I had expected Victor or Justine, the two in the house who loved me. But I had underestimated how much Madame Frankenstein depended on me. How terrified she was of what would happen if I were to leave them.

Her eyes shone with mania, and she pressed my hand to her hot, dry lips. “There you are, Elizabeth. You can never leave. I told you that. You have to stay here, with Victor.”

I had not the strength to nod. My throat, parched and cracked, could not force out the words. But I held her gaze with my own, and we were in agreement.

Then Madame Frankenstein crawled onto the bed next to me and fell asleep.

Within a day I had regained enough strength to sit up and take some nourishment. But my gain was Madame Frankenstein’s loss. She had disobeyed the doctor’s orders, exposing herself to my illness in order to nurse me. The fever had abandoned me and claimed another prize.

When the doctor came to move her to her own room—which, it was clear, she would never leave again in this life—her fingers curled around my wrist like a manacle. “This is your family,” she said, her voice rasping as though she had swallowed a live coal. The same coal burned with imagined red light in the intensity of her gaze. I realized she was not, finally, declaring me a true part of the family. She was assigning them to me as a burden lifted from her shoulders and deposited onto my own. “Victor…is…your…responsibility.”

The doctor and Judge Frankenstein carried her from my bed. Her head lolled to the side so her eyes could watch me the entire time as they bore her away. I pushed out of the bed and away from the ghost of Madame Frankenstein already taking residence there, though she yet lived.

Sliding against the hallway walls for support, I stumbled to Victor’s room. I found him, there, barricaded in amidst a fortress of books. His candle was burned low; his clothes, usually so meticulous, were dirty and in a state of disarray. His bed, unslept in, now functioned as a desk and bookshelf in one.

“Victor,” I whispered, my voice not yet healed from long disuse.

He looked up, eyes unnaturally bright in contrast to the dark and hollow space around them. “I had to save you,” he said, blinking as though seeing me and not seeing me at once.

“I am better.”

“But you will not always be. Someday death will claim you. And I will not allow it.” His eyes narrowed, and his voice trembled with fury and determination. “You are mine, Elizabeth Lavenza, and nothing will take you from me. Not even death.”

—

“You forgot Victor’s new clothes,” Mary said, her lips pursed and her clever eyes examining my disheveled and breathless state. It was well past dark now.