12. ~Silas~ #2
I lean forward, lacing my pale fingers, and offer the suits the language they actually worship.
“And consider the economics, since I know they sing to you. Your guards draw a salary to stand in hallways and be magnificently outmaneuvered by a sedated woman and an unsupervised ceiling. They are paid, in essence, to breathe institute air. We are three specialists at a flat day rate who happen to be personally invested in the outcome. You would be downgrading from an expensive failure to a cheaper success. I’d have thought a man who runs a place like this could do that arithmetic in his sleep. ”
Neither of them speaks, which I have learned is the sound men make when they’ve been insulted in a register too reasonable to object to.
It is, I’ll admit, one of my favorite sounds.
I collect them the way other men collect wine—the specific silence of a powerful person realizing he’s been outmaneuvered by someone he came in prepared to dismiss. There’s a vintage to each one.
Pryce’s is dry and affronted, the silence of wounded seniority.
The CEO’s, even flattened through a screen, has a colder note underneath, the silence of a man recalculating.
I file them both. One never knows when the precise shape of a man’s discomfort will prove useful, and I have built an entire second career on the principle that the powerful tell you everything about themselves in the half-second before they decide what to say.
“The location matters as much as the custody,” Lucien says, gathering the thread back into his patient hands. “I have a place in mind. Arch Hollow.”
He describes it, and I let the description build a little cathedral in my chest, because it is, in its own grim way, perfect.
A secluded valley town hours from anywhere, ringed in old stone arches gone soft with moss, a self-contained little world purpose-built to house a particular class of precious, incarcerated individual—the wealthy, the connected, the inconvenient, kept under gentle, total surveillance in a place pretty enough to photograph and remote enough to forget.
There is a market square. A chapel. Walks and gardens and the illusion of liberty stretched taut over a cage with very good landscaping.
I know Arch Hollow, though I don’t say so.
I’ve worked there—quietly, in the small hours, the way I work everywhere that matters.
It is a beautiful place to die, which is the highest compliment I extend to any location, and a beautiful place to live too, I’m told, if living is what one has in mind.
The arches are real, Roman bones the valley grew a town around, and at dawn the light comes through them in long gold bars and lays itself across the cobblestones like something holy.
I think of Vex standing in that light—out of the dead fluorescent hum of Blackthorn, out of the orange and the counts and the cameras-in-the-walls, her sugar-and-cake scent unspooling into clean valley air for the first time in nearly four years—and the image does something to me I have not let an image do in a very long time.
It makes me want. Plainly. Greedily. For her to have the light.
For me to be standing in it when she does.
“What makes it useful,” Lucien says, “is that it is small, and it is watched, and everyone in it knows everyone else by sundown. A stranger cannot pass through Arch Hollow unnoticed the way a stranger passes through your three hundred churning patients. If something is wrong in that town, the town knows before sunrise. Which makes it the ideal instrument for the only question that matters: is the killer hunting Genevieve, or hunting Blackthorn?”
“Remove her from these walls,” he continues, “and watch what the bodies do. If patients keep dying here after she’s gone, then the murders were never about her at all—they’re an assault on this institution’s foundation, and you have a far larger and more public problem than one Omega.
But if the killing stops here and follows her there—if death walks into Arch Hollow behind our girl—then we are no longer looking at a serial killer.
We are looking at a stalker. A single fixated hand.
And a stalker,” he says, with the faint distant warmth of a man describing a solved equation, “is something we are exceptionally well equipped to handle.”
“By any means necessary,” Riot notes, calm as still water, and somehow that is the most frightening sentence spoken all afternoon.
I simply smile.
I am, I confess, already planning the flowers.
Not for Vex—never for Vex, her fate wasn’t meant to end and I’ve made my peace with the disappointment—but for whoever is foolish enough to follow her into a town where the three of us hold the only keys. I’m thinking hellebore. Something that blooms in the cold and means betrayal.
It would suit the occasion.
It is a strange thing, planning a funeral for a man who has not yet chosen to die. But planning ahead is simply courtesy, and I am, above all my other crimes, courteous. I have decorated the endings of statesmen and traffickers and three murdered girls who deserved far softer ones.
I would consider it a genuine, unhurried honor to arrange the last bouquet of the wretch who imagines he can reach into our keeping and take her. I will make him beautiful. It’s the cruelest thing I know how to do to a man—to make his ending lovelier than his life ever managed to be.
“And what,” the CEO asks, “does she get out of this? Why would a patient agree to be your experiment?”
“A chance at normalcy,” Lucien answers, “after years of having none. Sunlight she’s permitted to stand in.
A door she’s allowed to open. And—clinically—the regulation of a pack bond.
She has gone her entire incarceration without one, suppressed and isolated and dosed, and an unpacked Omega’s nervous system frays in ways yours never will.
Proximity to a stable pack would settle her.
It’s the single most therapeutic thing this institution could prescribe, and it has refused to prescribe it for years out of squeamishness. ”
“And the two of you,” the CEO says, the screen-flat eyes moving over Riot and me, “are content to be the guinea pigs in this.”
“I volunteer as tribute,” Riot hums, and folds his scarred arms behind his head, the picture of a man who has never volunteered for anything less gladly in his life.
It’s a joke, and it isn’t.
I’ve watched this man over the last six days refuse to be removed from a sleeping woman’s side by four guards and the threat of a needle.
I’ve watched him absorb her delirium—the screaming, the nails, the wild accusing terror of a mind half-poisoned—and emerge each time gentler with her than before, as though every blow she landed only proved her worth the keeping.
Volunteer is a small grey word for what Riot is doing.
He would sign over the rest of his life in blood to be one of the three hands on her, and he’d call it nothing, and he’d mean the nothing as the deepest vow he has.
I understand him better than he’d like. We are, all three, men who learned to love in the only dialects available to us—mine fluent in endings, his in violence, Lucien’s in the cold mercy of a plan.
None of them are the dialect she deserves. We’re going to teach ourselves a new one anyway, or die trying, which for men like us amounts to the same devotion.
“And what,” the CEO presses, sharper now, “assures me that he, specifically, won’t simply decorate this charming little town with bodies of his own? The man earned his way here by turning a prison into an abattoir.”
Lucien doesn’t flinch, and neither does Riot.
“Let me tell you about that prison,” Lucien says, and he does—spare, unhurried, naming what the men inside it had done and to whom, and what they’d been about to do when Riot’s hands ended the conversation.
He doesn’t soften it. He doesn’t excuse it either.
“I’m not justifying it. I’m telling you it had a purpose, and a target, and that he has never once in his life raised those hands at something that didn’t earn them first. If it comforts your morals to pretend you wouldn’t have done precisely the same in his place, by all means, pretend.
But don’t insult the room by calling him random. ”
No one argues.
The silence has the texture of men who recognize a truth they’d rather not have heard.
I watch Lucien defend Riot, and I think, not for the first time, about how unlikely a trinity we are. A doctor who feels nothing and has built a cathedral of control over the absence.
A killer who feels everything and has never once learned to dam it.
And me—something in between, a man who feels precisely as much as he chooses to and chooses, mostly, the dead, because the dead never ask to be felt back.
By every law of nature we should be rivals, three obsessions circling a single flame, snapping at each other’s throats.
We aren’t.
We slotted together around her like we’d been cast for it, and I’ve stopped questioning why, because the answer is simple and I dislike how simple it is: she is large enough for all three of us.
Whatever she is—victim, mastermind, lunatic, saint, the thing the dead girls were and survived—there is enough of her to hold a doctor’s mind and a killer’s devotion and an undertaker’s reverence all at once and never run dry.
I have arranged a great many things in my life.
I never arranged to belong to something. It is, like the fear, novel.
“We’ll handle the logistics,” Lucien says, sealing it. “Give us two weeks in Arch Hollow, and I’ll tell you exactly what you’re dealing with. A true serial killer, attacking your foundation—or a stalker, fixated on one woman.”
“Or both,” Riot adds.
I give him a look.
He doesn’t take it back. Lucien only nods, as though both is a possibility he’d already filed, and turns his attention to the screen and the silver commissioner alike.
“Your verdict, gentlemen.”
I confess Riot’s addition has lodged in me. Or both.