The Butterfly Garden (The Collector #1)(44)

Almost like a butterfly.

Victor shudders, but he reaches across the table to gently pull her arms down. He keeps his hands over hers, careful not to put too much pressure on the burns, and waits for her to find the words. After several minutes of silence, she turns her hands under his until she can lightly clasp his wrists, and he returns the grip.

“Desmond didn’t know the true nature of the Garden for a while,” she tells his hands. “Maybe a long while, by the way of things. His father made sure of that.”




The Gardener didn’t give an access code to his younger son right away. For the first couple of weeks, he escorted Desmond through the Garden, controlling what he saw and who he spoke to. Bliss, for example, was one of the later introductions, after the Gardener had a chance for several long conversations with her about what was and was not appropriate to show or tell his son.

Desmond wasn’t shown the criers or the suck-ups, and those of us he was allowed to interact with received a dress with a back.

Bliss hurt herself laughing when she found hers neatly folded outside her room. Lorraine was the one to deliver them, and for a moment she seemed so satisfied. She didn’t know that Desmond had discovered the Garden, didn’t know that this was temporary.

She thought we were sharing her punishment, her exile.

The dresses were simple but elegant, like everything else in our wardrobes. He knew all our sizes and had probably sent Lorraine out to get them—regardless of her panic attacks at the thought of leaving the safety of the Garden—but we had them so fast there couldn’t have been another way. Still black, of course. Mine was almost a shirt, sleeveless and collared with buttons to the waist where it disappeared under a wide black stretch belt and became a swishy skirt to my knees. I secretly loved it.

Our wings were hidden, but much to the Gardener’s delight, I still had some wings showing. The black tribal butterfly I’d gotten with the girls in the apartment was still stark and fresh on my right ankle. As long as our wings were hidden anyway, we were even allowed to wear our hair however we liked. Bliss left hers down in a riot of curls that got tangled in everything, while I wore mine back in a simple braid. It felt remarkably self-indulgent.

The Desmond of the first two weeks was his father’s shadow, polite and respectful, mindful of his questions so as not to strain his father’s patience. We were all carefully coached in our responses. If he asked anything about our lives before, we were to cast our eyes down and murmur something about painful things being best forgotten. It wasn’t until the fifth or sixth time he heard this that something struck him as odd.

That it struck him at all made me revise my initial estimation of his intelligence.

Only a little, though. After all, he was still buying into his father’s story.

He came in the evenings for a few hours, not every evening but most of them. After classes were done, and if he didn’t have too much homework. During that introduction, Avery was banned from the Garden completely and the Gardener didn’t touch any of us while Desmond was there. He touched us later, of course, or before, but not where his son could see. The walls stayed down over the girls in glass, not just from the outside but the sidewalls in the rooms as well. We went weeks without seeing any dead girls, and though there was guilt at wanting to forget or ignore them, it was glorious to not have that constant reminder of our impending mortality and immortality.

Desmond’s introduction was like the way Lyonette brought girls into the Garden. First you make them feel better. Then you show them, tell them, a piece at a time. You don’t bring the markings up right away, you don’t bring up the sex right away. You acclimate them to one aspect and then, when they didn’t balk at that anymore, you introduced another.

One of the many reasons my introductions weren’t nearly as graceful as Lyonette’s.

I mostly kept to my routine whether Desmond was in the Garden or not. I spent the mornings talking to girls in the cave, ran my laps before lunch, and spent my afternoons either reading up on the cliff or playing games down on the ground. Wherever he and his father started in the afternoon, they usually ended conversing with me up on the cliff. Bliss was sometimes there for that.

More often, she saw them coming up the path and climbed down the face to avoid them.

As much as he liked Bliss’s temper and spirit, the Gardener was all right with that. It meant less of a risk that his son would discover the truth before his father had adequately prepared him.

That last evening of direct supervision, the Gardener started the conversation with me and Desmond, then left it in our hands as he made his way down the path and into the hallways. The display cases had been covered, after all, and I think he missed them. But the conversation petered out not long after he left, and when Desmond couldn’t find a way to continue it—because it was certainly not my responsibility to do so—I turned back to my book.




“Antigone?” Eddison asks.

“Lysistrata,” she corrects with a small smile. “I needed something a little lighter.”

“Can’t say I’ve read that one.”

“Doesn’t surprise me; it’s the kind of thing you appreciate more when you’ve got a steady woman in your life.”

“How—”

“Really? The way you snap and snarl, the graceless way you interact, and you want to try to tell me you have a wife or girlfriend?”