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But my hope—long-cherished by my departed wife—is that you and Victor will soon bring happiness back by celebrating a most blessed event.

I am grateful for your delicacy in broaching the subject of a marital union with Victor. You are ever thoughtful to offer him his freedom should he view you more as a companion than a future wife. But I assure you that he cherishes nothing more than the thought of spending the rest of his life with you. He has told me repeatedly how determined he is that you two never be parted.

As such, we will proceed with a marriage as soon as possible upon our return. I am eager for the day you join our family legally as my daughter. We will travel with as much haste as God and the elements grant us to see that it is so. You can anticipate us within two weeks.

Victor shares my joy, though a lingering fever from his brief confinement prevents him from writing to you himself. He sends his love and devotion, and I send the warmest regards of my heart from a father to a daughter.

With all other regards nobly and lovingly sent,

Alphonse Frankenstein

I set down Judge Frankenstein’s letter. My entreaty—delicately and carefully worded—for Victor to return and marry me had succeeded.

And thus the date for my vengeance would be set.

I knew I should feel sorry that I looked forward to my wedding day not as a blessed moment to be forever united with the family who had sheltered and raised me, but as a day for bloody reckoning, when I would make that forever-damned monster pay for what it had taken from us.

I did not feel sorry.

Perhaps in another life, under other circumstances, knowing that Victor and I were to wed would fill me with relief that my place in the world would at last be secure, with all the legal protections the Frankenstein name would offer. Never again would I fear that I would be abandoned, that everything they had given might be taken away.

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Certainly only a few months earlier, receiving such oddly loving sentiments from Judge Frankenstein would have given me cause for celebration and happiness. Perhaps, if he had thus expressed himself ever in all our years under the same roof, I would not have chased after Victor and brought the monster back with me.

But I suspected it was that same monster and its devastating evil that had effected this change in Judge Frankenstein. Had he not lost so much, would he bother clinging to an orphan of no family, no fortune? Losing those things he loved most must have broken his heart enough that I finally found purchase there.

So be it. I did not doubt that Victor would want to marry me. I had always been the only girl in the world who mattered to him. If he was to marry anyone, it would be me. But I had feared that Judge Frankenstein would reject my claim on Victor. I was grateful to have his and Victor’s official approval, and to learn that they shared my desire for speed.

I had never been the type to imagine a wedding or what it would mean to be a wife, other than having binding protection. I tried now, envisioning something simple. Beautiful. But in my imagination, Justine was at my side, and Henry at Victor’s.

I had lost that ideal. And so I would push through, little caring about the wedding itself. It was the wedding night I had to plan for.

With no other women in the house to help me besides the maid, with whom I had no relationship, I was free to arrange the barest, most utilitarian wedding ever planned in the long history of the Frankenstein name. I scheduled a priest to marry us at the chapel nearest the edge of Geneva bordering the lake. I invited no one.

My one extravagance was a notice sent out to all the regional publications I could find, advertising the upcoming union of Victor Frankenstein and Elizabeth Lavenza.

The trap was set. And I was both bait and poison.

* * *

—

Once my plans were settled, I had nothing to do but wait. It was agonizing. I knew Victor and his father were making their slow and steady way home to me. And I knew that somewhere out there, the monster was doing the same. I was in the midst of a great spider’s web. Whether I would end up as the spider or the fly was yet to be determined. All I knew was that the strands that held me here had been woven since my childhood on the shores of Lake Como.

We were, all of us, bound in this deadly and horrible dance, until we died or triumphed.

A few days before I expected Victor and his father to return, I received another letter. But it was not from them.

It was from Mary, the bookseller in Ingolstadt. And it was addressed to Elizabeth and Justine. Another person who dwelt in a beautiful fantasy in which Justine still lived. I could not so much as bring myself to open it. Could not linger in words that assumed Justine was alive, that assumed the world was good and fair and as it should be.

And I could not think of Justine without remembering the stitches, the neck repaired from its injuries so that it could once again draw breath from dead mouth to dead lungs.

Despite some time and distance from having discovered Justine’s body, I had not moved any closer to forgiving Victor. I wanted, instead, to understand. He still tried to keep me in the dark about his monster. How deep his shame and horror at what his own hands had wrought on the world must be!

But in helping to destroy the monster, I would no longer be able to feign innocence, and he could no longer deny the truth. Once it was dead, Victor would have nothing further to hide from me, and we could speak plainly. It was another reason any thought of delay was unsupportable. With the monster’s death, so too would die any secrets between Victor and me. We would have only each other, a truth too terrible to be believed by outsiders binding us more permanently than any priest could.

I yearned for the freedom I anticipated.