I smiled. “I was so young when they took him away. I remember crying as the doors to our villa closed behind me and they loaded him, shackled, into a black carriage.” I remembered nothing of the sort.

“Do you know what your mother’s name was? Anything about her family?”

“Oh.” I batted my eyes as though the dim light were difficult to see in. “Let me think….I know I was named after her.” I did know that much, at least. “Pretty little Elizabeth, as pretty and useless as the Elizabeth you came from. I spit on her grave for burdening me with you,” my caretaker still hissed in my memory. “But I do not know what her family name was. I wish I did. Then I would have something of hers to hold on to.”

“Hmm.” His brows, wiry and gray with age, drew low over his dark eyes. Where Victor’s eyes were lively and intense, the judge’s were the heavy, forbidding brown of an aged gallows.

“Why do you ask?” I said as innocently as I could, keeping all trace of fear out of my voice.

“No particular reason.” His voice slammed the conversation shut.

I would have avoided him after that, but it was not necessary. Most days he spent shut up in the library. When I would sneak in at night to find a book, I would find his desk littered with papers and half-finished letters. He looked increasingly troubled, and his trouble affected me most deeply when I found a list on his desk titled “Drains on the Frankenstein Estate.”

There were no items listed, but it was not difficult to imagine my name at the top.

Without Victor, I had no reason to be here. And while the Frankensteins had been generous to take me in, they had also rendered me useless. If they had taken me on as a maid or even a governess, I would at least have employable skills, like Justine. Instead, I was treated as a cousin: pampered, and educated in disciplines that in no way translated into the ability to care for myself.

They had saved me from poverty and, in the same stroke, doomed me to utter dependence. If Judge Frankenstein kicked me out, I would have absolutely no claim or legal recourse to take anything with me. At any moment he could force me to leave, and I would once again be simply Elizabeth Lavenza, with no family, no home, and no money.

I would not let him do that.