She buttoned him into a coat that wasn’t Henri’s.

Black wool, cut for the weather. The tailor built it to be rained on, because that was its purpose. His silver seams sat under the collar, visible only to someone who knew where to look.

She put them there.

The mismatched eyes she could do nothing about, so it was pointless to try. He stood in the Oratory’s stone passage and let her work the buttons, patient as a man being dressed for a funeral he hadn’t chosen.

“Where?”

“Out.”

He waited for the rest of it. She finished the collar instead and herded him through the cold-chain dark the way she always went alone, past the stench of preservation, past the galvanic hum in the walls, up the grate stairs into an alley already breathing coal.

The sub-district closed over them: visibility down to four feet in still air, lamps that worked and others that only made the gesture, iron without gilt, channels underfoot for runoff and worse, and over all of it the copper-and-old-breath she reduced to logistics years ago and was tasting again tonight because he was taking it with his whole face.

He stopped three steps past the grate and turned a full circle, slow enough that she almost told him to keep moving.

She braced for wonder. He took the Oratory that way in the first weeks, and the townhouse, and Henri’s coat on the hook, and her own face when she thought he wasn’t looking: everything received at full attention, nothing ranked, the flat total gravity of something that not yet learned to be selective.

What she got was an assessment, item by item. Failing lamp, unpolished iron, the grate he’d come up through, the cart woman whose face Victoria never once read and who still didn’t lift her eyes.

Legible, she thought.

Failures with addresses on them, continuation without ornament, a city that stopped pretending several decades before he arrived.

She set her pace and didn’t look back to see whether he’d take it.

“With me.”

She walked it at the speed she always used down here, the one that said she had business at the other end of the alley and had been through it before. Both were true. Three years of it: Marc’s people, the unmarked doors, the back rooms where the cold chain lived. The sub-district was her supply line. It was also the underside of the world, and she had stopped seeing it as anything except a route between errands a long time ago.

He hadn’t stopped seeing anything.

A gas fixture hissed and failed above them. His head tilted up and stayed up half a second longer than the sound accounted for. Two lamps down, another one flickered and held. Rendered fat cut through the copper from a doorway the smog eaten, and a mechanical cart rattled a street they hadn’t reached yet, and he took delivery of all of it, ranking none of it, and she taught him that. She did not cost out what it would be like to have the looking turned on a city she’d spent three years walking without seeing.

They passed the cart woman again from a different angle. Her eyes stayed down. He watched her anyway, the way you watch a door that might still open.

She didn’t explain the markets. She showed him the grates that opened onto stairs going down. She let him stand in a channel where the air pressed darker and thicker, and she didn’t apologize for it. This was where the cold chain lived. This was where Marc’s people moved parts the Upper City preferred not to name out loud. None of it had ever needed to be beautiful in order to work.

He stopped walking. When she turned, his head was back and his chin was up, and he was looking at the ceiling.

The permanent low one. Grey-yellow on its underside, sitting at the fourth floor of everything, decades of the city’s own exhaust held down by still air and a municipal decision never to examine it. Crossing it left grit on anything light-colored and a taste at the back of the throat that stayed for an hour. He had never been above it. He had only ever been below.

He read it the way he read everything she handed him.

“What’s above it?”

“The Upper City.”

He turned that over. “Are we going there?”

“Not today.”

Read more

She started him on the technical documentation because nouns do not lie.

Conductor.

Coupling.

Galvanic differential.

The word, the diagram, and the thing in the world that the word fastened.

Victoria figured out the method that same hour, standing in the study with a hand on the maintenance schematics shelf.

She ignored novels.

Novels had imprecise narratives; a speaker, a listener, and a gap between them where meaning could rot.

A schematic only said what it was.

He learned the alphabet in an afternoon.

That evening, she documented this as retention, aligning with previous observations, and omitted recording her hand’s actions while he replicated the letter forms.

It moved halfway to the crown of his bent head, then came back down on its own.

There was nothing to record.

A hand is not a finding.

By the second week, he had already used up all the schematics. He could read a transfer diagram aloud in that slow, assembling voice, each word set down like an instrument returned to its tray, and there was nothing left on her wall that could teach him what a sentence did when it ran longer than its function.

The lessons required sentences.

The study had two libraries.

She stood in front of the north wall for some time. She would not have been able to say how long, which was unusual.

She did not examine it.

Inventory decision.

The technical library had run out of stock. She selected the treatise on bridge aesthetics, pale green spine, because it was the closest thing that wall had to a technical text. If some part of her selected it because it was the furthest thing from a love letter, that part did not submit its reasoning for review.

The northern window admitted afternoon light with its usual lack of conviction. He sat where she put him, in the reading chair that was too small for him the way every chair in the house was too small for him. He took the book from her, and the first wrong note sounded before he had read a word.

He opened the cover with a specific, respectful pressure, thumb flat along the hinge of the spine so the binding would not crack.

Nobody had taught him that. She had certainly not taught him that. She made a note of it, and where the hands originated, and filed both notes with the other provenance she managed by pre-decision.

“From the top of the page.”

He read.

“A bridge is an argument conducted between two banks that have never met. The engineer does not resolve the argument. The engineer only holds it still long enough for people to cross.”

The room went wrong.

Read more

He did not fit.

The doorway from the Oratory stairs to the kitchen measured six feet three inches. She had noted this four years ago, when Henri brought the drafting table through it sideways, swearing amiably at the iron frame. The body she had activated eleven hours ago did not clear it.

His left shoulder caught the doorframe on the first attempt. He stopped. Looked at the frame. Looked at his shoulder. Looked at the frame again.

She made a note in the journal she had been carrying since he sat up.

Spatial calibration: incomplete.

Overestimates clearance by four centimeters.

Favors left side.

“Duck,” she said.

He looked at her.

“Lower your head when you come through. The frame will not move.”

He lowered his head. Came through. His right hand found the doorframe as he passed, and the fingers curled against the iron with a grip that was too practiced for someone who had been alive for less than a day. The sculptor’s hands knew how to hold things. The sculptor’s hands had been holding things for twenty-three years before they arrived on her table.

The rest of him had been holding things for eleven hours.

She noted the discrepancy. The body that followed the hands through the doorway placed its feet. Carried its arms close. When she led him to the kitchen table and pulled out the chair, he lowered himself into it by degrees, one hand flat on the table, letting the structure prove itself under him.

The chair held.

There were two coffee cups in the cabinet. There had been two coffee cups in the cabinet for three years. She took them both down.

She poured. Set one in front of him. Sat across the table with the journal open between them.

He picked up the cup with both hands. The sculptor’s hands arranged themselves around it with the specific grip of fingers that had held similar vessels in another life: steady, balanced, the thumb settling into the curve. The cup looked small.

He drank. His face did something she did not have a framework for. A sequence of minor adjustments as the taste registered. No pleasure. No discomfort. A variable, being processed without prior reference.

“Coffee, bitter.”

She paused.

“You will develop a preference.”

He drank again. The second sip produced fewer adjustments.

She made a note.

Read more

The barometric needle touched forty-two at eleven minutes past nine.

On the tray, she set the loupe.

She finished the radial nerve map on both hands: the right showed the precision she’d specified, the left showed a slight delay in the ulnar response she’d noted and intended to correct in calibration.

She established the anastomoses for individual finger movement.

She checked the needle; forty-two and holding.

The storm would arrive before midnight.

The most recent cup of coffee on the shelf beside the documentation wall had grown a skin.

It was the third coffee since she began working after Marc Tessier set the galvanic case on the central table twenty-nine hours ago and buttoned his coat and told her to finish it and left through the stone passage for the last time.

She had not slept.

She crossed to the generator beneath the central table; three months she had spent building it from a salvaged university transformer and sixteen hand-wound copper coils, the specifications classified three years ago and memorized before the classification took effect.

She had started the warm-up sequence at six that morning. The first coil engaged at a subsonic register felt in the molars before the ears registered it. The second and third added intervals she had calibrated to the resonance of the Oratory’s stone walls, measured in her first month down here, before the central table existed, before she understood what the room would need to hold.

The generator had been producing a continuous vibration by ten o’clock, which traveled up through the floor and settled behind her ribs.

The tube array along the eastern wall had responded.

The galvanic-reactive fluid detected the generator’s frequency and replied to it, much like an instrument answers a tuning fork not meant for it.

The Oratory was waking up.

Read more

Tomorrow will be The Storm.

She had been measuring the barometric forecasts for eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty hours.

Every hour: the temperature, the pressure, the feel of the air, documented across five thousand pages dedicated to tracking the exact conditions the storm required.

She had narrowed the margin of error in her predictions to within .04 of a percent.

Acceptable for her science, for an experiment over a year in the making.

The sheet was off the body when she heard the knocks. The stone passage made a specific sound when it opened. It was older than the foundations of the neighboring building she had absorbed into the Oratory’s eastern wall.

The lock, made of iron, had stayed in place for eighty years. When the bolt drew back, it spoke in a register her own apparatus could not produce: stone-against-stone, the cold low note of a thing that lived in the dark and did not appreciate being moved.

Victoria did not look up.

Read more

The coffee was cold. Made two hours, 32 minutes, and 20 seconds ago.

The caffeine will remain potent for another 21 hours, 27 minutes, and 36 seconds.

Right hand, clad in black surgical gloves, gripped the mug, downing the tepid, oil-colored liquid before setting it behind her. Her eyes, much like her left hand, remained on task. The pipes above her, behind her, took quick breaths. The generator at her feet shuddered and gasped, galvanic mechanisms pumping electric currents. The glass flutes bubbled with clear liquid, flexible tubes pumping cooling fluid through the needles piercing the body underneath the sheet.

Though it would be imprecise to consider it a single body. The heavily oiled sheet rested over the large silhouette, but what was underneath was the whole of disparate parts, specifically chosen by her precise exact standards.

She never examined those standards; why that jaw, why that left eye versus that right eye, why were those legs chosen to carry that broad chest. The multitude of questions, the “why”...it’s uncomfortable. Meaningless.

The only thing that mattered was the result.

She lowered the sheet further, tugging the silver silk taut. She almost finished the sutures that began at the clavicle and ended just before the sternum. The thread caught the light, prismatic where serum had touched it, silver wire against ivory skin. She cut the stitch, wiping away the serum weeping from the tissue. “I’m still working.” She let out a murmur to the hum and hisses of gas seeping from the copper fixtures behind her, “I’ll be up in an hour.”

To be honest, she was not sure when she would be done. She pinned the skin from the midpoint of the forearms to the wrists open like wings, and bare wrists awaited suitable hands to attach. The grimy humidity that seeped from the smog outside caused the skin to warm and expand, the seams along the temple stretching. They would have to be redone before she could apply liquid nitrogen and turn on the vents.

Only then could she stop. Maybe.

“You don’t like the smell down here. You’ll get used to it. At least copper has a pleasant tang.” She lifted her head from her work, closing her eyes and taking a slow breath. Her hands were shaking. Inefficient movement that would only slow her down.

She pulled off one glove, her hand pressing on the top of her sternum. “I’m almost done.” She turned her head to the side. “Then I’ll go upstairs and sleep.”

That motivation, the promise of rest after an unfortunate absence, brought back focus. She put the glove back on, picking up a clean needle. She lowered her glasses from the top of her head to the bridge of her nose; the loupe attached to the lens following before threading the surgical silk through the eye. She needed a fresh needle; the flesh did not resist the point as it pierced through, making a clean closure. Once the sternum seam was closed, she went back to the temple.

To his face.

High cheekbones, full lips, a square jaw. Aesthetic reasons guided the choice of facial features, contrasting with the functional choices made for his broad chest and rip-corded legs.

She tightened and cleaned the sutures and seams. She stood up, taking off the glasses and turning the vents; the humidity sucked away into the brass hood. She covered the assembled body with the sheet, before resting her palms on the edge of the table.

Almost.

Her hand pressed against her belly, eyes closing tightly again.

Almost done.

She turned off the generators and the bright lights; the heat quickly dissipated, the temperature lowering in the Oratory. There would be no light or heat here until the next day. “Yes, I’m heading up to bed. I’m tired of the smell too.”

She walked up the stairs to the upper level, opening then closing the door behind her, locking it. Though she shut the metal window panels, she also kept the curtains closed. She had grown tired of the outside light and all of Aurenveil’s distractions. She stepped over the letters by the door, barely registering the addresses. She took one step away from the coat on the hook, walking down the hall before turning sharply to the Master wing.

No matter how fast she moved, the door was always there first; it was at the end of the hall, always just in front of her.

A door painted pale blue, like the sky she last saw three years ago.

She sat down at her desk, adjusting the amber lamp to a letterhead she had left that morning, blank except for the current date. Her hand shook again as she picked up the pen. Once she pressed it against the paper, it stilled.

Everything was still.

Dear Emile,

It has been one thousand and ninety five days since I last saw you. You would have been three by now. If you were anything like me, you would have snuck down to the basement and dismantled the clock on the shelf. Your father’s clock. He wouldn’t want you down there.

I wonder how long the pain stays. Does it stay in the same place, or does it move? It still hurts me. I don’t think it will ever stop hurting.

Grief remade her. Once a woman of science and wonder, Victoria now moves through a world hollowed by loss — a cathedral of smoke and silence. In the hush of her workshop, where gears turn like rosaries and glass hums with trapped breath, she seeks what the heavens have denied her: life born from death, beauty drawn from decay.

When her creation stirs beneath the storm, it opens its eyes not to the light, but to her — the mother, the maker, the mourner. Between them blooms something fragile and forbidden, a tenderness that teeters on the edge of ruin. Every touch is a confession; every breath, a betrayal of nature itself.

In a city gilded with Art Deco splendor and corroded by secrets, Victoria becomes both god and ghost, haunted by the love she has forged from grief’s raw marrow.

A re-imagining of Frankenstein steeped in shadow and sorrow, Victoria is a gothic elegy for the ones we cannot let go — and the monstrous beauty born when we try.

Welcome to Victoria, a Gothic reimagining of Frankenstein, where a genderbent Victor commits the same blasphemous act of reanimation.

Not because she can.

Because something was taken.

And neither God, nor time, nor grief would give it back.

Due to the gothic and erotic nature of ‘Victoria’, this will not be a free serialized novel. This will be available to premium subscribers.

However, for those premium subscribers, I plan on putting future serializations on Substack first before Kindle or KU, thus ALL future publications, from ‘Victoria’ to ‘Letters Between Sex and Violence vol. 4’ will be accessible for premium subscribers.

Not only that, but check out the following perks!

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1. Character References and Behind-the-Scenes Insights: Get an in-depth look at the characters that inhabit my worlds as well as behind-scene-notes and inspirations.

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Schedule

Episodes of ‘Victora’ will, tentatively, be released weekly on Thursday as this would be perfect for #ThrowbackThursdays (throwing it way far back). When an episode is released or scheduled, I will announce it on my newsletter.

Not only that but comments and a chat dedicated to each episode for my publications will open for critique on Thursday as well!

Without further ado…enter the world of ‘Victoria’.