The Butterfly Garden (The Collector #1)(32)

“Not that you’re actually capable of going anywhere, but wait here.”

She flapped her hand and closed her eyes.

There were two refrigerators in the kitchen attached to our dining room. One held our meal ingredients and was always kept locked, Lorraine having the only key. The other held drinks and what snacks we were allowed to have between meals. I grabbed a couple bottles of water for Lyonette and a juice for myself, then pillaged a book from the library to read aloud to her while we waited for the new girl to wake up.




“There was a library?” Eddison asks incredulously.

“Well, yeah. He wanted us to be happy there. That meant keeping us occupied.”

“What kinds of books did he give you?”

“Whatever we asked for, really.” She shrugs and settles back into her chair, arms crossed loosely over her chest. “It was mostly classics at first, but those of us who genuinely enjoyed reading started a wish list by the doorway, and every now and then he’d add a few dozen or so volumes. And some of us had personal books, direct gifts from him, that stayed in our rooms.”

“And you were one of the readers.”

She starts to give him a disgusted look, then reconsiders. “Oh, right, you weren’t here for that part.”

“What part?”

“The part where I explained that being in the Garden was usually boring as fuck.”

“If that’s boring, you’re clearly not doing it right,” he mutters, and it startles a laugh out of her.

“It wasn’t boring when it was my choice,” she admits. “But that was before the Garden.”

Victor knows he should drag the conversation back to the original question, but the sight of the two of them in agreement about something is far too entertaining, so he lets it go, even ignores the slight trace of a lie in the girl’s face.

“And I suppose your favorite was Poe?”

“Oh, no, Poe had a purpose: to distract. I liked the fairy tales. Not the watered-down Disney shit, or the sanitized Perrault versions. I liked the real ones, where horrible things happened to everyone and you really understood it wasn’t intended for children.”

“No illusions?” Victor asks, and she nods.

“Exactly.”




New Girl took a long time to regain consciousness, long enough that Lyonette even debated sending for Lorraine. I talked her out of it. If the girl was going to die from it, there was little enough our nurse could do to prevent it, and that pinch-faced bitch wasn’t the first thing I would want to see. Lyonette used that to insist I be the first thing New Girl saw.

Given that Lyonette looked like death warmed over, I didn’t even argue . . . much.

It was late in the afternoon before the girl finally stirred, and I closed Oliver Twist on a finger to see if she was actually waking up. We got another two hours of reading in before you could call her any sort of coherent. Under Lyonette’s instructions, I poured a glass of water to have ready and wet down a few cloths to help against the headache. When I folded one of them under the girl’s neck, she batted at my hand and swore at me in Spanish.

Good enough.

Eventually she gathered enough of her wits to pull the washcloths away from her face and try to sit up, her entire body swaying with the force of her nausea.

“Careful there,” I said quietly. “Here’s some water, it’ll help.”

“Get away from me, you sick fuck!”

“I’m not the one who kidnapped you, so save it. Either you want the water and aspirin or you can eat shit and die, your choice.”

Lyonette groaned. “Maya.”

The girl blinked at me, but meekly took the pills and the cup.

“Better. You’re being held by a man known as the Gardener. He gives us new names, so don’t bother telling us yours. Remember it, but don’t say it. I’m called Maya, and the lovely one with the flu over there is Lyonette.”

“I’m—”

“No one,” I reminded her sharply. “Not until he gives you a name. Don’t make it harder than it has to be.”

“Maya!”

I glanced over at Lyonette, who was giving me the pathetic, exasperated, incredulous, what-the-fuck-are-you-doing-to-me look she usually reserved for Evita. “You do it, then. You weren’t the first face she saw, hooray! Now you can take over if you don’t like how I’m doing it.”

I’d had Sophia as a maternal example for young children. New Girl wasn’t that young, and I wasn’t Sophia.

Lyonette closed her eyes and whispered a prayer for patience. Before she could finish, though, she had to fold herself over the toilet bowl again.

The new girl’s hands started to shake, so I took them between my own. It was always warm in the Garden, except sometimes in the cave behind the waterfall, but I knew the shivers were from shock more than anything. “Here’s the thing, and it’s terrifying and bewildering and fuck-all unfair, but it’s still the thing: we are here as the unwilling guests of a man who will come to you for company and, as often as not, sex. Sometimes his son will come to you. You belong to them now, and they will do what they want to you, including mark you as theirs. There are quite a few of us here, and we support each other as we can, but the only way you’re getting out of here is to die, so you’re going to have to decide if this life of ours is better or worse than death.”