness of the line scrolling green across the monitor, the small unconscious way her hand had found Riot’s and refused to give it back even three floors deep in a coma.
And I felt, standing there, the thing I have spent a career and a constitution training myself not to feel: the cold certainty that if she does not come back from this, I will take the building apart looking for the person who did it to her, and I will not be quiet about the dismantling.
That is not a clinician’s feeling.
I have stopped pretending to myself that it is.
Because here is the thing none of them at this table understand, and I have no intention of educating them: I do not actually require their permission to protect her.
Riot would tear this building apart stone by stone.
Silas would arrange the rubble beautifully. I simply prefer to win by consent, on paper, with a clemency order and a transfer authorization and a paper trail that makes our taking of her look like their idea.
A cage opened from the inside still locks behind you.
A door held open by the warden does not.
“I don’t agree with any of this,” Hale announces from her corner, because she cannot bear the silence she’s been left standing in. “It is obvious that she has something to do with all of it.”
The CEO’s face stirs on the screen for the first time.
“She has something to do with it,” he agrees smoothly, “in the sense that she has been present at, adjacent to, or implicated in every single incident. Which is precisely why we retained you, Detective. And your colleague.” A pause, weighted, deliberate. “Agent Soren Bishop.”
Hale goes still.
“Who,” the CEO continues, “submitted his resignation in the small hours of this morning, withdrew from the case entirely, and accepted a transfer to a department on a different continent before any of us could so much as ask him what he’d concluded.
A remarkable turn of speed, for a man who arrived so very interested. ”
“That’s—” Hale’s composure cracks straight down the middle. “I wasn’t informed of any resignation.”
“You wouldn’t have been,” Silas offers, gracious as ever. “It happened this morning, before you arrived. Frightful hour. The man was moving at the speed of light…quite impressive to witness, really, at four a.m.”
Hale rounds on him.
“And why,” she demands, “were you awake at four in the morning?”
Silas laughs, soft and delighted.
“The finest bouquets are built at the crack of dawn, Detective. One arranges in the dark, by feel and by faith—and then, when the first rays come slanting through, one is rewarded with the sight of all that careful beauty waking into the light. The petals, you understand, are never lovelier than in that first hour.” He smiles at her with genuine, unsettling tenderness. “I never miss it.”
I let the silence that follows do its work.
It is one of the great underrated instruments, silence, and Silas plays it as well as anyone I’ve met, which is no accident, given where he learned.
But I file the matter of Soren Bishop, under a heading that troubles me.
Because Riot ran him off.