Victor shooed me with his hands. “On our wedding day, we need only consider our own future.”

“Ungrateful boy!” his father roared.

Victor turned to him, smiles replaced by a cold radiating so powerfully that even I shuddered, though his wrath was not directed at me. Victor slammed his fists on the table, rattling the chipped finery. His father startled, nearly tripping over the chair behind him. He sat heavily in it instead.

I put my hand on Victor’s back, stroked his neck to calm him. Part of me wanted him to lose control, to throw one of the violent mad fits of his youth. To terrify his father even further.

To hurt him.

But Victor responded to my touch, taking a deep breath and stilling. “I know what you think of me,” he said to his father. “What you have always thought of me. You have never truly seen me, have never seen what I am capable of. You looked only for fault, only for weakness. The unimaginable heights of my genius, unrivaled, unrestrained, have made you nervous and petty. You would have me gentled. You would have me do nothing with my life but provide you with more money to feed your own appetites and pleasures. And you would use Elizabeth to do it.” Victor leaned forward, and Judge Frankenstein shrank back, that old fear fully resurfaced. He had gotten too used to a tame Victor. “You have no power over us, old man. And if you ever try to control me again, you will understand at last what true power is and who wields it in this family.”

He turned away from his father, his face still a cold mask, terrible in its alien lack of emotion. I saw only a second of it before he fixed his gaze on me and my Victor was returned. “Well,” he said, “shall we go to your old home?”

I had assumed we would be fighting the monster here, but with this new information, everything was put off balance, dizzied and confused. A trip by boat, some distance between us and this house; his father; that monster—

“Yes,” I said, taking his hand once more. “Take me home.”

Chapter Twenty-one: Him Whom to Love Is to Obey

OUR JOURNEY WAS BY boat, taking us down the Rhone toward where it connected to Lake Como. The river was swift but placid, the countryside enough to fill the breast with stirrings like religious euphoria. The green and gold of the land promised a wealth of happiness and health.

But I could not stop my thoughts from spinning with Judge Frankenstein’s revelations and the alteration they cast on my life. Such was my agitation that the monster and its promised attack were pushed to the furthest reaches of my mind. The river carried me swiftly from my past—and back toward my past.