Page 97 of Her Creation

Victoria turned and fled up the stairs, searching the house with frantic urgency, opening doors, scanning shadows, calling his name. She told herself he was toying with her, punishing her with a cruel game of concealment. But room after room answered her with emptiness. At last, breathless and shaking, she found herself pacing the long hallway near the front door, forcing herself to slow, to think.

It was better this way. With his particular skills, he could vanish entirely if he wished. He would not harm her. Of that, she was certain. Perhaps this separation was necessary—perhaps it was the only path forward for either of them.

Yet no amount of logic could quiet the ache spreading through her chest or dispel the echo of his words lingering in the mind. She knew with a certainty that settled deep in her bones that this was not abandonment. He had sworn he would never leave her, and she had believed him.

This was something else.

He was proving a point.

Chapter 27

Log entry

March, 1803

Recounting events 1773–1795 Location: Unknown

It had been three days since Inno had escaped and gone out into the world, and Victoria had unraveled in his absence. At first, blinding worry and fury had poured through her in equal measure, but then the anger in her heart flared wickedly. She cursed herself relentlessly for trusting him to stay and then for pushing him away.

By the third day, when the sharpest edges of her anger had dulled, and she was sad and empty, a more devastating truth emerged. She missed him. Desperately. Even in the loneliest stretches following her father’s death, she had not felt quite so abandoned as she did now.

Though she had insisted on distance between them, the knowledge that he was there, waiting for her with unspoken patience, had steadied her more than she had ever allowed herself to admit. He had always been there. From the moment his broken, battered body had entered her life, Inno had offered a constancy she had never known elsewhere.

She knew she had treated him less like a companion and more like a dangerous thing she was afraid to acknowledge, a found creature she fed and confined rather than trusted. Yet she had believed it was the only way to remain faithful to her father, to the countless voices that insisted his existence was wrong. Wrong to create. Wrong to sustain. Wrong to care for. Everything about him was condemned and wrong to love. Anger crept back in, quieter now, threaded with reason. He was intelligent, calculating. Perhaps he had gone somewhere remote, far enough away to remain undiscovered. The thought soothed her even as it wounded her. This was for the best for both their sakes.

The night at the ball had offered Inno a glimpse of a different life. One without her. She was not surprised that he had chosen it. Perhaps it would have been kinder to kill him outright than condemn him to the existence that now awaited him, whether he understood it yet or not.

She was cleaning the last of her dishes from eating lunch when the sound came, deep and resonant, cutting through the still air of the castle. The bell. Her shoulders stiffened, her head bowing instinctively as resignation settled in. What if she did not answer it? What had all this effort been for?

She would bury her father tomorrow. Then she would speak to Helena about the possibility of staying with her. She would find a way to be useful, to exist without becoming another burden. And she would live knowing she had at least gotten to kiss the only man she would ever truly love. Those memories would not be gone.

The bell rang again.

She needed to tell the town, and the new baron, that her father was dead. All those years of study at her father’s side reduced to nothing—because she was a woman.

Anger finally surged strong enough to move her. It propelled her through the door and into the tunnel, through the final threshold and out into the open air. She slammed the last door behind her and strode forward, grateful for the distraction as she approached the men waiting near the horses. Two stood beside bay geldings. A third man lay slumped across a black Oldenburg, unmoving.

She did not bother with pleasantries. One look at their faces told her this was serious.

“My father and his assistant are inside,” she said briskly. “I will bring the man to them. What happened?”

Something was wrong. She could feel it in the way the men kept glancing behind them, their eyes restless, scanning the castle grounds as if expecting movement.

“You should not be out here alone,” one of the younger men said, his concern immediate and unguarded.

The comment unsettled her. She gestured toward the man slung over the horse. “What happened?” she asked again.

The older man hauled the injured figure down, his heels dragging through the dirt as he pulled him toward her.

“It got him too,” the man said, his gaze never lingering on her for more than a heartbeat. “After church. Right there in the crowd.”

“Just like the other two,” the second man added, his voice low and strained. “Jacquine Dons was speaking with Baron von Lichtenmarstein in town when Jacquine dropped dead. No cry. No struggle. Same with the other one. Found him sitting upright on the steps like he was resting. No wounds. Nothing. It is as though the life was taken so fast the body did not even realize it.”

Victoria felt her chest tighten. “All of them?”

“All of them.”

“It is the Nachzehrer,” the younger man said, his brows drawn tight with fear.