The Butterfly Garden (The Collector #1)(63)

If this is the twisted she’s admitting to, how much worse is the twisted she’s still hiding?

“How did things change after his finals?”




He was around more in the summer, except for an hour or so in the early afternoon when he walked with his parents in the outer greenhouse. If he came in the mornings, he stayed atop the cliff or in the library, respecting the privacy of my conversations with the other girls in the cave. Danelle had come to replace Lyonette as my balance in the more delicate of those conversations, just as she’d started taking the night shift with our new arrivals.

There wasn’t much to the night shift, given that they were in a drugged sleep, but still. I appreciated being able to get some space.

And despite the wings that spread across her cheeks and forehead, Danelle could be trusted as a sensible option. I’d grown used to her double set of Red-Spotted Purples, with their contrasts of deep, rich color and bright pattern breaks. I won’t say it suited her, any more than the ones on my back suited me, but she’d made them a part of her and learned from the experience. She and Marenka were the last to receive the wings on their faces; after that, they’d talked everyone else out of sucking up to that extent. There were some who came close, but they hadn’t crossed the line yet.

I took the earliest conversations and she traded with me once the new girl showed signs of waking. Danelle held back on actually meeting the new girls until they were more or less settled, just like the others with the wings on their faces did.

After the first session, I was actually in the room whenever the Gardener worked on the new girl’s tattoo. She hated needles, but if I read to her—and let her squeeze the ever-loving fuck out of my arm—she could lie still for it. It was by her request that I was there, rather than the Gardener’s, though I think he was pleased by it. As I read aloud from The Count of Monte Cristo and wondered if that counted as irony, I watched the brilliant ice blue of a Spring Azure spread across her porcelain skin, broken by occasional veins or fringes of silver-white and one narrow band of midnight blue on the tips of the upper wings.

Bliss brought an ice pack with the lunch trays to put on my now-perpetually bruised arm.

The Gardener didn’t touch me if Desmond was in the Garden, but his son’s interest in me roused a corresponding excitement in him. It was no secret among the girls that he liked me best—honestly, I think they were relieved—but he’d gone from coming to me two or three times a week to damn near every day.

He still went to the other girls, of course, but when he was with anyone else, he didn’t care if his younger son was in the Garden or not. And there was still Avery, but his fangs had been mostly pulled by the destruction of his playroom and the clear pride his father had in Desmond. With his younger brother as a strong example of how their father wanted us treated, it was hard for him to give in to the things he enjoyed.

I grew to hate lunch, because every single day, when Desmond went to share the meal and the early afternoon with his mother, the Gardener came to me with a need that made his hands shake. I started taking lunch in my room just so I wouldn’t have to suffer the indignity of him coming to the dining room and calling my name across conversations. Even though he knew Desmond hadn’t done any more than kiss me, just the thought that he could do more was enough to make the Gardener nearly mess his pants.

And dear fucking Christ, the possibility that he scoured the security footage hoping to see his son with me was enough to make my brain turn off completely.

At least those visits had a specific time limit, because he had to be up at the house by a quarter to two to meet his wife for their walk. While the family strolled along the square in the outer greenhouse, I spent the hour with the girl he rechristened Tereza. She was just shy of seventeen, the daughter of two litigators, and almost never spoke above a whisper. When she did, it was important, like her asking me to read to her while the Gardener inked her wings. She could also be drawn into conversation about music. She played piano, we learned, and wanted to be a professional pianist. She and Ravenna could talk for hours about ballet scores. She paid attention, noticed the undercurrents of any given situation, so she seemed to understand our precarious existence even before I showed her the display cases that first week.

For her sake, so she’d have a way to keep herself grounded, I asked the Gardener to give her a keyboard.

He installed an upright piano in one of the empty rooms, replacing the bed with a beautiful instrument and an entire wall of filing cabinets of sheet music. Except for meals, sleep, and putting up with her visits from the Gardener—numerous because she was new—she was in that room, playing the piano until her hands cramped.

Desmond met me in the hallway one afternoon, leaning against the Garden-side wall. His head was tilted to one side as he listened. “What happens if someone has a breakdown?” he asked quietly.

“In what way?”

He nodded in the direction of the doorway. “You can hear it in the music. She’s disintegrating. She’s getting choppy, changing the tempos, pounding at the keys . . . maybe she doesn’t talk, but that doesn’t mean she’s adapting.”

You never really forgot that he was a psych major.

“She’ll either break or she won’t. There’s a limit to what I can do to prevent that.”

“But what happens if she does?”

“You know what happens. You just don’t want to admit it.” He’d never asked why Simone hadn’t returned. Tereza’s arrival was greeted with consternation followed by an obvious, concerted effort to not think about it too deeply.