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Victor stares at me. I think I feel it again: his suffering and his rage and his sorrow. Some trace of Hunter senses locked in my DNA, emerging for the first time.

“Dr. Wolrath said they were going to try an experimental surgery.”

I slide my hand away from him, but he doesn’t look away from me.

“A lung collapse. He fucking sliced her lung open and said it would save her.” His body tenses. His eyes flash. “After the surgery, they wouldn’t let me see her. Even called their security to drag me away.”

I hold my breath.

“Of course, I broke in later that night,” Victor continues. “She was so close to death I could taste it on the air. They were just going to let her die without even giving me a chance to say goodbye.”

“Jesus,” I whisper.

“I should have killed him then,” Victor says in that flat, terrifying voice. “Wolrath. But all I could think about was saving her.” He looks away, back out at the sunset. “I gathered her up and carried her out the window. She weighed nothing.” He wipes at his eyes, his tears evident in the soft golden light. “I had a horse back then, and I managed to take us up the mountain, away from the sanatorium, to a little creek in the woods. She died the next morning, in my arms.”

Silence. I don’t know what to say, don’t know what to think. Victor runs the back of his hand over his eyes, and part of me wants to kiss him, and part of me wants to run away, because I know he won’t ever love me like that.

Do you want him to?

“I buried her there,” Victor says. “I swore I would never leave her alone for too long. And I haven’t. Even when I leave, I always go back to that mountain.”

That mountain. The mountain where he trapped me, where he almost killed me. She was out there too, somewhere in the dirt.

“I did try to kill Wolrath a few days later.” Victor’s voice has gone steely again. “But I was sloppy, and stupid, and I got myself shot in the face. It took ten fucking years to revive. By the time I came back, Albert Wolrath had died. Heart attack.”

Silence falls around the car, and I know I need to say something. “I’m sorry,” I whisper, even though it feels stupid. Not enough at all.

Victor laughs, sharp and cruel. “So was I,” he says. “I never got over it. I tried, a million different ways, but the only thing that came close was⁠—”

He stops suddenly, and I feel a kind of sick dread in the pit of my stomach.

Mary, he’d called me.

“Killing woman,” I say numbly. “That’s what helped.”

Victor doesn’t look at me. The car feels suddenly too small, too constricting. The sunset is too bright.

“Marys,” he whispers, and all that too-bright golden sunlight makes the tears on his cheeks glitter. “I killed Marys.”

“You killed women,” I snap, startled by the vehemence in my voice. “They had nothing to do with her.”

“They reminded me of her,” he says darkly. “You remind me of her.”

It’s like being slapped. A sudden, angry heat blooms in my face. Not at him, particularly, but at myself, for thinking I actually was special, that I actually did mean something to him.

But no. I’m only alive because he didn’t want to bring my mother’s wrath down on himself.

“Fuck you,” I whisper.

Victor jerks his gaze over to me, startled. Maybe confused, too.

“I didn’t mean⁠—”

“Didn’t mean what?” I hiss. “I’m sorry that happened to her. Truly, I am. It seems the Wolraths are pieces of shit no matter what the year is.”

Victor narrows his eyes.

“But you killing women because they remind you of her—what gives you the fucking right?”