Up close, it was easy to see that he’d inherited his father’s eyes, but most of him belonged to his mother. He had a slender build and long, elegant fingers. Musician’s hands, I thought, when I recalled what his father had said of him. It was still hard to guess his age. He could have been my age, maybe a little older. I wasn’t as good at that game as the Gardener.

His father pointed to the armchair under the lamp. “Sit down, please.” For himself, he chose a seat on the couch and tugged me down next to him, all while keeping my back from sight. I curled my legs beside me and leaned back against the well-padded cushions, my hands folded in my lap. His son was still on his feet, still staring at me. “Desmond, sit down.”

His legs fell out from under him and he collapsed into the recliner.

If I spilled horror stories to this shocked boy, could he get the police here faster than his father could kill me? Or would his father simply kill him to silence him? The trouble with sociopaths, really, is that you never know where they draw their boundaries.

I couldn’t quite decide if it was worth the risk, and in the end, what stopped me was the thought of all the other girls. All the air for the Garden came from a centralized system. All the Gardener had to do to take out the entire flock was put a pesticide or something into the air. After all, he had to keep all sorts of chemicals stocked for the care of the greenhouses.

“Maya, this is Desmond. He’s a junior this year at Washington College.”

Which would explain why he only walked with his parents on weekends.

“Desmond, this is Maya. She lives here in the inner garden.”

“Lives . . . lives here?”

“Lives here,” he affirmed. “As do others.” The Gardener sat forward on the edge of the couch, his hands clasped loosely between his knees. “Your brother and I rescue them from the streets and bring them back here for a better life. We feed them, clothe them, and take care of them.”

Very few of us were from the streets, and in no sense were we rescued from anything, but the rest of it could be true from a certain skewed perspective. The Gardener never seemed to think of himself as villainous, anyway.

“Your mother does not know about this, nor can she. The strain of caring for so many people would put too much work on her heart.” He sounded so earnest, so sincere. And I could actually see his son believing him. Relief worked over his face, chasing away the momentary flash of horror that his father had been keeping a harem for his own pleasure.

Stupid, stupid boy.

He’d learn better. The first time he heard a girl crying, the first time he saw someone’s wings, the first time the walls came up and showed all those girls in resin and glass, he’d know better. For now, he swallowed it all. By the time he learned better, would he be in too deep to do the right thing?

We sat together in that room for almost an hour as the Gardener explained his version of things, occasionally looking to me to nod and smile along. I did so, my stomach churning, but much like Bliss, I didn’t want to die yet. I didn’t quite have the hope that Johanna’s mother had espoused, but if I had a few years left, I wanted them, even like this. I’d had too many opportunities to give up, give in, and I’d kept going. If I hadn’t fallen to suicide, I wasn’t going to go meekly to my death.

Finally the Gardener checked his watch. “It’s almost two o’clock in the morning,” he sighed, “and you have class at nine. Come, I’ll walk you back to the house. And remember, not a word, not even to Avery unless you’re here. We’ll put in a code for you when I’m sure you can be trusted with it.”

I would have stood as well, but when I swung my feet to the floor, he made a subtle gesture that had me sinking back into the couch.

I guess I was the right kind of bitch after all.

He called us Butterflies, but really we were well-trained dogs.

I stayed on the couch exactly as he left me, not even getting up to wander around the rest of the suite. There wasn’t a window or another door, so there wasn’t a point. I’d seen it all already, of course, but this time there wasn’t the blur of pain and shock. This was something private for him, something even more so than the Garden. Even Butterflies didn’t belong here.

So why the fuck was I here? Especially without him being present?

He returned maybe half an hour later. “Turn around,” he ordered hoarsely, tugging at his clothing and dropping it into careless piles on the carpet. I obeyed before he could see my face, twisting to sit back on my ankles with open air behind me. He dropped to his knees, tracing every line on my back with trembling fingers and lips, and somehow I knew this was him coming apart from the stress of telling his son, the excitement that perhaps this younger son might share his interests in a gentler way than the elder. He fumbled with the hooks on my dress and when he couldn’t get them on the first or second try, he simply tore the fabric away from the fastenings, leaving me in shreds of black silk.

Yet if hope has flown away in a night, or in a day, or in none, is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

But then, by that point I’d been in the Garden for a year and a half, and even Poe was more a habit than a true distraction. I was more aware than I would have liked of what he was doing, of the sweat that splashed from his chest onto my spine, of his groans every time he pulled me back even closer against him. Too aware of all the ways he worked to pull responses from me, and all the ways my body betrayed me by obeying, because there was never enough fear from me or brutality from him to shut things off completely.

Even when it seemed like he was finished, he stayed where he was, and he blew little puffs of air against the outlines of the wings, and after a full circuit he did it again with kisses, soft as prayers, and then he did the whole thing over again, and I thought how fucking unfair it was that he made us butterflies, of all things.

Real butterflies could fly away, out of reach.

The Gardener’s Butterflies could only ever fall, and that but rarely.

She pulls the lip gloss from her pocket and reapplies it with shaking hands. Watching her, seeing the tattered shreds of dignity the gesture helps her wrap around herself, Victor makes a note to thank his daughter for her thoughtfulness. Such a simple thing, but more than he could have guessed.

“And that was meeting Desmond,” she says after a minute.

Eddison scowls at the stacks of photos and other papers. “How could he—”

“Those who want to believe something badly enough generally do,” she says simply. “He wanted his father to have a good, reasonable explanation, and when he was provided with one, he wanted to believe, so he did. For a while, he did.”

“You said you’d been there a year and a half at that point,” murmurs Victor. “You kept track?”

“Not at first. Then I got an unexpected present on my anniversary.”

“From Bliss?”

“From Avery.”

After that first time, when his father raked him over the coals for what he’d done to me and Giselle, Avery had only touched me twice, and only with his father’s specific consent and the threat that anything untoward that happened to me would also be happening to Avery. He didn’t slap me or choke me, didn’t bind me past tying my wrists together at the small of my back, but Avery knew other ways to make things painful.

After each of those two times with Avery, I spent most of the following week dehydrated, because if it was going to hurt to piss anyway, at least I was going to make sure it didn’t happen more often.

He still watched me all the time, though, much as Desmond probably looked at those hints of the inner garden until he found a way in. I was something that wasn’t supposed to be touched, therefore I was fascinating and desirable.