Page 72 of Her Creation

Victoria’s large brown eyes widened slightly. “I see.” She bristled a little.

“You don’t like it,” he stated, feeling his heart sink. His hand curled around the small wooden figure in his pocket.

“I—I just had my own system,” she said with a smile that might have convinced someone else, but not him.

It filled his stomach with acid. He had hoped she would be so happy with what he’d done that she would start to come down more frequently, that she would see he wasn’t all that bad…that he would be good for her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. His thumb ran up and down over the smooth wooden piece concealed in his pocket repeatedly. “I’ll fix it after you leave.”

She must’ve seen the sadness in his face, because she shrugged off her annoyance and moved to her father’s desk. She grabbed a hold of the deck of cards and began to shuffle.

“You don’t need to fix it. I like it, I think. I just—I guess it surprised me how much you paid attention to me. I truly appreciate you…and…” Her face flashed red as she flustered. “Inno, would you like to—”

“Yes,” he said with more enthusiasm than he had meant to project. This was quickly turning into the best day he’d had all week. So far, she’d already stayed with him an extra seven minutes.

“—play piquet?” she finished with an amused look.

He grinned, biting at his lower lip when he felt foolish. He hurried to the chair nearest hers as he always did. He slowed his feet. If he went slower, he could keep her here in the laboratory longer with him.

“How is—” She lifted her brows and chewed thoughtfully on her lower lip, prompting him to finish the sentence when the word refused to come.

“Дружочек,” he supplied with a small, pleased smile. Tiny little friend.

“Droo-zhoh-chik?” she repeated, watching his face closely as she tested the sound.

He grinned and settled back into his chair. “Droo-ZHOH-chik is good. I brought her a fly today—and nearly a centipede. My hunt for the centipede will take place tomorrow morning. After I see you.”

Victoria’s smile softened, then faltered, her gaze drifting toward the shadowed corner where his spider friend lived. The web still clung there, unchanged. In his loneliness, Inno had made friends with a spider that lived in the basement, a fact she had discovered when she had brought a meal down to him one day and found him lurking in the corner talking to a spider that crawled across his shoulder. He had expected her to tell him to kill it and was surprised when she only smiled and asked what the words he was saying meant. They played in silence for a few moments more, the soft shuffle of cards filling the space. And then she seemed to feel it—his attention shifting. Inno’s eyes were on her now more than the game. Everything about the woman was beautiful. He was a moth to her flame, and all he wanted to do was be set on fire by her.

“Is your mattress comfortable?” she asked at last, glancing toward the heap of straw tucked neatly against the wall, carefully arranged and kept out of the way. A blush crept over her, realizing what she’d asked. “For sleeping. Your sleeping.”

He smiled at her a moment before answering, memorizing her face. “I told you I don’t sleep.”

“Why are you grinning like that? You’ve just lost,” Victoria said as she pulled the stray cards on the table into a stack.

He attempted to wipe the smile from his face, but gave up. It felt too nice to feel this way; he didn’t want to cut it short by even a second.

Her fingers looked impossibly long as they worked, deft and unhurried, drawing the streaked, flat-washed blue cards into a single pile. She tapped them against the table once, twice, and the edges surrendered and fell evenly together, aligned with surgical precision.

“I don’t mind losing…some things,” Innominatus said, unable to look away from her as his gaze grew intense.

His voice never rose. It never needed to. The sound lived deep in his chest, held there deliberately, a smooth, controlled rumble that suggested power kept on a short leash. It was the kind of voice that did not beg, did not plead—only waited.

He lifted one large hand and held it flat in the air between them. The scars mapped across his skin distorted the knuckles, leaving them uneven, swollen in places where bone had once broken through flesh. Without moving his hand at all, two cards slid cleanly up between his fingers from nowhere.

The motion had been easier before the scars, before the stiffness crept into his joints—but Victoria was not a gambler. She would not notice what had been lost.

He noticed.

His gaze never left her face as the cards revealed themselves. He watched for the smallest reaction—the hitch of breath, the widening of her eyes, the faint tension at the corners of her mouth. Her face was the only beautiful thing he saw now. The only true light left in the black, decaying hole that had become his world. When her dark, cherry-brown eyes widened, something settled inside him with cold, absolute certainty.

He would practice the trick again tonight. Again and again. Until it returned to him perfectly. Anything that delighted her was worth reclaiming, no matter how long it took, no matter what it cost.

“Impressive,” she said. “Were you a gambler in your old life?”

Amusement flickered across her expression—but even as she spoke, her attention betrayed her. Her gaze slid, briefly, toward the longcase clock beside her father’s bookshelves.

Once.