The Summer Children (The Collector #3)(12)

“Esperanza. She keeps my number under a different name, but I’m the only person she knows with an East Coast area code, so her mother always snoops and finds it. She just can’t make up her mind whether she should be haranguing me to come back to the family, or haranguing me for leaving it in the first place.”

“Your dad’s still locked up, right?”

“Yes, my great sin as a daughter.” I shake my head, hair falling in my face. “Sorry.”

“I forgive you,” he says sententiously.

I throw a pillow at him, and immediately regret it despite his goofy, confused blinking. Now I have to get up and retrieve it unless I want it thwacked back in my face.

Instead, he picks it up and offers his free hand. “Come on.”

“?Qué?”

“You’re never going to get any sleep now. You’re just going to lie there and brood.”

“You’re going to accuse me of brooding?”

“Yes. Come on.”

I take his hand and let him pull me up, and he uses it to tow me into the bedroom. He steers me to the left side of the bed, because he doesn’t really care which side he’s on as long as it’s the one farther from the door. A minute later, he returns with my gun, which I’d put under the couch where I could easily reach it, and puts it into the holster nailed to the side of the left nightstand. He gets under the covers first, sliding over rather than walking because he’s tired and lazy and I really can’t blame him, and for a moment it’s all shuffling linens as we settle in comfortably.

“You don’t have to feel guilty for it,” he says suddenly.

“For what, Ronnie showing up?”

“For not forgiving them.” He reaches out in the darkness, finds a handful of my hair, and uses it to find my face so he can tap the parallel scars that run down my left cheek from just below my eye. “You don’t owe them that.”

“Okay.”

“It’s not right for them to ask it of you.”

“I know.”

“Okay.”

A few minutes later, he’s fast asleep and snoring again, his hand still splayed across my face.

I honestly can’t imagine how half the Bureau thinks Eddison and I are hot for each other.



5

Saturday is spent back at the office, catching up on what was supposed to be yesterday’s work. After several months of so many back-to-back cases that we were barely home long enough to change go bags before being sent out again, Vic put us on desk rotation for a few weeks so we could catch our breath. Basically that means paperwork, and a lot of it.

I spend Sunday on Eddison’s couch with a stack of logic puzzles to get my brain off worrying about Ronnie, while Eddison has the Nationals game up on his insanely large television. His laptop is open on the coffee table, Skype running to show Priya stretched out on the bed at Inara and Victoria-Bliss’s New York apartment. She’s got the game streaming on another computer at her side, so they can watch the game together across two hundred fifty or so miles. She set up in the bedroom so as not to disturb her summer hosts, neither of whom give two shits about baseball, but they both drifted in anyway, sprawling over her, each other, and the bed in equal measure with their own projects.

Inara and Victoria-Bliss we met during what may be our most infamous case. Certainly it was one of the most bizarre. They were among the many girls kidnapped by a man over three decades and kept in the Garden, a massive greenhouse on his private land, some of whom he killed to preserve their beauty. Tattooed with intricate butterfly wings, the Butterflies were his prized collection, in both life and death. After the Garden, with the wounds still fresh and the trials looming, Vic connected them to Priya. The three became fast friends, and whenever Priya was back in the States, she managed to spend at least a few days in New York in the warehouse apartment they had shared with half a dozen other girls.

They have their own place now, the massive bed covered in a quilt made of Shakespeare lithographs. Neither of them are in black, the color the Gardener gave them, neither of them have their backs bared the way he insisted was necessary. Victoria-Bliss is, in fact, in an eye-smarting shade of orange even brighter than a traffic cone, both front and back emblazoned with the name of the animal shelter she volunteers at. It’s healthy, and it’s good, and it’s wonderful to see the three of them so close. And possibly a little terrifying; they’re indomitable young women, and could probably take over the world if they were so inclined.

“How are the pictures going?” Eddison asks during a commercial break.

“Going well,” Priya answers. “Next week or two, I’ll head down to Baltimore to talk to Keely’s parents. They want to see some of the finished photos before they and Keely decide whether or not to participate in the project.”

“Think they will?”

Priya’s knee gently nudges Inara’s hip, and the other girl looks up from her tablet, pen bouncing against the pad beside it. Inara shrugs at the webcam. “I think they will,” she says. Keely is the youngest of the Garden survivors, brought in only in the Garden’s last days, and Inara has always watched out for her very closely. “We’ve talked to them about it several times since Priya and I came up with it, making sure they know it’s not prurient or sensational, that it really is about healing. I don’t blame them for wanting reassurance.”