6. ~Lucien~ #2
“Ooh. Should I wear a different jumpsuit?” She’s already half-bouncing on the balls of her feet, lit up as though we’ve announced a scavenger hunt rather than an interrogation at a corpse. “I have opinions about the occasion.”
Hale’s glare could strip paint.
The guards exchange a look of pure bewildered male helplessness, the expression of men who trained for violence and find themselves disarmed by glee. None of them know what to do with her, and that ignorance is the whole reason she’s run rings around this place for years.
So I speak, because someone fluent ought to.
“Leave the pink.” My voice lands flat and certain into the room’s confusion. “Wear something more serious. The occasion calls for it.”
She beams at me and claps her hands together once, delighted.
Our Omega clearly loves to be led…
“Ah. Normal, right? Read the room, dress for the funeral, that sort of thing. Okay.” She’s already reaching for the folded standard-issue at the foot of the bunk.
“I’ll be good and wear the boring orange.
Blend right in with the scenery. Since apparently”—she shakes the jumpsuit out with a flourish—“we’re filming a very special episode of How to Get Away with Murder. Puddin Edition.”
It costs me everything I have to keep my face a closed door.
Because I’m the only soul in this room who catches it.
Puddin—the hamster, the dead one, the small white grief she still keeps a shrine to behind the lunacy, the single creature she’s ever publicly admitted to loving.
She’s named her own murder trial after her dead pet.
It is gallows humor of a rarefied, lethal vintage, a joke pitched so far over the heads of the armed men around her that it may as well be in another language, and the fact that she lobbed it into the air knowing only I would catch it—the fact that she made it for me—lands somewhere I keep carefully unguarded and detonates.
She dresses fast, swallowing all that mapped and maddening skin back into shapeless orange, and I regret it the way you regret a candle pinched out too soon.
For now, I tell the regret.
We’re moving before the regret has finished settling—down the white corridors, through three sets of mag-locks that thunk shut behind us like the building swallowing, into the east wing and the hush that hangs over a place where something has recently been emptied of life.
A forensic unit has already arrived and begun its grim choreography, gloved hands and numbered markers and the low murmur of people who do this for a living.
The scent reaches me before the sight does—the flat penny tang of blood gone tacky, the sour note of a body three hours past its tenancy, all of it laid over the institutional bleach in a way the bleach was never built to win against.
And every eye in the room lifts and swings and fastens onto Vex the instant she crosses the threshold, hungry to watch the monster meet her handiwork.
One look at her and I have my confirmation, the last bolt driven home in a certainty that was already welded.
Boredom.
Absolute, unperformed, faintly put-upon boredom.
If the small downturn of her mouth weren’t confirmation enough—the expression of a woman who would dearly love to be back in her cell being the singular acrobat she is, rather than standing in a draughty corridor being shown a corpse she has no relationship to—then it’s written plainly in her body.
No spike. No freeze. None of the micro-tells a guilty animal can’t suppress when confronted with its kill.
Just the loose-limbed heaviness of someone running on empty, her shoulders low, her weight settling, a fatigue that has nothing to do with guilt and everything to do with five hours of exertion on no food.
I read it off her without trying, fluent in her already, and that fluency is the most dangerous thing in this room, because it loosens my tongue before my judgment can catch the latch.
It’s a particular failure, for a man who has spent his life weaponizing the gap between what he notices and what he chooses to say.
I notice everything—it’s the trade—but I have always owned the second half, the discretion, the long cold pause where I decide which observations are worth surrendering to the room.
With her, the pause is gone.
I see the fatigue in the set of her shoulders and the slight tremor of low blood sugar in her clever hands, and the seeing simply becomes saying, the way it does for ordinary men who haven’t spent thirty-four years building a dam between the two.
“Did you eat?”
The question drops into the middle of a homicide scene like a glass shattering in a church. Every head turns to me—the detective, the techs, the guards, all of them recalibrating whether the institute’s celebrated new director has just lost his grip.
I don’t look at any of them.
My eyes are on her, only her, watching her surface slowly from wherever she’d drifted, blinking like someone waking in an unfamiliar room, reorienting by degrees until her mismatched gaze finds mine.
“What?” she says.
“Did you eat,” I repeat, unhurried, as if we’re the only two people standing over the body.
She’s thrown—genuinely, for the first time since I met her, knocked off whatever script she keeps running—and the surprise cracks open into a giggle, and the giggle tips over into a real laugh, bright and helpless, as though I’ve told her the finest joke ever assembled.
The forensic unit goes very still.
Laughing at a corpse will do that.
“No, Doc.” She wipes the corner of one eye, grinning.
“I skipped lunch to play with my new toy. Hyperfixation, or whatever the diagnostic flavor of the month is. So I suppose I’ll just starve, seeing as you lot are busy accusing me of murdering”—she pauses, turns her head with theatrical leisure, and considers the body for the first time—“that one. Over there.”
And then, because she cannot help herself, because the performance is compulsive and the room has made the mistake of giving her a stage, she begins to recite.
“Wren Halloway. East wing. Patient four-one-seven. Omega, twenty-six, admitted on a fifty-one-fifty that quietly became a forever after she set fire to her foster father—good for her, by the way, I read the transcript, he had it coming in surround sound. Allergic to penicillin. Hoarded the green Jell-O and traded it for phone minutes she never used. Sang in the shower, badly, something churchy. Had a sister in Tacoma who stopped writing in the spring and a tremor in her left hand from the older meds they don’t prescribe anymore.
” She tips her head at the dead woman with something that, in a kinder creature, I’d call tenderness.
“She apologized to the vending machine when she kicked it. Nobody here is gentler. Was. Was gentler.”
By the time she winds down, the whole room has stopped watching her and started watching me—the techs, the guards, even Hale—every face turned my way, waiting, as if the lunatic’s eerie eulogy has somehow made me the arbiter of what just happened here.
They heard a madwoman gloating over a corpse.
I heard something else, and it’s the something else that will keep me awake.
She didn’t recite that catalogue to perform guilt or flaunt some intimacy with death.
She recited it because she knew it—all of it, the penicillin and the green Jell-O and the sister in Tacoma who stopped writing in the spring—because she has quietly memorized every soul in this building down to their smallest tender absurdity, the way a shepherd knows a flock, or a queen her subjects, or a predator her territory.
The correction landed hardest. Is gentler. Was gentler. She caught her own tense and grieved it in real time, in front of an audience she despises, and tried to hide the grief inside the joke. There is a person under the costume who is keeping a ledger of the harmless ones.
And someone is crossing names off it.
I let the silence hold a beat longer than comfort allows.
Then I give them the truth, because the truth, in this single instance, costs me nothing I’m unwilling to spend.
“She didn’t do it.”
Hale’s jaw sets.
“And how,” she says, with the flinty patience of a woman who has had men announce certainties at her all her life, “are you one hundred percent confident of that, Doctor?”
I open my mouth to lay it out—the timeline, the footage, the five irrefutable hours—and I never get the chance.
Because a laugh enters the room ahead of its owner.
Sweet, giddy, trembling with a delight so genuine and so wildly out of place that two of the techs actually recoil from it.
I know that laugh. I’ve known it for years, in better suits and worse circumstances, and the recognition arrives with the weary fondness of a man who hears his oldest, most exhausting friend pull into the drive.
We go back further than anyone in this building would believe of a director and a volunteer undertaker—back to a city, a wager, a long correspondence about the architecture of monstrousness that began as my research and became, somewhere in the years, the closest thing to friendship either of us tolerates.
He has read every private paper I’ve never published.
I have stood in his cold beautiful workrooms and watched him make the ruined dead lovely again and understood that we were two instruments tuned to the same impossible key.
If Riot is the blade and I am the hand, Silas is the thing that comes after—the careful, smiling craftsman who arranges what’s left. The institute thinks it invited a soft-spoken funeral artist to soothe the violent ones.
The institute, as ever, has no idea what it has invited.
“The writing is on the fucking wall,” the voice announces, high and bright and gleefully masculine, ringing off the tile. “Literally.”
Every head wrenches toward the sound.