The Love That Should Not Be
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 unperfect, 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.
Can love be a sin? he wondered. Love is beautiful. Love is sublime. But love can be wrong, he thought. It can corrupt. It can be harmful. And it could be warped and unnatural. Yet, he thought, we cannot help who we love.
His thoughts soon yielded as jagged lightning cracked near the asylum. The candles trembled. The machine hissed behind him, runes burning into copper, fluid trembling in glass veins. The Seraph Engine, he called it. Not lightning, but language. Not life stolen, but life screaming out into the world of mortals.
He had translated the rite from a manuscript in blood. He had stitched its vowels into her flesh. He was confident she would resurrect. He was certain she would. And when she did, she would be his.
She was not a monster. She would not be a bride. Something was to be something new. Something sacred. Inevitably, she would be something damned.
CHAPTER ONE
When She Woke
“Men May Become Gods, but Men Will Create Hell as Collateral”
--Adam
It began with breath. Not a gasp, not a scream. just breath. It was low and wet and trembling, as if the lungs beneath the silk stitched skin had only just remembered how to exist. Her chest fluttered once. Then again. Then it was still.
Colin didn’t move. He was standing in the violet haze of candlelight, shirtless, blood on his collarbone, hands trembling at his sides. The air in the tower room was heavy with ozone, sweat, and the metallic sting of ritual, yet it all felt so wrong. She smelled of burnt copper and lilac oil, the incense of unnatural resurrection.
She lay before him on the marble slab, naked, beautiful and wrong. Her skin was too pale for the living, too perfect for the dead. No pulse danced beneath it, yet still she breathed. Her lips, full and parted, were the color of stolen wine. Her lashes fluttered like moth wings. And her hair—a storm of crimson—fanned out like blood spilled across the linen altar beneath her.
She was art and heresy. She was flesh made from defiance. She was his. And she was waking. She was alive.
Lightning cracked the heavens beyond the tower glass, throwing her body into a sudden silhouette of bones and curves, stitches and scars, breast and hip, all outlined like a cathedral’s stained-glass saint come to trembling life.
Then her eyes opened, not slowly or gently, but they snapped open, as if something in her had risen from deep beneath the sea of the self and clawed its way to the surface.
Colin stepped closer. “Breathe,” he whispered.
The candlelight caught the edge of his face showing black, wet curls, hollow cheekbones, eyes wide with madness and awe.
“Breathe, my love…”
She turned her head. Her pupils contracted. The storm outside roared again.
And then: her mouth moved.
She birthed a word from her beautiful mouth It sounded broken, drenched in memory. It was almost a name.
“A… da…”
Her body arched. Veins flared under her skin in bright violet trails, like lightning frozen beneath the surface. She gasped. And screamed from remembering.
He caught her before she fell. She had thrown herself off the table, writhing, trembling, the sheet falling away from her skin like a forgotten shroud. He held her to him, one arm around her waist, the other cradling her skull.
She was burning up as her mouth was against his throat, teeth bared. Her nails dug crescents into his ribs.
“Shhh,” he murmured, lips against her temple. “You’re safe. You’re safe.”
“No,” she said. “No.”
Her voice was hoarse, yet beautiful, but unformed.
His muscles tightened as he carried her through the tall chamber with its black chandeliers and pools of shadows. Past the altar, past the machine, its copper coils still glowing with dying heat. He took her into the bed chamber, crossing the threshold as if he were carrying his virgin bride to their bed for the first time.
It was not a sterile room. It was not a cage. It was her own quarters. The bed was built of mahogany. Velvet drapes flanked a massive window. Black rose petals littered the sill. A carved angel that hung above the headboard looked like it wept into the firelight.
He laid her gently on the bed and knelt beside it, hands shaking. “You’re awake,” he whispered. “God, you’re awake.”
She stared at him. Her eyes were not like the eyes of the dead. They shimmered with unshed sorrow, with want. They conveyed something too ancient for language.
“Who… are you?” she asked.
He smiled, blood on his lips from where her nails had cut him. “I’m the man who brought you back.”
The storm raged. The fire in the hearth bloomed. And Astrid lay beneath furs and silk sheets, skin damp with newness. She slept without dreaming, but her breath was full of half-spoken names, and her thighs shifted restlessly beneath the covers as if chasing something she had not yet found.
Colin sat in the chair by her bed. He was always watching. He had not slept in four days. He had not wept in twelve years. But tonight, he did both.
He kissed the edge of her pillow when she turned in her sleep. He whispered stories to her bones. He opened the book beside him, the Liber Seraphim, the one that had stitched her back together with words too ancient for sanity.
He burned pages into the fire. One by one. “You are no longer bound to it,” he whispered. “You are real now. You belong only to yourself.”
But he was lying. Because she belonged to him. Didn’t she?
She woke at dawn. The storm had passed. The sky outside the frosted, glass window was pale lavender and bruised gold. Snow fell lightly, painting the tower in hush and shimmer.
Colin was asleep in the chair, his head bowed, one hand holding a bloodied cloth.
She sat up slowly. Her muscles ached, but not like death. She was… sore. As if born from something more than stitching. Her thighs trembled. Her throat burned.
She looked down at her hands. They seemed perfect. They were pale, scarred at the wrist with a thread-thin seam of black. Her breasts rose and fell in a slow, aching rhythm. She stood up. The cold hit her nipples like glass. She didn’t flinch. She walked barefoot to the mirror. The reflection was… strange. She saw herself but she didn’t. That is not who I remember, she thought, and her eyes lingered, her head tilting slowly, to and fro. Her hair was the color of red candlewax. She had full hips and a slender waist. The curve of her stomach rose like a moon. Her lips seemed too red. Here dark eyes seemed too knowing.
“I was made,” she whispered.
Then she said it again. “I was made.”
She ran a hand down her chest, to her belly. Then she slid her hand surreptitiously between her tender thighs. It was her. But it was not enough. She needed to know who had looked at her with longing before the world turned to fire. Who had whispered her name. Not this name, but the one she had forgotten, long ago, in the dark.
She turned to the man in the chair. “Wake up,” she yelled. Her voice was louder than she thought, and it startled her, maybe more than it startled him.
He jolted, eyes bloodshot. He was breathing fast.
She stood there, naked and terrible and holy, her hair wild around her shoulders.
“What is my name?” she asked.
He stared at her like a dying man seeing heaven. “Astrid,” he said. “I called you Astrid.”
She blinked. Then nodded. “Then I’ll take it.”
She did not ask for a robe. She walked barefoot to the hearth, hips swaying with unnatural grace. The movement was neither learned nor practiced but remembered, as if the body had once danced in another life, in another fire.
Colin watched her like a man half-mad with thirst. The flames kissed her skin in waves, lighting the slope of her back, the soft swell of her thighs, the outline of her ribs beneath skin that was far too flawless for any god’s mercy.
He stood. Slowly. Carefully.
“I thought you might be cold,” he offered, voice rough as a blade dulled on bone.
Astrid turned. “I am,” she said, and let the words hover in the chamber. “But I don’t want to cover it.”
He hesitated. “It?”
She tilted her head, her hair cascading in loose, shining waves. “This. Me.”
A smile tugged at her lips. It was almost cruel, almost innocent. “Isn’t this what you wanted to see?”
Colin swallowed. “I created you to live.”
She walked closer. Step by step, with predatory grace. “No. You created me because you were lonely.”
She was in front of him now. She was close enough he could feel her breath against his chest, cold and crisp and tinged with ash.
“Do you want me?” she asked.
The question cut through him like lightning. He tried to answer, and he tried to look away. But her hand touched his throat, fingers tracing the hollow where his pulse lived.
“Don’t lie. I’m made of your lies,” she whispered into his cold ear.
He shuddered, closed his eyes, and spoke the truth. “Yes.”
She leaned in. “Then kiss me.”
Their mouths met like blood and blessing. It wasn’t gentle at all. She bit his lip. Blood trickled down his chin. He didn’t seem to care. He grabbed her waist too hard, left bruises he would weep over later. She tasted like silver and salt. Like winter roses and old dust.
Their tongues tangled, breath stuttering. He lifted her, reaching his arms under her thighs. and laid her across the wide velvet chaise beside the fire, her hair spilling like red yarn over the blue fabric.
She pulled him down atop her, her nails clawing along his spine. “Tell me,” she gasped between kisses. “What did you use?”
“What—?”
“My lips. My thighs. My—”
“A courtesan’s mouth,” he confessed. “A dancer’s hips. A duchess’s hands. A poet’s tongue.”
“And my heart?”
He hesitated.
She looked up at him. Her piercing eyes were like twin bruises of moonlight.
“Did you give me yours?”
“I—I didn’t have one left.”
“Then I suppose I’ll make one.”
They didn’t make love. They didn’t fuck. They writhed. It was clumsy, brutal. And then they broke. She pinned him with her thighs. He buried his face in her hair and sobbed as she rocked above him, guiding his hard cock inside of her. She felt herself soaking inside. It was odd, but it felt satisfying in a primal way, but something here was missing.
She slid up and down. He pulled at her hair and kissed her as she thrusted up and down him. She pulled her lips away from his, tearing spittle away from his mouth. It was bestial, she thought. She gazed into his eyes, she lowered onto him, feeling his heart pounding savagely. His cock went deeper, slower, until he begged for release. They moaned in sync, for the head of his cock had hit a spot that felt different than the rest. She heard the creaking of the floorboards. Sitting up, she readjusted his cock inside her. She lifted her cunt up, feeling the warmth of his flesh slide and quiver. This was pure want and desire, she mused as she could feel his flesh spasm and pump hot liquid deep into her. He moaned more, louder this time, his eyes rolling.
She had pleased him certainly, and she had felt things she didn’t know were possible in this short life, but again, she knew something was wrong. Something was not right.
“I was not born to be yours,” she whispered. “But I’m not ready to leave.”
He kissed her breasts like prayer. He tasted sweat and salt and something stranger. It was a hunger rising in her blood, ancient and unnamed.
After, they lay together on the floor before the hearth. They were still naked, their legs intertwined like vines stretching to live forever. He seemed spent, but Astrid wanted more.
The velvet throw covered them like a shroud. Colin stroked her back in slow spirals. She gazed at the dancing light of the fire in the hearth.
“You don’t own me,” she said softly.
“No,” he agreed. “I only… found you.”
“You built me,” she corrected. “Like a cathedral. Like a gallows.”
“I hoped it would be enough.”
“It isn’t,” she replied, not understanding the feelings that gushed out of her like a geyser.
He nodded. Tears welled at the corners of his eyes, but he let them fall in silence. She closed hers. Leaned her head to his chest. His heartbeat was different this time.
She whispered into his ear. “There’s someone else. In the dark. I saw his eyes before I died.”
“Who?” Colin asked her, his voice high-pitched.
“I don’t know his name.”
There was a beat, then and awkward breath. Colin began to cry audibly.
“But he knew mine,” she continued.
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