7. ~Silas~
~Silas~
What a stunning beauty she is.
Not the corpse—though the corpse is lovely too, in the particular way the freshly arrived always are, the face slackened past all its performances into the honest, dreaming stillness I’ve devoted my life to honoring.
That is one definition of beauty.
The peace at the peak of eternal salvation, the moment a body stops being a battlefield and becomes, at last, a still life.
I’ll make her gorgeous. I always do.
But the other beauty in this room—the living one, the sweet-scented one looking at me with those mismatched eyes and a glee so genuine and unspoiled it could make a man weep—she is a different definition entirely.
And I have already, in the handful of seconds since I glided through that door, begun the delicious private work of deciding which blooms would best flatter that pale complexion on the inevitable day she ascends from all this earthly suffering.
Ranunculus, perhaps.
Layered and secret, a flower pretending to be simpler than it is. Or anemones, for the bruise-dark centers. Nothing so vulgar as a rose.
She is not a rose woman; roses are for people who want to be understood at a glance, and there is nothing about her meant to be understood at a glance.
Most people recoil from the way I think.
I stopped minding around the time I stopped being able to help it. To me a body is the most honest document a person ever produces—truer than a diary, truer than a confession wrung out under lights, because the dead have finally surrendered the exhausting business of lying.
I read them the way Doc reads the living and Riot reads a threat: fluently, helplessly, with love.
And the freshly dead are loveliest of all, because the struggle has only just left them and the peace hasn’t yet hardened into absence. There’s a window. A few hours where they’re still almost here, still warm with the story of how they left.
I do my finest listening in that window. I’m listening to Wren Halloway right now, even as I drink the living woman’s perfume, and the dead girl is already whispering that her story is a lie someone wrote over the truth.
I breathe her in, and the breath nearly undoes my composure.
Strawberries warmed past ripeness. Spun sugar. A deep cocoa richness beneath, like the heart of a cake split open, and threaded through all of it a powdered sweetness I cannot name and immediately resent for being unnameable.
I take her apart the way I take everything apart—the top note, the heart, the long sugared base—and I find myself doing the impossible arithmetic of the florist: which living thing, cut and arranged, could replicate an aroma this singular?
Tuberose comes closest to the sweetness, and falls miles short of the menace.
There is no flower that smells like her.
She is, distressingly, her own genus. And the scent of her winds into me and lights a heat low and insistent in my belly, a wanting so immediate it borders on rude, and I have to physically still the urge to lean closer and simply breathe.
No. Discipline.
If I sink any further into the cathedral of her scent I’ll lose the thread of the actual task, which—tedious, necessary—is proving that this exquisite creature did not kill the woman cooling on the floor.
It’s an unfamiliar problem, the losing of threads.
I do not, as a rule, want things. I curate, I arrange, I admire from the cool remove of a man who has made his peace with endings; desire is a hunger of the living and I have spent so long in the company of the finished that I’d half forgotten its weather.
She has reminded me.
Standing over a fresh corpse, with three hours of someone else’s death in my nose, I am thinking about the heat of a mouth I have not yet been given, and the wrongness of that—the sheer inconvenient vitality of it—is the most alive I have felt in years. I should be appalled.
I am, instead, delighted. It’s rather my failing across the board.
Wren Halloway. Three hours dead, give or take the margin of a body’s last warmth. I was conducting the morning audit of my new temporary office when the call came down, which is its own small comedy.
Transferring a mortician onto the premises of a mental institution—permanently, with an office and a budget line—is the most damning admission Blackthorn has ever failed to realize it was making. Does a sane facility require a resident undertaker?
Only if its residents are dying at a rate that would alarm the public, were the public ever permitted to count.
But the public never counts.
Blackthorn’s reputation is a sacred, gleaming thing out there beyond the cliff—a discreet, expensive sanctuary for the unwell of good families. No one out there knows the depths of what howls down in these locked and watched dark places.
And if they knew that something as rare and dreadful as the woman currently radiating sugar at me were kept here, filed under lunatic, dosed and counted and underestimated—they would lose their collective mind.
I nearly have, and I’ve been in the room ninety seconds.
I let my gaze travel her, unhurried, head to bare-ankled foot. She is, by every measure I keep, attractive in the dangerous way certain orchids are attractive—the ones that smell of carrion to lure what they need and are exquisite all the while.
Doc has clocked it; I can read it in the unnatural rigidity of his stillness, the discipline of a man holding a leash on himself with both hands. I wonder, idly, whether Riot has caught it yet.
The thought answers itself. The obsessive brute has almost certainly already pleasured himself raw to the mere fact of her existence and called it Tuesday.
I set the admiration down—gently, the way you set down something you fully intend to pick back up—and arrive at my point with the bright efficiency that unnerves people most.
“The woman’s death,” I announce to the room, “is not at the hands of Genevieve.”
“Vex,” she corrects, sweet and immediate.
I turn the full force of my smile upon her and sweep into a small bow, courtly and ridiculous over a corpse.
“Silas Crowe. Mortician.”
“And why,” Detective Hale cuts in, her voice as flat and scentless as the rest of her careful nothing, “would anyone in this room defer to a mortician’s opinion on cause of death?”
Ah. The redhead with the granite jaw and the blockers and the desperate, gleaming need to be the most credentialed person in any room she enters.
I do adore a challenge.
“Mortician,” I repeat pleasantly, “is the hobby, Miss Hale. The retirement. The little garden a man tends to keep his hands occupied once the serious work is behind him.” I tip my head, and I let the warmth in my voice stay exactly where it is while I let the warmth leave my eyes entirely.
“The serious work being a decade and change consulting for agencies that don’t put their names on doors.
The bureaus with three initials and the offices with none.
The quiet cleanup after deaths that were never going to be ruled deaths—statesmen, financiers, the occasional head of state, the people history actually turns on, all of whom required someone who could read a body the way you read a confession and tell the difference between what happened and what was meant to look like it happened.
I have closed cases your department isn’t cleared to know exist.”
I hold her stare while I say it, and I keep holding it after, sweet smile fixed. It’s like watching the granite take its first hairline fracture. It always does. The hardest exteriors are simply the ones with the most pressure built up behind them, and I have a gift for finding the seam.
“That’s a great deal of unverifiable theatre,” Hale says, recovering admirably. “Classified work no one can confirm. How convenient.”
“Isn’t it,” I agree warmly. “Though you could verify a little of it, if you wished. Make a call to the field office you transferred out of…yes, I know you transferred, the posture is unmistakable, the chip on the shoulder is regulation issue…and ask the senior agent there what name makes the room go quiet. I’ll wait.
I’m very patient. It’s a requirement of the trade; the dead are never in a hurry.
” I watch the small flinch she can’t quite swallow, the confirmation that my guess landed dead center, and I gentle my voice, because cruelty without elegance is just noise.
“Or we skip the references and I simply show you. Which, mercifully for us both, takes less time than your skepticism.”
“But credentials are tedious,” I sigh, releasing her. “Far simpler to prove it. May I?”
I turn from the detective to the swan, the beautiful questioned thing at the center of all this misdirected suspicion, and I let my smile soften into something just for her.
“Vex, was it?” I hum, savoring the single syllable. “Come hither, my Sweet Peony.”
She coos, a delighted little sound from low in her throat, as though I’ve selected her personally for passage on the ark while the floodwaters rise around lesser creatures.
She skips to me.
Skips, over a body, through a forensic unit, past three armed guards, and arrives directly before me to plant herself with the proud, expectant posture of a girl awaiting a prize, those impossible eyes—lavender and emerald, the disagreement of them a small private vertigo—locked fast on mine.
“What do I need to do?” she asks.
I lift my hand between us, extend a single long finger, and smirk.
“Suck my finger.”
The silence that drops over the room is loud enough to deafen.
I can feel every soul present recalculating my sanity in real time—the techs frozen mid-task, the guards openly appalled, Hale’s jaw doing something complicated.
I have never in my life been the most comfortable presence in a room and I gave up apologizing for it before most of them were born.
Vex squeals.
Pure, gleeful delight, and then she leans in and takes the offered finger into the wet heat of her mouth, and the world contracts to that single point of contact.