The Butterfly Garden (The Collector #1)(23)

“You’re coming with me.”

He led me by my hair, which Bliss had put up into an elegant French twist that soon came unraveled in his grip. Whenever I didn’t move quickly enough for him, he turned and cracked me again. Other girls looked away as we passed them, and one even started crying, though the girls nearest her quickly shushed her in case Avery decided a weeper would be more entertaining.

He hurled me into a room I hadn’t been in before, one near the tattoo room at the very front of the Garden. This was a room that was closed and locked unless he was playing. There was a girl in there already, her wrists bound to the wall with heavy rings. Blood thickly coated her thighs and parts of her face, trailed down from a nasty bite on one breast, and her head lolled forward at an awkward angle. She didn’t look up even though I landed on the floor with a loud smack.

She wasn’t breathing.

Avery stroked the girl’s flaming hair, curling his fingers into it to pull her head back. Handprints wrapped around her throat and bone protruded against the skin on one side. “She wasn’t as strong as you are.”

He dove at me, clearly expecting me to fight, but I didn’t. I didn’t do anything.

No, not entirely true.

I recited Poe, and when I ran out of lines I knew, I thought them again and again and again until he threw me against the wall with a disgusted snarl and stalked from the room with his jeans undone. I guess you could say I won.

At the moment it didn’t feel like much of a victory.

When the room finally stopped spinning, I stood up and looked for a key or a latch, whatever would let the poor girl out of those wide cuffs. Nothing. I found a locked cabinet that, when I pulled the door as far as the lock would allow, showed whips and flails; I found bars and clamps and things my mind shuddered away from; I found any number of things, in fact, except a way to give her any shred of dignity.

So I found the remnants of my dress and found a way to drape it around her until the most important bits were covered, and I kissed her cheek and apologized with everything in me, as I’d never apologized to anyone before.

“He can’t hurt you again, Giselle,” I whispered against her bloody skin.

And I walked naked into the hallway.

Everything hurt, and each girl I passed hissed in sympathy. None of them offered to help. We were supposed to go to Lorraine for that, so she could catalogue every injury and report it to the Gardener, but I didn’t feel like looking at her stony face or feeling her press harder than she had to against forming bruises. Retrieving the ruins of the poetry book from where it had fetched up in the pond, I returned to my room and sat in my narrow shower stall. The water wouldn’t come on until evening—we each had an assigned time, unless we’d just been with the Gardener. The girls who’d been there longer could turn their water on themselves, another earned privilege, but that wasn’t me yet. Not for another few months.

I wanted so badly to cry. I’d seen most of the other girls do it time and again, and some of them always seemed to feel better afterward. I hadn’t cried since that fucking carousel when I was six years old, when I sat trapped on that beautifully painted horse and went round and round as both of my parents walked away and forgot all about me. And, as it turned out, sitting in the shower stall waiting for water that wouldn’t come for hours wasn’t going to flip that switch back on.

Bliss found me, water still trickling down her skin from her own shower, her hair wrapped in a brilliant blue towel, the color of the wings inked on her back. “Maya, what—” She stopped short, staring at me. “Fucking hell, what happened?”

It even hurt to talk, my lip swollen and my jaw aching from so many slaps, among other things. “Avery.”

“Wait here.”

Because there were so many places I was likely to go.

But when she came back, it was with the Gardener, who was unwontedly disheveled. She didn’t say a word, just led him into the room, dropped his hand, and walked away.

His hands were shaking.

He stepped slowly across the room, the horror on his face growing as he catalogued each visible injury, each bite mark or scratch, each deepening bruise or handprint. Because the sickest thing was—and there were so many to choose from—he genuinely did care about us, or at least what he thought of as us. He knelt down in front of me and inspected me with concerned eyes and gentle fingers.

“Maya, I am . . . I am so sorry. Truly I am.”

“Giselle is dead,” I whispered. “I couldn’t get her down.”

He closed his eyes with a look of genuine pain. “She can wait. Let’s get you taken care of.”

Until then, I hadn’t realized he actually kept a suite in the Garden. As we passed through the tattoo room, he bellowed out Lorraine’s name. I could hear her scrambling from the infirmary in the next room, her grey and brown hair fluffing around her face as it escaped her updo.

“Get me bandages, antiseptic. Something to help with the swelling.”

“What hap—”

“Just get it,” he snapped. He glared at her until she disappeared, returning moments later with a small mesh bag bulging with haphazardly packed supplies.

He punched a code into the pad on the wall and a section slid back and away, revealing a room done in burgundy and deep gold and mahogany. There was a comfortable-looking couch, a recliner positioned under a tall reading lamp, a television mounted on the wall, and that was all I got a chance to see before he led me through another doorway into a bathroom with a floor-set whirlpool tub bigger than my bed. He helped me sit down on the edge and started running the water, then wet a cloth to wipe away the worst of the blood.