I raced through the halls and upstairs to my old bedroom and put on one of my white dresses; it felt like preparation for a ritual I wanted no part of. All our rituals as humans seemed to revolve around birth and death—marriage being the exception, though my wedding had been a ritual intimately connected to death, given my choice of partner.

I had no weapons in my room other than the useless pistols. But Victor did not know they were useless! I tucked one into the broad, heavy pleats where my skirt met my waist at my back. If I minded the angles I presented to him, he would not see it.

Taking a steadying breath, I marched back to Victor’s new laboratory to be reunited with my husband and my deceased father-in-law—who might not be in that state much longer. I had not cared for him in life; I did not care to be reunited with him after his death.

“Much better,” Victor said, barely glancing up from where he was reading gauges and measurements on his array of instruments, the use of which I could only guess at. “You may sit. I have to concentrate.” He gestured with the gun toward a chair on the opposite end of the room from Mary. I moved to sit beside her instead, and he cocked the hammer of the pistol. “You may sit over there.”

Mary watched him with more curiosity than fear. “Did you kill him?” She was using exactly the right tone to keep him calm. We had already disrupted his process, and he was liable to snap at any moment. It was what I would have done—what I should have done. Gotten him talking.

“Hmm?” Victor seemed confused about whom she was referring to. Then he looked down at the naked body of his father. Incisions, black and neatly sewn up, went down each pale limb and in numerous tracings across his broad chest. The throat, I saw, bore old markings.

He had been strangled.

“Yes,” I answered. “Victor killed him.”

Victor followed my eyes to his father’s throat and tapped it thoughtfully. “The key is not to crush the windpipe. That is a challenge! I learned that lesson in a frustrating sequence of events I do not care to relive. You have to squeeze hard enough to cut off the supply of blood to the brain until they pass out. And then you simply continue until they stop breathing. I tried a lot of other methods, but they were too messy or too destructive to the materials. I lobbied for Justine to be executed in some other way, but they would not listen to me, and I could not tell them why. It took so much time to replace her neck and throat. I might have succeeded if I had not had to waste all that effort.” He glowered.