My knuckles twitched and I grasped my hand together as if it could hold off my illness, but the stiffness was already spreading to my arms. Soon all my joints would ache, and vertigo would set in. Already my head felt strangely light as I looked to the window. Traces of sunlight were coming through. Dawn. The professor would be up in another hour, and if I showed up drenched in blood with a wrinkled dress and bruised lips . . .
The doorknob twisted. For a brief instant a memory from last night flashed in my head, Edward standing in the open doorway dressed in his victim’s blood. It was Edward again this time, but he’d changed clothes and smoothed his hair back, and now held a cone of newsprint in one hand that smelled of roasted chestnuts.
“I heard the vendor outside this morning,” he said. “Dickens wrote about hot chestnuts so often that I’ve always wanted to try them. And I thought you might be hungry after . . .” He couldn’t hide his smile. “Well, you know.”
I stared at him as my mind still struggled to piece everything together. Edward and I had embraced last night with a desire I’d never known. But now, in the first rays of daylight, everything looked bleaker. I threw the covers back so hard that Sharkey yipped and jumped on the floor, and then I started stripping the bed of its sheets.
“I have to wash these,” I cried, then froze as the cold air bit my bare skin. Naked, not a stitch of clothing. I grabbed a sheet and pulled it around me as Edward set the chestnuts on the worktable and hurried over to stop my frantic movements.
“Juliet, wait. Calm down. What’s the matter?”
“The matter?” I asked, wrapping the sheet tighter around me. “The matter? Edward, there’s blood everywhere!”
“I’ll handle it,” he said. “Come here, to the fire. Sit down.” He pulled me over to the chair by the woodstove and guided me into it. He took my hands in his, which were now washed clean of the evidence from last night.
Of the murder he committed.
I started to breathe faster. What was I doing, protecting him? I didn’t even know who he had killed last night, and neither did he. He rubbed my shoulder, then touched my hair, trying to soothe me. “Shh, calm down. What we did last night was only improper if you think it is. I’ll make it right. I’ve read about how these things happen. I need only find a minister, and we’ll pay a fee for a license, and then once we’re wed—”
“Wed?” My fingers dug into the wooden arm railings. “Wed?”
“Well, yes. I assumed that’s what you would want. Isn’t that what men and women do, after what happened last night? You could get . . . with child.”
I pushed my way out of the chair, eyes wild, pacing a little in the strangling bedsheet. “No, I can’t. I haven’t had my cycles in months, not since Father’s serum stopped working. And you . . . you . . .” I wanted to remind him he wasn’t even human, he was a collection of animal parts made to speak and look and kiss like a boy. Oh god, what had we done?
I collapsed back into the chair, a hand over my mouth. I was hardly a prude when it came to such things. Half the girls who came to Lucy’s teas probably had indiscretions with men they weren’t engaged to, but this was different.
This was Edward. This was a murderer.
“No,” I stuttered. “I don’t want to get married. We can’t.”
He swallowed, though his eyes still gleamed with hope. “All right, then. Yes, you’re right, we should wait until after we’ve cured ourselves. Then we’ll have a lifetime together.”
“No, Edward, you don’t understand.”
The light in his eyes flickered. “What do you mean?”
“It was a mistake,” I said, though my voice broke. “I care about you, but I was lonely. I needed someone . . .”
“Juliet, shh,” he started, shaking his head a little too quickly.
“ . . . but I’ve never stopped loving Montgomery. I thought you understood that.”
For a moment the entire room was still, no wind at the window, no cracking in the fire. Just me, and him, and Montgomery’s name between us.
“Montgomery?” he repeated, barely above a whisper.
When I didn’t answer, his hands curled on the wooden armchair rails so hard the wood splintered. I jumped at the reminder of how strong Edward could be, how quickly his moods could shift. He pushed himself up to pace before the fire. “Montgomery left you. He didn’t come back for you. I did.”
My heart started pounding. This was wrong—talking of Montgomery here, now.
“I must get home. It’s nearly morning. I’ll need to give myself an injection, and I haven’t any here.”
I crawled out of the chair and snatched my dress from the floor, shaking it out and struggling into fabric that was stiff with dried blood. I started to reach for my coat, but Edward grabbed my arm. “Wait.”
I didn’t dare look at him. “I’ll come back tonight and we’ll work on the serum.”
But his hand held me with an unnatural strength. Outside, the wind howled all the same warnings that my heart was whispering to me. My thoughts turned back to the broken chair rail and how easily that could be my bones splintered in two. I shivered, but not because of the cold.
Sharkey picked his head up and growled low in his throat.
“He’ll never understand what’s inside you,” Edward whispered. “He wants Moreau’s daughter, the girl he used to know, but that’s not who you are now. You’re no one’s daughter anymore. You can think for yourself, take care of yourself. You’re Juliet, and that’s enough, and Montgomery will never fully understand that.”
His other hand slid to touch the delicate skin above my rib cage but I twisted out of his grasp, not certain if I dared believe his words.
“The professor will worry,” I stuttered.
“I don’t care about the professor. I won’t let anything, or anyone, come between us.” He stepped close enough that I could feel his breath on my neck, warm and moist. I noted a different smell in the air—an animal smell. Not Sharkey’s light musty scent, but something heavier, more primal. I felt like here, in this moment, I was seeing that tenuous line between man and Beast I had been so curious about.
“I love you, Juliet.”
Sharkey stood up now, growling louder. I could tell by the deeper timber in Edward’s voice that the boy I knew was slipping. The Beast was used to getting his way, and I was refusing him what he wanted most—me. How far would he go to get what he wanted?