7. ~Silas~ #3
“And yet I solved your scene in under ten minutes,” I note, mild as milk, “which is more than the professionalism in this room has managed in three hours. Do let me know if the trade ever interests you. There’s always room at my table for someone who hates being wrong as passionately as you so clearly do. ”
My smirk couldn’t get wider.
“Then let me enjoy flirting with my Sweet Peony,” I say, spreading my hands, magnanimous, “who is innocent, and who clearly hasn’t eaten a thing if she spent the morning on a pole. Yes?”
Vex nods—and on the perfect, conspiratorial cue, her stomach growls, loud and shameless into the hush.
Every eye in the room drops to her midsection. She shrugs, unbothered.
“What? I worked up an appetite.”
I am already reaching into my coat. I produce a granola bar, blueberry-filled, my own, smuggled past the morning checkpoint against precisely such an emergency, and toss it across the room. She plucks it from the air without looking, a small casual miracle of coordination.
“She can’t eat that,” a guard objects immediately.
“It cleared security on my person not forty minutes ago,” I reply, breezy. “Whole and sealed. But by all means—if you’re famished yourself, inspect it for poison. I’m sure my Sweet Peony would share a bite, if I asked nicely. Wouldn’t you?”
“No,” Vex says cheerfully, already peeling the wrapper, and then—because she cannot help herself, because the cataloguing is as compulsive as the breathing—she tips her head at the objecting guard and continues.
“He doesn’t need it anyway. He ate lunch.
He always eats at twelve-ten, on the dot, and takes a little snack at three-ten—Its in those charts about transfers and such.
So by my clock he should still be perfectly full for another half hour, unless he’s simply bored and looking for something to chew on besides me. ”
The room’s attention ricochets—from her, to the reddening guard, to me—and I let the delight show on my face, because there is no longer any reason to hide it.
Don’t we love a mischievous nosey Queen who stalks men like prey.
It seems as though no one is going to question how she knew I was going to be transfered here, or how she acquired such details, so I assume its best we move on.
“The innocent has spoken,” I declare amusingly. “Shall we wrap this up? I have a funeral to plan.”
And—because it pleases me, and because the look on Hale’s face when I do it is its own small reward—I add, to the room at large, “Do write that down, somebody. Cleared by chemistry, by alibi, and by the testimony of a guard’s digestive schedule.
Three exonerations in under a quarter hour.
I’d call it a record, but I’ve cleared the innocent faster, and the guilty faster still. ”
The guards stir, recovering their purpose, and inform Vex it’s time to return to her cell.
She doesn’t resist, never does I’m told, which is its own kind of warning—but before they can move her, Doc speaks from the wall, quiet and absolute.
“See that a tray is delivered to her cell within the hour. A full one.”
No one argues.
Not like they would dare; there’s a register in Doc’s calm that ends conversations.
Vex turns those luminous eyes on him, soft for a flicker, and then she turns them on me, and the soft thing sharpens back into mischief.
“Nice to meet you, Silas,” she hums—my first name, unhurried, tasted, claimed—and it takes a discipline I did not know I’d need to keep my face from showing what that does to me.
She waves goodbye over her shoulder as the guards usher her out, sinking her teeth into the granola bar with frank, humming bliss.
“Blueberry,” I hear her whisper to herself, delighted, as she goes. “My favorite.”
As if I didn’t already know.
As if I hadn’t read it in a requisition log at two o’clock this morning, in the office I’d been transferred into hours before I’d met her, the way a man reads the obituary of someone he hasn’t finished falling for.
We watch her be escorted out, the sugar of her scent thinning from the room degree by degree until the bleach and the blood have it back.
Then I turn to the body.
Wren Halloway, who apologized to vending machines and will never again, gazes up at the ceiling with the patient blankness of the truly finished. I narrow my eyes at her ruined, beautiful stillness and I ask her the only two questions that matter.
Not who.
Who is for the slow and the official.
What killed you, sweet girl—which precise compound bloomed violet in your throat?
And, far more troubling: how did anyone in a sealed and searched and endlessly counted fortress like this one ever get their hands on it?
Doc drifts up beside me, hands in his pockets, gaze on the corpse.
“Should I ask?”
I say nothing.
There is nothing to say that he doesn’t already know, has known since the moment the card bloomed violet and I didn’t look surprised. He exhales through his nose, slow, and lifts two fingers to settle his glasses—the small ritual he performs when he’s decided to let a thing lie.
“Get to work, then,” he says. “I’ll review the rest of the cameras. See if anything turns up.”
I nod and let him go.
Crouching beside the lovely, ruined girl and begin, with gloved and gentle hands, the work I was actually brought here to do—knowing, with the serene certainty of a man who has spent a decade arranging exactly such things, that Doc will comb every frame of every camera in this building and find nothing he can use.
Not because he isn’t thorough.
Because the footage was never going to hold an answer, and because the three of us would prefer it that way.
A killer the institution can name is a killer the institution can close the file on—and a closed file means a sealed wing, a tidied scandal, a Blackthorn that no longer needs the dangerous, brilliant patient it dragged to this scene in handcuffs.
We are not in the business of helping this place find its monster.
We are in the business of finding it first, quietly, on our own terms, for reasons each of us guards as closely as a throat—and of keeping a certain sugar-scented swan exactly where we can watch over her until we do.
So let Doc review his cameras.
Allow Hale to file her frustrated reports.
Encourage this body to tell me, in the patient language of the dead, the secrets the living are too frightened to read.
Whoever is killing the harmless ones of Blackthorn has made one catastrophic miscalculation, and it isn’t the violet in a dead girl’s throat.
It’s that they did it in a house that now contains the three of us. And they will be found, dealt with, and what’s left of them, when we’re finished, will require a very small and very private arrangement of flowers.
Which is exactly what they want.