Page 73 of Her Creation

Then again.

Then a third time.

One more glance, and she would begin to leave. He felt the knowledge settle into him with a quiet, animal awareness. He would not see her again until evening…if she remembered his meal this time.

“I don’t know,” he said.

The answer was true enough. A thread of irritation tightened inside him, sharp and unwelcome. He didn’t want to think about his old life. Of course he remembered. How could one forget such horrors?

His thoughts threatened to stray, to drift toward the hunt he had planned for the centipede, toward the satisfaction of tracking something smaller and weaker through shadow and stone. He crushed the thought instantly. He would not allow even a fragment of her presence to be diluted by anything else. Not now. Not ever.

“Are you struggling to tap into your memories? If you are, I need to document it for further research,” she asked.

This time, her eyes moved not to the clock, but to her desk.

Better.

She was looking for her notebook.

To write about him.

Warmth unfurled slowly in his chest, spreading upward with unsettling calm. Not pleasure—something deeper. Something possessive.

“I don’t know,” he said again. “Things I know we’ve spoken about before no longer have a place in my mind. I remember them as if someone else told me. As if they belong to another man entirely.” His gaze sharpened, inward now. “If I try to reach further, I can feel them…but I don’t grasp them.”

She nodded, already retreating into observation, into reason.

He didn’t mind.

He didn’t care about his old memories anymore. All he cared about was her. He knew he could access all his memories if he wanted, but he didn’t want to. He wanted her in all his memories, and he knew already that she wasn’t in those. He would tell her whatever she wanted to hear as long as it kept her in the basement for longer.

The things that pressed at the edges of his mind—how to press a door against its hinges so it would not make a sound and give him away, how to snap a neck before his touch could even register, which streets to vanish down and how to reshape himself so no one remembered the face that passed them—those memories were not useful in this life, but they were there.

He did not want them to be. He did not want anything of the man he had been before her. There was nothing in those memories more beautiful than Victoria. Nothing more worthy of devotion. Nothing he would not erase, if it meant remaining here—watching her hands move, learning the rhythms of her breath, memorizing the moments she looked away.

“Why?” he rasped.

Her eyes snapped to him, wary of the emotion flooding his voice.

“Why do you turn away from me? Why do you not have a spark inside for me, when my insides burn for you?”

She cleared her throat and looked at the cold chamber with a heavy exhale.

“Why can I not enjoy the rest of this castle with you—the rest of this life with you as a man and not a beast?” He reached for her hand, but she pulled it away.

“Because you are not a man.” Her eyes flickered about, as if unable to remain on his.

“Whatever I am, I love you, and I know that you love me too. You deny it, but I feel it. I have always felt it. I know that you do, Victoria Frankenstein. I’ve known since before I took my first breath that you loved me. That love was built in my bones. It coaxed me to life, and now you deny me the one thing I need, the one thing that I cannot live without.”

“Enough,” she whispered as she looked down at her lap. Her hand on the table moved slightly toward his.

“I am your Adam, and despite what you say, you are my Eve!” He was losing control; his face had begun to shake as he tried to contain himself. “Why will you not love me back? I can’t take it. All I do is sit in this hole and wonder why I am not enough for you.”

She shook her head with glistening eyes.

“Victoria…” he pleaded.

“You do not love me. You are mad and broken. You don’t even know me,” she said with a soft laugh. She was trying to deflect, and they both knew it. The air was brimming with tension. She could only fight against her feelings for so long. He reached his hand out and covered hers. She inhaled but didn’t pull away.