The Butterfly Garden (The Collector #1)(67)

I shook my head. “I can’t think like that. Not when I don’t have any chance to be that person again.”

His face fell, but honestly, what did he expect? Then he got down on one knee, holding both my hands, and smiled up at me. “I love you, Maya, and I swear, I will never hurt you.”

I believed part of that.

I didn’t want to feel guilty for it.

But I did, so I perched on his knee and kissed him, and he got so involved with kissing me back that he overbalanced and we both fell onto the damp stone. He laughed and kept kissing me and kissing me and I knew I could never believe the rest of it. Desmond wasn’t good, no matter how much he wanted to be, and better than his family just wasn’t enough. Every day he helped keep us here, he hurt me.




“I didn’t recite Poe that time, in case you were wondering.”

“No, for that I’m sure you were paying full attention,” Victor agrees dryly. “So, were you serious?”

“What, me and Des?”

“Well, yes, but more specifically, what you said about your mother.”

“Actually, yes.”

He ponders that for a moment, tries to make sense of it.

He fails.

“Still want to find out who I am and where I came from?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He sighs and shakes his head. “Because I can’t put a fake person on the stand.”

“I’m not a fake person; I’m carefully and genuinely handcrafted.”

He shouldn’t laugh. He really shouldn’t laugh but he does and then he can’t stop, and he’s leaning against the table trying to at least muffle the sound. When he finally looks up, she’s smiling at him, a real one this time, and he answers it gratefully.

“The real world intrudes, doesn’t it?” she asks gently, and his laughter fades.

“Keeping me honest?”

“It hurts you to ask, and it hurts you to listen, even when so much of it you’ve heard before. I like you, Special Agent Victor Hanoverian. Your girls are lucky to have you. The story’s almost over anyway. Then it can’t hurt for a little while.”




The end of the summer brought a shift in the Garden. Desmond had spent so much time with us he’d become a fixture, and even though I was the only one he touched, I wasn’t the only one who got to know him. Tereza talked to him more than she talked to me, because music crossed the boundaries of our cage and made her forget, even if just for a while. Even Bliss seemed to like Desmond, though I wouldn’t stake a wager on how much of that was for my sake.

Gradually, the girls felt comfortable with him in a way they never would with his father and brother, because he was never going to ask anything of them. Most of them had given up hope of ever being rescued, so there wasn’t even much bitterness as to why he didn’t report anything.

And the Gardener was over the moon.

The very first time we talked about Des, he’d said “his mother’s very proud of him.” I had thought that meant that he wasn’t, but I knew better now. He was always proud of Desmond, but when faced with a girl who knew only Avery, he had to acknowledge the son who openly shared the same fascination with keeping an unwilling harem. Now that Desmond was part of the Garden, his father’s happiness was complete. Tereza’s breakdown was the only one that summer. There were no accidents, no twenty-first birthdays, nothing to force us to remember that we couldn’t have just a little bit of fun.

Well, except for the Gardener and Avery still raping at will. That put a damper on things.

But the Gardener shifted how he treated me. After Desmond and I had sex, the Gardener didn’t touch me that way anymore. He treated me like a . . . well, like a housemother, I guess. Or a daughter. I wasn’t like Lorraine, I wasn’t being exiled from his affection, but somehow he decided that I was Desmond’s now. With Avery he shared; with Desmond, he gave.

Fucked up, no?

But just for a while, I was willing to accept that without question. If I was going to have any hope of moving Desmond, it couldn’t just be infatuation. I needed him to truly love me, to be willing to fight for me, and that wasn’t going to happen if he was still sharing me with his father and brother.

The Gardener even disabled the camera in my room because Des asked him to, said it made him self-conscious to think that his father was watching him have sex, and couldn’t he be trusted not to hurt me, when he loved me so dearly?

Okay, I’m sure the conversation was a bit more graceful and manly than that, but Bliss had the girls in stitches with her version of it.

Desmond was still his father’s son, though. Whenever I tried to walk him to the door, he’d politely but firmly send me away so I couldn’t see him put in his code. “It would destroy my mother,” he said when I finally mentioned it. Taking direct action against his father would be complicated, I got that, but why not give us the chance to rescue ourselves? “My family’s name, our reputation, our company . . . I can’t be the one to destroy that.”

Because a name means more than a life. Than all our lives.

The weekend before the fall semester started, we had a concert in the Garden. Desmond brought in better speakers and set them up on the cliff, and just for the evening, the Gardener gave us all bright colors and treats, and fuck, it was pathetic how happy we were that evening. We were still captives, we still had death sitting on our shoulders and counting down to our twenty-first birthdays, but that night was magical anyway. Everyone laughed and danced and sang, no matter how badly, and the Gardener and Desmond danced with us.