I should have screamed. I knew that I should be screaming. But I could not manage it. I had been too well trained in silence. But I could not go into that building. I had seen horrors this trip; I did not wish to see any more. And I did not want to know what he would do with me behind closed doors.

My heart racing, my tongue frozen, I reached up to my hat with my free hand and pulled one of the long, sharp pins used to keep it in place. And then I stabbed that pin down into the man’s wrist as hard as I could, taking care to aim for the space between the two bones of the forearm so it would go all the way through.

He screamed in surprise and pain, releasing me. I turned and ran.

His angry shouts followed me, but thankfully, footsteps did not. When I was safely back within the city walls, I leaned against a brick building and struggled to catch my breath. My heart continued pounding as though I were still being pursued.

I wished I could not imagine Victor doing business with him, but I could. Victor had left, possessed by the need to defeat death, and without me here to temper his obsessions, he had descended to hellish depths.

I had driven Victor to this madness. I would repair it in any way necessary.

—

Secluded as we were across the river, our only regular company Henry and occasionally his parents, we managed to avoid most illnesses that took toxic root and spread like mold in Geneva during the long winter months.

When I was nearly fifteen, however, illness found me and staked its claim with ferocity to make up for lost time. I fell into darkness and pain. Doctors must have been called, but I was sensible of none of it, lost to the violence of a body destroying itself. My world burned. It ached.

And then it felt like nothing at all.

The border between life and death had fascinated Victor for so long. I had crossed that border coming into this world—changing places with my mother, who died as I was born. I felt certain that once again I was on the edge of it. On one side: Victor. Justine. Henry. The life I had built with such vicious determination. On the other: the unknown. But the unknown beckoned, promising rest from pain. Rest from sickness. Rest from the endless striving and manipulating and working, working, working just to keep my place in the world.

But a cool hand on my brow broke through. Whispered pleadings, an endless stream of them, led me from those dark, unknown lands like a trail of crumbs glowing white in the moonlight to lead me home. After a time, days or weeks, I finally opened my eyes to find my determined savior.

Madame Frankenstein.