The Butterfly Garden (The Collector #1)(61)

I closed the book and sat up as Desmond rosined his bow and stretched his fingers. It was fascinating to watch all the little rituals that went into warming up, but when he finally set the bow to the strings to play for real, I realized why his father called him a musician.

It was more than just playing. Though I was no expert, he seemed technically skilled, but he could make the notes weep or laugh across the strings. He infused each piece with emotion. Down in the pond, the trio stopped splashing and just floated so they could hear. I closed my eyes and let the music wrap around me.

Sometimes when Kathryn and I were sitting out on the fire escape or the roof at three or four in the morning after work, a guy from the next building over would come out onto his roof to practice the violin. He’d fumble his fingering and his bow work wasn’t always to tempo, but sitting in the semi-darkness that was as close to true night as the city could get, it was like the violin was his lover. He never seemed to realize he had an audience, everything in him focused on the instrument and the sounds they made between them. It was pretty much the only thing Kathryn and I routinely did together. Even if we had the night off, we made sure we were awake to go outside and listen to that boy play.

Desmond was better.

He segued smoothly from song to song, and when he eventually let the bow swing down to his side, the last notes hovered expectantly.

“I don’t think you’ll have a problem passing your proficiency,” I whispered.

“Thanks.” He checked over the instrument, cradling it gently, and when he was satisfied all was as it should be, he put it away in the velvet-lined case. “When I was younger, I used to dream about being a professional musician.”

“Used to?”

“My father took me to New York and arranged for me to spend a few days with a professional violinist, to see what it would be like. I hated it. It all felt . . . well, soulless, I guess. Like if I actually did that for a living, I’d grow to hate music. When I told my father I’d rather do something that still let me love music, he said he was proud of me.”

“He seems frequently proud of you,” I murmured, and he gave me a queer look.

“He talks to you about me?”

“A little.”

“Um . . .”

“You’re his son. He loves you.”

“Yes, but . . .”

“But?”

“But it doesn’t strike you a little weird that he talks about his son to his captives?”

I decided not to tell him the entirety of what his father had said about him. “More weird than him having captives at all?”

“True.”

And here he was, finally able to call us captives, and unable to try anything to change that fact.

The stream that connected the waterfall and the pond was barely three feet deep, but Eleni managed to swim all the way up to the rocks before standing. “Maya, we’re going in now. Do you need anything?”

“Not that I can think of, thanks.”

Desmond shook his head. “Sometimes you seem like a house mother.”

“What a twisted little sorority.”

“Do you hate me?”

“What, for being your father’s son?”

“I’m starting to realize just how much,” he said quietly. He sat down next to me on the rock, draping his arms over his bent knees. “One of the girls in my Freud and Jung class has a butterfly tattoo on her shoulder. It’s ugly and badly drawn, one of those butterfly-type fairies with a face that looks like a melted doll, but she was wearing a tube dress and I saw it and all I could think of for the rest of class was your wings and how beautiful they are. They’re horrible, but they’re beautiful, too.”

“That’s pretty much how we look at it,” I replied neutrally, curious to see where he was going with this.

“I doubt the sight of your wings gets you off.”

Oh.

Yes, definitely his father’s son.

But unlike his father, ashamed of that fact.

“In one of my other classes, we were talking about hoarders and I thought of my father’s story about his father’s butterfly collection, but then of course I thought about my father’s version of that, and suddenly I was thinking about you again and how you can be more dignified in nothing but ink and scars than most people can manage fully clothed. For weeks now, I’ve been having these . . . these dreams, and I wake up sweating and hard and I don’t know if they’re nightmares or not.” He shoved his hair back from his face, hooking that hand behind his neck. “I don’t want to believe I’m the type of person who could do this.”

“Maybe you’re not.” I shrugged at his sideways look. “Going along with it is complicated, but it doesn’t mean you’d ever do it yourself.”

“It’s still going along with it.”

“Right and wrong doesn’t mean there’s an easy choice.”

“Why don’t you hate me?”

I’d been thinking about that a lot the past few weeks, and still wasn’t sure I’d found the answer. “Maybe you’re as trapped here as we are,” I said slowly. Except I did hate him a bit, as much as but in a different way than his father and brother.

He turned that over for a while. In a flash of lightning, I tried to make out the emotions racing across his face. He had his father’s eyes, but he was much more self-aware than the Gardener would ever be. The Gardener clung to his delusions. Desmond eventually confronted the hard truths, or at least the beginnings of them. He didn’t know what to do with them, but he didn’t try to make them less than they were.