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“ . . . to see if I could,” I blurted, at last.

Grendel nodded.

“He loved you,” he said, hefting Ivan’s skull at me, while I shrank back, panting—practically stumbling over Rebecca’s forgotten body, as I tried to shove myself even further into the laboratory’s farthest corner. “Did you deserve it?”

“I don’t KNOW. Oh, Grendel, please take that thing away, you can’t comprehend how it terrifies me—”

“I can, and I do. But it doesn’t matter.”

Discarding the head, he stepped forward. And I shut my eyes, sure that the inevitable end of all my hubris was as sure as my next breath.

* * *

When I touched you, you spun in my grasp, sweat dulling your hair, eyes grey as the gleam of a blade. “I was wrong,” you babbled. “I was wrong, I admit it.”

“Wrong,” I echoed.

“Yes, wrong. You didn’t want or expect to be created. My ambition drove me on, as it always has, and I thought of no one’s comfort but my own. I cheated you, cheated Ivan, cheated myself. I was wrong.”

“No,” I said. “I was.”

You stopped, met my eyes for the first time in—how long? You frowned, uncertain.

“I don’t understand.”

“I was wrong, I admit it,” I replied. “I should never have asked you for Rebecca. I didn’t want her at all.”

Your mouth came open, then—small teeth, very even. Pale lips over a warm, red heart.

“I never understood the hunger she gave me. I didn’t know. I found the answer in no book you said I should read. All the knowledge in the world, you gave me, but not this one truth. I didn’t want her, I never did.”

“No,” you said, almost a question, edging toward a statement.

“No,” I said. “I wanted you.”

And smiled. Your mouth stayed open.

“Always,” I said, “right from the start. God, Father, Mikela. Your face was the first thing I ever saw, the only thing I’ve ever seen, and I had forgotten.” I almost laughed at the ridiculousness of it. “Forgotten!”

And what I had forgotten had festered in me like an open wound, a mouth I could never feed, a void I could never fill. Until now—until that idiot, your cousin, showed me what neither of us had ever been able to see before.

“Oh no,” I said, so softly. “I wanted Rebecca, once. But she was only your shadow.”

I could drown in your eyes.

“Only your shadow,” I breathed, and held your head still as my mouth came down.

And then, of course, you ran—not getting very far. And of course you fought, though you—of all people—must have known the futility of it. And after I caught you, I did have to hurt you a bit. But only a bit.

So when I finally came walking through the keep toward your room, holding you as I had held her in the laboratory, I was happier than I had ever been since those bright days before I knew there were really any others in this world I thought created by you for me alone.

For me and you alone.

4.

“Let me love you, Mikela. Let yourself be loved. We’re both monsters, after all—and even though you made me for yourself, God made you for ME.”

And at those words I recover my senses, only to find us already converging upon our inevitable coupling with all the voluptuous paralysis of a nightmare. Whispering lie back, lie quiet, let me do what I was born for. Over which I can hear my own voice, moaning: No, Grendel, please—remember whatever I was to you, not what you’d have me be. But I hold you down with ease for all your struggle, shirt ripping open under my claws, nuzzling chest and throat alike in passion’s swirl. With each black tongue-flicker a quick electric jolt clear to the root of me, I’m harder than I’ve ever been before, pierced with silver skewers of twisted delight. Free to swallow you whole at last, delighted by your gasp of unexpected joy. No one makes me do anything, cousin, you may have bought me but you do not own me . . . No, Grendel alone holds that title. And revels in it. Knowing me better than I know myself, he’s big enough to hold me down and do everything I MUST want done to me, in my hearts of hearts—slowly, and with exquisite relish. Expressly for your pleasure, which is to say my own. To turn me over, gently, and—