The Butterfly Garden (The Collector #1)(12)

“What kind of problem?”

The girl looks at him sharply.

“One of the girls they identified has some important family. She’s still calling herself Ravenna, but her fingerprints matched to Patrice Kingsley.”

“As in Senator Kingsley’s missing daughter?”

Inara settles back in her chair, her expression clearly amused. Victor isn’t sure what she finds funny about what promises to be a hell of a complication.

“Has the senator been informed yet?” he asks.

“Not yet,” answers Eddison. “Ramirez wanted to give us a heads-up first. Senator Kingsley has been desperate to find her daughter, Vic; there isn’t a chance in hell she won’t push into the investigation.”

And when that happens, any privacy they may be able to offer these girls will be out the window. Their faces will be plastered on every news network from here to the West Coast. And Inara . . . Victor rubs wearily at his eyes. If the senator learns they have any suspicions about this overly contained young woman, she won’t rest until charges are filed.

“Tell Ramirez to hold off as long as she can,” he says finally. “We need time.”

“Roger.”

“Remind me how long she’s been missing?”

“Four and a half years.”

“Four and a half years?”

“Ravenna,” Inara murmurs, and Victor stares at her. “No one ever forgets how long they’ve been there.”

“Why not?”

“It changes things, doesn’t it? Having a senator involved.”

“It changes things for you, as well.”

“Of course it does. How could it not?”

She knows, he realizes uneasily. Maybe she doesn’t know specifics, but she knows they suspect her of some kind of involvement. He measures the amusement in her eyes, the cynical twist to her mouth. She’s a little too comfortable with this new information.

Time to change the subject, then, before he loses the power in the room. “You said the girls in the apartment were your first friends.”

She shifts slightly in her seat. “That’s right,” she answers warily.

“Why is that?”

“Because I hadn’t had any before.”

“Inara.”

She responds to that tone of voice the same way his daughters do—instinctively, grudgingly when she realizes it a moment too late, and just a bit sulky. “You’re good at that. You have kids?”

“Three girls.”

“And yet you make a career in broken children.”

“In trying to rescue broken children,” he corrects. “In trying to get justice for broken children.”

“You really think broken children care about justice?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“Never really did, no. Justice is a faulty thing at the best of times, and it doesn’t actually fix anything.”

“Would you say that if you’d gotten justice as a child?”

That not-quite-smile, bitter and gone too fast. “And what would I have needed justice for?”

“My life’s work, and you think I won’t recognize a broken child when she sits in front of me?”

She inclines her head to concede the point, then bites her lip and winces. “Not entirely accurate. Let’s call me a shadow child, overlooked rather than broken. I’m the teddy bear gathering dust bunnies under the bed, not the one-legged soldier.”

He smiles slightly and sips his rapidly cooling coffee. She’s back to dancing. However disconcerting Eddison might find it, Victor’s on familiar ground. “In what way?”




Sometimes you can look at a wedding and realize with a certain sense of resignation that any children produced in that marriage will inevitably be fucked up and fucked over. It’s a fact, not a sense of foreboding so much as a grim acceptance that these two people should not—but definitely will—reproduce.

Like my parents.

My mother was twenty-two when she married my father; he was her third marriage. The first was when she was seventeen and married the brother of her mother’s then-current husband. He died in less than a year from a heart attack during sex. He left her pretty well off, so a few months later, she married a man only fifteen years older than her, and when they divorced a year later, she came off even a little better. Then came my dad, and if he hadn’t knocked her up, I doubt the wedding would have happened. He was good-looking, but he wasn’t wealthy and he didn’t have prospects and he was only two years older, which to my mother was an insurmountable series of obstacles.

For that we can thank her mother, who had nine husbands before early menopause made her decide she was too dried up to remarry. And every single one of them died, each faster than the one before. No foul play about it, either. Just . . . died. Most of them were ancient, of course, and all of them left her with a tidy sum of money, but my mother was raised with certain expectations and her third husband met none of them.

I will say this for them, though: they gave it a try. For the first couple of years we lived near his family and there were cousins and aunts and uncles and I can almost remember playing with other children. Then we moved, and the ties were cut from one end or the other, and it was just me and my parents and their various affairs. They were always either visiting their latest lovers or holing up in their bedrooms, so I became a pretty self-sufficient kid. I learned how to use the microwave, I memorized the bus schedule so I could get to the grocery store, I staked out the days of the week when either of my parents were likely to have cash in their wallets so I could actually buy things at the market.