The Butterfly Garden (The Collector, #1)

by Dot Hutchison

The Gardener stood there, leaning back against the garden-side wall as he studied the girl in the glass. Her head was bowed nearly against her chest, small stirrups under her armpits keeping her upright. Clear resin filled the rest of the space, the gown caught in the liquid like she was underwater. We could see almost every detail of the bright wings on her back, nearly pressed against the glass. Everything that was Lyonette—her fierce smile, her eyes—was hidden away, so the wings were the only focus.

Jesus

Alerted by the screams, the other girls had come running from their rooms or elsewhere in the Garden, and together all twenty-two of us stood in dry-eyed silence as our captor wept for the death of the one girl he hadn’t killed.

My eyes closed, my hands curling into fists at my sides, as his fingers moved lower into the bottom wings of roses and purples. He didn’t follow the lines down, but in, toward my spine, until he could run a thumb up the entire length of black ink that ran down the center of my back. “That’s gorgeous,” he whispered. “Why a butterfly?” “Ask your father.” Suddenly his hand was trembling against my skin, against the mark of his father’s ownership. He didn’t move it away, though. “He did this to you?” I didn’t answer.

“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.

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.

Intimacy with Des wasn’t real, any more than with his father, but he didn’t realize that.

I’d never said it, but he thought I loved him too. He thought this was happiness, that this was somehow healthy and stable, the kind of thing you build a life around. He either missed or glossed over my frequent reminders that caged things have shorter lives.