The Butterfly Garden (The Collector #1)(35)

I should have felt sorrow, or rage, or confusion.

All I felt was numb.

“What do you do with the girls who never get their full wings?” I asked quietly.

He gave me a swift, thoughtful look, and I wondered if I was the first girl to ever ask that. “I see them properly buried on the estate.”




Eddison growls and reaches for his notebook. “Did he say where on the estate?”

“No, but I think it overlooked a river. Sometimes he’d come to the Garden with mud on his shoes and this wistful look on his face, and on those days, he’d give Bliss river stones to use as a base for some of her figures. Nothing I could see from the trees.”

He balls up the aluminum foil and tosses it at the one-way mirror. “Get a team out to the riverbank, look for graves.”

“You could say please.”

“I’m giving them an assignment, not asking for a favor,” he retorts through gritted teeth.

She shrugs. “Guilian always said please. Rebekah, too, even when she was just assigning sections. But then, I guess that’s why I loved working for Guilian. He made it a very pleasant and respectful place.”

She might as well have slapped him in the face. Victor sees the angry flush climb up from his partner’s collar and looks away so he won’t smile. Or at least so Eddison won’t see it. “Was it just the girls who died before the wings were finished?” he asks quickly.

“No. If they died in such a way that it ruined the wings, he didn’t display them. Avery put several girls into the ground instead of the glass, when he whipped them hard enough to scar across the ink.” She lightly touches her neck. “Giselle.”

“That wasn’t where the conversation ended, was it?”

“No, but you already know that.”

“Yes, but I’d like to hear the rest,” he replies, just as he would to his daughters.

She quirks an eyebrow at him.




Like Lyonette had, I usually borrowed a stool from the infirmary to keep beside the girl’s bed. Sitting on the bed probably would have been fine, but this gave her a little space. Gave her a territory that was hers. The Gardener didn’t really recognize territory in that way. He sat with his back against the headboard, placing the girl’s head in his lap so he could run his hand over her shaven skull. So far as I knew, he never visited the girls in their rooms until after they were fully marked, until after he’d raped them for the first time.

After all, that was what made them his.

But then, he wasn’t there to see the new girl. He was there to talk to me.

And he didn’t seem in any big hurry to do it.

I pulled my ankles up onto the seat, sitting cross-legged on the narrow stool, and spread my book across my lap, reading to fill the empty space until he reached over and gently closed it. Then I gave him my attention.

“How long have you been watching my family?”

“Nearly since my wings were done.”

“But you haven’t said anything.”

“Not to you or anyone.” Not even to Lyonette or Bliss, though I’d been tempted. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was easier to think of him as just our captor. Putting a family in there made it . . . well, more wrong somehow. Just the fact that it could be more wrong was disturbing enough.

“And what do you think when you see us?”

“I think your wife is sick.” I rarely lied to the Gardener; the truth was the one thing that could always be mine. “I think she’s scared of Avery and doesn’t want to show it, and I think she dotes on your younger boy. I think she treasures those walks with you as the only time she has your undivided attention.”

“All that from a stand of trees?” Thank God, he looked more amused than anything. He settled his back more comfortably against the headboard, one arm bent behind him to act as a cushion for his head.

“Am I wrong?”

“No.” He looked down at the girl in his lap, then back at me. “She’s been struggling for years against a heart condition. It isn’t severe enough that she qualifies for a transplant, but it causes a significant drop in quality of life.”

So his wife was a kind of butterfly too. “That’s one.”

“And she does dote on our younger son. She’s quite proud of him. He keeps perfect grades, is always polite, and is a treat to hear on the piano and violin.”

“That’s two.”

“Between the Garden and my business, and her own charitable functions and planning, our schedules are often in conflict. We both make time for our afternoon walks unless we’re out of town. It’s good for her heart.”

“That’s three.”

And all that was left was the hard one, the one no parent wants to admit.

So he didn’t. He left it unsaid, and in the silence there was truth.

“You pay a great deal of attention to things, don’t you, Maya? To people, to patterns, to events. You find more meaning than others.”

“I pay attention,” I agreed. “I don’t know that I find more meaning.”

“You observed a walk in a greenhouse and made it mean all that.”

“I didn’t make it mean anything. I just noticed body language.”

Body language was one of the things that told me my next-door neighbor was a pedophile long before the first time he exposed himself, long before the first time he touched me or asked me to touch him. It was in the way he watched me and the other kids in the neighborhood, in the bruised looks of the foster kids who lived with him. I was prepared for his advances because I knew they’d be coming. Body language warned me about Gran’s lawn guy, about the kids in school who would try to beat you up just because they could. Body language was better than a flashing light for warnings.