Bracing myself for disappointment, I opened the door to the cottage. Inside, I found a sparsely furnished space: a stove, a cot, a table with one chair. On the table was a journal. My heart pounding so loud I could hear the blood pulsing through my veins, I stepped across the slate floor and looked down. The last lingering light of day revealed Victor’s handwriting.

I had found him.

Letting out a trembling sigh of relief, I resolved to sit and wait. His things were here; he would be back eventually. And when he returned, I would tell him I had discovered the truth and wanted him with me. We would fight this monster together, as we should have from the beginning.

But I wondered—what was he doing out here? Did he hope to lure the monster to such a secluded spot? To keep it away from me, or to destroy it?

The outbuilding could contain anything. Or it could be empty. But I suspected with growing excitement that it held a trap for the monster, or some other means of destroying it. That must have been the work Victor referred to.

I took the lamp from the table and lit it. As I went back outside in the shrieking wind, the flame nearly went out in spite of its protective glass globe. I pushed open the door to the outbuilding and was immediately assailed with strange chemical scents I both recognized and was repulsed by.

It was another laboratory, I realized, a split second before I saw what was on a metal table in the center of it.

Or rather, who was on a metal table in the center of it.

Chapter Nineteen: Should God Create Another Eve

JUSTINE LAY AS THOUGH sleeping, but there was something terrible in the stillness of her face. Truly relaxed, it lost the shape of her life, her happiness, her soul.

It was Justine, and it was not.

It was only a body.

But it was her body.

I wanted to run from this place. But I could not run from Justine, not when she needed me. Because she needed me still.

How could Victor do this? How could he violate her so completely? She lay beneath a short sheet, her head and shoulders exposed and her feet bare. I twitched to cover them so she would not get cold but could not bring myself to touch this…thing. This thing that had been my beloved Justine.