His look of condescending annoyance would have frozen me previously, made me immediately change course. Even now I flinched from it. His lip curled. “You cannot complain that you dislike the method, when so many of the methods were of your own design. You made it clear from the start you did not care what I did so long as you did not have to know the specifics. It was our agreement!”

“No. No, no, no. I never asked for this. I never wanted this.” I longed to pace, to curl into a ball, to run screaming at him and strike him. Instead, I stood there and stared at the boy I had always known, the boy I had thought I knew better than myself. I was looking at a stranger, yet I understood every flicker of emotion on his face. It was too much for me to reconcile.

And still I did not understand. “Why would you do any of it? Why would you take Justine like that? Why would you even think of creating a mate for the monster?”

He frowned, tilting his head in confusion. “Why would I give anything to that loathsome creature? As soon as it took its first breath, I knew I had fallen infinitely short of my goals. You have seen it. You understand. It was an abortive mistake, a repugnant error. That it has continued to haunt me, watching me, threatening me, is my own punishment for failing so spectacularly in my pursuit of perfection.”

“What perfection can you hope to find in death?”

He lifted his eyes to the ceiling and gave a minute shake of his head. “You do not understand. You have never understood these things. You, who can appreciate the beauty of the world so easily without ever wanting to go deeper—I have done all this for you. To save you.”

“To save me from what? The greatest suffering of my life has been in the last few weeks, and has been at your unseen hands!”

He moved toward me in an explosive burst. I shrank back against the wall. He was between me and the door. His anger was mounting, but he still seemed in possession of himself. I was here to soothe him, after all.

I would never soothe him again.