The Butterfly Garden (The Collector #1)(38)

She glared at me.

Right.

The dragon’s home was next to Simba, and where the lion was just a joke, the dragon actually came to mean something.

But that day he was new and sad, and Bliss was angry and sad, so I rested him on my knee and went back to reading Antigone until she felt up to saying something.




“If my room is intact, do you think there’s a chance of my getting the figures back? And the origami menagerie? And the . . . well, all of it, really.”

“We can ask,” Victor hedges, and she sighs.

“Why Antigone?” Eddison asks.

“I always thought she was pretty cool. She’s strong and brave and resourceful, not above a certain level of emotional manipulation, and she dies, but on her own terms. She’s sentenced to live out the rest of her days in a tomb and she says fuck that, I’m going to hang myself. And then there’s her betrothed, who loves her so much that he flips his shit at her death and tries to kill his own father. And then, of course, he dies too, because come on, it’s a Greek tragedy, and the Greeks and Shakespeare really love killing people off. It’s a great lesson, really. Everyone dies.” She lays the photo down and covers the boy’s face with her hands. Victor can’t be sure she even realizes she’s done it. “But I might have picked something else if I’d known Bliss was going to join me.”

“Oh?”

“It seemed to inspire her.”




She paced around me as I read, snatching leaves off plants and shredding them as she walked until you could follow her progress by the slaughter of green bits on the rock. She snarled and swore with every step, so I didn’t bother to look up until she fell silent.

She stood on the very edge of the false cliff, her toes curled over the rock, with her arms spread wide beside her. Her pale skin glowed in the moonlight where it showed through the gaps in her knee-length black dress. “I could jump,” she whispered.

“But you won’t.”

“I could,” she insisted, and I shook my head.

“But you won’t.”

“I will!”

“No, you won’t.”

“And why the fuck not?” she demanded, spinning to face me with her fists planted on her hips.

“Because you can’t guarantee that you would die, and if you were injured, it might not be badly enough for him to kill you. It’s not that high a fall.”

“Evita fell from lower.”

“Evita broke her neck on a tree branch. You have luck like mine; if you tried, you’d fuck it up and be fine except for a few bruises.”

“Godfuckingdammit!” She flopped beside me on the stone, her face buried in her arms as she wept. Bliss had been there three months longer than I had. Twenty-one months, for her. “Why isn’t there a better option?”

“Johanna drowned herself. Think that’s less painful than an uncertain fall?”

“Pia says it won’t work. He added sensors in the bank; if the water rises, it sends him an alarm and he can check the cameras. She said you can see the nearest cameras move to focus on whoever’s swimming.”

“If you waited till he was out of the house, or even out of town, it would probably give you enough time to drown if you really wanted to.”

“I don’t want to drown,” she sighed, sitting up to mop at her tears with her dress. “I don’t want to die.”

“Everyone dies.”

“Then I don’t want to die now,” she snarled.

“Then why jump?”

“You have absolutely no sense of sympathy.”

Not entirely true, and she knew it, but true enough.

I closed the book and turned off the book light, setting them both on the ground with the sad little dragon on top of them so I could twist onto my stomach to lie alongside her.

“I get so sick of this place,” she whispered, and even though we weren’t in the cave—the one place we were truly private—I thought she’d probably said it softly enough to avoid getting picked up. None of us knew if he went back through the recordings, never knew if it was safe to talk even when we knew for a fact he wasn’t sitting at a monitor.

“We all do.”

“Then why can’t I make the best of it, like you do?”

“You had a happy home, right?”

“Right.”

“That’s why you can’t make the best of it.”

I’d been happy in the apartment, which had eventually become home, but I’d lived through bad things before getting there, so I’d lived through bad things before coming here. Bliss never had, or at least, not nearly to the same extent. She had too much good to compare this to.

“Tell me something from before.”

“You know I won’t.”

“Not something personal. Just . . . something.”

“One of my neighbors had a weed garden on the roof,” I said after a moment. “When I moved there it was just a corner, but as time went by and no one reported it, it expanded until it covered half the roof. Some of the children from the lower floors used to play hide-and-seek in it. Eventually, though, someone tipped off the police, and he saw them coming, panicked, and set the whole damn crop on fire. We were all a little bit high for a week, and we had to wash everything we owned multiple times to get the smell out.”