Page 74 of Her Creation

“Mad and broken I may be, but that does not discount my love for you. I know you better than anyone—your life force flows through my veins.” He snapped his mouth closed when her small hand flipped and she pressed her palm to his, holding his hand back. “You are my god, my creator. Do you not love your God despite never even seeing him? Why is my love for you so hard to believe?”

She squeezed his hand back and looked up from her lap with glistening eyes as round and haunted as the moon.

“I brought charcoal and pages for you,” she said, glancing about as she rose from the table. “I know how bored and lonely you are down here and how awful I have been in neglecting your care. I’ve accidentally left them in the parlor. I will set them on the top step. Please feel free to take your own notes—or sketches—on any memories that come up,” she said as the last of her sentences turned clinical. She had pulled away completely. She was done.

He wasn’t prepared for her to leave so soon. He had ruined everything.

He stood a hair too quickly. The chair scraped back and toppled, striking the stone floor with a sharp clang that echoed far louder than it should have. “You are leaving,” he said at once. “Will you not bring the supplies back down yourself?”

He saw it immediately. The way her body went rigid, the way tension surged through her shoulders as if bracing for impact. Her sad, dark eyes—so deep they nearly swallowed the light—flicked instinctively to the door of the cold chamber.

“I—” Her voice caught. “No. I have other obligations and will not be back down tonight.” The words thinned as she spoke them, already retreating as she moved around the table toward the stairs.

Something in the set of her gaze told him, with sudden and terrible clarity, that he had miscalculated. That he had reached too far. He forced his face to soften, his posture to loosen; he smoothed his expression into something meant to resemble indifference—but the correction came too late.

She was already halfway up the stairs.

The trailing sweep of her dark red skirt vanished behind the stone wall, leaving only the echo of her steps. He folded inward, shoulders drawing tight as though the room itself had grown colder.

The door creaked open above and shut a fraction harder than usual.

He did not flinch. Instead, he dropped heavily into her empty chair. His mandible flared once before his face locked into perfect stillness, jaw clenched so tightly it ached. The laboratory settled back into silence, its familiar, cavernous quiet rushing in to fill the space she had left behind.

Everything was still again.

And inside him, something flattened. Went dull and lifeless.

Silent irritation stretched through his body as he replayed the interaction again and again. Every word spoken, every shift of her weight, every inflection of his voice. He searched the memory with surgical precision, isolating the exact moment where he had pushed too much, where restraint had failed him and he had pushed her away. He was crumbling. Her refusal of him was cracking him apart. Every time she refused him, obsession worsened and his need for her love grew more frantic and possessive until he wasn’t sure he would survive it. He was an ocean with no water, a tree with no branches, a bird with no wings; he was empty and not whole without her love.

His hand slid into his pocket and closed around the small wooden figure he carried there. He rolled it between his fingers slowly, methodically, the motion grounding him as he turned over each second of her presence.

His gaze flickered toward Дружочек’s web in the corner.

The hunt for the centipede could wait. It would wait for hours if it needed to. Nothing took precedence over this. Over understanding her. Over correcting his mistake.

He resisted the urge to pace the length of stone in front of the wall that separated him from the stairs—the path he wore thin every night she left him. Instead, his eyes settled on the chair he had knocked over.

With a slow breath, he reached down and gripped the leg. A low grunt escaped him as he snapped off the lower few inches of wood cleanly, the break precise and controlled. It had been difficult, earlier, not to rock on the chair’s uneven legs while speaking to her. He would correct that flaw now.

He crossed to the tray of tools and selected the bistoury—the one Victoria never used. The blade flashed as he flipped it across his knuckles on his way back to the table. The familiar feel of a blade in his hand soothed his agitated mind. He sat, withdrew the wooden figurine from his pocket, and set it carefully down before him. Then he kicked his chair back, stretched his long legs out, and braced his heels against the table’s edge.

The broken piece of chair leg fit easily into his palm. He drew the bistoury across the corner of the wood, slow and deliberate, pale shavings falling into his lap. The tension began to bleed from his body almost immediately, easing with each stroke as the image of Victoria’s face filled his mind.

He did not need to look at the other figurine—the one already carved in her likeness. Her pretty face haunted him. Every freckle, every wrinkle on her perfect face lived behind his eyes, relentless in their precision. He knew the moment she grew excited, the way her pupils flared when her gaze lingered on his stomach muscles—it was the reason he no longer wore a shirt. Inwardly, he begged and pleaded and yearned, painfully, obsessively, for her attention, for her gaze, for the smallest mercy of her noticing him the way he noticed her. He wanted her to mirror his want, even if only for a breath. One hundred and sixty-four eyelashes on her left eye. One hundred and seventy-six on the right. He had counted them because it was the only way to survive the wanting, the only way to keep from reaching for her when she was not his to touch.

He pressed the blade in deeper, shaping carefully, obsessively, as though precision might earn him closeness. He wanted to capture the way her face looked when she laughed—the exact softness at the corners of her mouth, the moment that ruined him every time. The sound of his creator’s voice filled his chest with something dangerously close to light, and he chased that feeling with the blade, desperate to carve it into permanence, desperate to make something that might stay when she would not.

“Moya prekrasnaya spasitelnitsa,” he murmured to the quiet room—my beautiful savior.

And he carved.

Chapter 21

March, 1803 Log entry

Recounting events 1773–1795 Location: Unknown

Another week passed, and as Victoria grew more distant, Innominatus struggled to keep himself in check, the effort wrecking his insides like a slow fever. The space between them had begun to feel deliberate, measured, like she was practicing a life without him. His body carried the strain of it constantly, a tightness beneath his near transparent, gossamer skin that never loosened or relaxed.