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“Why do you want to kill Wolrath?” My hands are shaking, and I think about my phone, tucked into my purse down by my feet. I need to text Callie, my mom, Abi, Chloe—anyone. This is dangerous. I’ve been so fucking stupid, letting myself trust Victor.

“Because of Mary,” he says.

Suddenly, I don’t care about my phone. I jerk my gaze back up to him, my heart racing. He’s said that name before. He called me that name before, when we were fighting in the cabin.

“Who’s Mary?” I ask.

The car slows, the engine groaning, as he turns off the road and pulls into some lookout point, an overhang that juts out into a steep drop-off. I snatch up my purse, reach inside, curl my hand not around my phone but around my knife. If Victor notices⁠—

I’m sure he’s noticed

—He doesn’t say anything, just pulls the car up to the low metal fence, the only barrier between us and oblivion. He shoves the gear into park but doesn’t cut the engine, just sits there with his hand on the wheel, his hair hanging in his eyes as he looks at the view.

And it is a spectacular view. I can’t deny it. We’re facing west, and the sun is a molten orange globe sinking into the waves of aspen and towering Douglas firs, turning them golden. The sky is on fire. Everything is on fire.

“Mary was my wife,” Victor says.

My whole body clenches up, and somehow this betrayal is worse than the idea that he’d kill me. But then it registers. Was.

“We married in 1901,” he continues. “She was human.”

I keep my hand wrapped around the knife, although some part of me knows, instinctually, that I’m not going to be using it. Not here.

“She didn’t know,” he adds, and this is the first time he looks over at me, and his eyes look golden, too. “About me. What I am. I kept it from her. Killed just enough to keep the madness from overtaking me. It was easier in those days.”

“Killing?” I say.

“Getting away with it. The world was more violent, especially out here.” He keeps looking at me, and his eyes nearly swallow me whole. “I didn’t kill her. I know that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I wasn’t, actually,” I say softly. “You said you didn’t stop killing.”

Victor smiles a little. “And you know I won’t kill someone I care for. Even a human.”

His eyes linger on me a little too long, and I jerk my eyes back to the sunset. “What does this have to do with Nicholas Wolrath?” What does this have to do with you calling me Mary?

“Mary died of consumption,” Victor says. “Or TB, I guess you call it now.”

“Oh.”

“It was a terrible death.” His voice sounds strange. Strangled, almost. “Not just because of the consumption, though. There was a sanatorium she went to, here in Colorado.” A darkness flickers across his features. “Wolrath Sanatorium.”

My breath catches, and I feel my fingers slide away from the knife.

“Albert Wolrath was the head physician. He told us he had some special cure, that he’d healed people before. I was desperate. So was she.” Victor’s words come out faster and faster, and all I can do is listen. “I spent all our money on her stay there. Sold our house, our furniture, all of it. Got a room in the town nearby so I could visit her every day.”

Victor stops, and just for a second, I think I feel it: the hot, terrifying surge of his rage, even though his face is blank, his body still.

I blink in surprise. That’s never happened to me before.

“But then they started encouraging me not to see her. I’d get in once a week, maybe. And I knew it was because she wasn’t getting better. Every time I’d visit, she looked worse. Like she was already dead. I found out years later that they were having her inhale turpentine and tar, that they were poisoning her when she was already dying.” His voice trembles a little, and when he speaks again, the words come out ragged. “Part of me knew I should have killed her myself,” he whispers. “I should have ended her suffering.”

Pity surges through me. I think of this woman, this Mary. A hundred years ago, she had been in my place. Well, sort of. But she had loved him.

You don’t love Victor.

The thought feels sharp and cruel and also wrong. I put a hand on Victor’s forearm, and when he looks over at me, his eyes are glassy with tears.

“What happened?” I ask, still touching him.