The Butterfly Garden (The Collector #1)(88)

Victor looks at Inara. “Isn’t that what Desmond was doing? Protecting his family? You didn’t think very well of him for it.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Isn’t it?”

“You know it isn’t,” she says dryly. “Sophia was protecting her children. Innocent children who don’t deserve to suffer for what happened. Desmond was protecting criminals. Murderers.”

“How did you escape?” asks Eddison.

“I was going to have to take a pregnancy test,” Sophia replies. “I’d been gaining weight, and I was sick sometimes after lunch. Lor—our nurse brought the test to me, but got called away to deal with an injury before she could watch me take it. I just panicked. I ran around looking for any way out I might have missed in the past two and a half years. And I saw Avery.”

“Avery was already in the Garden.”

“He’d discovered it just a few weeks before. His father gave him a code but he had trouble remembering it. He was very slow when he put it in. That day I hid in the honeysuckle and watched him fumble through it. He even said the numbers while he pushed the buttons. I waited for a bit, then punched it in myself. I’d almost forgotten that doors could open normally.”

Victor rubs at his cheek. “Did you tell any of the others?”

She starts to bristle, but then her shoulders slump. “I guess I can see why that’s a question,” she admits. “After all, by not going to the police, I left them there to die, didn’t I? But I did try.” She meets his eyes firmly. “I swear to you, I did try. They were just too scared to go. I was too scared to stay.”

“Scared?”

“What happens if you only almost escape?” asks Inara, but it feels more like a reminder than a question.

“It had been less than a month since a girl named Emiline stayed out during maintenance,” Sophia says. “She tried to tell the gardeners what was going on, but the Gardener must have smoothed it over somehow. The next time we saw her, she was in glass. Escape is a hard thing to attempt when you see it punished like that. But you blame me for leaving them behind.”

“No.” Victor shakes his head. “You gave them the chance. You can’t save someone against her will.”

“Speaking of which, Lorraine is here.”

Sophia turns to Inara with dismay. “Oh no. Still?”

Inara nods.

“That poor woman,” she murmurs. Inara gives her a sideways look but says nothing. “I was on the street with other whores longer than I was in the Garden, but I’ve never seen a woman so thoroughly broken as Lorraine. He loved her and then he didn’t and it was never any fault of hers. Hate her if you have to, but I just feel sorry for her. More than the rest of us, maybe, she never had a chance.”

“She’s never going to be in glass now.”

“She was never going to be in glass back when I knew her. Does it change anything?”

“Inara?” They all turn to look at Eddison; as far as Victor can remember, it’s the first time Eddison has called the girl by name. “Did you get kidnapped on purpose? Is that what you’ve been hiding?”

“On purpose?” gasps Sophia, shoving off the bed.

“No, I—”

“You did this on purpose?”

“No! I—”

Victor tunes out Sophia’s rather impressive lecture, turning sideways to look at his partner. “How did you get from complicit to getting caught on purpose?” he asks, mind racing. If Eddison is right, this could change everything. There’d be no saving her from the senator, or the courts. To go to such lengths without going to the police? To be deliberate in the middle of such dangers is one thing, but to choose to go there? To knowingly endanger herself and, perhaps, those other girls?

“If she wasn’t hiding that she was part of it, what was she hiding?”

“I was hiding Sophia!” snaps Inara, grabbing her friend’s arm and tugging sharply. With a startled “oomph,” Sophia falls back onto the bed. “On purpose, really, do I look that stupid?”

“Do you want me to answer that?” Eddison asks with a grin.

She glowers at him. “I was hiding Sophia,” Inara repeats more softly. She glances at Victor. “I appreciate that my word may not be worth particularly much, but I swear to you, that’s the truth. I knew if Sophia’s name came up, so would the truth about Jillie, and I couldn’t . . . Sophia worked so hard to get her life back together. I couldn’t be the thing that turned that upside down. I couldn’t be the reason she lost her girls. I needed time to think.”

“About what?” Victor asks.

She shrugs. “I needed to see if there was a way to avoid tying her back to the Garden. Hiding the book would have been the easiest, but that . . . well. So then I thought, if I could just delay long enough, I could call her, warn her, but she . . .”

“You didn’t expect her to come.”

Inara shakes her head.

“But you knew about the Garden,” Eddison insists.

“Not that it was them.” Inara cradles the sad little dragon in both hands. “When her memories of the Garden started bleeding, it was at the sight of the costume wings, nothing more. None of us who worked that night said what the clients looked like; why would we? And they were fundraising for Madame Butterfly, the theme made sense. I didn’t know.”