The Love That Should Not Be by C.C. Matthews
Prologue
Velvet and Lightning
Münsterberg Asylum, Lower Saxony — 1831
The storm hadn’t come yet, but Colin could smell it. Lightning flared behind the clouds. Rain pounded the glass. He was always waiting for storms. Always hoping they would come.
The old wings of Münsterberg were hushed for the night, though silence was a lie in a place like this. Behind iron doors and frosted panes, the mad whispered to ghosts. Some screamed into their pillows. Some murmured prayers in Latin, backwards. Colin had stopped asking them why.
Colin was no physician. Not really. He was the bastard son of a ghost. His father, Victor Frankenstein, had died in the Arctic, pursued by the same thing he had conjured from death and hubris. Colin knew this not from books, but from his mother’s lips. He had never seen her face clearly. She lived in the shadows of his memory: bruised mouth, copper hair, a birthmark shaped like a teardrop on her collarbone. A servant, maybe. A baroness. A whore. It didn’t matter. She had died mad, and that was legacy enough.
What mattered was the name she gave him: Frankenstein.
He had not spoken it aloud until he was seventeen, when he slit open the chest of a hanged man beneath the cathedral and whispered it into the exposed lungs.
“Frankenstein,” he had said. “We begin again.
He stood now in the eastern tower, watching lightning bruise the clouds over the hills. Behind him, the operating table gleamed like a confession.
On it: her.
Or rather, the shape of her. She was not finished, not complete. There was no breathing. She was not alive. Not yet.
But she was beautiful. He had carved her form from memory, from notes, from myth, and from the ache in his bones. Her skin was a shade too pale for mortality. Her lips were a shade too red for innocence. He had stitched her thighs with silken thread and perfumed her body with rose water. Her hair was red, a wild shock of scarlet.
She was not a corpse. She was a promise. He had not named her. He would not. Not until she opened her eyes. But he had dreamed her name.
Astrid.
Colin unbuttoned his shirt with trembling hands, not from desire. Not quite. But from a thing deeper than desire. A madness with a pulse. A hunger that bled into devotion.
He pressed his bare chest to hers. She was cold. She was imperfect, unmoving.
He whispered. “I am not my father.”
He repeated it. “I am not my father.”
And yet, he had stolen from graves. He had lied to bishops. He had defiled the altar and offered up the bones of innocents in place of saints. He was his father. But even worse. Because he loved her...
