The Butterfly Garden (The Collector #1)(60)

But my wings couldn’t move and I couldn’t fly, and I couldn’t even cry.

All that was left to me was the terror and the agony and the sorrow.




Victor leaves the room without a word.

A moment later, Yvonne steps into the hall from the observation room, handing him two bottles of water. “Ramirez called with an update,” she reports. “The girls in more delicate condition are stabilizing. They still want to talk to Maya before answering too many questions. Senator Kingsley is starting to lean on Ramirez to get to Maya.”

“Shit.” He scrubs at his cheek. “Can Ramirez keep her leashed in the hospital?”

“For a little while. She’s negotiating between the senator and her daughter. She figures she can get a few hours out of that with everything else going on.”

“All right, thanks. Let Eddison know when he gets back?”

“Will do.”

Politicians are like child services, he thinks. Ultimately useful, but a pain in the ass all the way there.

He returns to the interrogation room and hands Inara one of the bottles.

She accepts it with a nod, unscrewing the cap with her teeth rather than her tender hands. Half the bottle disappears before she puts it down, her eyes closed. One finger traces patterns on the metal surface of the table as she gathers herself for the next question.

He watches the motion, his gut clenching when he realizes that what he thought were nonsense symbols prove to be butterfly wings, traced again and again into the metal like a reminder of what brought her here. “I’m running out of time to protect you,” he says finally.

She just looks at him.

“Powerful people want to know what happened. They’re not going to have my patience with you, Inara, and I have been very patient.”

“I know.”

“You need to stop dancing around this. Tell me what I need to know.”




For a while, the Gardener just had to continue being baffled by his younger son. Desmond came to the Garden regularly, but he didn’t touch anyone past a hand to help them up.

And he brought his textbooks.

During the days, I stayed with the newest arrival, an exquisite creature of Japanese descent. During the nights, Danelle stayed with the sleeping girl and I sat up on the cliff, clinging to the illusion of space. Desmond frequently joined me there, and the first few times we sat in silence, each of us lost to our own reading. It had been a long time since I could sit with a male and not feel actively threatened. Not safe, precisely, but not threatened. We talked about his studies, sometimes. Never about the Garden. Never his father.

I hated him, I think, for refusing to put the pieces together, but I didn’t show it. The Gardener was never going to let us go, and Avery was too dangerous to try to influence. I wasn’t sure Desmond was hope, but he was the closest thing to it that I could see.

I wanted to live, and I wanted the other girls to live, and for the first time, I wanted that myth of the escaped Butterfly to be true. I wanted to believe I could get out without ending up in glass or the riverbank.

Then one night Desmond brought his violin.

The Gardener had told me his son was a musician, and I’d seen the way his fingers silently played chords against books, against rocks or knees or any available surface when he was thinking. It was like he translated his thoughts into music so they could make sense.

I was lying stomach-down on the rock with my book and an apple in front of me, keeping an eye on three of the girls down in the main Garden. They were neck deep in our small pond, splashing at each other as best they could, and I knew the sensors had to have alerted the Gardener that someone was in the water, but all they had to do was play long enough for him to get comfortable and move on to something else. He wasn’t present in the Garden that night—he’d mentioned something about a charity function with his wife when I came to escort the new girl back to her room after the first tattoo session—but I didn’t doubt he had a way to watch us if he wanted to. Eleni and Isra had been there three and four years respectively, generally past the point of foolishness, but Adara had arrived only two months or so before me. She mostly held up well, but every now and then she sank into severe bouts of depression that were nearly crippling. They were clinically based, and without her meds I was surprised they weren’t more frequent, but we tried to make sure she wasn’t left alone during these episodes. She was mostly through the latest of them, but her mood still teetered.

Desmond walked up the path, his case in hand, and stopped beside the rock. “Hi.”

“Hello,” I replied.

Normal was a variable thing in the Garden.

I eyed the case in his hand. Would asking him to play for me flatter his ego? Or would it make him feel like I owed him a favor? I was skilled at reading the Gardener and Avery; Desmond was more difficult. Unlike his father and brother, he didn’t know what he wanted.

I was good at escaping people, not manipulating them. This was new ground.

“Play for me?” I asked eventually.

“You wouldn’t mind? I have a proficiency tomorrow, and didn’t want to wake up Mother. I was going to practice outside, but, uh . . .” He pointed up.

I didn’t look. I could hear the rain against the glass. I missed the feeling of rain.

There was nearly always music playing in the apartment. Kathryn liked classical, but Whitney liked Swedish rap, and Noémie liked bluegrass, whereas Amber liked country, and in the end we had the most eclectic listening experience imaginable. Here some of the girls had radios or players in their rooms but for most of us, music was a rare thing anymore.