It was a foolish impulse to protect her from the cold anyway, and knowing it would not matter made me feel all the worse. What he had done to preserve her body thus I did not know, but there were stitches up and down her arms, across her shoulders, down to her chest beneath the sheet. The greatest concentration of work was done immediately below and above her neck. On her throat was no evidence of the rope that had cut her tragic life short. I wondered what the rest of her, covered by the sheet, looked like, then gagged and turned away so I would not have to look at what had been done to her.

How had she ended up here? For what purpose? The explanation crept upon me, rising along my spine until it settled like a sickness in my brain.

The monster had not implicated Justine merely to punish Victor.

It had framed Justine as a means of getting her body.

This must have been what the monster was talking to Victor about on the mountain! A demand for Victor to create it a mate as horrible as itself. But why would Victor agree? He knew that what he had created was an abomination. I did not doubt that, from the little he had told me while he was sick and delirious. So why would he be willing to do something this wretched for that creature?

And then I realized: The monster had already killed. It would do so again. And doubtless it had watched long enough to know how to manipulate Victor. The monster had threatened to harm me. No wonder Victor had ranged so far to conduct his devilish experiments! He had to draw the monster away from me.

We had cost Justine her life, and now we had cost her body its rightful peace in death.

Wild rage consumed me. I lifted the lamp above my head to burn this sacrilege done to her body. But the sight of the light catching in her chestnut hair, still shining and lovely in death, stopped me.

I sat on the frigid floor, where the edge of the table blocked my view of Justine save one lock of her hair that hung over the side. What would Justine want?

She would want to be alive. She would want to be with William. I could not give her any of that. All I had given her was death. And even that was a cursed and threatened state, thanks to me.

Justine deserved better. She had not attended the burials of her mother or her siblings. She had been denied the chance to grieve. And she had been denied her own body’s Christian burial. She deserved one, as proper as I could manage. I did not want what was left of her mortal frame to remain forever on this blighted island.