The Butterfly Garden (The Collector #1)(57)

A hand touched my shoulder and I whirled around, slapping it away as I fell back from the uncoordinated movement.

Desmond.

I rolled onto my hands and knees, scrambled to my feet and through the waterfall into the cave, but he followed me, catching me when I tripped on a dip in the floor and fell again. He lowered me gently to the ground and knelt in front of me. He studied my face as I struggled for air. “I know you don’t have any reason to trust me, but do it anyway, just for a minute.”

His hand came toward my face and I slapped it away again. Shaking his head, he spun me quickly and pinned my arms to my side with one arm, and his other hand covered my nose and mouth. “Breathe in,” he whispered against my ear. “Doesn’t matter if it’s a full breath, you’ll still get some air. Breathe in.”

I tried, and maybe he was right, maybe there was some, but I couldn’t feel it. All I could feel was his hand between me and what I needed to live.

“All I’m doing is forcing you to breathe in a high concentration of carbon dioxide,” he continued calmly. “Breathe in. The carbon dioxide attaches to your bloodstream in place of oxygen and slows your body’s responses. Breathe in. When your body gets to a critical point, when you’re on the verge of passing out, your body’s natural responses push past the psychological factors. Breathe in.”

Each time he gave me the instruction, I tried to obey, I truly did, but there just wasn’t any air. I stopped struggling, my limbs leaden and heavy, and sagged against his chest. His hand stayed sealed over my nose and mouth. With all of me so heavy, I could barely feel the weight in my chest, and slowly, as he periodically repeated his instruction, air trickled in. My head swam with sudden light-headedness, but I was breathing. He moved his hand to my shoulder, rubbing it up and down my arm as he continued to whisper, “Breathe in.”

Eventually it became a habit again, something I didn’t have to think about, and I closed my eyes against a blinding sense of shame. I’d never had a panic attack before, though I’d seen them plenty in others, and my own inability to do anything sensible was mortifying. More so, having someone else witness it. When I felt fifty percent sure I wouldn’t fall flat on my face if I stood, I tried to push to my feet.

Desmond’s arms tightened around me. Not painfully, but enough that I wasn’t going anywhere without a fight. “I’m a coward,” he said quietly. “And worse than that, I think I may be my father’s son; but if I can help you this way, please let me.”

If the little match girl had someone curled around her like this, someone warm and solid against her back, his own body wrapped around her, would she have survived?

Or would they have both frozen?

Shifting until his back hit the wall, Desmond gently tugged at me until I was almost sideways between his legs, my cheek pressed against his upper chest so I could nearly hear his heart beat. I timed my still-shaky breaths to that, feeling how it jumped and skipped whenever I moved. He didn’t have his brother’s stocky frame, the obvious threat of muscle, nor his father’s wiry strength. He was slender like a runner, all lean angles and long planes. He hummed softly, something I didn’t recognize and couldn’t properly hear pressed against his chest, but his fingers brushed against my skin in the shape of piano chords.

We sat in the damp, dark cave in clothing soaked from the waterfall, clinging to each other like children against a nightmare, but when I fell asleep, the nightmare would still be there. When I woke up, the nightmare would still be there. Every day for three and a half years, the nightmare would always, always be there, and there was no comfort against that.

For a few hours, though, I could pretend.

I could be the little match girl and strike my illusions against the wall, lost in the warmth until the glow faded and left me back in the Garden.




“They weren’t just fellow captives, were they?” Victor asks after giving her a moment to collect herself. “They were your friends.”

“Some of them are friends. All of them are family. I guess that’s just what happens.”




Sometimes it was hard to make yourself get to know other people. It would just hurt more when they died, or hurt them when you died. Sometimes it was hard to believe it was worth that pain. At the heart of the Garden, though, was loneliness and the ever-present threat of shattering, and connecting with the others seemed the safer of two evils. Not the lesser, necessarily, but the safer.

So I knew that Nazira was even more worried about forgetting than Bliss. She was an artist, and she filled sketchbook after sketchbook with her family and friends. She drew outfits she’d loved, her home and school, the little swing set in the city park where she’d gotten her first kiss. She drew them over and over, and panicked if the details changed or got fuzzy.

There was Zara the Bitch, and when Bliss names you that, you know you’re an unholy terror. Bliss was generally scathing and intolerant of bullshit; Zara’s default setting was mean. I appreciated that she didn’t buy into the illusion, but she made things hell for those who needed to cling to it. Like Nazira, who believed that as long as she didn’t forget anything from before, she’d see it all again. Not a week went by that I didn’t break up a fight between them, usually by dragging Zara to the stream and shoving her in until she cooled off. She wasn’t a friend, but in quiet moments, I liked her. She loved books like I did.