6. ~Lucien~
~Lucien~
“And the prime suspect,” I say, “is you.”
I deliver the sentence because she asked me for it, and because she has already proven she’ll prise the truth out of me one way or another, and a man should choose the manner of his own surrenders.
But I want it noted, in the private ledger where I note such things, that I consider this the single most barbaric and witless conclusion the administration of this institute has produced in all its long catalogue of barbaric, witless conclusions—and the field is crowded.
Because she didn’t do it.
The matter isn’t in question. It isn’t a hunch, a clinician’s instinct, a soft spot I’m refusing to examine. It’s arithmetic, and arithmetic doesn’t care how anyone feels about the woman in the pink jumpsuit.
Wren Halloway died three hours ago; that case is a slow, cold thing, and the evidence around it is thin enough to read print through.
But the body these people are presently rushing toward—the fresh one, the second, the escalation no one has had the spine to call an escalation—that one has been dead some three hours.
I know, because I read the preliminary the moment it crossed a desk, the way I read everything before anyone decides what I’m permitted to read.
And for the entirety of those three hours, and two more besides, Genevieve Valentine has been on a steel pole in a monitored cell, climbing, spinning, and sweating before an unblinking camera I personally positioned.
Five hours, continuous, time-stamped, witnessed by the very surveillance this institute worships.
A woman cannot be in two places. Cannot strangle a patient in the east wing while inverting herself forty feet of footage away.
It is the most ironclad alibi I have encountered in twenty years of testimony, and the beautiful, vicious joke of it is that the killer handed it to her—struck precisely when she was at her most watched, to bury her under a second body, and never once accounted for the toy in the corner of her cell that kept a camera trained on her the entire time.
Someone is framing her.
Someone competent, patient, and a half-step behind the one variable they couldn’t have predicted: us.
And the administration, predictably, has reached for the nearest convenient throat.
I understand the logic, if you can dignify it with the word.
Blackthorn has a corpse problem and a reputation to protect and a roster of patients no jury would weep over; pin it on the celebrated lunatic with the arson conviction and the mismatched eyes, and the institute gets a tidy villain, a sealed file, and a press release that uses the word contained.
The CEO would sign it before lunch.
It’s the same reflex that’s burned through three directors before me—the deep institutional preference for a comfortable lie over an inconvenient investigation—and it tells me something the timeline already hinted at.
Whoever is doing this knows the building’s appetites.
They’re not only killing. They’re feeding the institute exactly the suspect it most wants to swallow.
I could say all of this now. I could lay the timeline on the table and watch the case against her evaporate.
But I’ve learned that a truth delivered too eagerly looks like a thumb on the scale, and the word for a director who clears his most dangerous patient inside seventy-two hours of meeting her is favoritism, and favoritism is a leash I won’t hand these people.
So I do what I do best in a room full of lesser minds convinced they’re the cleverest present.
I leave it to the professionals.
Which means the next move is to walk the accused through the scene of the crime and read her reaction against it—standard procedure, defensible, the sort of thing a thorough investigation requires—and reading reactions is precisely the lane I was built to occupy.
So that is where I insert myself. Not as her defender.
As the instrument best calibrated to study her in the one place she’s expected to flinch.
The detective runs the room, or believes she does, and I let her believe it because her belief is useful to me.
Hale is a Beta—I’d have guessed it from her bearing even without the manufactured nothing where her scent should be—and she carries a hard ego inside an even harder exterior, the particular armor of a woman who clawed up through a profession that never wanted her and decided somewhere along the way that the only safe posture is superior.
She thinks she occupies the power seat.
In a building where men rule and Alphas would sooner chew glass than take an order from anyone they can’t out-muscle, she has installed herself at the head of the table by sheer force of contempt, and I find it almost admirable and entirely beside the point.
Let her have the high seat; a moment of command.
Her authority is the door that keeps me in this room—this cell, this space I quietly confiscated for myself days ago under the bland fiction of a temporary observation suite, the better to oversee the installation of a certain gift and ensure it was laced precisely to our obsession’s liking.
Mine and the other two’s.
Ours.
And she likes it.
That’s the thing worth the whole maneuver. She likes it, and she’s standing in the middle of liking it right now, and it is taking a quantity of my discipline I did not know I still kept in reserve.
Hale doesn’t know she’s a piece on a board she didn’t set.
She thinks she walked in here to run a homicide and instead she’s providing cover for three men to circle the same woman without any of them having to say the word out loud.
Riot in his chilled chamber, plotting his way back into the same air as her.
Crowe, drifting toward this building like a moth that’s scented a particular flame.
And me, having quietly annexed her cell and dressed it with the one gift guaranteed to reach her, telling myself it was clinical.
It wasn’t clinical.
None of it has been clinical since the moment she said woof and sat. We are not investigators orbiting a suspect.
Because she’s barely dressed.
She danced herself out of the jumpsuit at some point in those five hours and she’s standing in nothing but a bra and underwear the pale nude of bare skin, the set leaving little to the imagination and offering everything to the eye—and what the eye finds isn’t merely the obvious, though the obvious is considerable.
It’s the map.
Her body is a document written in a language I happen to read fluently.
A dancer’s architecture, yes, long and deliberate.
But beneath the grace, the rest of the text: the silvered seam of an old break healed without proper setting, the puckered ghost of a restraint worn far too tight for far too long, the faint geometry of teeth at the wrist, a constellation of small white punctuation marks scattered across ribs and hip that each, individually, tell a sentence I want to finish.
Her scars.
Heavens help me…
Every one of them is a record of agony survived, of a body that was hurt and refused, repeatedly, magnificently, to stop—and the recognition of that, the kinship of it, does something to me that has no place in a homicide investigation.
It isn’t the wounds that move me.
It’s the surviving.
The defiant, unkillable fact of her, standing damp and unbroken in a cell that has eaten stronger people whole, and I am not built of stone no matter how convincingly I’ve dressed the absence up. My pulse, which obeys me in front of finger-collectors, slips its leash.
Heat coils low and unwelcome.
My cock twitches behind the immaculate line of my trousers like the body underneath the suit has remembered it’s a body, and perhaps I need what Riot has—a chilled chamber and an endless cold shower—to drown the part of me that has begun, urgently, to imagine.
Imagining what it would be like to be buried in her.
Envisioning worse, softer things.
Daring to dream—and here is the door I keep nailed shut sliding open a treacherous inch—climbing onto that pole beside her.
Which...no.
That belongs to a chapter of me that hasn’t seen daylight in a decade, securely buried under degrees and citations and very good wool.
A past of survival by any means the night demanded, in rooms lit red, before I discovered that the one weapon no one could confiscate was the machine between my ears, and turned it, coldly and completely, into the respectable fortune and the respected name and the man who now stands fully clothed and composed and pretending his heart rate is his own.
I was very young, very pretty, and very poor.
The city has an old and reliable economy for boys who are all three.
I learned the steel before I learned the science—learned how to make a body say what a room wanted to hear, how to read an appetite across a dim floor and price it, how to climb and arch and smile through whatever the smiling cost.
I climbed out, eventually, hand over patient hand, the same way I climbed everything: by understanding the mechanism better than the people who built it.
No one alive connects the doctor to the boy.
I made certain of the gap with the same thoroughness I bring to everything. And now a woman in a pink jumpsuit has spent five hours doing, for the sheer wild joy of it, the precise thing I once did to stay fed, and the sight has reached across ten sealed years and rung the old bell.
I despise how badly I want to answer it.
She has been in my orbit three days and she is already prising at that nailed-shut door with the same idle confidence she brings to everything. I shut off the part of me that wants to let her.
I remind myself, with effort I haven’t had to spend in years, that I am working—that there is a body in the east wing, that the most useful thing I can be to her right now is the coldest version of myself. It doesn’t entirely take. It takes enough.
“Get dressed,” Hale says to her, crisp with borrowed command. “You’re coming with us.”
Vex brightens like a child told the day trip is back on.