Chapter Text

-LE PETIT JOURNAL-

A Macabre Discovery in the Cellars of the Palais Garnier.

“Opera Ghost” Found Dead

Evening Issue – April 25th, 1884.

     It is with the greatest astonishment that we report the death of the mysterious figure long whispered of within the walls of the Paris Opera. Known only through rumor and fearful speculation as The Phantom of the Opera, the man has been confirmed by official sources to have perished in solitude beneath the great edifice.

     According to the testimony of a mysterious gentleman once attached to the Shah's Court of Persia, the man – whose existence has been dismissed as legend - was called Erik. The Persian gentleman claimed that Erik had possessed talents of extraordinary genius; architect, musician and inventor, he lived hidden in the labyrinths beneath the Opera. No other information was given.

     The body was well-decayed when the proper authorities were sent below to retrieve it. The Persian who claimed to know Erik and, surprisingly, Mlle. Christine Daaé, celebrated Prima Donna of the Palais Garnier itself, collected the remains; stating they were to give the man a Christian burial at an unknown location. What Mlle. Daaé’s relation is to Erik, she refused to say.

     M. Armand Moncharmin and M. Firmin Richard, the current managers of the Opera have declined to make a public statement regarding this extraordinary revelation, though others employed within the Opera have confirmed that strange disturbances within have ceased.

     Thus ends the tale of the so-called Phantom; at once monster and man, criminal and artist, who haunted our Opera for so many years. The silence in which he perished is perhaps the most fitting epitaph for a soul that lived, and died, in the shadows.

Chapter Text

     Joseph Martin stirred in his bed, roused by the sparrows chattering in the eaves above him. Their shrill excitement heralded the Parisian dawn, though the sky beyond the window remained dark. The room was already stifling, the air thick and hot beneath the slanted roof of the single-room apartment. Plaster walls, flaked with age and neglect, pressed close around a warped wooden table, two chairs, and the old bed he shared with his only daughter—nearly the sum of all they owned. At the foot of the bed, a wiry ratting dog leapt up, shaking off sleep. The bell at his collar jingled sharply, its bright sound splitting through the silence like a crack in the stillness of the hour.

     “Le Fou.” Joseph regarded the dog as he stretched his thick legs over the side of the mattress. The dog leapt down eagerly, nails clicking on the floorboards. Beside him on the old mattress his daughter still slept soundly. She was turned on her side, one hand curled against her cheek. He reached out to nudge her shoulder firmly, his voice rough with exhaustion.

     “(Y/N),” he rumbled. “Come on now girl. The day will not wait.” She groaned, shifting beneath the blanket, reluctant to surrender what little rest she had managed. Joseph coughed into his fist and wiped the sweat from his brow with a calloused hand before rising.

     (Y/N) stretched, peeling the stifling blanket from her skin, irritated. Despite the night’s heat, it had clung to her like a shroud. By the time she pushed herself upright, Joseph was already dressing, pulling on his worn trousers and the faded shirt he kept for work. He frowned at a fresh fray unraveling at the elbow, plucking at it before deciding the battle was pointless. With a muttered curse, he snatched an old wooden brush from the dresser and dragged it briskly through his dark, graying hair and thick beard.

     (Y/N) eyed her shabby blue dress folded neatly at the chair, but the thought of heavy fabric in the stifling room turned her stomach. Better to stay in her shift until the meal was made. She lit two stubby candles to fight back the gray pre-dawn gloom, tied her long (H/C) hair back with a strip of cloth, and padded toward their cramped kitchenette. Le Fou followed at her heels, the jingle of his collar and the scratch of his nails echoing in the silence.

     She stood before the iron stove and frowned. A fire would mean a warm, filling meal for her father—his only one until nightfall—but in the stifling apartment the heat would be unbearable. Better to leave the stove cold. With a weary sigh, she lifted the pail from the counter and poured water into two wooden bowls. A few handfuls of dry oats followed, swelling into a thin gruel as they soaked. She gathered what scraps of seasoning she could to make the porridge less miserable.

     At the table, Joseph pulled on his cracked boots and set his old leather work bag beside him. He emptied its contents one by one: steel-spring traps, small vials of oil of aniseed, satchels of stale oats mixed with sawdust, coarse netting, a short cudgel, a hunter’s knife. He examined each carefully, as if in ritual—wiping the steel clean, checking springs, sharpening edges, testing the woven nets for tears. The knife must cut. The traps must snap. The nets must hold.

     Joseph, well into his fifties, had hunted vermin for twenty-five years. He worked with precision, never careless, never greedy; he knew a rat-catcher who stole or damaged property would soon starve. In recent years, he had come to trust dogs more than ferrets for the chase. Ferrets slipped away, unruly and spiteful. Dogs—at least the right ones—learned discipline. Obedience.

     “You already cleaned and sharpened everything last night,” (Y/N) chided as she sprinkled the last of the cupboard’s salt into the bowls. She stirred the oats until they thickened, then huffed. A pitiful meal.

     “I know.” Joseph fiddled with a spring-trap on the table, testing its teeth with his thumb. “But today must go well. We can’t afford mistakes. They need to see I’m reliable—” He broke off as (Y/N) set a wooden bowl before him. She added a hard crust of stale bread, and sat down. For a moment she only stared at the thin spread before them. Joseph laid the trap aside and bent to eating without ceremony. At his feet, Le Fou quivered with excitement, tail thudding the floor, one paw lifted in anticipation at every bite.

     “I wish we had coffee,” (Y/N) sighed, stirring her porridge. “What I wouldn’t give for coffee.”

     Joseph swallowed, thick beard catching the pale mush. “If this job goes well,” he said, matter-of-fact, “we might.”

     “Who’s this job for again?” (Y/N) asked; chin resting in her hands as she watched dawn spill pink and orange across the heavens, restless and alive.

     “Monsieurs Moncharmin and Richard. The managers of the Palais Garnier.” Joseph tore the bread’s hard crust in half and pushed the larger piece across the table. She winced at it - he needed the bigger piece more than she did - but took it without protest, softening the stale heel in her porridge as he did the same.

     “The Opera?” she mused. “That’s a long walk. And I thought they already had rat-catchers. A place so fine has never cared to hire you before.”

     Joseph grunted, pulling a folded newspaper clipping from his pocket. “According to this posting, the cellars are crawling with drain rats. They’re coming up into the House itself in droves. And after the whole… ghost business, their regular men won’t set foot below.” He gave a humorless little laugh, tinged with pride. “It pays better than the markets. Those rats must be fat as dukes.”

     (Y/N) wrinkled her nose at the mention of the ghost. She tried to recall the rumors from a past spring, but such things felt far from her daily struggle to keep food on the table. Someone had died—she thought—but beyond that, it was all a blur.

     “What happened with the ghost?” she asked, listlessly stirring her porridge.

     “Some nonsense about someone haunting the place,” Joseph muttered. He shoved his empty bowl aside and brushed the last crumbs of bread to the floor, where Le Fou snapped them up with eager clicks of his jaws. Reaching for the trap he had toyed with before breakfast, Joseph set it squarely on the table and bent over it again.

     “Why would there be so many rats now?” she pressed, finally tasting her meal. The porridge was gray, thin, and tasted only faintly of salt, more like damp paper than food.

     Joseph pried the traps jaws open, listening to the spring with a critical ear. “Could be gas rising from the sewers, killing them off. Rats are clever creatures—they’ll flee when they sense danger.”

     “Something is chasing them up?” (Y/N) mused, watching dawn ripen from orange to pale blue. A mischievous glint flickered in her eye as she took another bite. “Perhaps it’s the ghost.”

     Joseph barely twitched, bent over the trap’s pressure plate. “Don’t be childish,” he grumbled. Testing the spring, he straightened and fixed her with a hard look. “Did you find work yesterday?”

     Her throat tightened. She let her spoon fall back into the bowl with a dull clink and propped her chin on laced fingers. “No,” she said at last, meeting his eyes.

     “And why not?” His scowl deepened. “I thought you spent all day yesterday knocking at houses, asking after scullery work.”

     “They ‘already had everyone they needed,’” she muttered.

     “What about laundress? Seamstress? Nanny? Cook?” he pressed, gruff voice rising. He set the trap down with a sharp snap of metal on wood. “Christ’s sake, girl, there are plenty of places you could try.”

     “I have been trying!” (Y/N) shot back, dropping her hands flat against the table. “But there’s always someone younger, quicker, cheaper—someone they’d rather have than me. I—” her voice cracked. “I don’t understand—”

     “Well, you never found a husband,” Joseph said flatly. “And you’re not getting any younger. No man will—” he stopped himself, scowling. “It’s past time you figured out how to earn steady money. What will you do when I am gone?”

     “I don’t know.” (Y/N)’s voice caught, thin with quiet desperation. “The easiest work I can do… well—”

     “What?” Joseph pressed, not looking up from the trap in his hands. His tone was sharp, pointed.

     “It’s…” She faltered, shame weighing down her tongue. “It’s not respectable.”

     The trap snapped shut with a vicious clang, steel jaws nearly catching Joseph’s fingers. He froze, glaring at the mechanism as though it had betrayed him, before shoving it into his bag. (Y/N) sat stiffly across from him, throat tightening as she waited for his reply.

     “I… I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” (Y/N) choked. Joseph only grumbled, dark and low, as he shoved the last of his tools into his sack. He swung it over his shoulder and fastened Le Fou’s leash to his belt with practiced motions. (Y/N) stared into her bowl, her shoulders bowed, the shame pressing down.

     A rough, heavy hand came to rest on her shoulder. “You’ll find something,” Joseph rumbled. “you will.” He bent to place a brief kiss on the crown of her head before straightening again, already reaching for the flat cap by the door. His dark curls spilled untidily around his neck as he tugged it on. Le Fou danced around Joseph’s feet panting, eager for the violent work to come. Still at the table, (Y/N) lifted her gaze, misery etched plain on her face.

     “I’ll be back by sundown, same as always,” he announced gruffly. “I’ll ask around the Opera house. Someone must need something cleaned.”

     “Thank you, Papa.” she murmured. For a heartbeat, they regarded one another—unspoken worry behind her eyes, stubborn certainty in his. Then he ducked out the door, down the creaking stairwell, and into the clamorous street.

     From the window, she watched him tugging at Le Fou’s leash, the little dog darting at every shadow. The crowd swallowed them both within moments. She drew herself back from the streaked window. The day awaited her—another day, like all the others, certain to scrape away at what little sense of worth she still clung to. With mechanical care, she gathered the bowls and forced down the thin porridge she had left. No food could be wasted.

     Pulling her rough blue dress over her shift, she tied it tight around her waist and slipped into her ragged shoes. For a moment she stood in the stifling room, her gaze drifting over the peeling walls, the warped table; the silence always seemed to press in harsher once her father was gone.

     By habit, she told herself she would spend the long August day scouring the city for work, then return by evening to have dinner waiting when Joseph came home. The same pattern, the same weary rhythm—unchanged for as long as she could remember. As she tidied the room before leaving, Joseph’s words lingered in her mind, heavy as a shadow she could not shake: What will happen to you when I am gone? She forced the thought down, choking on the image it conjured—her father lying cold and lifeless somewhere in the city’s depths. She could not bear it.

     That day was still far off… wasn’t it?

Chapter Text

     The rough wooden door swung closed behind (Y/N) with a weary click. She brushed damp strands of hair from her brow and slipped off her shoes, setting the small bundle of food she had managed to secure that day onto the warped little table. The apartment felt even more suffocating than it had that morning, the heat climbing from the lower floors and settling like a fever in her and Joseph’s upstairs room. She went to the window and shoved it open, praying for a current of air, even the faintest stir. Nothing. The city outside lay as breathless as the room itself.

     She wiped her palms down the front of her dress and drew in a steadying breath. Endure. Always endure. Her father’s voice lingered in memory: Be grateful for the heat while you can. Winter will come, and you’ll beg for summer again. And yet, as sweat trickled down her neck, she found herself yearning for the first clean fall of snow.

     Unwrapping the cloth bag, she uncovered her small haul—three potatoes, a few carrots, and the skinned breast of a chicken. No work again, not today. Perhaps it was pity, or perhaps she had looked so defeated at the kitchen door, but the Lady of the house she’d been turned away from had pressed the food into her hands.

     A small charity for her shame.

     Joseph would be glad to come home to a proper meal—especially the meat. The trouble with it was the stove. She eyed the iron beast and the meager stack of wood beside it with weary resentment, knowing there was no choice. With a sigh, she struck a match.

     Soon the small room filled with the crackle of fire and the thick, suffocating heat it bled into the air. Potatoes, peeled and diced, went into a pot to boil with the carrots, their thin scent blending with the sharp tang of iron and smoke. On a pan beside it, the chicken breast—split carefully in two—hissed and spat.

     By then her blue dress lay discarded in a heap, unfit for the swelter. She worked in her thin white shift, wet and clinging to her back, every movement reminding her of how the room closed in tighter with every passing minute.

     The sky bruised into twilight as (Y/N) laid the table. One tin plate, piled high for her father, and her own set more modestly across from it. On the table between them, she placed a jug of water she had hauled up from the street spigot. At least it was cold—wonderfully cold against her palms.

     She remembered, half-embarrassed, how she had lingered at the spigot, splashing her face and hair with the cooling stream. The neighbors probably thought her childish, playing at the water like a girl half her age. Still, the relief had been worth the shame.

     She sat at the table, hands folded in her lap, unwilling to lift her fork until her father ducked in through the doorway with a happy but tired Le Fou. The chicken and boiled vegetables waited in front of her, its thin steam curling away into nothing. The sky outside kept sinking into deeper shades of violet, and the beastly stove itself began to cool. At last, hunger broke her resolve. She ate quickly, guiltily, each bite heavy in her throat.

     Still, the room stayed empty. Twilight bled further into night, and the two scoundrels she had been waiting for never appeared.

     (Y/N) lit a few stubby candles, their weak flames trembling against the stifling dark. Her gaze settled on her father’s untouched plate, the food no longer steaming. What should she do with it? If she draped a clean cloth across it, the meal would keep a few hours more. At least then when he returned, there would be something waiting for him.

     Her thoughts drifted from the food to the yawning window. She carried one of the candles over and set it on the splintering sill, its light spilling feebly into the night. Fingers tightening on the wood, she leaned out, searching the street below. The bright streetlamps only cast moving shapes—shadows of strangers passing by, their faces blurred in the glow.

     The hours continued to drag, each one darker and quieter than the last. (Y/N) kept her vigil at the window, the candle fluttering beside her. The avenue eventually thinned of its decent folk; only drunkards and wanderers remained milling about.

     No stocky silhouette appeared, and no little dog trotted faithfully at his master’s heels.

     She forced a steady breath. He was fine. He had to be. The Opera House lay a few hours deeper into the city—perhaps he’d found a place to sleep rather than walk the long way back. Perhaps the work was good, better than expected, and he stayed late to prove himself or to earn more francs per dozen rats killed.

     She told herself these things again and again, as though saying them would make them true. The night was deep now—nearing midnight. He would not come faster for her watching. At last, she rose, snuffed the candles, and crossed to the bed. The worn sheets were cold, wide, and empty. She curled into them anyway, her stomach knotted with fear.

     He would be home, she whispered into the dark.

     He had to be.

     She drifted in and out of uneasy sleep, every sound on the street outside tricking her into believing she heard his step, his voice, the scratch of Le Fou’s paws. When the pale light of dawn filtered through the window, she stirred, reaching across the bed as she had since she was a child.

     The sheets were still empty. Her father had not come home.

     Panic slammed into her chest, wrenching her upright. Maybe he was at the table—eating, tinkering with a trap, anything. Her eyes darted wildly about the room, grasping for the shape of him, his bag, Le Fou’s leash—some sign that they had come home. The apartment was undisturbed.

     A strangled sound tore from her throat as she stumbled from the bed. She yanked the cloth from the plate she had saved for him—still untouched, stone-cold. His boots, his cap, his bag of tools were nowhere to be seen. Her dress still lay in a crumpled heap on the floorboards where it fell, the candles sagged in their brass holders where she had left them. Nothing had changed.

     He was gone.

     Tears burned in her eyes as panic coursed through her. Where was he? Injured? Lost? Lying dead in some gutter, his life snuffed out without warning? He had never failed to come home. Never.

     Another whimper escaped as she stared at Joseph’s untouched plate. She wrapped her arms around herself, her thoughts spinning faster and faster until they broke apart into nothing. Only the hollow ache remained. Who could help her?

     The Gardiens de la Paix! They would know. If Joseph had been hurt—or worse—they would have found him on their patrols. There was a commissariat a little over an hour’s walk away. She had to start there.

     She snatched her crumpled dress from the floor and shoved it over her shift, leaving the ties hanging loose. Her hair sat tangled in her face, but she ignored it. Shoes on, lock turned, she flew out the door.

     The morning outside struck her like a furnace—sun glaring, air already heavy with heat and bodies. She pushed into the crowd, walking fast, then jogging, then running. Strangers cursed as she stumbled into them, but she didn’t stop, didn’t care. (Y/A) years old, yet the thought of her father gone reduced her to a frightened child, sprinting blindly through the throngs of Paris with tears stinging her eyes.

     Her legs nearly gave out as she reached the commissariat. She stumbled through the door, sweat streaking her face, hair wild, dress untied. A few officers lounging in the lobby stiffened at the sight, some retreating deeper into the building as if to avoid her.

     One unlucky young man with a curled moustache sat at the front desk. He straightened just as (Y/N) grabbed onto the counter.

     “Please!” she gasped. “Please, Monsieur—my father—” Her voice broke into sobs.

     For a moment he only stared, but then waved over another officer, older, still clutching his morning tea. The man sighed, set his cup down with a click, and fixed her with a flat look.

     “Hold on, Mademoiselle. Breathe, and then start again. What do you need?” She dragged in a breath, chest burning.

     “I…I am (Y/N) Martin. My father—he didn’t come home last night.”

     The officer fished a folded paper and a stub of pencil from his coat. “Your name?”

     “What? I-” she blurted, but clasped her hands together to calm herself. Was this man an idiot? “(Y/N). Martin.”

     “Your father is missing?”

     “Yes. Joseph Martin.”

     “Occupation?”

     “Rat-catcher,” (Y/N) answered.

     “How long gone?”

     “He left for the Opera Populaire early yesterday. He said he’d be home by sunset. He never came back.”

     The officer clicked his tongue. “Could’ve stopped in for a drink. Slept it off in a gutter. Happens every night in Paris.”

     “No! He’s not like that,” (Y/N) protested. “He always comes home.”

     The man only shrugged. “We hear that a lot. Description?”

     She rattled it off, fighting tears: “Tall, broad, about one-ninety centimeters tall. Dark curly hair, graying. Large beard. Green work shirt, worn tan trousers, brown cap. He carries his rat traps in an old leather bag and has a little ratting dog with him.”

     The officer barely reacted, finished his scribbling, and then tucked the paper back into his pocket. “We’ll keep an eye out. You can come back later to see if we have found anything.”

     “You haven’t seen him? Not last night, not this morning?” Her stomach turned.

     “No,” he said simply. “If we had, I wouldn’t tell you to come back later.” Her lips parted to plead again, but he cut her off. “That is all, Mademoiselle.” He reclaimed his cup, already finished with her. Her eyes shifted to the mustached clerk at the desk, who offered a strained smile.

     “I’m sure he’ll turn up.” He said simply. (Y/N) could only stare at him, hollow and trembling, before she turned and staggered back out into the blistering streets.

     The street clattered with hooves and carriage wheels, voices barking and shouting in the heat, and she was swept into the tide of bodies moving toward the markets. Sweat ran into her eyes as she walked, her untied dress clinging to her, the soles of her shoes already grinding raw at her feet. Each breath tasted of dust, horse manure, and the sour tang of sweaty human bodies pressed too close together in the sun.

     The officers at the commissariat had given her nothing. Nothing, but a slip of paper folded into a stranger’s pocket and the hollow comfort of being told to “come back later.” As if later would bring Joseph home. As if later would set things right.

     She forced her pace to steady, though her heart thrashed against her ribs. Perhaps he really was delayed at the Opera, counting his catches long after nightfall. Or, had he chosen to sleep in some shelter somewhere, curled against Le Fou, rather than make the long trek across the city in the dark? Perhaps—please God—he was already home now, ready to scold her for doubting him. She clung to that image, turned it over and over like a coin between her fingers: Joseph at the table, Le Fou at his feet, the plate she had left covered by cloth empty at last.

     Her father’s words came back to her then, as sharp as the first time she had heard them: What will you do when I am gone?

     She pushed the thought aside and walked faster, ignoring the sting of new blisters forming upon old in her shoes. By the time she reached the narrow stairwell leading up to their room, her legs trembled beneath her. The hallway was close and suffocating, heavy with the stench of boiled cabbage and chamber pots, but she hardly noticed. Her hand shook as she fit the brass key into the lock, her chest tight with hope and terror both.

     The door creaked open.

     The apartment greeted her with silence. The table still bore its untouched plate, the cloth undisturbed save for some crawling flies. No boots by the bed. No cap on the hook. No bark, no laugh, no low rumble of Joseph’s voice filling the room.

     (Y/N)’s knees buckled beneath her, and she sank to the floorboards with a hollow thud. The wooden door swung shut behind her, muffling the din of the city outside and leaving her stranded in silence. She pressed her hand over her mouth to smother the ragged sobs breaking free, but they tore through anyway. Folding in on herself, she drew her arms tight around her ribs, as if she could hold the ache inside and keep it from tearing her apart. How long she remained there, she could not say. The light through the window shifted inch by inch, time was pressing forward with cruel indifference, while she gasped for air.

     At last, she forced herself upright and staggered to the table, eyes fixed on the waiting plate. The flies hovered now, and when she lifted the cloth they burst upward in a frantic spray. The food was already spoiling in the heat—the edges of the chicken breast darkening, glossed with a sickly sheen. Her hand trembled as she dropped the cloth back in place, bile rising in the back of her throat.

     Think. She pressed her palms firmly against her temples, her thoughts running wild and useless. The police had offered nothing. That officer had looked at her as though her terror were nothing more than a tiresome tale. She could not sit here another night, waiting by the window like some poor widow who didn’t know she was one yet. She had to move, to do something, anything before grief and worry hollowed her out completely.

     She had to go to the Opera House. If she could not find Joseph there, then someone must know something about him. She wiped her face with the heel of her hand, smearing tears across her flushed skin. From somewhere beyond the rooftops, church bells tolled, heavy and unrelenting. Afternoon was already slipping away. If she left now, she might reach the Opera by the time the sun was sinking.

     Her gaze flicked to the corner of the room where an old lantern sat neglected, its glass clouded with old soot. She lifted it with trembling hands and checked the reservoir—oil still sloshed faintly inside. Relief flickered through her chest. Setting it firmly on the counter, she dragged her hair back from her damp face and tied her dress snug around her waist, forcing herself into order. Then, lantern in hand, she crossed to the door. One last glance at the room, and she forced herself through the threshold.

     The stairwell groaned beneath her hurried steps. She clutched the lantern as though its weight alone might anchor her. Outside, the city bore down on her on all sides, loud and jostling, but the noise seemed to pass her by, leaving her adrift in her own silence. Dust and glare blurred the hours as she trudged forward. Sweat coursed down her back, her limbs aching with exhaustion, but she did not slow.

Chapter Text

     By the time the hulking roof-line of the Palais Garnier rose before her, the sky had surrendered to dusk. Shadows stretched long across the stony boulevards, swallowing the last of the day’s heat as lanterns flared to life one by one along the streets. (Y/N)’s throat tightened with each step closer; the colossal shape loomed above her like some enormous beast waiting at rest.

     Iron gates barred the numerous doors sprawling along the building’s principle façade while the golden figures of Harmony and Poetry gazing down with serene detachment. (Y/N) tugged at one of the door's handles. It did not yield. She swallowed dryly. Perhaps another entrance lay around the building’s edge?

     She continued to trudge along the curling stone path, lantern clutched tight in her hand. Though the Palais Garnier loomed over the boulevard like a dark sentinel, its beauty caught (Y/N) despite her fear. Reliefs, busts and sculpted figures jutted from its richly embellished exterior; saints and muses alike gazing out at (Y/N) as if to mock her smallness. She had never imagined such grandeur existed.

     Around the western façade of the building, she found a pair of symmetrical steps that curling upward into the entryway of a rotunda. She stopped only for a moment at the base of the stone steps, glancing up at the building’s rich ornamentation, the lantern handle slick in her sweaty grip. Her feet ached from the long walk and she was exhausted, but the thought of her father and his little dog drove her forward. She forced herself to mount the first step, then another, her legs heavy as stone.

     A voice cut through the evening.

     “Closed, Mademoiselle. Come back tomorrow.”

     She didn't see the doorman as he leaned against the gilt-edged doors, dressed in a fine uniform; his posture suggesting boredom more than vigilance. His mustache bristled around a cigarette that dangled from his mouth, smoke curling lazily in the gathering dark. His expression soured as she approached, taking in her crumpled, dirty dress and the soot-smudged lantern in her hand.

      “Please!” she blurted, nearly tripping over the last stair in her sudden haste. “My father is Joseph Martin – he was here yesterday. He was hired for the rat-catching job. He hasn’t come home-“

     “I know nothing about that.” The doorman scoffed as he straightened, folding his arms. “The Opera House is closed. Off with you.”

     (Y/N)’s heart thudded dully against her ribs. “You must have seen him!” she pressed, voice cracking. “-A broad man, large beard, with his ratting dog. His name must have been posted! He was expected-“

     “I said the Opera is closed!” the man’s tone sharpened. “Managers are gone, staff is gone, performers are gone, and you should be gone.” He turned away, smoke drifting from his nostrils, already dismissing her; a nuisance buzzing in his ear.

     (Y/N) gripped the lantern tighter until her knuckles turned white. Heat rose in her cheeks – part shame, part fury. The gilded doors glinted dully behind him, immovable...mocking. She could hear her father’s voice in her head, patient but stern: If you want something, you must press until it yields.

     “I was meant to meet him here,” she said quickly, words tumbling out. “To help with his work. He’ll be expecting me. Please - let me through to find him!”

     The doorman’s eyes narrowed, the cigarette twitching at his lip. He only shook his head. “Enough of this. Go home.” he ordered. "This is the last time I will tell you."

     The words landed like a stone in her stomach. For a moment she stood frozen on the steps, shaking with the weight of helplessness, staring as the man returned to his idle stance, puffing smoke into the night as though she were never there to have bothered him at all.

     She lingered there on the steps, the lantern trembling in her grip as she stared dully at the man while he smoked. The last of the daylight slipped from the world, leaving the Opera House a vast and unyielding shadow before her.  Her chest rose and fell with ragged breaths. All the miles she walked in the heat, all the hours spent waiting, all the prayers she silently sent up – and here she was, turned away as if she were nothing. Well, to be honest, she was nothing. She was nothing but a tearful woman in a ragged dress, clutching a beat-up and soiled lantern, begging for scraps of notice.

    She turned at last and made her way down the steps, the sound of her aching feet scuffing across stone echoing in the dark. And then, as she circled a shadowed edge of the great palace, she saw it – a narrow window just above the ground left ajar, a dim glow flickering beyond.

     Her breath caught.

     The weight of helplessness shifted just slightly. She paused in the shadows and glanced back towards the steps where the doorman still lingered, smoke curling from his lips like a lazy serpent. No one was watching her now, not really – the doorman was completely ignoring her; turning her into another shadow among the many that clung to the building’s walls.

     The window was narrow, half-hidden between carved stone sculptures. Its pane stood ajar as though it was left carelessly open by a maid or a student. She touched the frame with tentative fingers, feeling the cool iron if it. One last look over her shoulder, and she forced the hand with the lantern through the opening, then her own body after it. The sill scraped at her dress and bit into her thighs as she wriggled and pulled, trying to keep her strained panting as quiet as she could. With a final, awkward twist, she finally toppled inside; landing on her shoulder. Pain jolted through her arm, making her gasp.

     The lantern rattled across the polished wood, rolling until it struck the base of a wall with a hollow thud. She froze, sprawled against the floorboards, listening for footsteps, for voices, for discovery. None came.

     Slowly she pushed herself upright. A dim glow bled from the few gas lamps that still lit in the room, their weak light pooling against mirrored walls that rose to the low ceiling. Silver and glass caught the glow and multiplied it; and with it, her.

     (Y/N) staggered, staring as a dozen ghostly doubles stared back from every angle — hair undone, dress twisted, face smeared with sweat and dirt. Her own wide, frantic eyes surrounded her, reflected until she could almost not tell which was real. It was as though she had stumbled into a rehearsal room for specters, and the mirrors conscripted her into their dance.

     She crept across the room, slowly collecting her poor lantern as she went. Each step was magnified by the mirrors; her many reflections walking with her. She pressed a hand to one of the panes, the glass surprisingly cool, before turning toward a far wall. A narrow door waited there, its brass handle dulled with use.

     Beyond the doorway stretched a long stone corridor, hushed and almost ceremonial in its stillness. A handful of gas lamps clung to the smooth stone walls, their flames small but steady, throwing pale halos across the stone. Each pool of light gave way to deep shadow, where corners and recessed doorways seemed to reach outwards like dark grasping fingers. Somewhere faint and muffled, she thought she could hear a carriage rumbling past on the street outside – the normal world far away now. She pressed forward, the smooth corridor bending and curling before her until she reached an arched entryway. She stepped through - and gasped.

     The grand chamber unfurled before her like the nave of a marble cathedral, vast and hushed; a place where even the silence seemed to bow in reverence. At its heart rose a grand staircase: a marvel of symmetry and splendor. Twin flights swept upwards in mirrored procession and met at a central landing before climbing again toward the many galleries above. The marble gleamed under the glow of hundreds of glowing gas lamps, polished to a crystalline sheen by the dedicated hands of a master mason.

     At the base of the steps stood sculpted female figures. Torchéres of bronze, their forms flowing, graceful and imposing. Each torchére bore aloft a lamp fashioned like a blazing torch, frozen in eternal illumination. The women’s sculpted robes cascaded in heavy folds, draping their bodies with the weight of classical dignity, their graceful hands gripping the lamps with a strength belied by their beauty. Their blank eyes gazed outward in silent witness to (Y/N)’s trespass.

     Above, balconies curled along the chamber’s perimeter in elegant tiers, their colorful balustrades were lined with busts and masks — comic, tragic, grotesque — their twisted faces forever leering down. She could see it in her mind’s eye: crowds of wealthy Parisians glittering in jewels and satin and leaning against the railings; watching one another as eagerly as the stage. This was no mere entrance hall. It was a theater within a theater, where all who entered became both spectator and spectacle.

     The ceiling soared impossibly high above her, painted with gods and muses twisting in eternal motion. Gaslight only hinted at their colors, yet even in shadow they seemed alive, acting out their scenes above the emptiness below. Crowning all was a great skylight, its distant glass catching the pale shimmer of a rising moon.

     (Y/N) stood at the foot of it all, her breath suspended in wonder. The silence pressed against her ears like heavy velvet, broken only by the faint tap of her shoes on marble. For the first time, she understood why the Palais Garnier was called a palace, not merely a theater. Yet...in its emptiness the grandeur turned menacing. She felt herself an intruder in a temple built for art and beauty — never meant for people like her to enter.

     For a heartbeat her purpose wavered. She had come here for her father, yet his name seemed to slip away in the sheer magnificence pressing down on her. Every gilded mask, every marble caryatid whispered the same warning: You don’t belong. Leave before you are swallowed whole.

     She clutched the lantern to her chest, sucking in a deep breath and fighting the dizziness at the edge of her vision. Where would she even go if she gave up now? Back to the apartment? To the untouched food souring on the table - to the silence that had already grown into a living thing? No. She would press forward.

     (Y/N) gazed up at the stairs; the vast sweep of stone rising like a challenge. Somewhere beneath this splendor, her father had vanished — and if she faltered here, she might lose him forever.

     She drew in a shuddering breath and moved. Her tired legs carried her upward, each step striking sharp against the marble. The lantern continued to wobble in her hand, its rhythm nervous, but steady. Trespasser or not, she would go forward. Whatever horrors or wonders lay ahead, she would face them — if only to bring Joseph home.

     She had scarcely reached the first step when a faint scrape broke the silence – the soft hiss of bristles as they dragged across stone. She froze, straining to listen, until her eyes caught the flicker of movement above.

     On the landing midway up the grand staircase, a young maid knelt with a ragged brush and pail of cloudy water. She was scrubbing the marble floor, her damp skirts tucked up, her sleeves rolled high. The faint smell of soap drifted down in the stillness, startlingly mundane in this vast and echoing temple.

     The maid looked up at the sudden tapping of hurried feet. Her face stiffened; her brush froze mid-scrub. No visitor should be here now — least of all a woman with a battered lantern and a face set with determination.

     (Y/N) stumbled forward; nearly tripping on the hem of her dress as she scrambled up the steps. The words burst out before she had even reached the landing. “Please! You must help me! My father is Joseph Martin — he was here yesterday. He was hired to hunt the rats. He hasn’t come home!”

     The maid blinked, startled, her fingers clenching around the brush as though it were a shield. Her gaze flicked over (Y/N)’s disheveled form, then darted nervously toward the shadowed doorways above, as if looking for another to come save her.

     “Rat-catchers?” she asked. Her voice was thin, cautious. “I haven’t seen many. They go down in the mornings, but… I never see them come back up.”

     (Y/N)’s heart leapt. “You’ve seen them? Please — did one of them have a little dog?”

     The maid shook her head quickly, biting her lip. She reached for the pail as if to busy her trembling hands. “I don’t know them. I don’t go near them. Nobody does. Everyone knows better than to go down there.”

     Frustration broke through. (Y/N) leaned in, her voice sharp with desperation. “Where? Please — tell me where the entrance is to the cellars. I must find him.”

     The maid recoiled at (Y/N)’s tone. For a moment she hesitated, then lifted one damp hand to point toward a shadowed archway off the staircase. “Through there. Follow the hall until it bends. You’ll find a gated door.” Her voice sank even lower, eyes fixed back on the marble floor. “But do not go past the first step. You will not come back.”

     The maid bent again to her scrubbing, signaling the end of the conversation.

     (Y/N) lingered only for a moment, throat dry, before she turned toward the archway the maid had indicated. A chill threaded through her, colder than the marble beneath her feet.

     She moved solemnly, retreating from the landing toward the shadowed archway. You’ll never come back. The words clung to her like a curse. Why had she spoken them so gravely, as if to go below was no normal danger, but certain doom itself? (Y/N) gripped the lantern firmly and pressed on.

     The gilded grandeur of the foyer fell away with every step. Rich ornamentation gave way to plain stone, cool and dim. After a bend in the corridor, she found the gated door, just like the strange maid had said. (Y/N) struck a match against the wall, the flare searing briefly before settling into her lantern. The newly-born light spilled across the stones sending shadows writhing up the walls.

     The door loomed before her, old and neglected. The gate the maid had spoken of stood shoved aside, folded into itself like a ribcage forced open. She set her hand on the dull handle, then paused. A faint breeze brushed past her legs through the crack under the door. She held her breath to listen. The current of air that streamed through the cellars and into the dark hallway whispered as it flowed past, like the breathing of some great beast.

     She pushed. The wood groaned, rusting hinges shrieking in protest. The door swung inward, slow and reluctant. A rush of stale air surged out to meet her: damp, mold-sweet, and earthy. It was cold — blessedly, piercingly cold. The lantern flame bent sideways under the draft, guttering low before flaring back to life.

     Her stomach knotted. She thought of her father. Of Le Fou’s bright, eager eyes. Of the silence consuming their home. She drew in a trembling breath and forced herself across the threshold. The door closed behind her with a hollow thud, like the closing of a tomb.

     She was swallowed by the first cellar.

     The narrow staircase spat her out into a black chamber that surrounded her possessively. The lantern’s glow barely held back the dark, its light stretching only a few paces before being swallowed whole. Beyond that, shadows remained thick and unbroken.

     The walls wept with condensation, their surfaces slick and glistening like wet skin. The air stank of mildew and rotted wood, undercut by something sharper - metallic - a taste that clung to the back of her tongue. Every droplet that fell from the ceiling struck the stone with dreadful clarity, each sound echoing as though the darkness itself were listening.

     “Papa?” Her wavering voice disturbed the black silence. The echo came back warped, sliding along unseen corridors until it returned to her again as another voice, faintly mocking. She swallowed dryly and forced her feet to move.

     The floor sloped unevenly beneath her. Some stones crumbled underfoot, pitted with decay, while the rest glistened under a slick film of scum. Her shoe slipped once, and she had to seize the dripping wall to keep herself from falling, her palm slicked with damp.

     Far off, faint and skittering, came the squeal of rats — a flurry of claws against stone. The sound cut off abruptly. Utterly. As though the creatures had sensed her intrusion and scattered into silence.

     “Papa!” she cried again, louder now, the word dragging painfully out of her chest. Her echo rolled back, hollow and cold. “Le Fou?” The dog’s name caught in her throat like a stone. She waited, straining for the jingle of a little bell, the bark that always answered.

     Nothing. Only silence.

     More stairs. She descended carefully, the stone slippery beneath her shoes. She entered another low cellar chamber, its stairwell yawning ahead. She followed, rounded a bend — and froze. There, glinting against the wall, lay one of Joseph’s steel traps. Its jaws gaped open, wet teeth glinting faintly in the lantern’s glow. A smear of darkened blood clung to the metal, damp and shining. Her throat felt impossibly dry. (Y/N) crept closer and knelt, fingertips brushing the cold contraption she knew so well. The weight, the design — it was his.

     Nearby, stale oats and sawdust were scattered across the damp floor, but not neatly, not as bait was ever laid. This was spilled in haste, the piles broken and wrong, as if spilled by accident.

     “Papa!” The word tore from her throat, sharper this time, her urgency rattling against the stone.

     A second trap lay deeper still, twisted out of shape; its spring snapped. The sight seized her chest with dread. She raised the lantern higher, the weak flame lurching and trembling, painting the passage with shuddering fragments of light.

     How far had he gone? Why hadn’t he come back?

     Her breathing quickened, sending ragged clouds spilling into the chill air. She turned to retrace her steps, heart hammering...but the way behind her was indistinguishable from the way ahead. Every corridor looked the same now: low arches, dripping walls, endless mouths of black yawning into the dark.

     More oats. More sawdust. More fragments of her father’s work, forming trails that lured her deeper, always deeper.

     “Papa!” she cried again, but her voice cracked, breaking apart in the cavernous silence. She spun in a slow circle, lantern held high, but every path was identical — no marker, no sign, only the stone that was swallowing her whole.

     Her chest cinched tight until she could hardly breathe. She stepped one way, then another, the lantern swaying wildly as panic clawed up her throat. Brutal clarity struck her — she did not, could not, know the way back. She had wandered too far, taken too many turns. The labyrinth had claimed her.

     The walls closed in, thick and suffocating, as if the very cellars leaned closer to watch. The maid was right. The thought shuddered through her. I won’t leave this place.

     Panic surged, full and merciless. Her breaths tore shallow and ragged. The lantern shook so violently in her grip that light lurched wildly across the stone room. She fixed her gaze on some passage ahead, desperate for something, anything she might recognize. The corridor only folded back into itself, a black mouth leading endlessly forward. The silence pounded in her skull, louder than any scream.

     Her pace quickened, faltered, and then broke into a stumbling half-run.

     “Papa!”

     The cry split the dark, cracked and shrill, only to be swallowed whole. She rounded a corner too fast, the lantern’s beam swinging wide — and her foot came down on something that shifted under her heel.

     A sharp snap split the darkness.

     Agony tore through her leg. Steel teeth clamped around her calf, biting deep into muscle and bone. She shrieked and collapsed to the wet stone. The lantern flew from her hand, clattering down the passage, its flame sputtering into wild, lurching light.

     The trap rattled as she writhed, blood spilling fast, slicking the stones beneath her. The jaws ground into her flesh with merciless force; every jolt sending knives of pain slicing up her body. She clawed at the iron, trying to pry the jaws apart, her fingernails splitting against the pitted steel.

     Then, a click.

     Soft. Mechanical. Above her.

     Instinct surged. She wrenched herself backward, grinding her leg against the trap's teeth so hard her vision burst white. A steel hammer slammed into the flagstone where her head had been an instant before. The impact thundered through the cellar; a deafening crack that rattled her skull. Stone shattered, spraying grit in her face.

     The steel cudgel fell to its side with a dull scrape, leaving behind a splintered crater inches from her face.

     (Y/N)’s body convulsed with sobs of shock and horror, her cries ragged and choking. She was alive — for now - with the trap clinging to her leg like the unrelenting maw of a beast; its teeth sunk deep, blood spilling steadily around her flesh.

     The cellar was stilled once more. Only her heaving gasps filled the dark, punctuated by her howls of despair and pain. The lantern guttered a few feet away, its light trembling against walls that seemed to inch closer with every flicker.

     And then — a movement beyond the glow.

     A scrape, faint but deliberate, cut through the hush like a blade. Then, another. Footsteps. Slow. Certain.

     (Y/N) froze. Her breath wheezed in her throat as her palms pressed hard against the damp ground. She strained her eyes into the dark, every muscle trembling, the overwhelming pain in her leg throbbed in time with her racing heart.

     The footsteps drew closer. Measured. Patient. Inescapable.

     And then, at last — he emerged.

     At first, he was only a silhouette — tall, angular, emerging from the deadly gloom as though he had been born from it. His steps made only the softest sound, gliding over the stone. The lantern’s glow caught the hem of a black cloak trailing behind him like a living shadow. Then, out of the dark, a pale glimmer rose: a mask, half illuminated, gleaming like bleached bone as he rose his head.

     Two eyes burned from the masks' hollows — a sickly yellow glinting from their sockets - fixed on her with the unblinking intensity of a predator considering its prey. He said nothing. The silence stretched unbearably, broken only by the rattle of the sprung trap and her ragged gasps as blood dripped onto the stone.

     At last, he crouched beside her with unnerving grace, the folds of his cloak spilling silently onto the floor. His gloved hand reached for the trap — not to free her, but to test it, fingers running along the teeth that pierced her flesh. He lifted his hand into the lantern’s trembling glow as crimson gleamed wetly against the black leather.

     “You should be dead.” The words were soft, low, resonant. Beneath them vibrated a discordant edge, as if a darker note threatened to break through. “The cudgel was meant to crush your skull. Meant to. And yet…” His head tilted, the bone-white mask shifting in the light, his gleaming eyes narrowed. “Your skull is not crushed.”

     (Y/N)’s lips trembled. She tried to form words, but only sobs caught in her throat.

     He leaned closer, filling her vision with the mask’s pale, inhuman contours, his presence suffocating. His voice snapped sharp, jagged with suspicion: “Who sent you? Another meddler? A thief creeping into my domain?”

     His hand shot out, seizing her chin and smearing it with her own sticky blood as he forced her face upward. His grip was unyielding, a cold echo of the trap’s deadly bite.

     “I-I was only—my father—” she gasped, sobs breaking her words.

     He stilled. His grip slackened, though it did not release. His breath rasped audibly beneath the mask, quickening. “Your father…” he repeated, the word bitter, as though it scalded him. Abruptly he released her and stood, pacing around her restlessly. His voice pitched wildly, swinging from contempt to amusement, and something dangerously close to...awe?

     “Do you know how many men this trap has swallowed? How many skulls dashed across these stones? Strong men. Clever men! All broken. But you—” He stopped, looming above her, studying her like she was an aberration. “You live. Even now, you look at me with eyes that see.”

     (Y/N) tried to drag herself away, but the trap’s teeth tore deeper. Pain ripped through her, and a pitiful cry escaped her throat. The sound startled him. His hand twitched, clenching in the folds of his cloak as though to keep some violent impulse at bay.

     “Monsieur—” she stammered, teeth clattering, voice strangled. “Monsieur, please. I—I’m sorry—I—”

     “Go on.” His tone was cold, demanding.

     “I… I shouldn’t have… trespassed—”

     “Trespassed,” he echoed, low, as if testing the word’s weight.

     “I-I only came to look for my father. He’s missing. I’m afraid for him. Please—help me. Don’t let me die here.”

     For a long, taut moment, he lingered above her — gloves stained red, the mask gleaming faintly in the lantern light. His silence was heavier than the dark. And she thought, with sick certainty, that he might finish what the trap had begun.

            Instead, he bent slowly, fingers deft on the mechanism. With a harsh creak, the trap groaned open, the steel jaws loosening their grip. Her leg slipped free at last, slick with blood and trembling violently. She collapsed sideways with a strangled cry, clutching at the mangled flesh.

     His gaze did not leave her. Those sickly yellow eyes bored into her face — streaked with tears, lips quivering in silent prayer. His breathing shifted, quickened, rasping audibly beneath the mask.

     “Th-thank… you…” (Y/N) sobbed.

     “…You thank me?” His tone was soft, curious, as though testing the words. He leaned closer, studying her as if she were now some rare and fragile specimen. “…Not like the others. No curses. Gratitude. You speak to me as though…” His voice faltered, dropped to a whisper. “As though I am a man.”

     Her tear-bright eyes lifted to his. The sight struck him like a blow, sending something twisting brutally in his chest. With a sudden jerk he tore back, cloak flaring, and begin to pace again as though to flee from himself. “Foolish girl!” he muttered, the words broken and jagged. “Foolish, foolish girl.”

     He returned to her side after a moment, dropping to a crouch, his shadow enveloping her once more. His voice was taut, trembling with a fevered edge. “You live. The jaws spared you. The cudgel missed you. Others died screaming on these very stones, their skulls shattered, their blood still in the cracks. But you—” he leaned close, his glinting eyes fixed on hers. “You live. You saw me.”

     Her mouth fell open, but no sound came.

“Do you see what this means?” His golden eyes glowed in the lantern’s wavering light, wild with intensity. “Now… you cannot leave. No one can see me and live, but you lived.”

     (Y/N)’s breath seized, her body rigid with terror.

     “Yes....” he hissed the word almost to himself, reverent and venomous all at once. “Death itself has refused you. Perhaps…”

     Abruptly he snatched up the lantern, its flame flaring across the mask: a cruel flash of bone-white and shadow. His voice cut like a blade. “Do not mistake this for mercy. I could have left you to rot in your own stupidity. But...I will not waste what has been given to me.” He rose, towering, the light spilling behind him into the endless dark. “You will follow me now. You have no choice.”

     (Y/N) braced herself and tried to run, but the moment her wounded leg bore weight, the agony ripped through her. She collapsed with a strangled cry, the torn muscle searing with every movement. She clawed at the stones, desperate, but her body betrayed her; she could not take a single step.

     He had already turned, striding into the dark, the lantern bobbing with his long, urgent gait. Its glow receded, shadows swallowing his form. He paused.

     She sobbed and shifted on the ground as pain consumed her. Suddenly, terribly, she feared he would leave her; abandoned like an animal caught in one of her father’s traps, to bleed out in a pit where no one would ever find her.

            He turned back.

     His cloak whispered against the stone as he descended on her once more. Without hesitation, his hand clamped around her arm, vise-like, and wrenched her upright. She shrieked as her ruined leg collapsed under her, but his grip did not yield.

     “You will come.” he said flatly, the words low and resounding, vibrating with a dreadful finality.

     Before she could protest, his arm swept around her, clutching her against him. Half-dragged, half-lifted, she jolted with every step he took. Her wounded leg trailed behind uselessly, smearing blood along the stones; her dress soaking and torn. She clawed feebly at his cloak, her voice strangled by sobs, but he did not slow. His strength was unrelenting, his pace unstoppable.

     The lantern swung in his free hand, its flame lurching wildly; throwing leaping shards of light across dripping walls, archways gaping like jaws, stairways that plunged into blackness without end. Her last glimpse of the cellar behind them was of the sprung trap, its jaws glistening with her blood, grinning at her in the gloom.

     Then the dark swallowed her, and she was gone with him.

Chapter Text

     The man’s grip was merciless as he dragged (Y/N) deeper into the twisting dark, his cloak whispering against the stone with every urgent stride. The passages coiled endlessly, the air growing colder with each turn until it stung her throat, the damp earth-scent thick enough to taste. Her torn leg screamed with every stumble, her shoes slipped on wet stone, but the arm locked around her waist never loosened. She was not walking so much as carried forward by his will alone, helpless in the iron cage of his hold.

     At last, the close passages widened. The oppressive darkness broke with the swell of lapping water, echoing vast and cavernous. A breath of cool air brushed her face as the darkness split open onto an immense black shore. He had taken her down to an underground lake that stretched without end - its still surface a void yawning in the dark. Scattered lamps fixed to the rock walls around the shore burned faintly, their glow trembling across the water in fractured golden streaks, swallowed almost at once by the abyss. A boat waited for them: a narrow thing, its tether a single rope straining against the pull of the water’s surface. It rocked gently, as if beckoning them. It looked to (Y/N) as if it was as flimsy as a coffin set upon the vast black.

     He lowered her against the rocks with sudden, brusque efficiency, and then – without warning – raised her burning lantern high and dashed it against the stone. Glass shattered in a spray of sparks, oil flaring bright for a heartbeat before guttering into smoke and darkness. The sound rang out like a death knell.

     “No!” (Y/N)’s cry tore from her. She broke into shuddering sobs as she lunged at the broken shards scattered like stars at her feet. “That was my father’s! “ The lantern had been her last tether to home, her father’s hand on her shoulder, and her courage in the dark. Now it was gone, destroyed with a wild swing of the man’s arm.

     He caught her before she could crawl to the shards. His pale mask tilted toward her only for a moment, the bone-pale gleam unreadable in the dark. He said nothing.

     With both hands now free, he bent and gathered her up swiftly, pressing her close to his chest. She twisted against him, clutching at his vest in a futile push, desperate for distance. The hard beat of his heart thundered against her palm.

     He carried her to the boat with precise steps as the hem of his cloak trailed along the wet stones. He set her down as the vessel pitched violently under her sudden weight. (Y/N) gasped, hands clawing at the worn boards on either side as the boat rocked against the black water, threatening to spill her into the abyss.

     A chill rose off the lake, a damp breath of stone and algae that clung to her skin. It seeped into her bones until her teeth rattled in her skull, her shivers shaking her as though the cold itself wanted to break her apart.

     He loosed the tether with a swift jerk, the rope snapping free into the black water. With one long step he pressed the vessel outward, his weight shifting smoothly into the prow. (Y/N) shrunk under him, his cloaked form towering over her as he settled onto the bench and seized the oars. His eyes – those sickly yellow embers - held her as he dipped the oars into the water. The boat glided forward with eerie grace, slicing into the dark expanse as though the lake itself obeyed him.

     (Y/N) curled into herself against the stern, huddled as far from him as far as the narrow vessel allowed. Her shoulders quaked. Tears streamed hot down her cheeks, blurring the shimmering black until the whole world swam. The sound of breaking glass still rang in her head: her father’s lantern – her last tether to home – shattered and gone, left behind on the rocks like a tragic death.

     The oars whispered in their rhythm, slicing the black water into ribbons of shadow and fractured reflections. Each pull carried them deeper into the gloom, until his sharp profile dissolved into the shadows themselves. She dared not look at him. His presence was inescapable: the rasp of his breath against the mask, the powerful flex of his shoulders, the dull scrape of the oarlocks – all of it threatened to overwhelm her. She fixed her gaze on the waters ahead.

     Eventually, impossibly, a faint glow surfaced, flickering like the embers of a fire smoldering in the black. She blinked, heart hammering, as the glow expanded.

     A shape emerged: the square silhouette of stone rising above the water, its edges limned with wavering firelight. Dozens of lit candles lined the shore, their flames glittering like a hundred watchful eyes. The trembling reflections bled across the surface of the lake, turning it into a river of molten gold.

     Her breath caught. It was a house – or something like one – built from the rock itself. Its door was framed by square cut-outs in the stone that were pane-less windows, their interiors alive with candlelight. A small dock stretched outward, reaching for them, its planks washed in the light of a lantern hung at its post like a beacon.

     The boat drifted closer, and the sight only grew stranger. The walls were laid with careful precision, straight and true as though hewn for a palace, not a cold cavern. Lanterns lined the exterior, their flames unwavering, as if they had been waiting all along for their master to return home.

     (Y/N)’s hands clenched against the boat’s rim. She could not reconcile it – the flickering warmth of all those flames with the cold dread gripping her chest. Was this a home? Or is it only a prison dressed as one? The prow kissed the dock with a soft scrape, and the boat rocked gently beneath them. She shrank impossibly further against the side, shuddering as his gloved hands left the oars and reached for the tether. The lantern on the dock swayed gently in the damp breeze, its light falling over her (S/C) face as though welcoming her home.

      The man rose in a single, fluid motion. The vessel pitched roughly under his shifting weight, but his balance never faltered. His shadow engulfed her again as he reached down, one hand clamping around her arm. She whimpered, shrinking from his touch, but resistance was useless. He lifted her effortlessly, her body swallowed by the sweep of his cloak.

     (Y/N)’s wounded leg dangled helplessly, every step he took sent fire through the torn flesh. Warm blood seeped freely into the front of his clothes, soaking the black fabric and streaking his trousers in steady rivulets. She cried and punched at his chest weakly, the blows no stronger than the flutter of a bird’s wings against stone.

     The candles lining the lake fluttered as they passed, their flames swaying and multiplying in the black water below. Shadows leapt high across the house’s walls, stretching their forms into towering grotesques that seemed to follow with each step. The heavy wooden door of the strange house loomed ahead, its face carved with twisting designs that might have been vines or serpents, but tt was impossible to tell in the restless light. He shifted her in his arms, braced himself, and thrust it open with his shoulder. A gust of warm, perfumed air spilled out, clashing with the cavern’s chill, damp breath.

     She shivered in his arms as they stepped across the threshold.

     The chamber opened before them in strange opulence. Stone walls had been dressed in heavy draperies of crimson and black, their folds swallowing the cavern’s cold face and giving it the illusion of warmth. Countless candelabras crowded the corners, their flames bending the air into a shimmering gold haze. Persian carpets sprawled thick across the floor as their intricate patterns unfurled beneath the candlelight.

     A grand piano commanded one wall, its lacquered surface gleaming like liquid night, the bench tucked before it with obsessive precision, as though no dust or time had dared to touch it. Towering shelves of books and music scores rose around it, their spines catching light like muted jewels, each arranged with a meticulous hand. Beside them stood a fireplace, unlit, adorned with trinkets — fragments of a life, or an imitation of one, displayed like relics.

     A low table stood nearby, set for one. Crystal glasses glittered faintly, beside plates rimmed with gold. Opposite the piano sat a damask couch of red and gilt, an object too alive with the echo of human luxury to be left down here; its presence was bizarre in this tomb of stone.

     (Y/N) clutched weakly at him, trembling, as her eyes swept the room. It was magnificent, yes — but magnificent in the way of a shrine built for one man alone, a place of worship to either his solitude or his rage. It was a strange sanctuary that was carved into the bones of the earth - beautiful and monstrous in equal measure.

     He carried her deeper inside, past a tall standing mirror shrouded under black cloth, past candelabras that hissed and wept as their wax burned down in pale rivulets. The scents of wax, stone, paper and…an unidentifiable floral perfume mingled in the air. Everywhere her gaze landed, contradiction reigned: opulence smothering ruin, treasures displayed in a chamber that felt like a tomb, beauty pressed into the bowels of the earth where no living soul was meant to see it.

     He lowered her onto the damask couch. The plush cushions welcomed her, but the comfort was short-lived—the pain in her leg pulsed with every heartbeat, sending hot blood blooming across the sumptuous fabric. She winced, fingers clawing at the gilt-trimmed edge of the couch as though she might anchor herself against both her agony and the strange beauty closing in around her.

     He wavered above her for a moment as his shadow was warped and stretched monstrously across the walls by the restless candlelight. With a sharp sweep, he turned away. He slid his cloak from his shoulders in a sound like silk sighing, letting it fall across a nearby chaise in a dark, heavy heap. Beneath it he stood in stark black: a high-collared shirt, fitted vest, and narrow trousers that sharpened his already thin frame. He looked to her like some figure torn from a funeral procession, stripped of grandeur yet steeped in severity.

     He vanished around a corner, his footsteps soft but sure. She was left alone with the hiss of burning wax and the thunder of her own pulse in her ears. Her gaze darted—toward the looming door, toward the slits of shadow that pooled between the candelabras. Could she crawl? Drag herself? Her wounded leg throbbed at the very thought, and the sight of blood soaking the couch made her stomach turn. Still, desperation burned, raw and hot.

     But then, he returned. Too quickly.

     The mask appeared first, gleaming bone-white in the firelight, its yellow gaze made stranger still by a veil of black cloth that draped across the lower half, concealing his mouth and jaw - a detail (Y/N) only realized now in the intimacy of the light. Then followed the stark precision of his black-clad form; in his hands he carried strips of linen and a glass bottle that glinted faintly as it caught the light. His steps were brisk, purposeful—unyielding—and whatever ember of escape she had clung to shriveled at once. She shrank deeper into the cushions as he dropped to one knee beside her without hesitation, his yellow pupils fixed on her wound. He set the bottle and linens on the carpet with measured care, and then seized the hem of her dress in his gloved hands.

     The sound of tearing cloth split the silence as he ripped it away, baring her leg up to the thigh.

      “No – please -” she gasped, panic rising. She tried to draw her leg back but the effort only sent a fresh wave of agony that tore a shriek from her throat.

     “Be still!” His voice cut through hers like a blade.

     Blood continued to well thickly in some places; in others, clots slid loose in gelatinous globs, trailing down her skin. For a moment, he stared, his gloved fingers poised above her torn flesh as if he were trying to decide where to start his work.

     He stripped his gloves from his hands with a single violent jerk, revealing long, skeletal fingers, scarred and misshapen, yet startlingly precise. He uncorked the bottle and soaked a strip of linen until it dripped with a clear, acrid liquid. Without warning, he pressed it to the mangled wound. Flame roared through her leg. She screamed, convulsing against his iron grip, her nails raking against the couch’s cushions. He did not flinch.

     “Disinfectant.” He said flatly, as though naming a punishment. “Do not waste your breath on screaming. We have much yet to endure.”

     (Y/N) bit down on her lip, tasting bile, tears spilling hot down her cheeks as the sting burrowed deeper. Again, he poured the burning liquid; again, he pressed the linen, the fabric coming away sodden and dripping crimson. Again, he poured the liquid, again he pressed. His mask leaned in closer now, gleaming cruelly in the candlelight. His eyes – those burning, wild eyes – never left her.

     At last, he seemed satisfied. The rag, sodden and red, was cast aside with a wet slap against a nearby basin. He reached for fresh strips of linen, his warped fingers working with startling care as he wound them around her leg. Layer after layer he drew tight, snug but precise, the cloth blooming red as blood seeped through in spreading stains. The pressure steadied the bleeding, though every tug made her flinch. He finished the bandage with a tight knot. Resting his hand on her bandaged leg, he inspected his work before drawing back. She didn’t like how his touch lingered.

     “You will not die here.” The words slipped from him in a murmur, soft yet edged with terrible certainty. He tested the knot with a harsh tug, binding his decision into the bandages themselves. “I have decided otherwise.”

     Her body shook with violent tremors, every breath broken and shallow. Somehow, through the rasp of her throat, she managed a single word, ragged and pleading:

     “Why?”

     In the golden candlelight he sat utterly still, the mask glinting, his eyes fastened on the slow spread of blood beneath the linen. For a long moment, there was only the sound of his breath, hollow and uneven beneath the mask.

     “Because you saw me.” He said, his voice suddenly raw.

     He turned abruptly, the fragile admission smothered as though it had never been spoken. She sagged back against the pillows, her limbs heavy, her body damp with sweat and blood. Her eyes blurred, the candelabras dissolving into molten smears of light. The pain, the fear, his voice, his mask, his scarred hands—it all blurred together into a single spinning haze until she could bear no more.

     Darkness reached for her, merciless and absolute.

     She did not know how long she slept. Her dreams had splintered into fevered fragments: shadows that bent into leering faces, the steady lapping of water at the lakeshore resounding like a clock counting down her breaths, and always – music. It wound through the haze, at first indistinct, then sharpened until it pierced her newly-born fever. It was the music that pulled her back.

     Her eyes fluttered open. The chamber swam with her pulse; fever burning hot through her veins, her body heavy and rigid, as if she were nailed into the couch cushions. Sweat slicked her skin and chilled in the faint draft that whispered across the lush room. She blinked, vision blurring and clearing, trying to make sense of the opulence above her: the lofty vaulted ceiling, the heavily draped walls…the endless shimmer of candelabras. A breath shuddered through her. She turned her heavy head toward the endless stream of music.

     At the piano across the chamber, the man’s thin frame sat rigid; carved from shadow and firelight. The mask gleamed faintly, its pale surface and clinging veil bowed over the keys. His shoulders strained taut, his spine was unyielding, and his hands—those scarred, skeletal hands—moved with a terrible grace. Notes spilled from him like a confession torn open: chords that thundered down like hammer strikes, jagged and furious, collapsing without warning into aching strains of melody that seemed to plead, to weep.

     The music filled her skull until it moved alive beneath her skin. Fury, grief, despair—each pressed into her fevered mind until her chest tightened and tears slipped hot and silent into her tangled hair. She tried to shift, to rise, but agony seared through her leg so sharp she nearly blacked out. A whine tore from her in a ragged gasp.

     The music broke. A discordant slam of keys echoed across the chamber as his hands fell still on the keys. He half-turned on the bench, head whipping toward her with predatory sharpness. His golden eyes caught the light, burning in the hollows of the mask.

     “You wake.”

     His words trembled on the knife’s edge between relief and dread. He rose swiftly, crossing the room to her. His gaze darted to her face and to her leg with its bloodied bandages before it returned to her fever-bright eyes. His breath rasped, harsh and uneven, seeping through the mask like steam from a fissure.

     “You are sick,” he said, the words both diagnosis and accusation. “You burn with fever.” A cold hand rose and bony fingers brushed against her cheek, tracing the heat of her skin. She flinched weakly, but he did not withdraw. His touch lingered, both an intrusion and a claim. “Your body betrays you… even as I keep you.” Any gentleness he had held for her cracked like glass. He wheeled away, a sudden storm, and slammed both fists against the piano’s edge. The sound boomed across the chamber like a gunshot.

     “Always betrayal!” His voice roared, fractured. “The body, the heart, the soul—they betray! They rot, they lie, they leave—” His voice broke. A single word burst raw and unbidden from him, dripping venom and grief alike. “Christine!”

     The name bled into the silence. He froze, shoulders heaving, trembling as if he had torn himself open. Then, as though dragged against his will, he turned back to (Y/N).

     “And now… you.” The words dropped low, jagged. Bitter. He stepped closer, his hand trembling before clenching into a fist, as if he might crush the reality of the situation out of existence. “Not her. Never her. Instead fate sends me you—another woman. Another reminder of what I cannot have, what was stolen from me.” His voice rose in a howl of anguish, echoing off the stone. “Why? Why not let me rot here, buried with my shame?!”

     But, his fury faltered when his eyes found hers again.

     She lay trembling against the damask cushions, (E/C) eyes glazed with fever, chest rising shallow and weak. She looked small—fragile—yet alive. Alive, because of him. Dependent on him. The fire in his eyes shifted, feverish still but wounded, torn between rage and a desperate hunger for meaning.

     “You should not have lived.” The words came in a whisper now as he sank to his knees beside her once more. His hand hovered above her as though unsure whether to strike or caress. “And yet, you did. The jaws spared you. The hammer missed its mark. Do you not see?” His golden eyes gleamed, alight with fervor. “The world itself delivered you to me. In my grief, my exile. You are mine.”

     (Y/N) swallowed hard, her throat catching against the heat of the fever, her wide eyes fixed on him in horror.

     He rose suddenly, dragging an armchair close and collapsing into it as though the weight of his body had given out. His long hands rose, skeletal fingers locking against the mask, clutching at it as though he meant to tear it free—or force it deeper into the skull beneath. His voice emerged muffled, strangled by despair.

     “And, I do not know if I am blessed…or damned.”

     The silence that followed was unbearable. His hunched figure shook faintly, shoulders drawn tight, the whole of him taut like a wire ready to snap. She could hear his breath through the mask, harsh and uneven, each sound scraping against the quiet until it seemed to fill the room. The anguish pouring off him was suffocating, thick as smoke, pressing down on her until she could hardly stand it. She lay trembling, her fingers digging weakly into the cushions, staring at the black folds of his now disheveled shirt where they quivered with every tremor of his chest.

     A shuddering breath tore itself from her lips before she could stop it. Her head turned weakly against the pillow, sweat cooling on her fever-hot skin, eyes fluttering open just enough to find his blurred shape through the haze.

     “…please,” she whispered, voice fractured and desperate. “Tell me your name. I don’t…I don’t know who you are.” (Y/N) swallowed. “…Please….”

     His hands slipped from his face, leaving the mask stark in the shifting glow. He stared down at her with eyes unblinking, caught as if her fevered whisper had hooked into him like a barb. The request — small, fragile, intimate — hung between them, trembling.

     “My name…” The words rasped out as though they were poison. His fingers curled at his pant legs, then returned to the mask, clutching at it like it might suddenly split away from his face. “Names are for men who live in the sun - above. I am not—” His voice fractured, teeth gritting beneath the mask.

     (Y/N)’s eyes stayed fixed on him, fever-bright, pleading, her lips parted as though her breath itself might vanish without an answer. In them he saw no mob, no Christine turning away in horror, no cruelty — only humanity; fragile and reckless.

     He leaned over her softly, his voice lowering into a whisper as raw as his soul.

     “…Erik.”

     The name vibrated through him like a wound pressed raw. His fists clenched white on the armrests as if to anchor himself against her gaze, his chest heaved with breath that rasped harsh beneath the mask.

     Her lips moved again, her voice barely audible; cracked and delirious. “…Erik…” she echoed faintly, the sound little more than a whimper. Yet, it fell into the space like a prayer, bleeding his loathed name of its venom. “Erik…don’t leave me. Papa will be so upset if…if I don’t come home….”

     Her voice dwindled, but the word lingered in the air between them: Erik.

     Something shattered in him. The name he had dragged like a curse through alleyways, had spat at him by men with torches, cried by Christine in anguish — here, now, it quivered from her lips without hatred, without jeering, soft and delirious and clinging. He staggered back to the safety of his piano as his hands clamped to his mask as though to block the sound from searing into him. “No,” he rasped. “No, not like that. Not—” His voice broke apart, fraying to silence as he started pacing, fleeing the echo of her voice.

     It followed him anyway. Erik. Erik. It clung to him like a hand at his sleeve, tugging him into a place he had never been allowed to step: human. He pressed against the piano, leaning into its body, discordant notes rattling beneath his trembling frame. His breath became more ragged and uneven; his hope flickered to life like a flame, even though he knew better than to let it return at all.

     What did it mean that she had said his name so? Feverish, lost in sickness, she had reached for him. On his couch, her head lolled against the pillows, damp hair plastered to her face. Her lips still moved faintly, whispering his name, then her father’s, then only small cries. The fever dragged her under, but she reached for him even as she sank.

     For an instant, his throat worked as though words might break free, trembling at the edge of…something. His breath hissed sharp, a serpent’s huff of restraint, and he pressed the heel of his hand hard against the mask, sealing himself shut.

     “Foolish girl.” he whispered hoarsely — not to her, but to the chamber, to the shadows stretching long across the stone, to Christine’s ghost that clung forever at his back. His voice cracked under the weight of it all. “You cannot know what you have done.”

The fever came for her in waves, not only as heat but as a drowning, a weight that pressed into her blood, her marrow, until every breath was a shallow gasp. Sweat soaked the cushions beneath her, chilled as quickly as it burned, and her lips cracked with the broken fragments of words—sometimes Erik’s name, sometimes her father’s, sometimes only a sound that was more plea than speech.

     Erik did not leave her. He could not.

     The ruined dress came away beneath his hands with a quick precision, the fabric sloughing off like a husk shed by something dying. He dipped a cloth into a basin and drew cool water across her brow, her face, her chest, and her arms— each stroke startled but tender. His fingers trembled as if every touch cost him. She stirred faintly beneath it, fever-tossed, while his long hands moved with their strange reverence, as though he were not merely cleansing her skin but anointing it.

     Her tangled (H/C) hair he combed back with slow, deliberate strokes, each pass an attempt to tame the fever’s disarray, to impose order where none could hold. His fingers lingered in the strands as though memorizing their weight. And when at last he clothed her again, it was not in her own garments, but in a pale, flowery dress and shift folded long ago, kept waiting in secret—meant not for her, but for Christine.

     Her leg was another matter. The smell alone was a horror—rot clinging to the air, flesh darkened and oozing with pus. Through the fever’s haze she caught fragments: the sharp hiss of flame, the gleam of hot steel, the damp smell of linen boiled clean. He laid everything he needed out with steady precision.

     He reached for the knife.

     His hands—long, skeletal, steady—cut into her torn flesh with ruthless care, carving away all that was dead. The pain split her open. Her cries tore from her throat, echoing against the stone walls; a sound that belonged to some creature being unmade. He bent closer, carving away the rot, purging it as though by fire and steel he could excise not only the infection but the cruelty of fate itself. Sweat beaded on his temple beneath the mask, dripping down into the hollow of his crumpled collar. His breath rasped beneath the mask, words spilling low and fevered: curses at her weakness, pleadings that she endure, mutterings in a language she could not recognize.

     The world narrowed to fire and steel and his voice above her. And then, at last, his hands slowed. The foulness was gone. What remained was raw and bleeding, but alive. He pressed clean cloth into the gash, wrapping her with layer upon layer until her leg was bound tight once more. The knot was cinched with brutal skill, sealing his work. When he sat back, his whole body trembled, his mask spattered dark, his hands streaked in her blood.

     The fever dragged her down almost before he had finished. Darkness surged at the edges of her vision, lapping over the candlelit chamber until all that remained was the ache of her body. She thought she heard water dripping again, steady as a clock. She thought she heard her father’s voice. She thought she heard Erik, closer than the pain itself.

     “Breathe,” his voice rasped, rough with command and something perilously like desperation. “You will not falter now. Do you hear me? You cannot.”

     She tried to answer, her lips parting, but only a dry rattle slipped out. His shadow leaned close, filling her failing sight, the gleam of his mask swimming in and out of focus. His hands, still sticky with her blood, hovered inches above her face, wanting to touch.

     In the end, he simply touched her hair. He brushed damp strands from her face with feather-light gentleness, the long fingers moving slow, reverent. His breath shook against the mask. “Foolish girl,” he murmured, but the words quivered, not hard but hollow, emptied of conviction.

     He sat there long after her cries had quieted, watching her chest rise and fall rapidly, as though her fragile breath alone held him in place. Every tremor of her body, every shallow exhale, pulled him further into devotion as sharp and ruinous as the knife he had just wielded.

     And as she slipped under, her lips moved one last time around his name. He bowed his head into the candlelight, trembling, neck gleaming wet with sweat, and whispered it back like a prayer neither of them could escape.

     Time dissolved. She no longer knew if it was hours or days that passed, only that fever carried her like a tide, pulling her under and spitting her back out in gasping fragments. The world existed in flashes: the golden blur of candlelight on stone, the sharp sting of liquid poured against her wound, the unbearable pressure of bandages drawn tight, his silhouette bent above her like a shadow she could not escape.

     Sometimes, she woke to music. The notes would swell around her before she could even open her eyes — great crashing chords that struck through her like thunder, or else trembling melodies soft as lullabies. When she did stir, her gaze would find him at the piano, rigid-backed, mask gleaming dully in the flicker of firelight. His fingers flew over the keys with a violence that seemed too much for the instrument, as though he poured every wound, every betrayal, every hunger into the music until it bled out across the chamber. And still, threaded between the storms of sound, there were moments of unbearable tenderness, melodies that seemed to cradle her drifting mind like a lover’s embrace.

     Other times she woke to his hands instead of his music. He lifted broth to her lips, coaxing her to sip, muttering low when she could not keep it down. He cleaned her wound with a surgeon’s patience, even as sweat ran from beneath his mask and spattered the linen. The sharp smell of antiseptic and the copper tang of blood hung always in the air.

     Through it all, he did not leave her side. Even when her fever dragged her so low she could no longer lift her head, she knew he was there. Constant was the scrape of chair legs on stone when he pulled it closer, the rasp of his breath behind the mask, the way his voice — harsh and raw — murmured words she could not always understand; continued curses, commands and pleas.

     And sometimes, she whispered back. Her lips moved without her knowing, shapes of sound forming names: her father’s, the little dog’s — and sometimes - his. Erik. Each time, his hands stilled. Each time, his music faltered. Each time, something broke loose inside him that he could not master.

     Her fever became their shared prison, her weakness binding him to her as tightly as the trap had once bound her leg. She hovered at the edge of death, and he hovered with her, refusing to let her slip from his grasp.

     Eventually, the fever finally broke.

     She surfaced like a drowning woman dragged back into air—lungs burning, body trembling with weakness. The air felt cooler now against her raw skin, her soaked shift clinging in damp folds. Every shallow breath rasped her throat, her head lolling against the pillow, too heavy to lift.

     A shape sat nearby, thin and rigid, unmoving…exhausted. Slowly she blinked the haze from her eyes until the candlelight bent around him—black-clad, bone-white mask gleaming faintly with its half-veil, the yellow glint of eyes fixed wholly upon her. He looked as though he had not stirred in days, as though he had been carved into the shadows themselves: sentinel, gaoler, witness.

     Her lips cracked when she tried to form a word. What left her was hardly a sound, more of a croak than a plea. “W…water…”

     At once he jolted, life snapping back into his body with such violence she flinched. But his movements, when he returned, were careful. He slid an arm beneath her head, lifting her as though she might crumble in his hold, and brought the glass to her mouth.

     Cool liquid touched her lips. She drank too greedily at first and choked. He steadied the tilt of the glass, murmuring low as he did—strange words half-muttered beneath his breath, fragments of French, fragments of prayer, and fragments of something darker she could not catch. His voice quivered beneath the mask like a wire pulled too tight.

     Relief slid down her throat, sharp and blessed. She sagged back against the pillows, shuddering, eyes watering. “…thank you…”

     The words were no louder than a breath, but they reached him. She saw it—the stillness that overtook him, the way his fingers tightened against the glass as though her gratitude were more dangerous than her fever had ever been.

     “No,” he rasped, the word tore out of him. “No one thanks Erik. They flee Erik. They curse Erik.” His other hand clenched tight against his knee until the fabric bunched and strained, his body taut as a bowstring. Then, slowly, deliberately, his eyes found hers again, gold burning through the shadows. “But you… you thank Erik.”

     (Y/N) faltered beneath the weight of that gaze. Her heart hammered, loud enough she thought he might hear it. She turned her face into the pillow, shivering, as though she could hide from those beastly eyes.

     He moved closer to her. He leaned close until his mask all but filled her vision, until she could feel the flow of his hot breath breaking against her cooling skin. His voice came low, ragged, trembling with some fever of its own.

     “You live because of me. You breathe because of me. Do you understand what that means?”

     Her throat closed. The whisper scraped out of her raw and fragile. “…I…don’t know…”

     The mask dipped closer still, so close she felt the chill of porcelain where it nearly brushed her cheek. His words struck like a blow, heavy with certainty, carved with finality:

     “It means I was right. You are mine.”

     Her lashes fluttered, heavy with grief as the words branded themselves into her.

     You are mine.

     They seared hotter than her fever, pressed deeper than her pulse. She tried to smother them in the fog of weakness, tried to tell herself that she had misheard him. But the force in his voice, the iron conviction itself, left no cracks for denial. He had not spoken a wish. He had declared a law.

     Her body had become a prison of weakness. She could scarcely lift her arm, could not move her throbbing leg, could not summon the strength to recoil from the shadow looming so close. Her mouth parted, but no sound emerged—her throat was too raw, her chest too frail to wrestle with the force of his delusion.

     Inside, though, her thoughts thrashed like caged birds. She wanted to scream at him, to hurl back the truth—that he was wrong, that he was mad, that she belonged to no one. Her thank you had been nothing more than instinct, a desperate reflex to the water comforting her thirst.

     Mine.

     She thought of Joseph, of Le Fou—were they alive, still searching? Would they ever know where she had vanished? Save her from who was keeping her? The ache of it hollowed her. She had fallen into the hands of a monster, and her gratitude and mere survival had been twisted into something terrible.

     Her gaze flickered weakly toward him. The pale mask gleamed in the candlelight as he paced the chamber, tight and restless, yet she could feel the invisible tether between them—his attention lashed to her, guarding, circling, never released.

Chapter Text

     Time had unraveled in the dark.

     Without windows, without the turn of sun or moon, what must have been days dissolved into a single, suffocating blur. Sleep came in broken fits, shattered by fevered dreams or the scrape of Erik’s chair as he rose again and again to the piano. She woke when he was busy, drifted into uneasy sleep when he finally settled, and ate only when he appeared before her with a tray. The rhythm of her life had been stolen, replaced utterly by his.

     Candles burned away and were immediately replaced, their wax dripping in frozen rivulets along bronze stems. Meals came and vanished, but never regularly enough to anchor her to the passage of hours. The air never changed: damp and mineral, tinged with wax and the faintest hint of perfume, always close against her skin. No summer breeze stirred. No birdsong softened the dank cavern. There was only Erik—his restless music and the ceaseless lap of water at the lake’s edge beyond what she guessed must be the drawing room.

     Through it all, her body continued to slowly heal. Her leg remained bound and no longer blazing with infection, though it throbbed constantly with a low ache that never let her forget her capture. At what must have been midday – or perhaps midnight – he appeared without a word, gliding in with a tray balanced easily in his long, thin hands. Upon it lay a soft, fragrant fruit sliced with fastidious precision, a hunk of pale cheese, slices of dark bread, and a crystalline glass filled with ruby wine that fractured the candlelight into shards of blood-red fire.

     He set the tray before her without ceremony, and took up his usual seat in the armchair opposite her. He folded his hands in his lap, his masked face fixed upon her as though every twitch of her fingers, every movement of her lips as she ate, were a cipher to be solved. She tried not to shrink beneath his gaze. The bread was coarse but soft, the cheese sharp on her tongue, the fruit pleasantly sweet and refreshing. She chewed slowly, each swallow made uneasy by the knowledge that he was studying her. Watching. Always watching.

     She had never seen him eat. Not once. He only set food before her and observed. The silence between them drew taut, broken only by the faint scrape of knife against plate or the whisper of fabric as she shifted uneasily in the new floral dress. A dress she had not chosen. A dress he had put her in while she burned with fever, unconscious, helpless. The thought of it still made her stomach clench with disgust.

     He had been quieter of late. The piano stood untouched for long hours, its lid closed, while the soft rasp of his pen filled the silence instead. She had heard him at his desk, writing in furious, endless stretches, the scratching of nib against paper frantic, desperate, as though each word might expel some torment from his soul. She did not know what it meant, or which ghost he wrote to banish.

     He cleared his throat, making her jump. His yellow eyes gleamed faintly in the half-light, fixed on her still, and her heart thudded painfully beneath his scrutiny.

     “I’m afraid I owe you a sincere apology,” he said at last, his voice strangely distant; almost abstracted.

     (Y/N) froze mid-bite, her jaw tightening. An apology? For what, exactly? Her mind spat the possibilities like venom. For the trap? For the leg he had cut open like a butcher? For dragging her into this nightmare, locking her away? Where could he even begin? She forced the lump of bread down her throat, the swallow burning.

     He was not interested in any of his crimes against her, however. He simply continued, as if the horrors he had inflicted were footnotes, irrelevant beside this one breach of etiquette. “You know my name,” he said, with that terrible composure, “and yet I have never asked you for yours. It is, I think, unforgivably rude of me. Would you…please tell me?”

     For a beat she only stared, caught between disbelief and laughter too sharp to escape her throat. That was it? That was his apology? A parody of courtesy, offered in the midst of her captivity? She lifted the wine glass to her lips instead, its coolness and strength her only shield, and tried to keep the disgust from showing in her face.

     “Oh,” she said carefully, her voice steadier than she felt. “that’s…quite alright.” The wine burned as she swallowed, but at least it dulled the edge of her nerves. “It’s (Y/N). (Y/N) Martin.”

     For a long, weighted moment, silence filled the space between them. Then Erik spoke her name aloud, softly, as if testing the sound on his tongue.

     “(Y/N)… Martin.”

     He drew out each syllable, slow and deliberate, as though tasting them. His masked head tilted, the gleam of his yellow eyes unblinking. He repeated it again, this time quieter, almost reverent, letting the syllables break against his teeth. “(Y/N).”

     She suddenly wished she hadn’t told him—that she could snatch the name back before it left her lips. It felt strange hearing it in his mouth, as if he was already reshaping it, claiming it. He leaned forward in the chair, his elbows on his knees, his long hands clasped together, staring at her as if she were something rare and delicate he had unearthed from the earth itself.

     “A name is more than a word, more than a label. It is a key. A tether. Yours—” his voice hitched, a faint, almost manic tremor beneath it, “—yours is pure. A beautiful fit.”

     Her skin prickled. She pressed the wine glass against her lips, trying to keep her face neutral, but her hand trembled faintly.

     “(Y/N).” He hummed, and then fell silent, allowing her to finish her meal in peace. When her plate was empty, he brusquely reached for the tray and stood. He left without a glance, his angular figure vanishing around the corner. A moment later, he returned and crossed to the divan, where his black cloak lay folded neatly. He swept it up, the fabric whispering as he shook it out, and drew it over his shoulders in a motion as ritualistic as it was abrupt. She raised her glass, buying herself a moment with a measured sip of the sharp wine, watching him warily. The act of donning the cloak was an announcement in itself, but still she wondered—was he…leaving?     

     “You’ll have to pardon me this afternoon, I’m afraid. I have some work to do around here.” he said at last, flatly. The cloth that draped across the lower half of the mask swayed slightly with his speech. He gave her a quick nod, the gesture a polite farewell, and then slipped out of the door.

     She sat very still, straining her ears, waiting for the echo of his footsteps to fade as they bled into the cavern. Each beat grew fainter until the sound vanished altogether, leaving her alone with the constant hiss of wax and flame. For the first time that he had brought her to this place, he was not smothering her.

     The room seemed larger without him in it, the air lighter, though the walls still leaned close as if eager to remind her that this moment was no freedom, only a reprieve. Her heart fluttered with the familiar rise of anxiety, its rhythm as sharp as the wine she sipped. She drained the glass, the taste bitter on her tongue, and waited. She expected at any moment to see the door burst open, for him to reappear as though the absence had only been a strange test. But the minutes stretched, and no shadow filled the doorway.

     He really had left her alone. No sickly yellow eyes were fixed on her; no shadow was lingering over her shoulder. She was relieved, but also strangely disoriented, as though she had been dropped into a void. Her hands rubbed nervously against the fabric of her skirts, the soft folds a fragile anchor.

     Eventually, she remembered she was not literally tied down to the sofa. The realization came with a strange jolt, as if her body had forgotten about freedom entirely. She pushed herself up unsteadily on her healing leg. The couch cushions creaked softly as she stood. She froze, heart pounding, certain he would come rushing back at once. But, the silence held. Only the faint lap of water against unseen stone reached her ears—a slow reminder of just how far beneath the world she had fallen.

     Blessedly, she was finally alone with herself – and the house.

     Her eyes darted about the drawing room, wary, uncertain, and then…curiosity gripped her harder than fear. The couch—her sickbed, her cage—loomed behind her, cushions molded to her shape after so many endless days. Weeks, perhaps? Could it truly have been weeks? The thought was disgusting. Her gaze slid across the low coffee table, the familiar divan near the door, the cold black fireplace with its cluttered mantle, and finally toward the beastly piano.

     She limped toward the mantle, drawn to the litter of objects resting there. It was a strange museum of trinkets: seashells, a pair of worn red pincushions, a delicate boat carved from mother-of-pearl, the opalescent shimmer of an abalone shell, and, dominating the center, a great ostrich egg mounted on a polished stand. The collection was incomprehensible, each piece a fragment from some other world brought down into this cavern. Her fingers brushed the egg’s rough surface, and she recoiled slightly, unsettled by the idea of accidentally shattering it.

     The bookshelf beside it caught her eye next, its spines glittering faintly in the candlelight. She leaned closer, though the neat rows of embossed letters meant nothing to her. She had never been taught to read, no more than her father. Still, the books gleamed like treasures, mute jewels she could not touch.

     And then – that damned piano.

     The black beast dominated the room, its polished lid reflecting the candlelight, its weight settling like judgment. Erik had been bent over it like a priest at his altar all these weeks, pouring every waking breath into its keys. Now it sat in uneasy silence, a battlefield strewn with his abandon. Music sheets lay everywhere—sprawled across the lid, strewn across the carpet, some crumpled and others rolled neatly and tied with string. He was a man caught forever between order and chaos.

     She stooped slightly, her hand trembling as she reached for one of the sheets. Rows of notes crawled across drawn staves in uneven lines, whole measures slashed out in vicious bars of ink. Strange symbols filled the margins, unintelligible to her. And the ink—it was red. The scrawl was jagged, unsteady.

     She let the sheet fall, unsettled. The piano loomed all the larger, a silent witness to the obsession that filled this house.

     The next page she lifted was worse than the last. The staves were mangled beyond recognition, whole lines obliterated beneath violent slashes of crimson. Measures bled into one another until the paper itself looked wounded, torn open by his fury. She turned each page with careful fingers, afraid they might crumble from the ferocity impressed into them. She remembered once watching a child struggle to scrawl letters on a slate, crooked and uneven – and Erik’s handwriting looked no different.

     At the bottom of the scattered pile lay a woman’s handkerchief, half-hidden, as if deliberately tucked away. Delicate - (Y/N) guessed they were initials – symbols were stitched in a soft pink thread, the careful embroidery startling against the chaos around it. She let the music sheets slip back onto the piano, her eyes straying toward the faint glow spilling through an open doorway.

     Propelled by her curiosity, she wandered toward it—into the dining room; a stage set for actors who would never arrive. A mahogany table dominated the space, its surface gleaming darkly under the candlelight. A runner of crimson cloth cut a neat line down its center, where steaming platters should have been laid for guests. Brass candleholders stood in precise intervals along it, framing a silver pedestal bowl heaped with apples, pears, and grapes. They gleamed with the promise of abundance, but when the light caught their stiff sheen, she realized they were wax—illusions sculpted too finely to betray themselves at a glance.

     Polished chairs lined the table, six in all, their carved backs severe, upholstered in soft velvet of red. They stood empty and waiting, untouched, oppressive in their stillness. Dust had never dared to settle on them—he must polish each one carefully, though no guest had ever sat at Erik’s table. At the head of the table sat a larger chair, subtly distinguished by its higher back, was pulled out slightly as if the host had stood from it and would return at any moment.

     Every detail ached with the imitation of life. On the mantle above the cold fireplace, a clock ticked softly, measuring time in this chamber of counterfeit warmth. Each beat of its hands made the silence more unbearable, reminding her of how long the room had been waiting—for voices, for laughter, for anything alive.

     (Y/N)’s hand drifted over the back of one chair. The velvet ran smooth beneath her fingers, the carved wood cool and firm. For a moment she tried—uneasily—to picture him seated at the head of the table, glass raised in solemn toast, presiding over a banquet that existed only in his mind. Did he rehearse civility here, practicing pleasantries for guests who would never come, speaking to shadows in a masquerade of belonging?

     This was not a dining room—it was theater. A pantomime of society’s graces, staged for an audience of none. Another shrine of his, not to passion, but to solitude. At the piano there was at least fire, raw feeling—here, there was only silence draped in ceremony, a hollow parody of life above.

     She did not linger. The candles hissed faintly, their wax bleeding down as though mocking her intrusion into the charade. She turned away quickly, slipping into the next room to her left, her chest heavier with every counterfeit echo of the world he had tried to recreate in stone.

     The kitchen was small, but no less meticulous than the rooms before it. Stone walls had been gentled by shelves lined with orderly rows of glass jars and labeled tins, each marked in the same crooked, childlike script. She reached for them eagerly, her curiosity flaring as she lifted each in turn and breathed in their scents. Some were familiar—cinnamon’s warm bite, the sharp sweetness of cloves and pepper that stung the back of her nose. Others were strange, intoxicating: the dusky perfume of cardamom, turmeric like sun and earth, saffron as fine as flame-thread, sumac tart and alien on her tongue. She returned each jar carefully to its place, the colors glimmering like cut jewels in the candlelight, as though the shelves themselves had been strung with treasure.

     Polished pots gleamed on their hooks, their surfaces so thoroughly cleaned they reflected her face in warped, gleaming fragments. The air was warmer here than anywhere else in the house, faintly scented with herbs and wood smoke, though the black stove before her lay cool and dormant.

     At the center stood a scrubbed worktable, its wood was pale and spotless with a line of knives arranged with mathematical precision along its edge. Their blades, honed to bright silver, seemed to catch the pulse of the candle flames, each one ready, each one waiting. Nothing here was out of place. Every surface bore the mark of an obsessive hand—a room ruled by a man who could not leave even the smallest ritual of survival unmastered.

     At the back, a narrow arch opened into the pantry. She stepped through, and a sudden chill wrapped around her, sharp as a winter’s wind. The cold preserved the bounty stored within: sacks of grain and flour slumped heavily in one corner; barrels brimmed with apples, pears, plums, turnips, onions. There were baskets of carrots, cabbages, and squashes that still carried the faint perfume of earth, as if they had only just been pulled from the soil. From the ceiling hung braids of garlic, pale bulbs swaying gently in the draft, alongside salted cuts of meat—hams, sausages, and sides of pork cured to last the season.

     It was abundance beyond anything she had ever seen. Her mind leapt, unbidden, to the shabby kitchenette at home: the scratched counter, the mismatched plates stacked crookedly on a single shelf, the iron stove that belched more soot than flame. She thought of the meager bread and thin vegetable stew she and her father stretched for days, of Joseph working himself ragged just to put a scrap of meat on the table. And yet here—here, beneath the Opera, a man lived in secret surrounded by enough food to feed them all for months.

     Her stomach twisted, not just with hunger but with the strangeness of it all. This was no simple kitchen. Like the dining room, it was another performance of a household, another mask of normalcy. Every tool, every stocked shelf spoke of a life meant to be lived, but was lived alone.

     Her hand hovered over the smooth curve of an apple, its skin gleaming red in the dim spill of light from the kitchen. For an instant, she imagined the taste: the sharp snap of teeth breaking its skin, the cool rush of sweetness against her tongue. But the thought withered almost as soon as it came. The chill of the cellar pressed in, heavy and watchful, and she knew with sudden certainty that the food was not hers to touch. Every grain, every fruit, every cut of meat belonged to him—and to reach for it would be to trespass into the brittle territory of his control.

     She withdrew her hand, the air colder for her hesitation, and slipped back into the warmth of the kitchen. The knives on the worktable still gleamed in their perfect row, polished to a shine, waiting. They seemed to follow her with mute, metallic patience as she passed.

     Through the dining room she went again with its pretend dinner party looming in silence. Beyond, a narrow hallway stretched. The walls here were stripped of their false grandeur, plain stone relieved only by candle sconces. Their flames flickered and whispered, casting restless shadows that reached across the damp walls. The air was different here—stiller, planer—carrying only the faint, unadorned scent of wax and wet stone, as though the house had shed its skin and revealed the bones beneath.

     At the far right, she glimpsed a door she knew—the bathroom. Heat flared in her cheeks at the memory: Erik carrying her there, half-conscious, her mortification drowned beneath his quiet efficiency. He had gathered what she needed without a word, briskly, almost clinically, as though he had anticipated her shame and chosen to treat it as invisible. At the time, she had been too weak to protest; now, the recollection burned hotter than the fever ever had. The door remained firmly shut, hiding nothing more than a tub, a toilet, and the faintest trace of lavender soap. She had no desire to linger.

     To the left, at the far end of the hall stood another door—unmarked, inscrutable. Its plain surface told her nothing, and that emptiness unsettled her more than any memory could. Curiosity prickled her spine. She would save that one for last.

     To her immediate left, midway down the hall, another closed door waited. A bedroom, perhaps? And directly ahead—her breath caught—the final door, its frame cracked open, spilling just the suggestion of shadow into the corridor. A bedroom, certainly. His. The thought alone made her throat tighten. She could not bring herself to face it, not yet.

     Instead, she turned to the nearer door. The brass handle was cool beneath her palm, its weight heavy with the anticipation of intrusion. She hesitated, nerves sparking as though she might be caught at any moment. Drawing a slow breath, she pressed the feeling down, tightened her grip, and stepped inside.

     The room was elegant - suffocatingly so. A faint sweetness lingered in the air, cloying and strange, like flowers long dead but still remembered. Heavy curtains of crimson and gold draped the walls, softening the stone, while every piece of furniture gleamed with gilt trim and was upholstered in fabrics more sumptuous than anything she had ever touched. Curved chairs with fragile legs stood about like ornaments, carved tables glimmered with delicate inlay, and the mantelpiece of the dark fireplace was edged in gilded filigree that caught and fractured the candlelight.

     Her feet sank into a thick carpet as she stepped deeper inside the Louis-Philippe room, the silence watchful. Against one wall stood a woman’s vanity, its surface ringed with gilded scroll-work, a divan waiting nearby. She reached out and brushed the carved edge with her fingertips, only to find it faintly rough with dust. Her brows knit in surprise. The mirror—one of the only uncovered mirrors she had seen in this entire house—was dulled with grime, her reflection fractured by the specks scattered across its surface.

      At the back of the chamber stood a bed, its dusty canopy of sheer curtains drawn down like a veil, the silken sheets within glowing faintly in the dim light. She approached the wardrobe set beside it and eased it open. Dresses greeted her, pressed and waiting, their colors rich, and their fabrics whispering of a life above ground. Her chest tightened. These were the dresses Erik had been clothing her in. A woman’s wardrobe. A woman’s room.

     Christine’s room?

     She shut the doors abruptly, the wooden panels clicking together with more force than she intended. Her heart thudded. She moved instead to the mantel, where delicate porcelain figures and crystal vases stood in tidy ranks. Trinkets chosen with taste, arranged with care, as though meant to please the eye of a mistress who never returned.

     Her thoughts tangled, sharp and uneasy. Who had this room belonged to? His daughter? His wife? The notion was absurd—she could not imagine Erik as any woman’s husband. More likely, she realized with a chill, this room was like the rest of the house: a pantomime of life above. Perhaps he had dreamed it into being, imagined a woman to fill it as he imagined dinner guests, building yet more shrines to a life he could never truly touch.

     The effect was unnerving. The beauty of the chamber felt hollow, its careful elegance sagging beneath its strange neglect that pressed down on her chest. On the floor near the dormant fireplace lay two discarded wooden boxes. The sight clashed against the otherwise meticulous arrangement of the room, as though these objects had been discarded in haste.

     She lifted the first box, its hinges stiff, and opened it. Empty. She frowned, replaced it, and reached for the second.

     Inside laid a figurine: a grasshopper, finely wrought, its lacquered body gleaming faintly in the candlelight. She turned it over in her palm, the weight of it cold and unfamiliar; the strange insect frozen mid-leap. Something about it made her skin prickle, as though she were holding not a trinket, but a secret she was not meant to touch. She set the box aside on a nearby table, her eyes flicking uneasily toward the door.

     The room seemed to watch her. Every curtain, every shadow, every polished surface seemed alive with a quiet disapproval of her presence. She tightened her grip on the grasshopper, its hard edges biting into her palm, and hurried out across the hall toward the door of the other bedroom, the weight of the neglected chamber clinging to her even as she left it behind.

     She eased the door open, the faintest creak splitting the silence like a trespass announced.

     The sight struck her like a blow. Every surface drowned in crimson—walls, floor, ceiling—an unbroken sea of red that pressed in, heavy, suffocating, as though the room itself pulsed as a living wound. The air reeked of wax and paper and dust, but beneath it lingered something sharper, acrid: the aftertaste of smoke, rage burned to ash and left behind.

     Sheet music covered the floor in drifts, hundreds of pages cast aside. Some intact, others torn, shredded, gouged with ink, crumpled into tight angry knots. They sprawled across the carpet like the wreckage of thoughts too volatile to survive. In one corner, a music stand lay splintered, its wooden spine snapped in two. A candelabra, flung aside, spilled broken shafts of wax across the floor, the pale fragments gleaming like broken bones.

     And there, towering above the wreckage loomed a pipe organ. Untouched. Untarnished. Its polished pipes rose in dark, gleaming ranks; immaculate amidst the chaos, as though it alone commanded Erik’s reverence—his altar, his sanctuary, where his violence dared not reach.

     But it was the coffin that turned her blood cold. Overturned, its black shell lay on its side like the carcass of some creature. Pillows and blankets had spilled from it, strewn across the floor in tangled disarray, a grotesque parody of a bed. Clothes were slumped in crumpled heaps against the walls. On the dresser and tables, masks lay scattered—white, black, red—some broken, some whole, some with a veil, and others without; a dozen faces abandoned, discarded skins of a man who could never bear his own.

     Her breath caught. She clutched the doorframe hard enough her nails scraped wood, unwilling to set even a single step inside. The intimacy of it was unbearable—this chamber where he had bled and raged, where he had torn himself apart unseen. A place of secrets stripped bare.

     She should not be here. This was not a room meant for her eyes.

     She backed away, still clutching the grasshopper figurine, and eased the bedroom door back to the narrow crack it had stood at before. He could not know she had looked inside. Even that fleeting glimpse felt like too much, like a trespass that could not be forgiven.

     Her limp carried her down the hall, the figurine turning nervously in her hand, her thumb tracing its ridges and grooves as if it might steady her. At the final door, she hesitated. A cupboard, surely—a broom, perhaps, or shelves stocked with the endless candles he consumed. She pressed her palm against the handle and pushed.

     Cold air rushed her at once. Damp, mineral, alive.

     It was no closet. It was a backdoor. The threshold of stone gave way to the Opera’s buried foundations, the cavern floor sloping down into open blackness. Before her stretched the underground shore, slick and uneven, tapering into the vast, glimmering sheet of the lake. The faint glow from the house’s windows reached only so far, lighting jagged rocks and the trembling edge of the water; beyond that was nothing but the endless dark.

     For a moment, the thought seized her: if she could just find a passageway, or a boat tucked somewhere beyond the lamplight, or even a path—any way out—she might escape without him knowing until it was too late. She could vanish into the catacombs before he knew she was gone.

     She stepped onto the cold stone, her breath quickening. One step, and then another; each one a revolution against her own fear. The cavern air clung to her skin, clammy and biting, raising a chill that made her flesh prickle. Her eyes strained against the dark, desperate to shape the void ahead into something—an outline of a boat, a bridge, some secret track hidden in shadow.

     She did not see the tripwire.

     The hand that seized her was merciless, sudden as lightning. Fingers clamped around her arm like iron, wrenching her sideways so violently that the breath tore from her throat in a scream. The grasshopper figurine slipped from her grasp, clattering against stone. One heartbeat she was alone in the cavern mouth, the next she was slammed against the wall of the house, Erik’s masked face looming above hers like the wrath of the grave.

     His grip bit into her flesh, bruising, as he dragged her backward several paces before shoving her down to her knees so she could see. Her eyes fell upon a thin wire, barely visible, stretched taut at ankle height across the stone. It glimmered faintly, leading off into the shadows where some hidden mechanism lurked, waiting.

     “You nearly killed yourself,” he hissed, the words spat sharp enough to flay. His voice echoed harshly off the cavern walls, feeding the terror already thrumming through her veins. “Do you even see what you are? A blind child, stumbling through a field of knives.” His yellow gaze bore into her, molten and unrelenting. “Every path beyond these walls is laced with death. My traps do not tire. They wait. They watch. And you—” he wrenched her upright so abruptly she gasped, her wounded leg buckling beneath her— “you do not know where death lies.”

     Her pulse hammered painfully in her throat. She hadn’t heard him at all, hadn’t known he was there. Had he been trailing her since she left the Louis-Philippe room? Since she dared to open the crack of his door? The thought of him following, silent and unseen, made her skin crawl.

     “You cannot leave,” he snarled, his voice trembling with more than rage, something darker, needier. “I forbid it. And so does my sanctuary.”

     Her chest heaved, lungs straining for air, and against all logic, her gaze drifted past him—to the grasshopper figurine, lying where it had fallen in the shadows.

     He followed her eyes. His body snapped taut, and a sound like a growl tore from him. Striding forward, he snatched the little creature up in his long fingers. For a moment he held it as though it had betrayed him, then with a furious motion he flung it over her head. The figurine arced once in the candlelit dark before vanishing into the endless black of the lake with a hollow splash.

     Erik yanked her bodily from the cavern and back into the house, the door slamming shut with a thunderous crack that echoed through the stone. His grip never slackened. Down the hall he dragged her, his strides long and furious, while she stumbled, half dragged in his wake, her pulse hammering in her ears like a drum of panic. Not a word left him until they reached the drawing room, where he thrust her forward with such force that she nearly fell.

     The piano loomed again in the wavering candlelight, its scattered pages whispering faintly as the draft of their entrance stirred them to life. He released her at last.

     She staggered back, clutching at her arm where his hand had pinned her, the flesh burning with the imprint of his fingers. Terror still clenched her chest—not only of the traps waiting in the black beyond, but of him. She hadn’t heard him coming. Not a footstep. Not a breath. He had been there all along, her silent shadow, watching.

     He stood in the center of the room, chest rising and falling with fury, golden eyes fixed on her like a predator holding fast to prey. She could not bear the weight of it; her gaze fell to the floor, and she forced her unsteady legs to carry her back to the couch she had grown to loathe, sinking into it as though conceding to his claim.

     Erik brushed his disheveled, greying hair back with a sharp motion, and then began pacing, his long figure slicing the space between piano and fire.

     (Y/N)’s mind reeled, shivering from the shock of his rage. The house pressed down on her, every image crowding into her thoughts: the kitchen with its immaculate rows of spices, ordered to obsession; the dining room laid for guests who would never arrive; the Louis-Philippe room with its perfume of absence, still waiting for a woman who was gone. And his room—chaos and crimson, ruin scattered like blood across the walls. And the grasshopper… that strange, harmless thing, cast into the abyss under the weight of a wrath she could not fathom.

     Her hands trembled in her lap, restless. She pressed them down, tried to still them, but they betrayed her, twitching, fluttering against her skirts. Slowly, against her better judgment, she stole a glance at him.

     Erik prowled before the piano, his long strides swallowed by the rug, each turn abrupt, violent. His hands flexed at his sides as though aching to seize or strike, fingers curling and uncurling like claws denied their mark. The mask caught the candlelight with every sharp motion of his head, bone-white, spectral, terrible. Now and again his voice broke the silence, spilling strange syllables in a guttural, rolling tongue she did not know. It didn’t matter. The tone alone carried his meaning: clipped and cutting one moment, then low and rough as if he sought to soothe himself, only to rise again into hissed curses. His words lashed the air like a whip. She could not look away.

     Her chest tightened at the memory of his fury outside: the crushing grip on her arm, the shock of being wrenched to her knees, the glitter of the tripwire, and the grasshopper figurine flung away as if it had been alive, dangerous. She curled tighter into the couch, drawing her knees close, trying to fold herself smaller, unseen. The questions gnawed at her, insistent, rising even through her fear. What are you, Erik? Who are you beneath the mask, beneath this house, beneath the traps that wait to kill anyone that stumbles into them?

     And who—who was Christine?

     She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding and pressed her forehead against her knees. Still he prowled, still his steps cut the silence, the very air vibrating with the heat of his unspent temper. Every turn of his stride felt like the coiling of a whip that might snap at any moment. The room seemed to wait for thunder that refused to fall.

     At last, the tension clawed at her too deeply to bear. Her heart rattled in her chest, her lips dry, but she forced a small, wavering smile onto her face. Her voice quavered as she tried, desperately, to break the storm.

     “Your house… it’s…beautiful.” Her voice was thin, brittle, as if the words themselves might snap and shatter in the air.

     He did not answer.

     Her gaze darted nervously over the room—the scattered sheets of music sprawling like wounded birds across the carpet, the candelabras that burned with such unnatural stillness, as though even the flames feared to tremble in his presence.

     “You seem to be quite the accomplished musician,” she ventured, forcing a steadier tone, though the compliment rang hollow even to her own ears. Still nothing. His pacing went on, sharp steps whispering over the rugs, his shadow swaying in jagged rhythm across the walls.

     She fixed her eyes on the papers again. “The papers… is that music? Did you… write it?”

     His stride faltered—not much, but enough. He did not reply, yet the frantic prowl softened into something slower, almost measured. A fragile thread tugged taut between them, and she seized it before it could snap.

     “It’s extraordinary, truly. You must—”

     He stopped.

     The air seemed to lurch with him. With one sudden turn he crossed to the piano, the long sweep of his cloak trailing behind like a shadow, and sat hard upon the bench, his scarred hands braced on his knees. The bone-white mask tilted toward her, unreadable, but the golden gleam of his eyes burned in the flickering light.

     The silence thickened; a weight pressing into her chest until her lungs ached. He was waiting—no, demanding—something of her. An offering?

     “I… I’m sorry, I…” The words tumbled out, raw and aimless. She thought wildly of the trap, of his fury, of the figurine hurled into darkness—was it an apology he wanted?

     But his gaze stayed on her, unblinking, piercing. Her breath caught. Whatever she had been about to confess withered under that terrible yellow stare. She swallowed hard, her eyes dropping to his rigid frame, her hands twisting in her lap as silence consumed her again.

     When he finally spoke, it was not to answer her, nor to demand she finish her apology, but to turn the silence back upon her. His voice rumbled low, a sound that seemed to scrape against the stone walls.

     “What do you know of music?”

     The shift startled her. She blinked, hugging her legs tighter, fumbling for an answer. “I…I know a little? Hymns, mostly. At church. I sang them when my father took me there, when I was younger.”

     “There is far more than just hymns.” he said simply, the words weighted like stone. His mask tilted toward her, as if to measure every flicker of her breath. A pause stretched, then: 

     “And…can you sing?”

     The pointedness of it struck her as odd. Her lips parted, faltering, before a nervous laugh slipped out—thin and strange in the thick air. “Sing? I…suppose. I sing to myself sometimes—in the kitchen, when I cook, or when I do my chores. My father once said I sounded like my mother-”

     The moment the words left her, the room seemed to tighten.

     He went utterly still.

     Her voice softened, trembling at the edges. “I never knew her. She…she died when I was born.”

     The silence that followed was not what she had hoped for—not conversational, not even simply awkward. It was heavier, clotted, weighted with something. Erik’s head turned slightly away, the hollow gleam of the mask shifting in the candlelight. His long hand flexed against the piano’s edge, gripping it until the wood creaked faintly. Shadows leapt and sharpened across his figure, pulling his body taut as if the very air pressed him to breaking.

     The mere mention of her mother—of family, of a life above, outside these stone vaults—seemed to sour the chamber. It pressed against something raw, some wound carved deep into him that no mask could cover. His chest rose with a jagged breath, the rasp of it loud beneath the veil, the black cloth billowing with the force of passing air.

     “I see,” he said at last. The words came clipped and brittle. His posture stiffened further, his head bowed—not to her, not quite, but as if he were listening to some voice she could not hear, one that spoke only to him.

     She bit her lip, the fragile hope of softening him shattering in an instant. A sick twist rolled through her stomach—she had stumbled onto something forbidden, though she could not have said why.

     “Those books…” she tried again, her voice tentative, her gaze sliding toward the shelves behind him. “They’re beautiful. What are they about?”

     For a moment he did not stir. Then, slowly, Erik bowed his head as though gathering patience from somewhere deep within himself. When he spoke, it was with that same clipped simplicity, the syllables deliberate.

     “Balzac.” His masked face turned slightly toward the shelves. “Daudet. Hugo. Maupassant. Verne. Zola.” His voice lingered on each name as though cataloguing them, and when he shifted on the bench, resting his long arm stiffly across the piano, his tone deepened. “Novels. Thought-pieces. About life…about love.” He stopped short. The single word hung there until his yellow gaze snapped back to her. “What do you read?”

     Heat rose to her cheeks. She shifted uncomfortably, embarrassed beneath the weight of that stare. “Oh,” she murmured. “I…I’m afraid I don’t know how to read.”

     Something in him slumped, almost imperceptibly—disappointment, or disdain, she couldn’t tell. She rushed on, her voice eager, almost pleading. “I’ve always wanted to. But I had to work, instead of school. My father—he…didn’t know how to either.” She cringed inwardly at the name she had let slip again Joseph remained a specter always on her tongue. Quickly she pressed forward, fumbling for redemption. “I’ve always wanted to learn. And to write. Perhaps…” she swallowed. “Perhaps you could teach me?”

     “…Perhaps.” The word fell flat, neither promise nor refusal, simply a wall she could not breach. His silence loomed, and she flailed again for some common ground.

     “Did…did you build this house yourself?” she ventured, desperate to keep him speaking, to keep the mask of civility between them. His golden eyes pinned her, unblinking, and for a long moment he said nothing. Her own voice faltered, whisper-thin. “I just mean…there couldn’t already have been a house beneath the Opera. Someone must have built it….”

     “I did.”

     The answer landed like a stone in water, simple and final, the ripples of it spreading in the silence that swallowed her next breath.

     “How…how long have you lived down here?” she pressed softly.

     He did not answer. Not a word. His silence was a wall. She bit her lip. …Music. That was what had drawn him out before, what had steadied his temper enough to speak to her in the first place. She shifted on the couch, letting her legs fall from their tight grip around her chest, folding them beneath her as though settling in to coax him.

     “What instruments do you play?”

     His head tilted, the mask glinting in the candlelight. “Piano,” he said dryly, almost mocking. “Obviously. Violin. The flute. The organ.” A pause, his tone cutting. “It would be simpler to name an instrument I am not intimately familiar with.”

     She forced a smile, though her stomach twisted. “What instrument are you not familiar with, then?”

     “None.” His voice was flat, absolute.

     “Oh.” Her lips tightened. She tried again. “You’re…you’re a very educated man.” The words felt thin, obvious. Still, she pressed forward. “Where did you go to school? Was your family—”

     “I didn’t.”

     The interruption hung sharp in the air.

     “Oh,” she breathed again, faltering.

     They regarded one another across the gulf of silence. Under his hard stare, her mind scrambled for something to keep him speaking, anything to keep the weight of silence from crushing her.

     “What do you love most about music?” she asked at last, her voice gentler, steadier. “It matters so much to you. Why?”

     That did it. Erik shifted. His long frame softened just slightly, his shoulders easing as though the question had unlocked a chamber inside him.

     “It is the only thing that never betrayed me.” The words came low, cryptic, each syllable landing like a stone cast into dark water. The ripples of them settled heavy between them, making her gaze falter to the floor. She didn’t know how to answer, but Erik didn’t need her to. He leaned forward instead, elbows braced against his knees, eyes blazing in the flicker of the candles.

     “The world,” he rasped, “only sees what it wishes to see. It looks upon something unusual—” he swallowed hard, his hand jerking once toward his mask—“something abnormal, something it cannot understand. And it destroys.” His words fractured, as though pulled from a wound. “Music…music does not recoil. It does not lie. It does not leave. It does not hunt me as men have hunted me. Do you understand?”

     (Y/N) nodded slowly, though her head was swimming with confusion.

     “It answers,” he went on, voice fierce, voice tender. “When I strike a chord, it answers me. When I pour grief, fury, love into the keys, it pours it back into me. Perfectly. Honestly. It never turns away.”

     He turned sharply then, fingers crashing down onto the piano. A single chord rang out, piercing the silence, its vibrations trembling through the chamber until it faded into nothing. He froze, breath caught, shoulders rising and falling sharply as though the sound had torn something out of him.

     “Music,” he whispered reverently. “It is my blood. My voice. My flesh and my soul given shape. Without it, I am nothing but…” His hand lifted, touched the mask as though he had forgotten it was there, then dropped away quickly.

     The silence that followed was unbearable. The echo of his confession lingered, alive, pressed close around them. His mask was caught in gold and shadow, his breath ragged, uneven.

     Then his voice softened—gentle, dangerous. “You ask me this question,” he said, low. His hand curled into a fist against his leg. “You. You would know why I breathe at all. Why I endure this existence. You would…know me?”

     She swallowed hard, nodding faintly, though her throat felt tight.

     “Music,” he said, voice rough as stone grinding against stone, “is the only part of me that is not monstrous.”

     Her heart pounded against her ribs, frantic as a bird in a cage. She was still terrified of him—of his mercurial temper, of the traps he ruled over like a tyrant, of the suffocating claim in his gaze—but something in his words slipped past her defenses. That naked honesty, so sudden and unguarded, unsettled her more deeply than any threat ever had. To feel even the faintest thread of sympathy for him, after everything he had done, made her chest seize with panic.

     Her lips parted. The question was on her tongue: Why do you say you are monstrous? But she bit it back before it could escape. To ask would be to open a door she was not ready to step through, to invite a confession or an outburst that she feared she could not endure.

     Instead, she forced a fragile smile, her voice trembling. “You…you are an extraordinary artist. I’ve never known anything like it.”

     The words sounded false even to her ears, flimsy as reeds against the storm. His eyes narrowed at once.

     “Do not flatter me.” His voice cracked like a whip, sharper for being quiet.

     The reprimand hit harder than a shout. Her throat constricted, dry as sand. She froze, unable to speak, heat prickling at the back of her neck.

     Abruptly, he surged to his feet. His long strides carried him only a few paces before he stopped, as if caught by some sudden command within himself. Slowly, he turned back, the bone-white mask gleaming in the candlelight, its hard gaze fixed on her.

     “Come here,” he ordered, voice low but edged like a blade. His hand gestured toward the piano bench. “Sit.”

     She hesitated, but his command allowed no refusal. Her legs trembled as she crossed the carpet, every step slow, reluctant. She perched stiffly on the edge of the bench, spine rigid; smoothing her skirts so that not even their clothes would touch.

     Without warning, his hands closed over hers—long, skeletal, scarred. They settled timidly at first, as though unsure, then tightened, inexorable, pulling her fingers down toward the keys. She flinched at the chill of his touch, at the roughness of his skin against her own. Revulsion rose sharp in her stomach, her pulse stuttering, but before she could draw back, the weight of his grip pressed her fingers down.

     The piano answered. A great chord thundered into the chamber, sonorous and pure, vibrating through the bench, the floor, up her arms and into her chest until it seemed her very bones trembled with it. The sound held her as firmly as his hands did.

     A flicker of awe broke through her resistance, quick and treacherous. The power of the sound—its richness, its clarity—struck her to her core. For one fleeting heartbeat, she was caught: pinned not only by him, but by the music itself.

     Together they pressed the keys again, another chord, and another—swelling, dissolving, building. The air thickened with it, every silence between notes stretching taut, almost unbearable. Her hands remained trapped beneath his, trembling under his control, yet unwillingly complicit in the beauty they summoned.

     The moment fractured when he tore himself away. His hands recoiled abruptly, retreating from hers as though the contact had burned. He rose in a single motion, the spell snapped, his voice returning to its flat command.

     “It is late,” he said.

     A bitter laugh almost escaped her. Late? Here, where day and night did not exist, where time had been swallowed whole by stone and water? She bit it back, her jaw tightening.

     He rubbed his hands together briskly, as though to rid himself of the memory of her touch, as though sheer force might erase what had passed between them. His mask tilted toward the kitchen door.

     “I must prepare dinner.”

     Without another word, he strode out, the heavy silence closing around her once more. She sat frozen on the bench, the candles swaying in their sconces, the echo of the chords still thrumming inside her, resonant and unwanted, like a second heartbeat she could not quiet.

     Left alone, she sat rigid on the piano bench, her hands still poised where he had forced them, the phantom press of his long fingers lingering as though etched into her skin. Her pulse thrummed unevenly, caught between panic and something she could not name. She should hate him. She did hate him. He was her captor, her tormentor, a man with blood on his hands, surely, and traps strung like spiderwebs through the dark. And yet—how could someone so merciless summon such beauty from wood and ivory? How could the same creature who tore her freedom from her speak with such stripped, trembling honesty about being utterly alone?

     Her throat tightened. She hugged her arms around herself, sealing her ribs against the storm of confusion inside. It terrified her— disgusted her - that something small and unsteady within her had been moved. Sympathy was the most dangerous weakness of all in this endless dark.

     The silence shifted. A faint crackle carried through from beyond the room, followed by the muted clink of metal on counter tops. Soon, the air itself seemed to change, thickening around her. Scents unfurled, rich and consuming: meat roasting until its juices hissed, steeped in rosemary and garlic, sharp pepper pricking the air, the edge of wine simmering into sweetness. Vegetables softened and caramelized, their fragrance earthy, honest. Beneath it all arose the warm perfume of bread as it baked, yeasty and golden.

     Her mouth watered before she could stop it. Hunger betrayed her, twisting her stomach, making her weak. For so long she had survived on scraps. But this—this was different. This was deliberate. A meal shaped with intention. With care.

     Her breath stilled. Was it kindness? An apology? A declaration - was it courtship, grotesque and inevitable, served to her on porcelain plates? Perhaps not even that. Perhaps it was simply another chain, as carefully forged as any trap hidden in the cavern—one more reminder that her life, her hunger, her survival, all belonged to him.

     She got up and sank back onto the couch, pressing her palms hard against her face as though she could block out the world. But the scents crept through her fingers regardless—roast, herbs, the warm sweetness of baking bread—seeping into her hair, her skin, until it felt as though she was being wrapped in them, smothered by them, drawn in against her will. You are mine. His words still clanged through her skull, relentless, inescapable.

     She was still curled in that thought when the air shifted. Heavy. Intentional. She looked up, heart jolting. Erik filled the doorway, his figure stark and dark, rimmed with gold from the candles behind him. He didn’t move. Didn’t speak. He only watched her, still as stone, as though weighing her against some secret measure.

     Then, at last, he stepped forward. Draped across his arms was a gown.

     The fabric unfurled as he held it out toward her, and her breath caught. Jewel-blue, deep as a sapphire, it shimmered faintly when it caught the light, every fold rich but controlled, elegant without excess. It was not of her world—it belonged to another life.

     Christine. The name slammed into her chest before she could stop it. Surely it had been meant for her.

     Her throat closed. She shook her head, panic rising. “Erik, I…I can’t—”

     “You will.” The words sliced across hers, flat and merciless. His mask gleamed bone-white above the deep fall of fabric. “Put it on. Meet me in the dining room.” His tone left no space, no mercy, only command.

     Her mouth went dry. Appetite gone, she forced herself upright, her legs heavy as stone. She reached out stiffly and took the gown from his hands, the fabric too soft, too fine against her fingers. His golden eyes flickered, sharp with a satisfaction that made her stomach twist. Without another word, he turned and vanished back into the kitchen, the echo of his retreating footsteps thumping louder than her pulse.

     She carried the dress into the bathroom and shut the door behind her, leaning against it as though the slab of wood might buy her a fragment of peace. The gown weighed heavily in her arms, more burden than gift. She unfolded it with care, fingertips gliding over the cool, smooth surface.

     It was undeniably beautiful: the neckline low yet demure, the sleeves modest, the waist drawn snug. Oh…but the bodice betrayed it—cut to frame and lift, to draw the eye. Heat crawled up her face at the thought of wearing it. It was not a garment; it was a display. Not hers to make, not here, not for him.

     But what else could she do? She had no strength left for defiance. She could still feel the phantom pain of his hand crushing her arm, his voice snarling as he forced her to her knees before the tripwire, the fury that left no room for resistance.

     The timid, intimate touch of his fingers on hers as they played piano….

      Shaking, she stepped into the gown. The skirt fell easily, airy and light about her legs—but the bodice clung, molding her into an ideal she had not chosen, a figure sharpened for his gaze.

     Her breath hitched as she caught sight of herself in a small sliver of mirror peeking out from beneath the black cloth Erik had thrown over it. On impulse, she pulled the veil of fabric away.

     She froze.

     The jewel-blue silk cascaded over her body like water, glimmering against the (S/C) of her skin, accentuating the smooth line of her throat, the curve of her shoulders, the soft fullness of her breasts. She looked…beautiful. The sight struck her like a blow. For an instant, a dangerous thrill sparked in her chest—elation, giddy and alien. And then shame and dread crushed it flat. What right had she to feel beautiful here? In this place, in her dress—Christine’s dress—with the weight of his monstrous gaze waiting just beyond the door?

     Her hands shook as she reached for the brush. If she had to endure this, she could at least make the choice of how she would style her hair? Slowly, she dragged the bristles through her hair, tugging at the knots until it fell loose, framing her face in soft waves. It spilled over her shoulders, a soft veil of its own.

     The walk back through the house felt endless. Each step made the jewel-blue fabric whisper against her skin, a sound far too intimate. She pressed her arms tightly to her sides, fighting the urge to turn back and barricade herself in the bathroom. But, forward she went, drawn through the corridor’s flickering glow until at last she entered the dining room.

     The mahogany table gleamed like glass beneath the candlelight. Crystal goblets shimmered, one brimming with water, the other filled with ruby wine. The air was thick with the richness of roasted meat, rosemary, garlic, and butter—scents so vivid her stomach clenched with a hunger that felt almost shameful. The table looked prepared for a grand banquet, a feast meant for a gathering. And yet only one place had been set—hers.

     Erik stood, waiting like a proper gentleman beside the table. When she appeared, he stepped forward and drew out her chair with solemn courtesy, his every motion rehearsed, deliberate. Then he moved to his own seat at the head of the table, exactly where she had imagined him—regal, commanding, the master of a house filled with invisible guests.

     He, too, had dressed for the occasion. His clothing was sharp, precise: a dark three-piece suit threaded with subtle crimson accents, a garment that lent him the air of both host and judge. His mask tonight was not white but a stark, gleaming black, the dark veil falling from it in its usual shroud across his mouth and jaw. Against the black, his golden eyes glowed like coals, fixed on her alone. Her own seat had been placed to his right—an honored guest, though she was quickly learning the chains that came with that honor.

     Her heart thudded as she lowered herself into the chair. The aromas of the roast curled into her lungs, dizzying. Her body ached to eat, her hunger gnawing sharp, but the ritual, the staging of it all, made her chest tight with dread. He made no move toward the food, no gesture of partaking. His role here was not to share but to serve her and watch.

     She clutched the cream-colored napkin in her lap until her knuckles burned, forcing her trembling into its folds. She despised how the scene painted her: decorated, seated, and exhibited.

     At last, Erik reached for the platter. With practiced precision he carved the roast, the blade gliding through tender flesh easily. He laid the slice carefully onto her plate, and then surrounded it with roasted vegetables, their edges glistening. A cut of bread followed, steam rising faintly from its crust, a curl of butter already melting into its surface.

     The motions were smooth, measured, and careful. Intimate. He cared for her as though it were the most natural thing in the world. His actions chilled her to the marrow: the grotesque parody of normalcy, the unsettling shadow of a marriage supper, a husband feeding his wife.

     He set the plate before her with careful ceremony, and after a pause, his voice dropped low, deliberate.

     “The dress becomes you.”

     Her chest tightened as his golden eyes moved slowly over her form, appraising. “The color…it flatters your skin. And the way it shapes your figure…” His voice lingered, the last word curling like smoke. “Exquisite.”

     Heat rushed to her face before she could will it back. She turned her head sharply, letting her hair fall forward like a curtain, desperate to hide in something. The gown clung indecently, her body displayed as if she had been arranged for him, laid out like a composition of flesh and fabric.

     “Oh. Thank you,” she murmured automatically, the words spilling out before she could catch them. A mistake. At once she felt the shift across the table—the faint adjustment of his chair, the subtle ease of a man satisfied. He had taken her shame for vanity, her mortification for gratitude. In his mind, her blush was acceptance.

     She bent her gaze to her plate, forcing down a forkful of roast. The meat was perfectly seasoned, tender and rich with herbs—but the taste was dulled, strangled by the weight of his stare. He leaned back, long fingers folding across his chest, content to watch. Each bite she took seemed to sustain him more than it did her, as though her compliance was his true meal.

     And then, his voice came, low and measured, threading through the candlelit air. At first, it was simple, almost harmless: he spoke of his music. He talked about the pages he had filled lately, the return of melodies after a silence that had lasted—what? Months? Perhaps a little over a year or so?

      “But, the pen moves again,” he said, his tone caught between pride and wonder. “the melodies return to me…though not as they were. They come darker now. Dissonant. Shaped by grief. But even grief can resolve—into something new. Into rebirth.”

     The words hung heavy, weighted with more than music. She chewed a piece of bread slowly, eyes fixed on the crust as if it alone demanded her attention, afraid to look up, afraid to see the intensity with which he studied her.

     His voice continued, smooth and steady, reaching outward into broader matters.

      “Summer dies above us, even now. Soon the snow will come, virgin and pure, blanketing the city. I will take you there, to the roof of the Palais Garnier. You will see the world as I see it. And the opera season begins soon. You will sit beside me in my private box. We will watch together.”

     The casualness of it, the domestic certainty, chilled her more than any threat. He spoke as though it were already decided, as though her life, her very future, had already been written into his score.

     “Faust, naturally.” He continued. “Don Giovanni. Others less worth mentioning, as well. But we will go – you and I. You shall learn of music as no one else can, all of Paris should envy you.”

     Her pulse stumbled. We. The words tolled like a verdict. This dinner, this dress, this soft-lit stage of candles and silver - was courtship indeed, but twisted. A grotesque parody of wooing. He played at romance as though her silence were acquiescence, as though her blush were delight instead of shame.

     And then he tested his illusion.

     “My dear,” he said, softly, tasting the phrase as if it were a sweet on his tongue. He savored the sound, his golden eyes locked on her, weighing her response like a conductor listening for a wrong note. “There are so many wonders ahead of us to enjoy. Let us drink deeply of this life together, hm?”

     Her stomach turned. She forced another bite of meat between her lips if only to keep her mouth occupied, her throat constricting as she swallowed. The food might as well have been ash. Across the table, his eyes glinted, satisfied, mistaking her silence for acceptance. A quiet triumph radiated from him—he believed the scene was working.

     She set her fork down with deliberate care, though her hands shook faintly against the white linen, the tremor betraying her even as she tried to still them. Her heartbeat thundered in her chest, so loud she thought he must hear it in the hush between candle flames. For a fleeting instant, she considered letting silence stretch, letting him compose his romance unchecked, as though she were merely the pliant heroine he demanded.

     But, something deep inside her rebelled. A stubborn spark ignited, a refusal to let him write her into his script unopposed. If she stayed quiet now, she knew she would vanish into the story he had already decided for her.

     Her voice, when it came, was thin but steady. “You speak as though it’s already been decided, Erik. As though I belong here. Belong to you.”

     He did not flinch. He leaned back in his chair with his terrible composure, long hands folding neatly in his lap, his golden eyes gleaming with fever-bright conviction.

     “But you do,” he said, low and certain. “You live because of me. You breathe because of me. I spared you, healed you, clothed you, fed you. Each moment you remain, the bond grows tighter. Even you must feel it. It is fate, my darling. You were delivered to me.”

     Her stomach twisted. He said it not as though he simply believed it, but as though it were an immutable truth. For a heartbeat, she faltered, her pulse stumbling beneath the weight of his certainty. Almost, she believed him. Almost.

     Then her eyes fell to the jewel-blue gown stretched across her body, alien against her skin, clinging indecently where it should not. Defiance flared, sharp and hot.

     “This dress,” she said, her voice breaking into the silence, low but steady. “It was not meant for me.”

     He went still. A breath hitched beneath the veil of the mask, almost imperceptible, but she caught it.

     “It was meant for her, wasn’t it?” she pressed, words tumbling faster, reckless now with the heat rising in her chest. “Christine. The bedroom—hers. The handkerchief on your piano. Even your music, your charm, your every gesture—hers. Everything here breathes her name.”

     The mask faced her, black and gleaming, terrible in its stillness. His silence stretched, so taut she thought the very air might crack beneath it.

     When he finally spoke, his voice was almost inaudible, thin and strangled. “Do not.”

     Her whole body trembled, but she could not stop herself. The words drove out of her in a rush, reckless and damning: “Even this dinner—this forced date—it shouldn’t have been for me. It was supposed to be for her.”

     Something fractured in him then.

     His composure split like glass under strain, shoulders jerking as his fingers dug white into the arms of his chair. The low, measured cadence of his voice broke, trembling with fury barely chained. “You dare—” The words were strangled, raw. “You dare speak her name at my table, profane this night, mock everything I—”

     He surged to his feet with such force the table rattled, silverware skittering against porcelain, the crystal glasses ringing in protest.

     The fragile spell of the meal—of candlelight and romance, of careful words and hollow promises—shattered in an instant. All that remained was the echo of rage filling the dining room.

     Her chest heaved. Against every warning in her bones, she pressed on. She would not be swallowed by his delusion.

     “I. Am not Christine. And, you cannot have me.”

     The words lashed through the silence, sharp and final, echoing in the cavern until it felt like the walls themselves bore witness.

     For a suspended heartbeat, the stillness was unbearable. Then his eyes flared, molten and inhuman, catching the light like struck metal—his rage erupting, terrible and uncontained.

      “You ungrateful wretch!” His voice cracked the chamber like a whip, booming and jagged, reverberating off the vaulted stone until it seemed the walls themselves recoiled. “I saved you! I clothed you! I gave you life—and you throw it back in my face? You dare spit Christine’s name at me as though you could measure yourself against her?!”

     His hand slashed violently across the table, sending crystal goblets flying to the floor. They shattered in shrieks of glass, ruby wine spilling in wide, arterial streaks across the Persian rug, gleaming dark as fresh blood.

     Her chair toppled as she stumbled back, breath caught sharp in her throat, pulse hammering so loud she could hardly register anything else—except the blur of black coat and mask surging toward her.

     She had had enough.

     She turned and ran. The air seared her lungs as she fled, skirts gathered tight in her fists to keep from tangling around her knees, her leg flaring in a band of pain. Behind her, his footsteps struck like hammer blows, his curses ringing through the house, each one lashing her spine.

     “Run, then! Run to your death! You think you can escape me? You think you can outwit my labyrinth? Foolish girl—FOOL!”

     The drawing room vanished behind her in a rush. She burst through the front door, the heavy wood slamming the frame behind her, and the cavern air hit like ice. Damp, mineral, sharp—it clung to her face and throat as she stumbled forward, half-blind with terror.

     Ahead, the dock stretched narrow and fragile into the gloom, its lantern burning a solitary flame against the abyss. Beyond it - the lake; a black mirror broken only by pinpricks of glitter, like stars drowned beneath the water’s surface.

     Her heart battered against her ribs as panic rose. Around her: death in the traps. The boat: surely another snare? The house: Erik’s bruising hands and his fury.

     No choice. No choice at all.

     She sprinted for the edge, skirts whipping, breath breaking in sobs—and leapt.

     The lake closed over her like a tomb. The shock of the cold stole her breath, and the jewel-blue dress dragged her down at once, heavy as iron chains. It clung to her limbs, choking her movements, wrapping her in folds of waterlogged fabric as she clawed frantically toward the surface. Her chest convulsed, her mouth filled with the foul, stagnant taste of still water and silt. Her arms burned, her legs screamed with pain, and still the pull of the dress dragged her deeper.

     For one shattering instant, she thought this was it—that she would sink into his lake and vanish, nameless, another shadow claimed by the dark. The thought burned strangely bright, almost like relief. She remembered the grasshopper figurine, its cold body lost in the depths. Perhaps she would join it there, silent and free of Erik.

     “NO!”

     A roar tore through the cavern, guttural, inhuman. The water broke beside her with a violent crash.

     Erik.

     He came at her like something born of the lake, black and terrible, his body cleaving the water with frenzied force. He seized whatever he could—her hair tangled in his grip, her sodden skirts wrenched in his fists, her flailing arm locked tight in his skeletal hold. She screamed, choking, sputtering, but his grip only tightened, brutal, and unyielding. He dragged her upward, every stroke of his arms a command against her will.

     “Foolish girl!” His voice split the cavern, ragged with fury and something harsher—terror. “Do you wish for death so badly? Do you crave it, that you fling yourself into the jaws of the lake itself? Do you not see? Every path here is mine. Every step, every breath—you are mine!”

     They broke the surface at the jagged shore. He hauled her from the water like prey in a snare, dragging her by fistfuls of wet fabric and handfuls of hair, until he flung her onto the stones. She collapsed in a coughing, gasping heap, water streaming from her hair, her trembling body wracked with sobs.

     His shadow loomed over her, vast and dripping, mask gleaming in the dim firelight, dark hair plastered to his skull. The lake water poured down him, as though the whole of the abyss had risen up to cloak him.

     “I’d rather be dead than spend another moment with you!” she spat, voice strangled but fierce.

     His arm jerked upward, fist clenched, trembling with violence.

     Her eyes went wide. Her arms flew up instinctively, every muscle locking in dread. She braced for the blow.

     It never came. The raised fist faltered and then dropped uselessly to his side as his knees buckled. With a strangled cry, Erik crumpled before her. His warped hands seized her sodden skirts, clutching them as though they were the only thing keeping him tethered to the world.

     She shrieked, scrambling backward, kicking at him in panic, but he clung with iron desperation. His masked face pressed against her writhing thigh, shoulders convulsing with harsh, broken sobs.

     “I cannot—” His voice cracked, gutted, choking on its own weight. “I cannot endure it—your loathing, your terror. I wanted—only once—to be seen, to be treated…as a man!” His fingers knotted tighter in the soaked fabric, twisting it. “I saved you! And still I break you! I drive you to this! My curse - my wretched self!”

     The cavern swallowed his weeping, each sound echoing raw and jagged, keening like a wounded child. This was not the weeping of a man, but of something fractured beyond mending. He clung to her as though letting go would cast him into a void deeper than the lake.

     When he finally lifted his face, the firelight caught on the wet sheen of his mask. Yellow eyes blazed through strands of black hair plastered to his skull, feverish and unearthly.

     “You cannot leave me,” he rasped, voice splintered between command and pleading. “Why don’t you see? The world above cast me into shadow, spat on me, beat me, hunted me like a beast. Christine—” the name tore from his throat like reopening a wound—“Christine could not love me, not even she, perfect angel that she is. She left! But you—” his grip wrenched at her skirts, dragging her closer, desperate—“you were given to me! Torn from death itself and placed into my hands!”

     His body pressed tighter to her trembling form, his words tumbling over one another in a fevered rush. “I will make you happy. I will wrap you in silk, feed you feasts finer than kings! You will never suffer again, never hunger, never freeze in the dark. I will compose for you music to shame the heavens themselves! And I will love you—” his voice broke into a hoarse whisper, shaking with its own fervor—“like no man has ever loved, like no man can love! Only stay. Stay, and be mine!”

     Her breath hitched, her chest heaving beneath the weight of her drenched gown. Horror churned in her throat like bile. His devotion, his grief, his desperate promises—each word crashed over her like a wave until it smothered her, as suffocating as his presence, as crushing as his traps.

     “No.” Her voice rasped, hoarse but unyielding. She shook her head violently, tears burning her eyes as she forced the word out again, louder this time: “No! I cannot! I will not!” The dam broke; her scream cracked the cavern air. “All I want is to find my father! I want to go home!”

     For a heartbeat, he froze. His entire body stiffened, his mask tilting as though she had struck him. Then, slowly, his hands slipped from her skirts, fingers trembling as though scalded. His breath came in jagged bursts, loud and raw against the veil.

     “So be it.” The words tore from him, strangled and warped, every last note of tenderness stripped away. What remained was hatred iced over with despair.

     His hand lashed out, seizing her arm, bruising her. She cried out, clawing at his grip, but he dragged her ruthlessly back toward the house. His resolute silence was worse than his rage, she learned, each footstep thrumming with violence reined in by the thinnest of threads.

     The Louis-Philippe room loomed ahead, its strange, feminine touches a mockery of sanctuary. He shoved her across the threshold. The door slammed shut behind her like a thunderclap, the lock turning with grim finality.

     “No!” She hurled herself at the door, fists pounding, voice breaking as curses and sobs spilled out in a single torrent. “Let me out! Damn you, let me out!”

     “You will stay!” His roar shook the wood, his fury surging on the other side like a storm against a fragile wall. “You will never leave that room! If it becomes your tomb, then so be it! You. Will. Never. Leave. Me!”

     Then, came crashing—first one, then another, then a rolling cacophony. Furniture was hurled against stone, glass bursting like gunfire, iron and wood groaning as though the house itself was torn being asunder with him. His screaming rose above it all, incoherent, broken, shrieking in French, in the guttural cadence of some other tongue and in animal howls that tore down the hallways. Rage and anguish tangled until they were indistinguishable, the sound of a man rending himself apart.

     (Y/N) collapsed onto the bed, her body wracked with sobs. She buried her face in her hands, her tears spilling unchecked, her whole body shaking with terror and grief. The lock on the door held fast. The walls carried every echo of his destruction. There was no refuge, no silence—only the storm of him, booming around her with nowhere left to run.

     She wept, trapped in the very heart of his unraveling storm.

Chapter Text

     The chill of autumn clung damp around the Palais Garnier, fog pooling at the base of its steps until the gilt and grandeur blurred into something ghostly. Nadir drew his long coat tighter across his shoulders and slowed his walk along the boulevard, his dark eyes lifting to the edifice that had devoured so much of his life—and Erik’s. For all its brilliance, the opera house was a mausoleum to him now, a monument whispering always with Erik’s shadow. He circled it often these days, unable to help himself, like a mourner keeping vigil at a grave.

     The patrons remembered him still. He caught the fleeting glances as they ascended into the Rotonde des Abonnés, murmurs slipping in his wake. The Persian, they called him—always with that same curious lilt, as though he too were some relic of the opera house, foreign and eccentric. He ignored them, his gaze fastened on the glittering façade that to him was no temple of art, but of secrets. Behind its golden face, he knew the shadows: the swaying catwalks, the hollow echoes of trapdoors, mirrors that opened into black passages, and always—always—Erik’s yellow eyes burning in the dark.

     Erik.

     The name itself carried the weight of decades. Friend, enemy, burden, blessing—Nadir could never untangle what Erik had been to him. He had known the man too intimately for such simple words. Memory dragged him back to that final night: Erik arriving at his apartment more fragile than Nadir had ever seen him, skin pale and slack, voice horribly thin as he declared he was “dying of love.” Not dying in truth—Nadir had suspected—but staging his latest illusion. Erik had always been the master of illusions, slipping one mask for another. And Nadir, too, had known what that visit meant: the death of one self, and the birth of another.

     He had played his part, as he always had. He followed Erik’s unspoken instructions. He had buried a body in his place—an unclaimed, rotting corpse, lowered into the earth, wrapped in Erik’s cloak. He could still smell the sickly-sweet stench of decay, hear Christine’s quiet weeping beside him as the dirt fell onto the box. An unmarked stone, a silent grave, a lie given flesh. He told himself it was mercy, necessity. But when Nadir left, when Christine returned to her fragile peace, he had gone back to his apartment and wept for himself—for the madness of it all, for the truth that Erik would never know peace, not in life, not in death, not in any illusion Nadir might help him weave.

     Christine. Her name slipped through his thoughts as easily as breath. A letter had come from her not long ago, full of quiet joy: the château safe, her husband devoted, her body growing heavy with new life. She still remembered him, the Daroga; still thought him worth writing. He wondered if she ever thought of Paris, of the Opera, of Erik. He hoped not. It was better she let the shadows fade. He saw her face as it had been the last time he’d seen her: luminous with fear, pity, and unshakable resolve. And then Erik before her—begging, raging, tearing himself apart with his passion that always consumed everything it touched.

     And, what was Erik now? Perhaps he had become the invisible master of yet another great enterprise—some grand construction company abroad, building palaces and cathedrals under a name stolen fresh. Perhaps he was again disguised as a foreign magnate, pulling strings unseen, shaping the world with his clever, terrible hands. Or…perhaps he was nothing at all now. Truly a body rotting in some anonymous gutter, brilliance spent, crushed beneath the fury of a mob. That was Erik’s danger. That was his curse. Genius always sharpened into ruin.

     At last, Nadir abandoned his circuit of the Garnier, the chill clinging too bitterly to his bones, and turned down the narrow streets. His feet carried him to a modest café tucked beneath the eaves of a sagging row of apartments. He slipped inside, the sudden warmth a balm, and chose a corner seat where he could melt into shadow. A small porcelain cup was set before him, steam curling into the air, its bitterness grounding him.

     The room buzzed softly—chatter, laughter, spoons scraping saucers, chairs shifting across the floor. He let it wash over him, savoring the anonymity. Old habits stirred: the quiet watchfulness of a detective, a man who built his trade on listening to what others dismissed. It was then, amid the clatter of crockery and hum of voices, that he caught the thread of a conversation from a group of young men at a nearby table. Their words drew his ear at once.

     “– still hiring rat-catchers?” one of the young men asked. “I heard they’re desperate. Can’t keep the Opera clean.”

     Another barked a laugh, shaking his head. “Desperate because the job’s cursed. Don’t you know? Men sign the contracts, go below, and vanish. Every last one.”

     A third leaned in, his voice lower, uneasy. “My cousin…he knew a boy once, years ago, dared him to explore the sublevels. They found his lantern smashed at the bottom of the stairwell. Never saw him again.”

     Nadir hunched deeper over his coffee, steam fogging his vision. His gut tightened. Yes. That had the taste of Erik.

     “It isn’t just the old tales,” the third persisted. “The last one was only a few months back. Hired on with his traps and his dog—big man, strong as they come. Went down, didn’t come back.”

     The cup in Nadir’s hands felt suddenly cold. A few months ago?

     “Bah.” The first waved it off. “Plenty vanish down there. Lose your way, the tunnels swallow you whole. No unusual curse in that.”

     Nadir’s jaw clenched. Yes, shadows always bred stories. He knew that better than anyone. The catacombs were treacherous enough without a phantom haunting them. Likely the cellars still held old snares, rotting mechanisms lying in wait for a fool too bold. That could explain it. That should explain it.

     And yet…he could not shake the thorn digging deeper in his chest. A few months ago. Too recent. Too precise. He heard the echo of Erik’s voice again—dying of love—and the memory of burying that stranger’s corpse in his stead.

     No. Surely not. Erik wasn’t stupid. He wouldn’t still be down there, like a dog returning to its vomit.

     Nadir had needed to believe that he and Erik were finished, that the man’s vanishing act had finally granted him a measure of silence. He did love him—God help him, he did. He had loved that tragic fool enough to save his life more times than he cared to count, enough to follow him across borders, even here to Paris. But love did not cancel the truth: he was exhausted. Exhausted by Erik’s chaos, his endless tragedies, his brilliance always curdled by ruin. For the first time in decades, Nadir had begun to live without Erik’s shadow at his shoulder, without the constant weight of moral dilemmas Erik left like snares in his path.

     Nadir set his cup down with deliberate care, porcelain clicking softly against the saucer. His hand lingered on it for a moment, as though weighing the burden in his palm, before he pushed it aside. His heart felt heavier than stone.

     He left the café in silence, coat drawn close around him against the damp autumn chill. The great bulk of the Opera loomed in the distance, its gilded façade gleaming faintly through the mist. The streets bustled with laughter, clattering carriages, merchants hawking their wares. But Nadir walked alone, his steps slow, shadowed by the weight of memory.

     The evening air clung damp to his coat as Nadir mounted the stairs to his apartment. Weariness pressed heavy on his shoulders, and when at last he turned the key and stepped inside, the familiar sight of home softened him. Rich carpets muffled his tread, their dyes deep and warm beneath the dim glow of the lamps. Curtains of patterned silk framed the windows, throwing long shadows over low tables crowded with brass trays and carved wooden boxes. The faint perfume of rosewater lingered in the air—a ghost of the East he carried with him always. Here, at least, was a refuge, a world untouched by the shadows festering beneath the Garnier.

     Or so he told himself.

     A faint rasp broke the silence. Paper beneath his sole. His gaze dropped. An envelope lay waiting on the dark floorboards, stark white against the wood. It must have been slipped through the letter-box while he was out. Nadir bent, joints stiff with age and fatigue, and turned it over in his hand. The writing was elegant but rushed. He broke the seal and unfolded the letter.

Monsieur Khan,

They tell me you take on cases—that you have a gift for finding the lost. I pray this is true, for I have nowhere else to turn. My son, Charles, was taken on at the Palais Garnier. They promised him good wages, more than he had ever hoped to earn. But he has not returned. It has been days.

They whisper that the cellars are cursed, that men vanish there as if the stone itself swallows them whole. I do not know what to believe—only that my boy is gone, and no one at the Opera will speak plainly.

If you have any mercy, I beg you—help me.

Anxiously awaiting your reply,
-Henri F. Delarue-

     Nadir lowered himself into the nearest chair, the letter trembling faintly in his hand. He read the lines again, as though the words might change, but they did not. The plea of a desperate father should have stirred only pity in him, only the familiar tug of duty. Instead, this phrase in particular had frozen his veins:

     The cellars.

     Always, it came back to the damned cellars. The Garnier’s glittering façade was nothing but a mask; its true soul, lay in the dark below—and in the phantom he could never quite escape.

     Erik.

     His chest tightened. He pressed his fingers to his brow, pinching the bridge of his nose as if he could force away the memory. He wanted to refuse—God help him, he wanted to. There were other men who would take the case, other detectives more eager for coin and far less entangled in the Opera’s shadows. He could even send the father their names with a note of polite regret. That would be the sensible choice. The safe choice.

     But the words lingered—my son. Nadir knew the sharp edge of that fear, the way it hollowed a man from the inside out. To turn away from it felt like betrayal.

     Still, his soul recoiled. He had given enough to those catacombs. More than enough. He had buried Erik once already—buried his name, his crimes, even an anonymous corpse to seal the illusion of his death. In his heart, he was trying to close - had closed that chapter. Erik was gone. Gone, and he was at last free of the man’s endless chaos, his endless grief.

     Nadir let the letter slip from his fingers onto the low table, its pale edge catching the lamplight like a blade. He pressed his palms against his knees, bowed his head, and for a long moment forced himself simply to breathe, as though steady air alone might keep the heaviness in his chest from crushing him.

     But always—always—it came back to the Opera. To the cellars that devoured men like some ancient beast. And behind that endless hunger he heard another presence, imagined the echo of Erik’s voice, saw those fever-bright eyes flicker in the dark, daring him to return.

     His jaw clenched, fury sparking through the fatigue. What had he not given Erik? Loyalty, counsel, silence, protection. He had endured suspicion, scorn, danger—all for the sake of one madman. And, what had Erik left him with in the end? Secrets. Heartbreak. Sleepless nights and a thousand regrets. Yet still, against reason, against all sense, Nadir felt the same inexorable pull he had known since Persia: the unspoken oath to shield Erik, from the world when it hunted him—and more often from himself.

     He dragged in a sharp breath and shook his head. No. Erik is gone. This letter is not about Erik. The cellars are only stone and shadows now, home to rats, stagnant water, and drafts. The boy’s disappearance must have been nothing more than some grim accident, another ordinary tragedy swallowed by the bowels of Paris. Nothing more.

     The traps.

     They had to be there still—Erik’s cruel devices, half-forgotten, waiting like patient predators in the dark. The young man, Charles, had likely stumbled into one: crushed, impaled, strangled by a snare meant for intruders, real or imagined.

     Nadir’s eyes slipped shut. The weight of the choice pressed down on him, suffocating, though the outcome was inevitable. He would go. Not only for Henri, a grieving father begging for help, but for himself. To silence the whispers before they grew louder. To dismantle the shadows that still lurked beneath the Opera. To break the last of Erik’s snares, and—God willing—to bury his ghost once more.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

     Nadir rose with the dawn, though the day itself seemed unwilling to wake. A pall of low, colorless clouds sagged over Paris, muting the city in greys. He had spent the last few days in restless half-measures: circling his cramped apartment, picking up objects only to set them down again, pacing to the window to watch the carriages rattle past on the street below. Always his gaze drifted back to the letter lying on the table, stark and silent as a verdict.

     He tried to bury himself in routine—notes for another client, his accounts, anything that would keep his hands busy—but the words blurred uselessly before him. The image of a boy swallowed by the Opera’s cellars would not leave. Damp stone. Eternal silence. Water lapping against unseen shores. And in the silence, a voice he had tried for years to banish: Erik’s, singing into the void.

     At last, weary of the charade of work, he pulled on his long coat and stepped into the streets. Paris breathed noisily around him: the clang of church bells, hawkers shouting wares, children shrieking and darting down alleys. But it all felt hollow, distant, muffled beneath the press of his thoughts. He had written Henri to accept the case. Now he could not turn away.

     By the time the bells tolled eleven, he was at the café Henri had named in his letter. It was a modest place off the Boulevard des Italiens, warm with lamplight, amber halos falling across little tables dressed in china. Nadir slipped into a corner seat, his back to the wall—as always. He ordered coffee and waited, the bitter anticipation settling into his bones.

     Henri Delarue arrived not long after, the café door swinging wide to admit a rush of damp air and a man clearly eroded by sleepless nights. His coat was fine, his mustache neatly trimmed, his bearing still marked by the stiffness of class and propriety—but the polish could not hide the exhaustion clinging to him like a second skin. He spotted Nadir at once and crossed quickly, hat in hand.

     “Monsieur Khan?” His voice was tight, urgent.

     Nadir rose politely, inclining his head. “Monsieur Delarue. Please—sit.”

     Henri lowered himself into the chair, fumbling with his gloves before stuffing them hastily into a pocket. His hat thumped down onto the table between them. For a heartbeat he seemed to wrestle with composure, jaw tight, throat working—and then the words spilled out brittle and fast, like glass under pressure.

     “It is my son. Charles. He has not come home.”

     “I read as much in your letter,” Nadir said evenly, folding his hands on the table. “You wrote he was employed at the Opera?”

     Henri’s lips pressed thin, his eyes flashing. “Against my counsel. We are not in want—my family has never been. I told him there was no need to soil himself with such labor. If he required money, I could provide it. Or arrange for respectable employment. But the managers…” His voice faltered, then hardened. “They offered him a month’s wages greater than what I pay my steward in two. He believed it would be quick work. Simple. Rats, nothing more.”

     Nadir’s brow creased. “And when did you last see him?”

     “Monday morning.” Henri’s composure cracked, his voice rough. “He kissed his mother, promised her it was only vermin, a trifle. Quarreled with me in the street.” His hands clenched atop the table, knuckles pale. “But he did not return. By Tuesday night I was at the Garnier doors, demanding answers.”

     “And what were you given?” Nadir asked, lifting his cup with quiet precision.

     Henri gave a thin, bitter laugh. “A paper. The contract every rat-catcher signs before he is permitted below. A waiver. ‘The work is dangerous,’ they told me. ‘Every precaution is taken, but accidents may occur.’ Accidents!” His fist struck the table, low but sharp. “As though my son were a stray dog, vanished into the gutters, and they could wash their hands of him.”

     Nadir did not reply. But the words chilled him. Contracts. Waivers. He could see Armand and Firmin already, their pale faces tight with nerves, eager to thrust a piece of paper at a grieving man, eager to protect the Opera’s gilded surface while men vanished in its depths.

     Henri leaned forward, his voice dropping to a hoarse urgency. “The police will do nothing. They shrug, say young men wander off in search of wages. But I know. Something is wrong beneath that place. The Garnier hides it, but I cannot bury my boy without truth. Please, Monsieur Khan. Find him. Or at least…tell me what has become of him.”

     Nadir studied the man across from him—the way desperation fractured the varnish of his bourgeois composure. Beneath the fine coat and neat mustache was only a father’s cry for help, raw and unmoored. Nadir knew that grief too well. It was a plea he could not ignore, no matter how fiercely he longed to turn away.

     The following day broke with a brittle clarity, the air sharp, the light thin. Now and again the autumn sun pierced the grey, spilling in narrow shafts across the cobbles. By early evening, Nadir once more stood before the Palais Garnier. The great façade rose above him in cream and gilt, every balustrade gleaming, every statue catching the last blaze of light before the lamps were lit. The steps already teemed with life—patrons sweeping upward in silks and furs, stagehands darting through side doors with their burdens, vendors shouting playbills into eager hands.

     To the world, it was Paris at its most dazzling, a theater of music and marble. But to Nadir it was still a mask. Beneath the polish, beneath the gilt and stone, he knew what lurked: tunnels, traps, shadows that whispered his old friend’s name.

     He passed through the grand doors as though he belonged there—because in truth, he did. The Palais Garnier had been a second home to him for…too many years. With a slight tilt of his head, the crimson sarpūš crowning his dark hair caught the light as he acknowledged other patrons drifting inside. To them, he was still only the Persian—the eccentric, foreign gentleman who was a fixture in the opera’s halls. Their curious glances slid off him without remark.

     Nadir let the tide of bodies carry him into the Rotonde des Abonnés, then onward into the hall of the grand staircase. The marble gleamed beneath a thousand lights; crystal chandeliers spilled brilliance onto velvet gowns and crisp evening coats. The staircase swelled with voices, anticipation, perfume. But Nadir’s gaze was not for the finery. His eyes traced the shadows instead, the hidden corners where once he had trailed Erik’s vanishing silhouette. He paused at the landing, listening. Nothing.

     The upstairs lobby breathed of polished wood and perfume. From there he drifted along familiar corridors until at last he stood before Box Five. His hand lingered on the door, the weight of memory pressing down. He entered. Within, velvet curtains hung still, gilt chairs sat waiting in silence. Oh yes, memory settled as heavily here as dust. The view of the stage below was unchanged—commanding, perfect—but the shadows yielded no secret sign, no whisper of movement. He studied the paneling, the carpets, the angles of light. Nothing. Not a trace.

     He moved through the Avant-Foyer, the mirrored walls splintering his reflection into a hundred versions of himself. Each duplicate seemed to follow him with silent mockery, a reminder of the futility of his search. He studied the mirrors for seams, for shadows where a passage might have once opened—nothing. Only his own face staring back, fractured into infinity.

     The Grand Foyer stretched before him, vast and glittering, chandeliers dripping gold light onto marble and gilt. This early in the evening, the space was nearly empty, just a handful of patrons pausing on their way to their boxes, their voices hushed in the echoing chamber. Later it would be alive with color and gossip, a parade of Parisian finery. Now, its silence pressed like a weight. Nadir’s eyes traced the gilded arches, the frescoes overhead, the long sweep of the parquet floor. He sought what others would not notice—a break in pattern, a shadow out of place, any hint that Erik’s hand still moved here. Again, nothing.

     He wandered into the smaller salons—the Sun, drenched in warm golden tones, and the Moon, painted cool and pale. Both were opulent, polished, waiting to host laughter and intrigue. Both were silent. He checked the corners, the bases of statues, the edges of drapery, remembering where once he had seen Erik slip soundlessly through spaces no one else perceived. But every shadow was only shadow. The Opera, it seemed, had been purged of him, as though the very walls had been scrubbed clean of his existence.

     When the performance began, Nadir slipped into the auditorium and took a seat. The orchestra swelled, strings thrumming with life, voices soaring in reverent harmony from the stage. He let his gaze sweep not toward the actors, but across the balconies, the rows of expectant heads, the great chandelier blazing above the audience—repaired, gleaming, a symbol of order restored. Here, if anywhere, Erik would have made himself known. This was his sanctuary, his theater, his kingdom. No voice whispered from the rafters. No shadow stirred at the edge of sight. Only Polyeucte unfolded—polished, flawless, indistinguishable from any other Parisian evening.

     Wait—what was he doing? This was not about Erik. It could not be. He was here for Charles, the missing boy—not to chase ghosts he had already buried. The cellars were his goal. That was all. He still remembered them: the paths that twisted like veins beneath the Opera, the corners where shadows disguised steel and rope, where Erik’s traps lay in wait, patient as death. But he also remembered the safer routes, the passages meant for unseen passage, for survival.

     At last, Nadir descended into the Cave of the Pythia. The statue reared above him, wild eyed and terrible, her stone gaze caught in the blaze of lamps so fiercely she seemed alive. Yet her sightless stare pointed past him, daring him to look into the dark behind her. Shadows pressed thick around her coiled form, and Nadir felt the memory at once: here lay a secret. Beneath her marble bulk was a hidden passage, a door disguised as art.

     He moved casually, as though in idle admiration, his fingers brushing the seam only he knew. He pressed, tugged. Nothing. The stone held fast. The way was barred.

     A flicker of unease tugged at him, but he pressed on. He slipped through dressing rooms and broom closets, into forgotten staircases and narrow staff corridors, retracing every hidden turn he remembered. Stagehands and clerks paused mid-task to watch him pass, their puzzled glances following the eccentric Persian who wandered too far from the gilded paths of leisure. Each passage he tested ended the same: blocked. Walled. Sealed.

     The cellars remained barred to him. Perhaps the managers had unearthed Erik’s secrets at last and entombed them in stone, desperate to silence old whispers. Frustration twisted inside him, but he smoothed it away, schooling his face into polite indifference as he ascended again. Above, the Opera lived in its usual brilliance—intermission swelling with laughter, with the rustle of silk gowns and the hum of eager conversation.

     Nadir set his jaw. If the hidden ways had been closed to him, then he would have to do what he had hoped to avoid: speak to the managers directly, and ask for passage into the cellars.

     Nadir let the tide of silk and perfume press past him, slipping free of the crowd. He knew the way—through quieter halls, away from the foyers that glittered with chandeliers and chatter. The corridors narrowed, the light dimmed, and the sound of laughter dulled behind thick doors.

     By the time he reached the administrative wing, the air had changed. The offices here smelled faintly of ink and old paper, not perfume and wine. Lamps glowed steady and pale, casting long shadows across the polished wood panels. Secretaries passed him with wary glances, surprised to see a patron straying so far into the Opera’s private heart.

     At last, he paused before the double doors marked with the directors’ names. Here was the true heart of the Opera—not chandeliers and champagne, but ledgers and contracts, the business of reputation and profit. He adjusted his coat, knocked once, and was admitted. The managers rose at once when they saw him, their expressions brightening with the eager courtesy reserved for old friends.

     “Monsieur Khan! But it has been far too long!” Armand cried, his pink hands outstretched in theatrical welcome. “We were only speaking of you last week—your generosity, your steadfast devotion to the Opera! Why, we have scarcely seen you of late. Is everything quite well?”

     “A delight, a true delight!” Firmin chimed in, bustling forward to clasp Nadir’s hand between both of his own hot palms. “The Opera would not stand so proudly without men of your caliber, Monsieur. Your patronage has been no small blessing.”

     Nadir inclined his head, smiling politely as he let their effusions wash over him. He accepted the chair they offered, folded his hands neatly on his knee, declined the wine pressed upon him, and waited until their flurry of compliments had run its course. Only then did he speak, his tone smooth, harmless, professional.

     “I fear I am not here only for pleasure this evening. A matter of some concern has reached me. A young man named Charles, recently employed as a rat-catcher, has disappeared. His father, Henri Delarue, sought me out in desperation. I have agreed to inquire on his behalf. For that reason, gentlemen, I must request your cooperation.”

     The brightness of their smiles dimmed as though a lamp had guttered out. A quick flicker passed between them, jaws tightening, silence settling with the heaviness of a dropped stone. They knew precisely what business Nadir was in—and what usually followed in his wake. Where he went, questions sharpened, secrets unearthed, and too often the police trailed close behind. Nadir had a reputation, and he had earned it.

     Firmin cleared his throat, his voice now careful. “Monsieur Khan, it is always an honor to be of service to you. And of course we will assist however we can.”

     “Then I thank you,” Nadir said with an air of relief. “I will need access to the lower levels, to search for any sign of the boy. His father is desperate to bring him home.”

     “Nadir,” Armand said—dropping the formality with a bluntness that revealed more than it concealed. “That is quite impossible. The cellars are closed. Indefinitely.”

     Nadir tilted his head, mild as ever. “To whom?” His dark eyes held steady on theirs.

     “To everyone,” Firmin said gravely. “For exactly the reason you mention. Men have been lost down there. Charles, yes…but others too. We are waiting for proper inspection. The police went below and found nothing. It is as if the men simply vanished.”

     “Accidents happen,” Armand added quickly. “Tragic, but sometimes unavoidable. Until further notice, no one—no one—is permitted beneath. That is final.” He rose, smoothing his waistcoat with hands that trembled only slightly, his polite mask firmly in place.

     Firmin stood as well, laying a hand on Nadir’s shoulder. His smile was warm, but his tone had firmed. “You have always been a loyal friend to this house, Monsieur. Let us return that loyalty with honesty: you do not want to involve yourself in the cellars. They are closed. Let the proper authority handle this. That is all there is to say.”

     Their words were smooth, practiced—too practiced. Nadir heard the rehearsal in them, the polish of a line repeated often, and it was damning.

     His own expression never wavered. He rose, bowing faintly. “Then I thank you, Messieurs, for your time and good company.”

     The managers smiled again, wide and hollow, their relief poorly concealed. They ushered him out with every courtesy, as if eager to see him gone before he could dig deeper.

     The polished floors of the Paris Opera gave way to the echoing vastness of the grand staircase, and Nadir descended slowly, his hand gliding along the curved balustrade. His expression betrayed nothing—the calm mask of a seasoned diplomat—but beneath it, his mind churned.

     Their words had been too smooth, too readily rehearsed. They had not been surprised by his request; they had expected it. He replayed every flicker of their eyes, every careful pause, the way Firmin’s voice had hardened into that final, subtle warning.

     All around him, the Opera bustled with its usual vitality—patrons flowing in and out, stagehands scurrying on their errands. None of them spared a thought for what lay beneath their feet: a black underworld of stone and silence, sealed and forbidden. Nadir knew those passages. He had walked them at Erik’s side, listening as the man explained his traps with perverse pride, pointing out where steel jaws waited for prey. He could still feel the damp chill of those labyrinthine corridors curling around his neck like a serpent. The managers’ evasions told him only what he had already feared: something was stirring in the cellars again.

     By the time he stepped into the Parisian night, the air felt thin after the heavy press of the Opera House. He moved slowly down the boulevard, the gilded dome glinting behind him, while carriages rattled past and voices of excited theatergoers rose and fell around him. His boots struck the pavement in even rhythm, though his thoughts staggered in turmoil.

     So. No one was permitted below. The police had “searched” and found nothing.

     That alone was confirmation enough. A missing young man, a father’s plea, and now managers closing ranks behind polished smiles and tidy lies. Nadir had spent enough of his life untangling men’s lies to recognize the texture of fear when he heard it.

     He clasped his hands behind his back, tightening them until the knuckles whitened.

     It must have been a simple accident. That was all. A misstep on crumbling stone, a hidden pit, a slip into stagnant water. At worst, Charles had stumbled into one of Erik’s old contraptions—some iron snare, some pressure-trigger that had lain dormant for years, patient as only steel could be. The managers, no doubt, feared as much. They could not allow whispers of death beneath their opera. Not again. Not with the shadow of the so-called “Opera Ghost” still lingering in the city’s memory. Better to close the doors, offer contracts absolving them of blame, and pray the stories did not rise to the surface.

     Nadir understood their desperation. He had seen the ruin Erik’s legend could wreak on a reputation. And yet their silence condemned them. A father’s son was gone, and they would rather let the matter rot in the dark than risk scandal.

     He exhaled slowly, his breath frosting faintly in the night. The answer was clear, though he wished it were not. He would have to go below himself. Sneak past the locked doors, find the truth of what had become of Charles, and—if God willed it—disable what remained of Erik’s infernal devices. If he succeeded, then the matter could be quietly put to rest: one dead boy laid to peace, one grieving father given an answer, and the Garnier spared the resurgence of old nightmares.

     Yes. That was all it needed to be. A simple descent. A riddle solved. A paycheck earned.

     But in his chest, unease still coiled. For he knew too well: nothing with Erik was never simple.

     Nadir mounted the familiar stairwell to his apartment, boots whispering against the worn wood. The night air still clung to him when he unlocked the door and stepped inside. The hush of home greeted him: lamplight on patterned carpets, the faint sweetness of rosewater still lingering, brass trays glinting dully on their low tables. It was a world apart from the chill and whispers of the Opera.

     He shrugged out of his coat and sat at his writing desk, pulling paper and pen before him.

Monsieur Delarue,

I write to you after making my first inquiries at the Palais Garnier. As I feared, the managers are unwilling to allow anyone into the lower levels of the Opera. Their refusal was polite but absolute; the cellars, they say, are closed to all for reasons of safety. I will tell you candidly that their words struck me as rehearsed. It is plain they are eager to prevent further questions.

That said, I do not intend to abandon this matter. Though my path to the cellars has, for now, been barred, I have not exhausted my means of investigation. I remain convinced that the dangers below are real, and that your son met with some misfortune there.

I ask your continued patience, Monsieur. This investigation will take some time, but I assure you that I will pursue every path available to me. I understand what it means to be a father searching for answers. You have my word that I will act with discretion and with persistence until I know what has become of Charles.

I will keep you updated regularly. If you have any questions, concerns, or updates, do not hesitate to contact me.

- M. Nadir Khan

     Leaning back in his chair, his gaze drifted across the room, unfocused. Inevitably, his thoughts returned to Erik. They always did. The madman, the genius, the burden that would not be put down. Yet, memory betrayed him—it did not conjure the monster, but the companion. One rare warm evening, decades ago, Erik had let his guard fall low enough to drink a little with Nadir on a hidden balcony in Persia. His skeletal hands had trembled only slightly on the glass, his yellow eyes softened, the mask laid forgotten at his side.

     And they had talked. For hours. Of politics and history, of music and mathematics, of life and God and the endless absurdities of men. It had been easy—unbelievably easy. For one night, Erik had not been a specter, nor a curse, but simply a man, brilliant and flawed, sparring with him over philosophy until they both fell apart laughing.

     The memory ached. After everything—after corpses and traps, after blood spilled and lives ruined—Nadir still felt a tug of fondness. Erik was impossible, insufferable, damned. Yet he had been his friend. And Nadir, though weary to his bones, could not quite smother the loyalty that remained.

     Oh, Erik.

Chapter Text

     The days bled together, marked only by the sound of Erik’s footsteps and mutterings outside the door. Sometimes he came with food, sliding the tray through without a word. Other times, he lingered, his voice low and venomous, taunting her through the wood, reminding her - needling her - her how utterly trapped she was. His moods shifted like storms: muttering and half-laughing to himself one hour, falling into suffocating silence the next.     

     (Y/N) paced until her healing leg trembled, beat her fists raw against the door, and screamed curses until her voice frayed to nothing. The Louis-Philippe room mocked her with its silks, its décor, its absent mistress. With each passing hour, each day, her fury only sharpened, burning brighter to hold despair at bay.

     Anger is good, she remembered Joseph saying one night, sometimes it keeps you going when nothing else can.

     At last, he came again. The black mask caught the candlelight as he pushed the door open, a tray in hand, the scent of roasted meat curling into the room. He set it down just inside, then lingered, head cocked, wild dark hair spilling over his forehead, with that terrible, patient condescension. 

     “Ah, my little songbird,” he leered, “you grow quiet. Perhaps you are learning at last that silence becomes you?”

     Something fell loose inside her – wild, giddy that this moment had come. Her lips curled into a snarl, her voice dropping low.

     “You hide behind your music and your masks, but even then all I see is a monster pretending at being a man.”

     The words hit their mark. She saw it at once. He fell very still – shoulders rigid, breath catching beneath the black veil. His hand twitched as if to immediately lash out, but nothing came. He faltered.

     She rose, trembling, fury finally spilling out ragged and hoarse. “You think your precious chords make you human? They don’t! They’re chains, just like everything else in this pit you dragged me into!”

     Her finger stabbed towards him, shaking. “Even your 'angel' – your Christine – couldn’t love you! She saw you for what you are, and she fled. Do you hear me? She LEFT you! And still you cling to her ghost as if it gives you worth. Pathetic.”

     He flinched. She pressed harder, her voice climbing, sharp enough to cut. “You call this love? Companionship? I would rather die than endure the kind of love you offer. Your ‘love’ is a cage, Erik. It is knives, traps, threats. It devours everything it touches. Better the grave than to suffocate beneath it!”

     Her breath came in ragged bursts, rage rattling her to her core. She turned fully on him, eyes blazing. “And this mask - do you think it makes you human? It doesn’t! It only hides the rot beneath. Propriety, candlelight, theatrics – you swaddle yourself in lies to try to make it better. But it doesn’t work. You know it. You’ve always known it.”

     Silence crashed between them, thick and electric. Her chest heaved. Then, with a final sneer, she let the cleaver fall:

     “Take off the mask, Erik. Let me see your rot. Or are you too ashamed even now to show the monster you are?”

     The words hung in the air like broken glass, sharp and glinting, impossible to take back.

     Erik did not move. His body locked in place, every hard line of him carved into stillness, as though she had impaled him on a blade. The mask flickered in the candlelight; behind it his yellow eyes stared wide – and empty.

     He did not roar. He did not curse. He barely seemed to breathe.

     Slowly, mechanically, he stepped back. One hand groped for the door. The mask turned toward her once, blank and unreadable, but whatever words lingered there withered soundless on his tongue. Without a breath, he pulled the door shut. The click of wood meeting frame fell like the lid of a coffin.

     The house drowned in silence after that. No restless pacing. No muttering, no curses.No more shattering of furniture, no sobs, no footsteps outside her door. Only silence – vast and crushing.

     She ate, grimly satisfied with her handiwork, and then busied herself with the only tasks she could find. She straightened the room, smoothed sheets, gathered the scraps of her confinement into some semblance of order. Thank God for the private bathroom; without it, she would have been reduced to filth. She washed her face, her hands, the grime of the day - or night - slipping away beneath the warm water. Then she returned to the bed. There was nothing left but waiting for the rattle of the lock, for his shadow in the doorway, for the next clash between them.

     Hours dragged. She remained curled on the bed, pulse counting each second, ears straining for the faintest creak of the door. Nothing. No footsteps. Unease began to coil in her stomach. What if he had left her? Left her here to rot, abandoned to die in this chamber with its mocking draperies? A bitter thought – yet not without a flicker of relief. At least she would never suffer his presence again. 

     But, the silence thickened. Eventually, it curdled into dread.

     She rose, pacing the narrow span of the room, palms pressed hard against her arms. Wait – had she heard him turn the key when he left? Or had he only…shut the door?

     Her breath caught. Slowly, scarcely daring to hope, she crossed the room and laid her hand on the knob. The brass was cool underneath her trembling fingers. 

     She turned it.

     The latch gave way.

     The door swung open.

     She stood frozen, one hand still clutching the handle, heart thundering with a wild, fragile excitement. Beyond lay the hall, dimly lit by the flicker of low candles. The air was heavy, stale, as though no breath had stirred it in hours.

     (Y/N) stepped out. Her bare feet brushed the carpet softly. The hallway stretched before her, unchanged, yet charged with unnatural stillness. She half expected Erik to erupt from the shadows, towering and enraged – but nothing moved.

     Bit by bit, she crept forward: past the threshold of the Louis-Philippe room, past the haunting door of Erik's chamber. Her fingers skimmed the wall for balance, her whole body drawn taut.

     It seemed the house had swallowed him whole. The kitchen door hung ajar, the smell of herbs and meat gone cold within. The mess from their little dinner date remained in the dining room – on the table and scattered across the floor. The food had long gone sour, and she wrinkled her nose at the smell.

     She pressed on.

     At last, the drawing room came into view. She halted in the doorway and…her heart fell.

     The place looked as though a storm truly had torn through it. Sheets of music carpeted the floor like snow - slashed, crumpled, shredded. The chair Erik sat in by her sickbed all those weeks lay overturned by the piano; broken-backed. Candelabras lay toppled, wax spilled in jagged streaks; only a few remained upright, their candles guttering low. 

     And there – amid the wreckage, amid the silence, lay Erik.

     Curled on the floor with his back to her, he seemed shrunken, folded into himself like a wounded child amid the ruins of his music. She never thought she would have seen him so undone. The figure once imposing was reduced to rags: his white shirt loose, limp against a frame far thinner than she had known, the fabric wrinkled and damp with sweat and tears. His dark trousers were creased and dirt-streaked, and his feet—bare, blood-smeared, bruised —pressed into the scattered pages, as if he walked the wreckage until it consumed him. 

     For one terrible instant, she thought he was dead. The sight rooted her in place, her breath caught in her throat, her heart thudding dully with dread. She searched the angles of his bony shoulders for movement; the faintest sign of breath.

     He was so small. The figure that held every room hostage with his all-consuming presence was diminished now to a husk. She gripped the door frame to steady herself, staring at the ruin before her. All the fear, the fury, the endless storm he had inflicted upon her – it seemed impossible to reconcile with the frail, broken figure lying silent in the wreckage of his own making.

     At last, she caught it – the faint lift of his back, shallow breaths stirring the stillness. Not dead. Not gone. Relief flared in her, sharp and unwelcome. She took one hesitant step closer, then closer still, each step grinding like stone in her ribs.

      The sight of him—collapsed, pitiful, silent—stoked something sharp and bitter inside her. How dare he fall apart now? How dare he play the shattered soul when she was the one imprisoned, taunted, stripped of dignity? How dare he steal even this, curling into ruin until she, his victim, was left standing over him like a tyrant?

     Her anger boiled, scorching her veins. But then – 

     A sound.

     Thin, broken, barely audible. Frail enough she might have missed it, yet it pierced straight through her fury. Her breath caught, and she hated herself for it.

     Her eyes raked over him - really seeing him now: the torn soles of his feet, bloody from pacing through broken glass. Hands split raw from tearing and clawing at wood and stone. The mask gleamed wet where tears had soaked through, his shirt and the carpet beneath him damp. He had wept himself fully hollow.

     Against her better judgment, she sank to her knees beside him. He began to shudder. Her hand hovered uncertainly over his trembling frame, her fingers twitching, aching to touch yet unable to. Where could she even begin? What piece of him could she possibly reach for first, to start pulling him back together?

     Resentment flared as she watched fresh tears slip from beneath his mask and trail down his neck – resentment, and something heavier; raw, unwelcome. Pity. She hated it, hated that her heart betrayed her even now.

     Because there he was: barefoot, bleeding, his hands torn and his shirt soaked through with his grief. His mask sagged damp against his skin, the black veil clinging wet; the man beneath crumbling apart in silence. He looked less like a monster than a child abandoned in the dark. This was a man wrong from the very start. Thin, volatile, cracked down to the foundations, propping himself up as best as he could on a house of illusions and velvet lies. Alone. Always alone.

     She felt sick. Not at him, but at herself. Her own words came back to her, heavy and barbed, lodging deep in her chest. She had flayed him open, driven cruelty straight into the one hiding place he had, and gutted it.

     Too far, (Y/N). She had gone too far.

     …This mask - do you think it makes you human?

     Her hand hovered, wavering between withdrawal and contact. At last - against everything in her that screamed don’t - she let her palm rest gently on his narrow shoulder.

     His reaction was instant, violent in its smallness. He cried out – not the roar of rage she knew, but a startled, broken sound – and flinched hard beneath her touch, like a child too often struck who could only ever brace for another blow. The jolt rattled her to the core. Tears sprang in her eyes before she could stop them.

     “Oh, Erik….” The words trembled from her lips, barely a whisper. “I’m…sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” 

     He did not move. Rigid beneath her hand, his body shook with shallow tremors, ribs fluttering against the damp fabric of his shirt. His golden eyes squeezed shut, as if by force he could erase her presence, banish even this fragile moment of contact.

     Still, she kept her palm there, steady now, whispering apologies into the silence as if words alone might thread through his pain and find him. But, the longer she lingered, the more violently he shook.

      At last, she drew back, heart pounding. He needed space. God knew she needed it too.

     Rising unsteadily, she padded to the bathroom. Her fingers fumbled for towels, for a basin she could fill with warm water, for whatever soothing salves she could find. The small act of gathering these supplies steadied her – something tangible to hold onto amid the wreckage.

     When she returned, the sight hit her anew. Erik had not moved from his nest of sheet music. His shoulders hunched tighter, sobs buried in the crook of his arms. He trembled as though each breath might shatter him.

     She sank to the floor before him, close enough to feel the damp heat radiating from his body. He would not look at her. Instead he pressed his face deeper into his arm, as though willing himself to vanish.

     Quietly, she took a deep breath and set the basin down. She dipped the cloth, wrung out the excess water, and reached for his hand. He flinched, stiffening, hiding it beneath himself like a cornered animal. She did not force. She did not pull. She only coaxed, shushing softly, her fingers brushing light against his sleeve.

 “Let me help,” she whispered, voice trembling, “please, Erik. I want to fix this.”

     Some buried, wordless hunger in him must have yielded, because at last his arm went slack. Slowly, reluctantly, he let her take his hand. His hands were hard to look at: knuckles split to raw flesh, palms bruised and torn, streaked with dried blood. She cradled it as though it might shatter, dipping the cloth, gently stroking the stains away.

      He said nothing. His golden eyes stayed hidden, but his breath betrayed him – ragged, uneven. Each careful pass of the cloth drew a shiver, half pain, half…something else.

     She worked in silence, wiping the blood from his skin until at last her fingers ghosted higher, brushing the edge of his sleeve. He flinched, but she leaned closer, her voice low:

     “Just let me see. Only see.”

     Slowly, she drew the fabric up. Her breath caught. His arm was all sharp sinew and bone beneath thin skin, blue veins stark against the pallor. Jagged cuts crossed in cruel patterns, some shallow, others deeper. Coarse dark hair clung to his arm, stiff with dried blood.

     She swallowed dryly. She dipped the cloth again, warm water running down her own wrist as she pressed it to him. He jerked at the touch, but she held fast, steady, dabbing, rinsing. The silence between them thickened—intimate, unbearable—as if every stroke of her hand peeled them both further open.

     When that arm was clean, she lowered it carefully and brushed her fingers against his other sleeve, coaxing softly:

      “The other one now, Erik. Please?”

     For a moment he resisted, clutching the fabric as though shame itself was woven into the cloth. But as before, the tension bled out of him. His arm slipped forward, limp, resigned, as though surrender was all he had left to offer.

     She continued to work in silence, cloth moving steadily over his thin, scarred flesh. The longer she touched him, the heavier her chest ached. Beneath her care, he felt each stroke like a flinch, as if her gentleness scraped at wounds he had buried much deeper. 

     At last, her voice broke the hush, low and trembling. “I was wrong. Very wrong…to wound you so.” She swallowed, watching the rise and fall of his ribs—shallow, fragile, uneven. “Erik…what happened to you? What life did you have, to make you so sick, so broken, so….”

     Her words hung there, not accusation, not apology, but something raw neither of them could answer. Her cloth slowed. In the candlelight, she saw more. Where his shirt had fallen open at his breast, pale skin rose and dipped strangely, muscles uneven, as though they had never quite found their proper shape. His breastbone looked almost carved out and hollowed in places, his jutting ribs pressing against the thin layer of flesh. Faint, white scars latticed with fresh cuts over his throat and chest, catching the glow of the candles in jagged lines.

     Her breath stilled at the sight—yet even as she tried to look away, she felt him looking back. Wide golden eyes peered from the crook of his arms, startled, stricken. To be seen was a punishment in itself, unbearable and forbidden, and yet he could not hide quickly enough.

     “I’m sorry,” she whispered, the words spilling before she could stop them. “I…there are more cuts. I saw.”

     Her hand twitched, aching to reach for his chest, but she stilled it. He was already locked, catatonic beneath her touch, and she would not push him further into shame. So instead she rinsed the cloth, cleaned the last of his arm, and leaned back—placing a span of air between them. The break felt necessary. For him. For her.

     Her eyes drifted down to his bare feet, smeared with old blood. Shards of glass could still be buried there. She hesitated. Would it help him if she tried touching him there right now? Or would it tear the fragile thread of trust she’d barely managed to coax from him?

     The question weighed on them both, a stone lodged between their hearts.

     She chewed her lip, torn on where to turn her care next. His feet – yes, they were the obvious place. But first, warmth. The longer she sat in the ruined drawing room, the more she felt how bitterly cold it had grown. The chill pressed through her bones like ice, and they were both suffering enough already.

     She rose quietly, unwilling to disturb the fragile stillness between them, and crossed to the fireplace with its strangely cluttered mantle. In the shadows of the hearth, a small alcove in the stone wall held a neat stack of firewood, cut and arranged with an almost obsessive care. She drew out a few pieces, set them carefully on the grate, and struck the match with fumbling hands. At last, sparks caught and a thin flame licked its way along the splintered kindling. She crouched there for a long moment, coaxing it to grow. The faint crackle broke the suffocating silence, and the first breath of warmth began to unfurl into the ruined room.

     From the couch she pulled a blanket, soft but heavy, carrying the faint scent of dust and something almost like home. Its weight steadied her—something real, something to give. Gently, she draped it across his shoulders. The fabric slid over him as she smoothed it, catching over the jagged bones of his back. He stiffened, but did not shrug it off. Only a shallow breath came from him; drawn as though the warmth itself were a trick.

     “I need to look at your feet.” She murmured, kneeling again. Not quite a question, not quite a command. “I think there’s glass stuck. Please, Erik – let me help?”

     No answer came. No resistance either. His silence was a door left ajar, uncertain whether to admit her. Slowly she settled, and lifted one of his feet into her lap.

     The soles were ruined – skin split and peeling, streaked with slick ribbons of congealed blood that flaked and smeared onto her skirt. In the firelight, she saw what she feared: tiny shards of glass glinting in the raw flesh. Some lay like buried grains of sand, others were long and needle-thin, half embedded in torn skin.

     “Okay. This will hurt.” she whispered, her voice trembling as her fingers brushed the rough fabric of his pant leg. “But, it will be all right. I’ll be so careful.”

     A faint sound rasped from him, something between a warning and surrender. Then, he stilled.

     She dipped the cloth into the water, wrung it out, and bent to work. At her first touch, he twitched—his toes curling hard, his whole body recoiling from the sting. She paused, murmured a hush, then worked the shard free. A bead of blood welled bright in its absence.

     One by one, she drew them out. Each fragment felt like a trespass, a violation disguised as care, and she fought to keep her hands steady. Her fingertips trembled, but she pressed on with patience, marking each small victory aloud: “Here’s another… just a little more… it’ll sting, but then it will pass.”

     His reactions were small, but unbearable—every twitch of muscle, every sharp breath betraying him. The cloth in her hand bloomed with red as she dabbed and rinsed, her own fingers growing slick where they steadied him. The smell of iron thickened the air, mingling with the faint smoke of the fire.

     When she reached a deeper shard, lodged beneath the arch of his foot, he jerked with a muffled cry, shoulders curling tight. Her breath caught, but she held firm, whispering soft words to anchor him, to keep him tethered here. “I know, I know—almost done. Just one more. Stay with me, Erik.”

     And he did. Trembling and rigid, he did. When the sliver slid free, a thin line of blood followed, hot against her palm. She rinsed it away, slow and deliberate, until the skin was clean.

     At last, the final fragment was gone. His foot rested limp in her lap, crimson streaks fading to pale pink where she had wiped them clear. She moved to the other, repeating the ritual—dab, rinse, pluck, soothe. By the end, both feet were raw, bleeding afresh, but free of glass.

     She sat back at last, the stained cloth slack in her hand, breath unsteady, heart hammering with the intimacy of it. It felt as though she had reached inside him, trespassing in wounds he had no choice but to bare.

     Her mind turned, sluggish with exhaustion, to bandages – how best to bind his feet to keep them from breaking open again.

     And then he moved.

     Erik shifted suddenly, palms braced against the carpet as he dragged himself forward. The blanket slid from his shoulders, his knees catching and tearing through scattered sheets of music. Pages crumpled, split beneath his weight.

     Without a word, without a glance, he pressed his masked face into her lap. He curled in on himself around her, arms clamping tight at her waist, fingers knotting in her dress as if anchoring himself to her was the only thing keeping him alive.

      The sudden weight of him stunned (Y/N). She felt every tremor of him; the violent shaking that wracked his frame, the damp heat of his breath seeping through her skirt, already wet with tears. He clutched closer, tighter, as if to vanish into her.

     Her hands hovered helplessly in the air, torn between pushing him back and holding him tighter. But his grip, his unbearable desperation, left no space for choice. Slowly, carefully, she lowered her hands into his mussed hair, stroking through the graying strands—tentative, almost afraid.

     This time, he did not flinch. He only shuddered deeper, and a sound tore loose—thin, raw, fragile—a sob dragged from some cavern inside him, buried for years. His long fingers clamped on her waist in answer, clutching hard enough to bruise.

     She bowed her head, tears spilling hot down her cheeks. The intimacy of it scorched her: his weight, his warmth, his desperate need pressed into her. She did not know what she was to him in this moment—enemy, caretaker, stranger, salvation—but he clung to her as though she were all of them at once, and she could not make herself let go.

     The fire popped in the grate, shadows leaping across the destroyed room. He trembled; they wept. And in the glow of the flames, they stayed—two broken creatures bound together by grief too sharp to name, wrapped in warmth and shadow.

     Her hand moved in slow, steady circles across his back. His body quivered beneath her palm, ribs heaving with each ragged breath, until at last the sobs thinned, then faded. Bit by bit the tension unraveled. His grip slackened at her waist, his weight sagged heavier into her lap, and his breathing eased into uneven but steady pulls of sleep.

     She should sleep too. Her body begged for it—eyes burning, shoulders leaden, her mind dulled from hours of fear and fury and tears. But, exhaustion did nothing to still her thoughts. They kept turning, restless.

     There was too much to do.

     The ruined house pressed in around them, thick with the sour stench of neglect. From the dining room drifted the spoiled reek of their last meal, cloying even here. That would have to be the first task: clearing the rot from table and floor before it seeped deeper into the walls. Then perhaps she might cook something—something hot, real, steadying.

     Her gaze dropped back to Erik—his chest still bloody with cuts she hadn’t tended, his feet cleaned but not yet bound, the tatters of his clothing clinging damp and sweaty to his thin frame. They both needed fresh clothes. Water. Order. Small things, but things she could control.

     Her hand stilled in his hair, brushing back a tangle. That was when she saw it.

     The mask, jarred loose by his collapse, had slipped a fraction from its careful place. A sliver of his temple lay bare: skin warped and ridged, flesh twisted, and uneven, and sunken. Candlelight struck across it, carving the ruin into sharp relief.

     She froze. Breath caught. Her eyes fixed on the glimpse of his temple. Her stomach tightened—not with revulsion, but with the sharp pang of the question that returned, relentless:

     What had been done to him? What hand, what life, had carved this into him—bone, scars, and ruin stitched together with music and shadows?

     Her heart thudded dully in her ears. Slowly, carefully, she smoothed his hair back into place, erasing the glimpse she had stolen. His features eased in sleep, but even here, even now, the mask remained between them, another wall she could not cross.

     She let out a long breath, forcing her eyes shut. There would be time to wonder later. For now, she would not touch what he had not offered.

     Instead, she turned her gaze to the ruined house, circling back to what she could manage when she finally eased him off of her. Anchor herself in action—because the weight of what she had seen, and what she had not, was too much to bear all at once.

Chapter Text

     Erik slept, heavy and slack, his head bowed into her lap. For a long while (Y/N) did not move, lost in thought, her fingers idly combing through his hair as the fire cracked low at their side. The blanket that had slipped from his shoulders when he crawled to her still pooled loosely around his waist; and she drew it up again, tucking it close around him.

     But, they could not remain like this. Not on the floor, not folded among the wreckage of sheet music and splintered furniture.

     Slowly, carefully, she unwound his grip from her waist and coaxed him upright. He stirred faintly at the shift, muttering something she could not catch, but he did not fully wake. He was still pliant in her arms, all long limbs and sharp bones beneath the loose folds of his clothes. Half-dragging, half-guiding, she brought him to the couch and eased him down into the cushions. She spread the blanket fully over his body, watching his chest rise and fall – uneven, but steady enough.

     She lingered longer than she meant to, her hand resting against his side. Her thumb brushed in small circles before she caught herself. She should not be doing this. He was her captor. This was wrong. And yet…she let her hand stroke him once more, gentle, unwilling to draw away too quickly.

      It didn’t matter, she told herself. They were alive. They were safe enough for now. If he kept her still, even after this – then they would have to find a way to live with one another. Forcing her hand to her side, she turned away. The fire was weakening, the stench of spoiled food lingered in the air. There was work to be done.

     The dining room stank - sharp with the sour tang of spoiled food. Plates lay abandoned across the table, old meat gray and slick; dropping clots of old grease onto the tablecloth. Vegetables sagged in their juices, limp and slimy. She set her jaw and began. One by one, she stacked the dishes, scraping their remains into the basin in the kitchen, her stomach twisting with the stench. Grease clung to her fingers, stung her nose. She stripped the fouled cloth from the table and dragged it into a corner with the rest of the refuse. The air eased little by little with each task, though the sourness still clung stubbornly.

     She carried the basin to the kitchen and emptied it, scrubbing her hands clean before moving on. There, she began to take stock: fresh candles tucked into a drawer, a compost bin tucked neatly in the corner, rags folded for scrubbing. The familiarity of order steadied her. For once, she even felt…capable, even in this unfamiliar house.

     Now – a meal. Something simple. Grounding. Soup.

     She ducked into the larder and began to search around. A butchered chicken waited in the cold, tucked among the other meats. She carried it to the counter and stoked a fire in the iron stove, the wood stacked ready at its belly. Carrots, onions, potatoes and turnips filled a basket, with herbs bundled tight beside them. She could not help but smile – God, if nothing else, this pantry was a treasure.

     She found a pot, rinsed it, filled it with water, and set chicken in whole, bones and all. As the fire matured, and the water began to warm, she worked slowly at chopping the vegetables. The scrape of her knife against the board echoed in the quiet. Soon onions sizzled in a small skillet for the broth, their sharp, savory scent filling the room. She added the carrots, the turnips, the potatoes, letting them tumble into the broth one by one. Fat rose to the surface in pale glimmers, and the house, once cold and sour, began to yield—to warmth, to steam, to the promise of something shared.

     For the first time since she had been brought here, the air did not feel wholly hostile.

     Yet, her mind would not rest. Again and again, her thoughts drifted back to the couch: to the frail man lying beneath the blanket, ribs that flinched under her touch, the warped temple exposed when his mask slipped askew. She could not reconcile them. How could the same hands that set traps, that bound and wounded her, also cling so desperately when he wept? How could the same voice that hissed cruelty into the dark break so easily in her lap?

     She added the chopped herbs and the onions to the pot and stirred slowly, the wooden spoon tapping the rim with a hollow note. Who was Erik? A monster who had imprisoned her? A man shattered by cruelty? Both? Neither?

     Steam curled around her face, fragrant with chicken and thyme. She closed her eyes, forcing herself to focus on the steady rhythm of the stew: stir, breathe, and stir again. Focus on the fire’s crackle, on the warmth filling the house, on anything but the tangle of contradiction inside of her.

     Another question lingered, sharp as a knife. How was she meant to see him now? With hatred? With compassion? And if there was no easy answer – if he was both tyrant and broken man – then how could either of them hope to live together at all?

     (Y/N)’s thoughts pulled her back to the drawing room to check on Erik. She wiped her hands on a cloth and leaned against the doorway, watching the figure slumped beneath the blanket, mercifully unconscious to the world.

     Her eyes drifted toward the hall behind her. If she meant to tend him properly, he would need clean clothes. His shirt was damp, his trousers streaked with grime, the mask sticky with sweat and tears. Leaving him like that  - unwashed, untended – felt unthinkable.

     She turned, hesitating at the threshold of the hallway. Down the corridor, Erik’s bedroom door gaped ajar. She remembered the first time she had seen it: the crimson, the strange coffin bed, the chaos. She had sworn to never enter it. But boundaries have already been shattered today, hadn’t they?

     Quietly, she moved down the passage, one hand trailing the wall for steadiness until she reached the door. She stood there a moment, heart heavy in her chest, before summoning the courage to pull it open.

     The room greeted her with the same disorder, perhaps worse. The overturned furniture, the air steeped in disarray – it looked like a space perpetually undone, as if he so often came apart here that he had long ceased to set it right again.

     Gingerly, she stepped inside and picked her way to the wardrobe. She tugged it open: shirts and trousers were hung unevenly, some collapsed from their hangers, others stuffed into corners. Vests were slumped in half-open drawers, jackets crooked and some even wrinkled on their hooks. She selected a loose shirt and a pair of plain trousers, folding them quickly against her chest before closing the doors with a quiet finality, as if not to disturb the room’s fragile peace.

     On her way out, her eyes caught on a bedside table. A white mask lay there with its veil waiting. She picked it up, cool porcelain brushing against her palm, before slipping into the hall again. The door clicked softly shut behind her, sealing the chaos away once more.

     Back in the drawing room, Erik had not stirred. His chest rose and fell in the same ragged cadence, his mask still fixed neatly in place. She set the folded shirt and trousers on the table beside him, and laid the dry mask carefully on top - a small offering, waiting for when he woke.

     Only then did she retreat to the Louie-Philippe room to strip off her own soiled dress, its skirts stiff with blood and the grime of hours spent tending to wounds. She had never truly looked through the wardrobe here; the thought of Christine’s presence clinging to the garments had always kept her away. She chose a simple blouse and skirt, with clean underclothes that smelled faintly of cedar. The change eased her shoulders, lifting the heaviness of sweat, blood and filth, making her feel less steeped in ruin.

     When she returned to the kitchen, the chicken stew bubbled steadily, the broth golden with fat, fragrant with herbs. She skimmed the surface clean, added a pinch more seasoning, and adjusted the fire beneath. Her movements settled into rhythm—test, stir, stoke, breathe—a quiet ritual that continued to still her scattered thoughts.

     Cloth in hand, she wiped her fingers clean and drifted back to the drawing room. Erik had shifted slightly, still dead to the world; half-buried beneath the blanket. His long frame seemed diminished against the cushions, his head turned slightly to the side so that a tumble of dark hair spilled across the edge of the mask.

     The room bore the marks of his violence—splintered wood, shattered glass, sheet music scattered like snowdrifts across the floor. She stooped to gather the pages, stacking those still intact on the piano, setting aside the ones too torn or stained with blood to salvage. A candelabrum lay toppled beside the instrument; she righted it, brushing shards of wax and glass into a small pile with her sleeve. On a chair she found a dust-stiff throw, shook it out, and folded it neatly across the couch’s arm just above where Erik lay. The tasks were small, almost meaningless, yet each gave her hands purpose when her mind wanted to wander into places she dared not follow.

     Bit by bit, order crept back. The room remained a ruin, but each small gesture chipped away at the chaos, restoring a shape of what had been lost.

     When she passed the couch again, her eyes lingered on him. The mask had slipped in his sleep, revealing the edge of his temple, a sliver of sunken cheek. Her fingers twitched with the urge to fix it; to shield his shame, but she forced them still. She would not touch. Not yet.

     Her gaze shifted lower, to the blanket drawn across his chest. Beneath it she imagined the cuts still untended, wounds angry and raw. And his feet, clean but unbound—she remembered each shard of glass, the blood that welled with every one she drew out. He would need bandages. He would need care. But…only when he allowed it.

     The fire popped softly in the grate, its voice small but steady. From the kitchen, the scent of simmering stew crept through the corridors, seeping even into the ruined drawing room, carrying with it the faintest suggestion of home. The air grew warmer, gentler, touched by an illusion of peace.

     And then Erik stirred.

     At first it was only the twitch of fingers against the blanket, the faint shift of breath. Then came a low sound, not quite a word, only a broken murmur pressed into the fabric. His head moved against the cushion, and the mask slid further askew.

     She froze. Curiosity and pity tangled sharp in her chest as she watched the fragile moment unfold.

     No.

     Whatever thread of trust bound them would surely snap if he woke to find her staring at what he so meticulously concealed. The certainty pressed heavy in her gut. Without another glance, she turned quickly back toward the kitchen.

     The stew bubbled thick and fragrant, the meat loosening from the chicken bones, slipping into the broth in tender chunks as she stirred. She fished out the bones one by one, coaxing the flavors through with slow, deliberate motions. More fat rose to the surface; she skimmed it away until the broth glowed golden and clear.

     She turned to the rest of the kitchen—scrubbing the counters clean, washing and stacking the dishes, setting spice jars neatly back in their places.

      Eventually there was nothing left to fuss over. The stew was ready, both the kitchen and dining room couldn’t be cleaner. She stood before the pot, letting the savory steam roll over her face, filling her lungs with warmth. She closed her eyes for one long breath, wiped her damp hands against her skirt, and knew she could delay no longer.

     She peeked around the corner and felt a quiet relief that she had given him space. Erik sat upright, rigid against the cushions. The blanket was drawn tight across his narrow shoulders, clenched in his fists as though its weight alone kept him anchored. The change in him struck her instantly—no longer slack and broken, but braced, every muscle pulled taut again, as if her absence had reassembled the guard he wore like armor.

     The mask was flawless on his face. Not a fraction askew, not the barest glimpse of skin. He must have woken to find it shifted and corrected it at once, the first act his hands allowed. In the firelight the porcelain gleamed, smooth and impassive, a wall between them.

     His eyes—golden, hollow—were fixed on the folded pile of clothes she had left upon the table. The shirt. The dark trousers. The clean mask laid carefully atop the rest. An offering. A gesture of care. Perhaps even a promise.

     He only stared. His gaze clung to them as if they were strange, dangerous things, too perilous to reach for. She lingered in the doorway, the warmth of the kitchen still clinging faintly to her skin, and felt the fragile thread of silence stretch taut between them, waiting to see which of them would break it first.

     The fire whispered in the grate. Paper rustled faintly on the floor. But Erik did not move. His eyes stayed fixed on the folded clothes, as though the sight alone unsettled him more than anything else she could have done while he was asleep.

     At last his head tilted, the blank mask catching the firelight. His voice broke the quiet, low and hoarse, edged with something sharp.

     “You’re still here.”

     The words struck like an accusation. Almost immediately he turned away, burying his gaze in the blanket clutched tight around his shoulders.

     When he spoke again, his tone was harsher, more brittle. “You went into my wardrobe.”

     Her lips parted, but no reply came. There was nothing she could say that would not deepen the wound. She folded her hands against her skirts and stood still.

     “You should not have.”

     The words hung in the air, their meaning uncertain. Did he mean she should not have stayed at all or that she should not have touched what was his—even to help? His shoulders hunched further; the mask dipped low. The venom in his voice thinned to weariness, more lost than wrathful, as though the accusation weighed heavier on him than on her.

     She held her silence, letting the crackle of the fire and the drifting scent of stew fill the gap his words had left.

     At last she spoke, her voice tentative, careful: “Are you hungry?”

     His head snapped toward her, just enough for the firelight to glint in the hollows of his mask. He did not answer.

     But the silence was not empty. It pressed between them, strained and brittle. His fingers flexed faintly against the blanket; his throat worked in a swallow he could not quite conceal. His shoulders trembled, his breath stuttered in uneven pulls, his frame curling tighter around itself.

     Famished. Starving. And still, he gave her nothing.

     The silence stretched on, taut as wire, as though even admitting hunger would cost him more than he could bear.

     She wet her lips, her voice hesitant. “I…made chicken stew. A large pot. Enough to last us for a few days, so we don’t have to worry about cooking while we—” she gestured faintly to the wreckage around them, “—put everything back together.”

     No answer. His gaze remained fixed on the folded clothes, the black mask gleaming blankly in the firelight.

     She shifted, tried again. “I hope it was all right, that I used the ingredients. I didn’t know if you…if you’d meant to save them for something else.”

     Still nothing. The blanket cinched tighter around his frame, silence drawn close like armor.

     Her words spilled faster, scrambling to fill the void. “The dining room is cleaned. I—” she faltered, drawing a shallow breath, “—I couldn’t get the wine stain out of the carpet. I scrubbed and scrubbed, but…it’s set in. I’m sorry. I tried.” She had. God, she had, but the stubborn stain had only darkened with her effort.

     The mask stared back, impenetrable.

     She smoothed her hands over her skirt, pressing on in a smaller voice. “I put the dishes away. Washed what could be saved, threw out what couldn’t. The table’s clear now. The air doesn’t smell so bad anymore.”

     Still he sat, motionless.

     “The kitchen too—it’s in order again. Counters wiped. Stove cleaned.” A nervous laugh slipped out, brittle and thin, before dying in her throat. “So…when you go in there later, you won’t have to see the mess.”

     Her words vanished into the silence. It grew thick around them, pressing in like smoke, swallowing everything she offered.

     After a long pause, she murmured, almost to herself, “So it’s only this room now. The music scattered everywhere. The broken chair. The glass.” Her eyes drifted toward the piano, to the candelabras she had righted. “It can be put back together. Not perfect. But…enough.”

     Still, nothing.

     Her voice fell to a whisper, her gaze lowering. “It’s something, at least. Something we can fix.”

     The fire popped, and the silence hung, swollen and unbearable.

     Then Erik’s voice cut through the quiet, rough and low.

     “You speak as if it is yours to mend.”

     The words struck like a lash—brittle, sharp. He did not look at her as he said them; his gaze remained fixed on the folded clothes before him. The mask revealed nothing, only the firelight glinting across its blank, impassive surface.

     Her hands stilled against her skirt. The air between them grew heavier, as though even his refusal to lift his eyes was deliberate, a punishment in itself.

     “You clean my home,” he murmured, quieter now, the edge in his voice thinning. “You make my food. You—” His throat worked, choking on something unsaid. The blanket twisted tighter in his fists. “…You act as if you belong here.”

     The last words faltered. Bitter on the surface, but beneath—uncertain. Almost broken.

     They drove into her chest like a blade. Her stomach clenched, sick and heavy, as if she had been caught stealing something that was never hers. For a long moment she could not breathe, could not summon words that would not splinter the brittle silence even further.

     At last, a whisper escaped her:

     “I know.”

     Her throat burned as she forced herself on, her voice wavering. “I know. But I… I can’t just leave you. Not like this. Not after—” She broke off, pressing a hand flat to her skirt as though the gesture could steady her. “Not after what I said. What I did.”

     Her eyes stung. She shut them hard, holding back the tears. “I would take it back if I could. Every word. Every wound I carved into you. But I can’t. I was angry, so angry—but, God, Erik, it was too far. And I can’t walk away now, not with you broken by my hand.”

     The fire snapped in the hearth, its restless voice filling the silence her confession left behind.

     Erik’s breath rasped once. Then again. And then it broke.

     “…You weren’t supposed to survive Erik’s trap. He never wanted you here. Never.”

     The words ripped out raw, jagged, echoing more like a wound than a condemnation. His head snapped toward her, firelight striking the blank mask so it gleamed cruel and faceless.

     “But you did. You survived. And in his terror, Erik tried to believe you were something else—an angel sent for him.”

     His shoulders shook, the blanket sagging loose as he pressed a fist hard against the mask. “Erik never wanted you to see him. Not this. Especially not the rot festering underneath. You tore through every veil he wove, every song.”

     “And you were right.” His voice cracked, rising. “God help Erik, you were right about it all.” He gave a laugh then, hollow and thin, collapsing into a cough. “A monster playing at being a man—yes. That is all Erik is. That is all Erik has ever been.”

     Her hands trembled at her sides. That shift—the third person—unnerved her more than his fury. It was the second time he had done it, as though he could not bear to claim himself, as though “Erik” were a creature distinct from the man before her.

     “You should have hated Erik and gone,” he spat, though the words rang brittle as glass. “You should have left him to rot in what he is. That would have been mercy.”

     The fire flared, snapping in the hearth, casting jagged shadows across his mask.

     His voice fell, splintering, the fury folding in on itself. “Not this. Not you, coming to him with pity. With gentle hands, with food and fire. With mending where there should be ruin.”

     His breath shuddered, ragged, filling the silence that followed.

     And then, lower still, the words slipped out—too raw, too stripped down to be anything but truth:

     “Erik cannot bear it. Erik cannot bear that you stayed.”

     He turned his head sharply away, as if the mask itself could shield the tremor in his voice, the quiver in his shoulders. His fists knotted harder in the blanket, but his frame sagged, hollowed, as though the words had torn the last strength out of him.

     She did not move. Her hands stayed clenched in her skirts, her head bowed beneath the weight of his admission. The silence swelled, thick and suffocating, broken only by the fire snapping restlessly in the grate.

     Then his head turned back, golden eyes catching faintly through the eyes of the mask. “Tell Erik—what do you hope to build here? With this?” His hand flung weakly toward himself, to the trembling husk of his body. “What can you possibly mend?”

     Her throat closed. The question rang through the room, splitting him apart—Erik, spoken as though separate, untouchable—and she could not bear it.

     “I don’t know!” The words ripped out before she could restrain them, raw with desperation. “I don’t know what I can mend—or if anything can be mended at all!”

     Her voice cracked, tears rising hot. “I only know I can’t stand to see you like this and do nothing. I can’t take back what I said—God, Erik, I would give anything if I could—but I can’t. And I can’t walk away, not when I’m the one who drove the knife in.”

     Her hands clutched at her chest, as though trying to hold herself together. “I can’t stop caring. I can’t stop trying. Even if it makes you hate me more. …Even if it means nothing.”

     Her breath hitched, falling to a whisper. “I don’t know what I can fix. But I can’t leave you like this. I won’t.”

     He jerked as though struck, the mask whipping toward her.

     “STOP!”

     The shout cracked against the walls, jagged as shattering glass. “Stop this cursed pity—do you think I haven’t heard it before? Do you think you are the first to look at me, to swear you cared, to press kind words into the wound you yourself carved?”

     He rose and staggered forward a step, trembling, his hand clawing at the mask as though he might rip it free. His voice boomed, fractured but thunderous, reverberating through the destroyed room.

     “You are not the first. And you will not be the last! They always say it. Always. And then they go—running, fleeing, casting Erik back into the dark where he belongs.”

     The slip into third person cracked through him like a fracture, chilling in its naked rawness. He gave a laugh—thin, hollow, curdling almost at once into a sob.

     “You speak of mending—of staying.” He shook his head violently, the blanket dragging with him as though he could wrap himself against her words. “No. Better to cut free now. Better to run while the door is still open, before you learn what the others did. Before you hate yourself for staying. Because you will go. You will. They all do.”

     His breath rasped, jagged, the sound scraping the silence raw. The fire threw a restless glow across the mask, and his eyes burned behind the dark hollows. “So go,” he spat, though the venom faltered, brittle as glass. “Take your chance and run. It is the only mercy left to either of us.”

     (Y/N)’s lips parted, but no sound came. His words still rang through the room, searing, leaving her shaken to the marrow. Her head bowed, shoulders curling inward as though the weight of his rejection had driven her down. When her voice finally broke free, it was small, trembling, barely a thread against the roar of his despair.

      “Run?” She let out a hollow laugh, brittle and cracking at the edges. “How, Erik?”

     Her eyes lifted to him, wide and wet with tears. “How am I supposed to escape? Your traps strangle these caverns. You’ve told me so yourself—every passage guarded, every trap rigged to bite shut; waiting with open jaws.” Her throat worked, forcing down the rising sob. “You’ve threatened me with them more times than I can count.”

     She shook her head, the words spilling out broken, but steady. “Don’t tell me to flee, Erik. Don’t offer me mercy with one hand when the other built this cage.”

     The fire hissed in the hearth, its restless voice filling the silence. Her words hung after, small and crushed, echoing in the stone around them.

     He answered with a low, bitter laugh that scraped like iron against rock.

     “Then you are trapped indeed,” he hissed, his mask angling toward her though his eyes did not rise to meet hers. “The snares were laid for prey, true, not just for you. But, they do not care. Their jaws will close all the same. And if you are too weak to escape them—” his voice faltered, just a breath, “—then you are no different from the rest.”

     The words struck cruel, but the venom frayed even as he spoke them. “Do you imagine Erik will guide you through? Do you believe Erik would spare you?” His mask dipped lower, as though the weight of it dragged his head down. “Mercy has never lived in him. He would watch you fall, watch the teeth close…” His breath hitched, ragged, “…and he would call it justice.”

     The last word shook. His shoulders hunched tight, fists wrenching at the blanket until his knuckles blanched.

     The only thing she wanted was to hold him. The need rose so suddenly, so violently, it left no room for thought. She moved before he could recoil, arms flinging around him in a desperate embrace. He lurched back, body twisting to flee—but she clung harder, dragging him down as his knees buckled beneath the weight of her insistence.

     They collapsed onto the floor, the jolt shuddering through their bones, yet still she refused to let go. Her arms cinched tighter, crushing him to her as if her grip alone could hold him together. Sobs tore loose in shuddering bursts, raw, uncontrollable, her tears soaking into his shoulder. She buried her face against him, pressing in as though she could force him to feel it—the anguish, the terror, the unbearable need that consumed her.

     He sat stunned in her embrace, rigid, frozen, his breath stuttering in shallow bursts. His hands hovered uselessly in the air, quivering with indecision; but he did not push her away. Her desperation filled the silence, violent in its tenderness, undeniable in its force. The mask turned aside, blank, refusing her gaze, yet she clutched him tighter.

     Her words broke from her, torn up from somewhere deep, trembling with the weight of everything she could not name.

     “Then we’ll have learn to live together,” she cried against him—plea and demand, vow and surrender all at once.

     Erik’s hands rose weakly, trembling as they pressed against her arms—a feeble attempt to pry her away. The effort faltered almost at once. His strength bled out of him, leaving only a quiver of uncertainty. His fingers hovered at her shoulders, then drifted upward, pausing over her hair, suspended as if caught between longing and dread—between the need to touch and the terror of what that touch might mean.

     A broken sob tore from his throat. The sound startled even him—thin, hoarse, scraping like stone dragged over iron. His body shuddered, shoulders curling in tight, and when at last he forced words past his teeth, they spilled in jagged gasps, desperate and uneven.

     “Please,” he rasped, the plea cracking against the mask. “Please… do not give Erik hope. To do that… to do that would kill him.” His head bowed low, tears streaking unseen beneath the porcelain edge. “Do not make him believe that someone could ever—” He broke off, choking, the rest collapsing in his throat.

     His breath hitched, ragged, unraveling with each syllable. “(Y/N) should have gone. She should have left the cellars behind. She should never have come. Better she had died…” His head began to shake in harsh, jerking motions. “Better she had been killed than this. Better they had never met at all.”

     He pressed his masked face harder into her shoulder, his whole frame trembling with the violence of grief. His voice shifted, turning outward, as if he could not bear to name himself at all.

     “Do not give him hope,” he whispered, splintering into sobs. “Do not let him dream of a life where someone stays. Do not let him think himself worthy of warmth, of touch. For he would cling to it—oh, he would cling to it until his dying breath—and when it was torn away, nothing would remain.”

     His hands hovered still, shaking just above her back, caught on the knife’s edge between reach and retreat. The words kept spilling, softer now, more broken, collapsing into the silence between them.

     “Please… do not give him hope. He cannot survive it.”

     Her throat closed around the words he longed for—the words that might soothe him. She could not give them. To promise love, to swear she would never leave—those were vows she knew she could not keep. To speak them now would be a lie, another illusion for a man already broken on too many falsehoods. To wound him with one more empty promise would be cruel.

     So, silence was all she had to give.

     And yet silence was not empty. It was breath and trembling, heartbeat and closeness. It was the tightening of her arms around him, the refusal to let his shaking body slip from her grasp. Her hands slid into his hair, fingers trembling as they smoothed the coarse strands back, again and again, until the rhythm itself became an answer: I will not let you fall. I am here. Now.

     She thought he would understand. She thought he would feel the truth in her silence—that this was all she could give him, comfort and presence, nothing more. Surely he would know her embrace meant only here, in this moment, I will not abandon you. Surely that would be enough.

     But Erik…God help him, he felt something else entirely. The strength of her embrace, the heat of her tears seeping into his shoulder, the way she would not let him go—these he seized as vows, confessions, promises stronger than speech. She stayed. She chose him. She loved him, or why else would she cling to him as though the world itself might shatter if she let go?

     And so the silence became dialogue, though they spoke two different truths. His sobs pleaded for love; her hands answered with fierce tenderness. She held him tighter, never guessing that what she meant as mercy he had already mistaken for devotion.

Chapter Text

     Nadir sat hunched at his desk in the rosewater-scented dimness of his apartment, lamplight guttering low. Tobacco smoke curled from the bowl of his pipe, drifting upward in pale coils that stained the ceiling like ghosts reluctant to depart. The air was thick with it—sweet, heavy, clinging to his clothes as stubbornly as memory. Spread before him were his relics of another life: blueprints of the Opera House, acquired in its infancy, their margins marked with Erik’s slashing red annotations; sprawling street maps of Paris, their neat grids overlaying chaos; and beneath them, darker sheets of the catacombs—sewers, water channels, the subterranean veins of the city. Stolen plans, bartered scraps, fragments smuggled into his keeping, so that Erik’s “friend” might understand the kingdom his genius was raising beneath the Palais Garnier.

     He bent over them now with grim precision, tracing corridors with the stem of his pipe, memorizing the false turns, the walls that masked themselves as doors, the air shafts that doubled as escape routes. There had to be more entrances. Erik had never been careless. He had never been simple. A single entrance, a single escape, was not in his nature. No—there had to be more. There were more. The foundations, the lake, the long-forgotten bones of Paris’s ancient underworld—Erik would have used them all. Somewhere in that sprawl of stone, there had to be another door.

     But Erik had only ever shown him one. The single path Erik had trusted him with.

     The memory struck suddenly, sickening in its clarity: the Rue Scribe.

     The pipe slipped from his lips and clattered against the desk, scattering a rain of ash and embers across the paper. He swore under his breath, batting the glowing flecks aside with the edge of his sleeve until they died, leaving black scars in Erik’s red-ink annotations. His breath came quick, sharp, as the thought crystallized. Of course. The Rue Scribe gate. Hidden in the alcove between buildings along the Square de l’Opéra, recessed where the shadows pooled thickest. For years he had walked that way, pushing through the iron gate as naturally as a man entering his own home. How could he have forgotten?

     A curse hissed between his teeth, his chest tightening with disgust. To forget the door in the Rue Scribe—it was unthinkable. But he knew why.

     Erik. Always Erik.

      Nadir had returned to the Palais Garnier too often of late, lingering in its corridors like a man pacing the grave of a foe. And now this accursed commission, to find Charles Delarue, a boy foolish enough to vanish into the Opera’s underworld. The very cellars Nadir had sworn never to see again. The very shadow he had tried to walk away from.

     And Erik was with him every step.

     His mind no longer felt his own. Every corner of it was Erik: the gleam of those yellow eyes burning in the dark; the rasping laughter, dry as a saw blade through bone; the whistling silence of the Punjab lasso tightening round a man’s throat. The Phantom had claimed him so entirely that he had overlooked the Rue Scribe—the most obvious road, the only direct way into that cursed house below.

     Nadir let his face fall into his hand with a long, ragged sigh. If he could forget that, what else might slip from him? What of the traps—the wires, the false doors, the stones that could split beneath his feet? A single lapse would be enough to kill him. And what then of Charles Delarue? What then of the poor fool already tangled in Erik’s snares?

     For a moment, temptation whispered: to go further, to step once more into Erik’s house. To stand in those rooms where shadow and genius had lived side by side. To pay respects to a man who had staged his own death, and yet never truly departed. The thought drew a shiver of longing and dread alike.

     But no. That was not his task tonight.

     He ground the dregs of his pipe into the waiting tray, watching the last embers flare and die. Then he rose, his chair scraping against the floor, and seized his wool coat. He drew it about his shoulders in a sharp movement, as if the act could shake the ghosts from his back. There was no more time to waste.

     Nadir strode to the door, boots striking hard against the wooden floorboards, and into the stairwell. The sound echoed down the narrow space as he descended, his stride quickening with each step.

     Outside, Paris breathed in a damp, early-evening haze. The lamps along the boulevards burned with their low, golden halos, reflected faintly in the slick cobbles. Carriages clattered, voices carried, laughter spilled out from the bright cafés. Above it all, the Palais Garnier loomed like a jewel box against the sky, glittering, splendid—and beneath it, the labyrinth waited, black and patient.

     Nadir turned toward the Square de l’Opéra, his jaw set. He would not falter again.

     He swiftly crossed the busy boulevard, slipping between the carriages rattling home after a long day, their wheels grinding against the cobbles. The air was thick with horse-sweat and coal smoke, sharp and acrid beneath the gilded lamps. Theatergoers lingered in bright knots beneath the Palais Garnier’s arches, their laughter spilling into the street, the silks of their gowns brushing past his dark coat. He moved through them as a shadow, unnoticed, his mind elsewhere.

     Each step beat with Erik’s name, Erik’s image, Erik’s voice. Cunning, cruelty, brilliance sharpened into cruelty again. Memory and dread braided together until he could scarcely tell where one ended and the other began. At last, he reached the Rue Scribe, where the buildings curved to embrace a familiar recessed square. The Square de l’Opéra unfolded before him, its stones pale in the twilight, its alcoves deep with shadow. Nadir’s stride slowed, heart quickening as he turned into one familiar recess, drawn as though summoned.

     The narrow alcove beckoned like an old confidant, and memory surged unbidden—how many times had his hand fit easily around the iron gate? How many nights had he passed through unseen, slipping into Erik’s labyrinth while Paris slept above, unsuspecting? The echo of those steps seemed to pulse beneath his boots even now.

     But what waited for him was no gateway into memory.

     It was a tomb.

     The gate still stood, but ruined for all use. Its slender bars were fused shut, thick seams of iron welding them together in ugly black scars. The metal was discolored, blistered where jets of fire had sealed it. The frame itself had been swallowed by masonry, new layers of stone pressed over the alcove, the wall smoothed around it. Not hidden. Not disguised. Bricked in like a corpse walled up in Montresor’s cellar, never to see light again.

     Permanently closed. Forever impassable.

     Nadir halted in the narrow passage, his breath caught, one hand resting against the cold, ruined iron. A shiver traveled through him, not from the night air but from the weight of what had been taken. For a moment it seemed that an entire world had been buried here. The door to Erik’s kingdom, welded shut. The path to an old life, sealed and silent. A chapter of his existence—gone.

     His disgust rose like bile, but beneath it lay something colder: fear. If the Opera’s managers had gone to such lengths—if the city's engineers had buried Erik’s ways beneath stone and fire—then what else had been lost in the dark? What passages had collapsed, what routes had been blocked? And what of the traps Erik had left behind, patient as ever? Waiting teeth, waiting wires, waiting pits yawning in the black. Traps with no master to call them off, lying in wait for a footstep that might never come.

     The thought of them stirred unease in his gut.

     He tore his hand from the gate and turned away sharply, his coat flaring behind him. Twilight pressed close now, creeping between the buildings, painting the city in gray and shadow. He strode back into the open square, the iron gate left behind him like a gravestone.

     He would not linger. There had to be another way. There was another way. If he could not find it on maps, if his memory faltered, then he would find it in the world itself. Still, doubt gnawed at him. If the Rue Scribe—once the surest path—could be erased so thoroughly, what hope did he have of retracing Erik’s labyrinth at all?

     He trudged on, head lowered, boots striking harder against the stones. The grand western façade of the Palais Garnier rose ahead, magnificent and merciless. Its gilded statues gleamed with the last retreating light, distant suns burning against the dusk, while the shadows beneath the colonnade grew deep and oppressive.

     And then he heard it: the din of voices, sharp and restless. A knot of policemen and opera staff had gathered on the steps, a curious crowd clustering around them. At the center of the commotion, a man shouted, his voice cracked and wild, carrying through the heavy twilight like a plea or a curse.

     “Please! She’s gone—my daughter!” The man’s voice rang out ragged, hoarse from shouting, torn through with desperation. He lunged at the sleeve of a gendarme, clutching it with callused fingers, but was shoved back roughly, stumbling on the steps. His words tumbled over each other in panic. “I know she came here! She came looking for me—and now she’s gone, gone below—with the traps—”

     The onlookers murmured uneasily. Some scoffed, others smirked at his frenzy, but the crowd shifted all the same, unsettled by his wild eyes. The gendarmes, growing impatient, seized him by both arms, wrenching them behind his back. He fought like a beast cornered, bellowing what Nadir realized must be his daughter’s name, his voice shredding against the stone façade of the Opera.

     Nadir walked on. Paris was littered with raving men; grief and madness were not rare companions in its streets. But then—words cut sharp through the din.

     “—a wire, tightening 'round my neck, out of the dark—choking me—I cut it free, I swear to God I cut it free—”

     Nadir froze. His steps halted mid-stride. His head snapped back to the prisoner.

     The man was a ruin: hair matted, clothes crusted with dirt and grime, eyes glittering with a feverish light. But as the policemen jerked him upright again, the lamplight fell across his throat. There, circling the thick column of his neck, lay a scar. Dark. Livid. Clean and unyielding as though pressed by iron. Too perfect, too cruel to be anything else.

     A Punjab lasso.

     Nadir’s blood went cold. He moved at once, his voice slicing above the row. “Release him. At once.”

     The gendarmes faltered, brows knitting at the command, but Nadir’s bearing carried the weight of old authority. He produced his papers with the ease of habit, his words clipped and sharp. “This man is a witness, under my protection.”

     Reluctantly, they complied, their hands dropping away with visible distaste. One gave the man a final shove toward Nadir before turning back to scatter the gathering crowd.

     The man was burly, broad-shouldered, built on years of hard labor—but he sagged against Nadir like a felled tree, trembling, wheezing for breath. The Persian caught him firmly by the arm, steadying him as though anchoring him in place. The scar across his throat stood out in the lamplight—old, yes, but still raw enough to speak of recent peril.

     Nadir lowered his voice. “What is your name?”

     The man’s breath came rough, his chest heaving against the night air. He swallowed, lips cracked. “Joseph.”

     “And your daughter?”

     Joseph’s throat bobbed as he wet his lips with a dry tongue. His voice rasped like gravel. “She came here…to find me. When I came back—she was gone. She never returned home.” His hands curled into fists, his voice shaking as he forced the words out. “I searched. Days, I searched every place I knew. Every street, every door. She was nowhere. No one had seen her.” He shuddered, coughing hard into his sleeve before continuing, raw. “She must have come to the Opera, asking after me. There’s nowhere else she could have gone. God help me—she must have followed me below.”

     His voice broke then, anguish cresting through him like a tide breaking stone. “I barely escaped myself. She won’t. She won’t.” The last words were nearly a sob, torn from a throat already scarred by Erik’s cruelty, the despair of a man certain he had condemned his own child to the same fate.

     Nadir steered the man firmly but not unkindly down the steps of the Opera, ignoring the mixture of stares that followed them—curious, scornful, pitying. They wound their way through side streets until the gaslight and chatter of the boulevards thinned into quiet. At last, they reached a narrow café Nadir frequented, a place where the proprietor knew to ask few questions. Inside, the air was heavy with coffee, old tobacco, and the faint tang of beer.

     He guided Joseph to a corner table. Food and a mug of strong beer were set before him without hesitation. The man seized them at once, eating like a starving animal, bread tearing between his teeth, crumbs scattering into his beard. Nadir sipped slowly from his own coffee, watching from behind the curl of steam until Joseph’s hunger had steadied into something slower, calmer.

     Then he leaned in, voice low but firm. “Tell me everything. From the beginning.”

     Joseph’s thick hand fell heavily to the table. “Now—hold on,” he rasped, his voice still raw from shouting. “First, I want to know who I’m thanking. I’m not a man of society, but I’m not a brute without manners.”

     Impatience flickered across Nadir’s dark features, though his tone remained level. “Nadir Khan. Private investigator.” He took another slow sip of coffee. “Luckily for you, Joseph, I have already been engaged to look into disappearances in the cellars of the Opera.”

     “My daughter!” Joseph cried, loud enough to draw several concerned glances from the few remaining patrons. His voice cracked with desperation. “Please, Nadir—you must find her! She is all I have.”

     “Yes. I understand.” Nadir’s interruption was clipped, his tone the only thing restraining Joseph’s hysteria.

     “I can’t pay you, Monsieur!” Joseph pressed on, panic rising in him. “But we can work something out. Please, you cannot turn away a father—”

     “Calm yourself,” Nadir ordered, his voice cutting like a blade. The man fell silent at once, tears brimming in his bloodshot eyes and spilling into the tangles of his filthy beard.

     “I will help you find your daughter,” Nadir continued, quieter now, with deliberate precision. “Free of charge.”

     Joseph’s mouth opened for another outburst, but Nadir’s raised hand silenced him.

     “But—” the Persian’s eyes fixed on him intently—“I will need your help. To find her, you must tell me what happened to you.”

     For a long moment, Joseph hesitated, staring at Nadir as if weighing him on some invisible scale. No one worked for free. But the grim certainty in Nadir’s eyes seemed unshakable, and Joseph had no choice. He nodded once, solemn. “…Alright.”

     “Alright.” Nadir echoed, leaning back, letting the steam from his cup curl up into his own dark beard. “Now. From the beginning.”

     Joseph looked around the room, unease in his restless gaze, before downing a long draught of the beer. He grimaced at the burn, steadied himself, and began.

     “They hired me as a rat-catcher. A month, maybe two months ago. Vermin flooding up from the lower cellars—brown drain rats, dozens at a time, bold enough to swarm the kitchens. The managers were desperate, offered pay I couldn’t turn down. So I went down.”

     Nadir’s brow furrowed. Rats did not swarm like that without cause. For them to come boiling up from the cellars in such numbers, something below had to be driving them out. Gas? Fire? Some sort of disturbance, a shift in the underworld they had claimed as their own. The thought unsettled him more than he let show. Erik’s passages were not meant to be disturbed. If something had agitated the rats, it meant something had changed. Were passages truly being filled? How many were left?

     His voice grew thin, eyes glassy as memory took hold. “I had my traps. My bait. My knife. And my…dog.” His thick fingers drifted absently to the livid scar circling his throat.

     “They never told me how many cellars there were. How far it all went. I wandered into passages not meant for men. And then—” He swallowed hard. “It struck. A wire. A cord. I never saw it. Out of the dark, it looped my neck and pulled tight. Tighter. Until sparks burst at the edges of my eyes. I thought I’d die there, dangling like one of the rats I’d come to kill.” His voice cracked. “But by chance—by God’s mercy—I had the knife in my hand. I slashed, I tore, and the cord gave before my breath ran out.”

     Nadir’s jaw hardened. A lasso. Perhaps the same fate that had befallen Charles Delarue.

     Joseph pressed on, words tumbling, broken by shudders. “I ran. God forgive me, I forgot my little dog and ran blind. I heard springs snap, stones shift, blades gleam in the dark. Every passage was death. I don’t know how long I wandered. Hours. Days, maybe. No food, no water, the lantern dying. Only rats and the whisper of more traps waiting.” His eyes went distant, hollow. “But then I felt it. Air. Moving air. I followed it. And when I clawed upward through the broken stone, I came out in a graveyard.”

     “Where?” Nadir’s voice was sharp, urgent. “Which graveyard?”

     “I—I don’t know.” Joseph’s voice cracked. His hands covered his face. “I thought it was over. I thought I had escaped. I stumbled home and—she was gone. My daughter - ” His voice fractured on the name, and Nadir did not catch it. “She must have followed me, thinking I was lost below. She must have gone looking. And now…” His shoulders heaved, grief choking his words. “To think of her strangled in the dark—it tears my heart from me—I cannot—”

     His hands muffled the rest as his body shook with silent sobs.

     Nadir sat back, eyes narrowing behind the steam of his coffee. He watched Joseph’s trembling frame, the terror in his eyes, the scar like a noose burned into his flesh. This man was no raving lunatic. He had walked Erik’s labyrinth and lived—a feat few could claim.

     The café emptied slowly around them, chairs stacked, lights dimmed, until only their corner remained lit. Joseph clutched his tankard as if its weight anchored him, knuckles white against the handle.

     At last, Nadir spoke. “Then we know where to begin. If you clawed your way into a cemetery, the passage remains there. Tomorrow, you will take me to it. And if God wills it, we will find both your daughter—and the young man I seek.”

     Joseph’s head snapped up, eyes wide, voice breaking. “You’re going? Monsieur—no. You don’t understand. The traps are everywhere. The dark moves against you. It is death waiting with its jaws wide open. Every step is peril. You cannot go!”

     “I understand.” Nadir said, clipped and vague, his gaze lingering on the man's scar. His fingers brushed his lower lip, distant, thoughtful. “I am prepared for the dangers of those passageways.”

     “Prepared?” Joseph barked a harsh, humorless laugh. “No one is prepared. I only lived because God put a knife in my hand. Otherwise I’d be carrion swinging in the dark. You can’t prepare for that.” He leaned forward, desperate. “There must be another way. Some other way to find them. Isn’t there?”

     Nadir’s eyes darkened, steady and unyielding. “If there were, I would take it. But there is none. If your daughter is below, and the boy as well, then the path lies downward. There is no other road.”

     Joseph sagged back in his chair, whispering a prayer under his breath. “It will kill you,” he murmured. “And then they will truly be lost.”

     Nadir let the silence stretch between them, then pressed, “You said you do not know the cemetery. But do you remember the way? The parish? Any mark, any sign?”

     Joseph blinked, shame hollowing his face. “No. I had never been that far north. I never learned to read. If there was a sign, it meant nothing to me.”

     Nadir frowned, fingers rubbing absently at his lip, mind turning over the city map he carried in memory. Graveyards to the north. Which ones might match? Too many, for now.

     “And the direction—you are certain it was north?”

     Joseph hesitated, then nodded. “Yes. North enough. When I stumbled out, the morning light was on my left. That means north. I’d swear to it.”

     Nadir studied him in silence, then shifted his tone. “Where are you staying now?”

     Joseph stiffened, shame dragging at his shoulders. “Nowhere. Not anymore. I lost my apartment months ago. Haven’t worked since I came back. Couldn’t think of anything but finding her. I’ve been sleeping rough. Truth is, I don’t sleep at all. Not while I imagine her choking in the dark.”

     Nadir’s jaw tightened. His decision came swift, without hesitation. “Then you will stay with me. Until she is found.”

     Joseph recoiled, shaking his head. “No. No, I won’t impose. You’ve done too much already.”

     “I insist.” Nadir said, voice sharpened with authority. “You will come to my apartment.”

     “I’ve lived rough long enough. I’ll not be your burden.”

     Nadir leaned forward, hands striking the table with a quiet thump that silenced Joseph’s protest. “Monsieur Martin, this is not merely kindness. It is necessity. You cannot help me—or your daughter—if you collapse in the gutter. You will come.”

     Joseph shivered, silence gripping him. At last, he dropped his gaze. “…Very well.”

     They left the café together, the hour late enough that the streets had emptied into silence. The revelry of the theater crowd had long since ebbed away, leaving only the hiss of the gas lamps and the echo of their boots on damp stone. Their shadows stretched long in the flickering lamplight, wavering across shuttered shops and the darkened faces of houses. Neither man spoke. Joseph kept his broad shoulders hunched, his eyes fixed on the cobblestones as though each step cost him, while Nadir walked with measured strides, his thoughts caught in darker places.

     They crossed several blocks before at last turning into a quieter street where the lamps grew thin and the hush of the city deepened. The narrow stairwell that led to Nadir’s apartment rose before them, a climb that seemed steeper than it was after the night’s weight. Nadir mounted first, his boots clattering on the worn wood, while Joseph lumbered after him, panting faintly with exhaustion.

     Inside, the small apartment opened into warmth. Rosewater lingered faintly in the air, mingling with the sweet residue of pipe smoke. Lamps burned low, their amber glow catching on the patterned tapestries and the faint gleam of polished wood, throwing the rooms into a shadowy half-light. It was not opulent, but everything carried the mark of deliberate care—arrangements chosen by a man who valued both comfort and a certain secrecy.

     Joseph halted just inside the threshold, stiff as a pillar. He stood clutching his own ragged coat, his eyes moving uncertainly over the tapestries, the brass fittings of the lamps, the soft rug underfoot. It had been months since he had been indoors in a home that was not his own, and the strangeness of it left him unmoving, as though afraid he would spoil something by crossing further.

     “One moment,” Nadir said, shrugging off his own coat and boots with practiced movements. He crossed into his bedroom, his footsteps muffled by the rug. From within a carved chest, he drew out one of his night robes: dark silk patterned with winding arabesques, the only garment loose enough to fit Joseph’s heavy frame. He returned to the entryway where the big man still stood, silent and hesitant, and pressed the robe into his hands.

     “Wash. Change,” Nadir instructed, his tone brooking no argument.

     Joseph accepted the robe with both hands, staring at it as though it were a relic. He removed his boots slowly, awkwardly, then shuffled toward the small washroom at the back. The door closed with a quiet click.

     Alone, Nadir crossed to his desk and lowered himself heavily into the chair. He re-lit his pipe, pulling smoke deep into his lungs before exhaling in a long stream that curled upward into the lamplight. He spread the maps before him again: the sprawling plan of Paris, the catacombs and waterways inked in black lines like veins, the blueprints of the Opera house littered with Erik’s clumsy scrawl. He shifted the map of the city to the top, his pipe stem tapping on the cemeteries marked to the north.

     There were several: the Cimetière du Nord, sprawling and new; the smaller Cimetière de Saint-Vincent nestled beside it; the larger Cimetière des Batignolles further west; the old Cimetière du Calvaire clinging to the hill. Others dotted the district like islands of the dead, some no more than parish grounds. Each lay half an hour to an hour’s walk from the Opera. Each was a possibility.

     He took a long drag from the pipe, the smoke spilling from his nostrils as he laid the catacomb maps over the city plan, aligning one with the other. The lines blurred together—water channels beneath streets, tunnels beneath avenues, graveyards above them all. They all looked as if they could connect, but the paths were twisted, incomplete, many drawn decades apart. Nadir pinched the bridge of his nose, eyes burning, and let the smoke curl out slowly.

     Which one had Erik chosen? Which mouth of stone had opened to spit Joseph Martin back into the world, scarred and half-dead?

     The door creaked. Joseph reappeared, sheepish, draped in Nadir’s robe. The silk hung oddly on him, spilling open across his hairy chest, his beard still damp from water, his skin raw and red where he had scrubbed himself clean. Yet for all the strangeness, he looked steadier, no longer reeking of sweat and filth.

     “Come,” Nadir beckoned, tapping one finger against the map. “These cemeteries to the north. Do any look familiar? Here—” he slid his finger downward “—the Palais Garnier, our starting point.”

     Joseph stepped forward, bracing his broad hands on the edge of the desk. He squinted down at the papers, uncomprehending. “I don’t know what these papers mean,” he admitted after a long pause, shame roughening his voice. “I’m sorry. I only know where my feet take me.” His gaze dropped, voice softening. “But if we walked…I could find it again. My feet would remember the way.”

     Nadir’s lips pressed into a thin line as he tapped the map again. That would have to do.

     “Get some rest, Joseph,” he muttered, already lowering his eyes back to the sprawl of streets and tunnels. “In the morning, we will find the passage.”

     Joseph lingered another moment, staring at the maps as if they held some secret he might force himself to see. At last he mumbled something like thanks, turned, and padded into the living room. He stretched his heavy frame along the low couch, the robe pooling around him, and was still within moments.

     Nadir remained at his desk, pacing back and forth between the table and the lamp-lit wall, the smoke of his pipe trailing behind him. His mind circled the sealed gate on the Rue Scribe, the buried pathways beneath the Opera, the boy and the girl both vanished into the dark. His eyes returned to the map and a sudden thought seized him. He had never asked Joseph his daughter’s name. So intent on questions of geography, he had left untouched the heart of the man’s grief. The omission stung him.

     At last he extinguished the pipe, snuffed the lamp, and withdrew to his own bedroom. The apartment sank into darkness, broken only by the low rumble of Joseph’s snores drifting from the other room.

     Sleep, when it came, was restless. Nadir turned on his sheets as Erik’s shadow wound its way through his thoughts once more, as inescapable in dreams as in life.

     At dawn, Joseph roused him. He stood by Nadir’s door, already dressed once more in his threadbare clothes. The robe Nadir had lent him was folded neatly at the foot of the couch, as though he could not bear to claim anything that was not his. His face looked carved from stone, but his eyes betrayed him—bloodshot, hollow with exhaustion, yet fever-bright with fear and desperate resolve.

     “It’s time,” he said simply. His voice was raw, as though he had not slept at all.

     Nadir rose without question. He dressed quickly, pulling his boots tight, fastening the collar of his shirt. At last he shrugged into his long wool coat, the one he always wore when stepping into places best left alone. His satchel waited by the desk, quickly packed: maps and blueprints folded in careful order, the lantern he trusted most, fresh oil and matches, and his cane—part walking stick, part weapon, and, when needed, a lever for prying apart traps. He carried it not for elegance but survival.

     The morning outside was pale and unsettled. Mist lay heavy in the streets, wrapping the gas lamps in halos, turning every sound into something muffled and ghostly. Their footsteps echoed against wet cobblestones as they turned northward, Joseph trudging at his side. The big man walked as though pursued, his strides uneven, his hands flexing and curling as if memory still tightened the lasso at his throat. He muttered beneath his breath, words too broken to catch, though Nadir suspected they were prayers—half to God, half to the daughter he hunted for in every shadow.

     Their first destination was the farthest of the northern graveyards: the Cimetière des Batignolles. It was a long march through waking streets, past shuttered stalls and sleepy porters, past chimney smoke rising to join the fog. Nadir kept his silence, conserving his strength for the long day ahead, while Joseph’s breathing grew harsher the closer they drew.

     The graveyard itself lay quiet, a parish ground hemmed by old walls furred with moss and lichen. The gates groaned when Nadir pushed them, and inside, the stones leaned at angles as though tired of holding vigil over their charges. The air was sharp with the smell of wet leaves and rain-soaked earth. Somewhere a crow called, the sound echoing across the mist, and then silence folded in again.

     They searched. Joseph walked among the stones, scanning for some flicker of recognition. Nadir pressed gloved hands against mausoleums, tracing mortar lines, crouching to test the ground for hollows, listening for any faint breath of moving air. His cane tapped along seams of stone, probing for weakness. But nothing stirred, no draft whispered from below, no stone shifted to reveal hidden doors. Only crows and rustling leaves kept them company.

     Joseph’s agitation grew sharper the longer they searched. His movements became jerky, his eyes darting from stone to stone. “It isn’t here,” he burst out at last, his voice ragged. “It can’t be here. I’d recognize it—the graves, the street, something.” He pressed both hands to his head, pacing in a tight circle. “Unless—unless I dreamed it. Maybe I dreamed the passage. When I saw the light of morning, I thought—I thought it was heaven.”

     Nadir turned sharply, fixing him with a steady gaze. “You escaped through the graveyard passage,” he said, his tone firm, brooking no argument. His eyes flicked to the livid scar on Joseph’s throat. “It was no dream. Do not let fear trick you into forgetting the truth.”

     Fear. He knew well how Erik had used it—how it could weaken even the strongest of men. Another of his more potent weapons.

     They moved on.

     The second graveyard lay on the slope of Montmartre, the Cimetière de Saint-Vincent. The climb itself wore on Joseph, his broad chest heaving by the time they reached the gates. The place was smaller, pressed in by the rising hillside, the stones here closer together, the paths winding. Mist still clung to the earth, pooling in the hollows.

     Joseph hesitated at the entrance, his brow furrowed. “This…this seems more like it. The hill. The way it rose around me when I came out. But I can’t be sure.” His voice trembled with doubt.

     They searched more thoroughly this time. Nadir paced the length of the walls, testing for hollows, examining every crack in the mortar. He leaned into the iron doors of the mausoleums, listening for echoes. His fingers trailed along the cold stone, seeking drafts where none should exist. Joseph trailed behind, muttering feverishly under his breath, “She’s down there still. She’s waiting for me. I should never have left her. God forgive me…”

     At last his voice faltered, broke on a sob, and he sank heavily onto a low stone. His hands gripped his head as though trying to crush the memories out. His shoulders trembled under the weight of his guilt.

     Nadir crouched beside him, steadying his own breath before speaking. His tone was calm, precise, the same tone he had once used with trembling informants in Persia. “Do not think about what you should have done. Think of what you will do. We are not finished searching. Your daughter may yet be found. But only if you hold fast.”

     He extended his hand. After a long pause, Joseph took it, and Nadir hauled the heavy man upright. His grip lingered a moment, steady and grounding, before he let go. Together, they turned back to the narrow paths of the cemetery, their search unfinished, the day already stretching long ahead.

     By the time they reached the third graveyard, the sun was already slanting low, casting copper light that stretched long shadows between the tombs. The gates loomed before them, stone flanking wrought iron, and arched across the top was a blackened inscription: Cimetière du Nord. The letters stood stark against the fading sky. Nadir paused, the words curling off his tongue in a low murmur.

     “The Northern Cemetery.” His breath puffed in white clouds, and the faintest chuckle slipped from him. “How literal Paris can be.”

     Joseph’s head snapped toward him, his jaw tight, his eyes rimmed with red from exhaustion. “My daughter is missing—most likely dead—and I don’t even know if this is the place I escaped. If it isn’t, then she’s gone for certain. Don’t…” his voice cracked, trembling on the edge of grief, “…don’t make jokes right now.”

     The rebuke landed heavy. Nadir inclined his head, chastened, and let the silence grow between them as they passed through the gates.

     The graveyard stretched wide before them; a city of the dead. Rows of monuments stood in careful ranks, some toppled and eroded by weather, others newly polished and glaring white. Marble angels loomed above the paths, their sightless gazes fixed downward, offering neither blessing nor pity. Gravel crunched beneath their boots as the men pressed deeper into the necropolis. The air carried the damp, metallic scent of turned earth, mingled with the faint sweetness of rotting flowers left too long at gravesides. Overhead, crows wheeled against the twilight sky, their cries tearing the silence into ragged seams.

     Joseph slowed as they walked, his eyes darting from stone to stone, his shoulders drawn tight. His breath came faster, uneven. “This…” His voice dropped to a whisper, almost reverent. “…feels right.” His gaze traced the slope of the ground, the angle of the vaults. “The ground sloped like this. And the walls, the vaults…” His words faltered, suspended between memory and dread. He swallowed hard. “I think…yes, I think this is it.”

     Nadir said nothing at first. His own eyes never stilled, sweeping across every crypt, every shadow, searching for the hidden geometry of Erik’s designs. He felt the prickle at the base of his neck, the old instinct he knew too well: the awareness that traps might still sleep beneath the ground even here, lying in wait. If Joseph was right, if this was indeed the place, then beneath their feet lay the threshold to Erik’s labyrinth.

     He rested one hand on the head of his cane, drawing a long breath of the cold air. “Then we have found the northern graves,” he said softly.

     Mist gathered with the coming evening, curling thick around the stones. It clung to their coats, dampened their hair, muffled their steps as they pressed deeper into the Cimetière du Nord. Joseph walked close at Nadir’s side, his movements jerky, as though half of him wanted to run. His lips moved ceaselessly, muttering broken fragments of prayer or curses, too low to follow. Twice he veered suddenly, darting toward a line of vaults whose doors gaped like dark mouths.

     “This way!” he whispered hoarsely, thrusting out a hand.

     But each time, the promise dissolved into nothing: solid stones, sealed mortar, earth unbroken. Joseph’s face crumpled with each failure, despair hollowing his broad features. At one such vault, he staggered back a step, clutching at his scarred throat as though he still felt the rope tighten.

     Nadir laid a hand firmly on his shoulder. “Steady. We will find it.” His tone was calm, assured—but his eyes never ceased to flick from shadow to shadow. He knew Erik’s mind too well. If the entrance lay here, it would not lie open. It would be hidden like a secret, defended like a fortress.

     They moved on. The search dragged as dusk thickened to night. At one mausoleum Nadir crouched, striking a match and holding it low to the ground. The tiny flame trembled, bending in a faint draft. His heart gave a jolt, but when he traced the seam it led only to a shallow crack in the mortar, no more than the breath of damp air. He ground the match under his boot, the sulfur smoke sharp in the air.

     The repetition wore on Joseph. The man’s broad frame, once defiant, seemed to fold inward. He leaned against a headstone, rubbing both hands hard over his face, dragging them down through his beard as though he could claw away his own despair. His breath hitched, his muttering broke into incoherence.

     It was then that Nadir realized with a start: again, he had never caught the daughter’s name. She had remained a shadow, a figure of grief without a face. A pang of guilt struck him, sharp and sudden. He had been so consumed with the puzzle—the maps, the gates, the young man he had been hired to find—that he had treated the girl as nothing more than another name to add to Erik’s tally of victims.

     He drew a breath and said quietly, “Tell me about her. Your daughter.”

     Joseph’s head lifted sharply, eyes glistening in the lantern’s glow. “My daughter?”

     “Yes,” Nadir pressed, his voice softer. “I should have asked before. Forgive me. I let other matters drive the question from me. But you must tell me.”

     Joseph’s face twisted, torn between grief and fury. His jaw trembled as he forced the words out. “Her name is (Y/N). She’s…” His voice broke, then steadied again. “She’s strong. Stronger than I ever was. Smart. Brave. Too brave.” He pressed his fists against his eyes. “She wouldn’t have hesitated to come looking for me. I know it. That’s what damned her. She’d walk into hell itself if she thought it meant pulling me back.” His voice cracked again. “And now she might be trapped in one of those snares, choked on a rope in the dark, while I walk free.” He shook his head violently. “I should never have taken that job. Never.”

     Nadir’s hand settled once more on his shoulder. “We will find her. That is why we are here.” His voice was steady, but the words tasted heavy. How could a girl untrained, unprepared, survive Erik’s traps? Even the strongest men had failed to.

     Joseph rounded on him suddenly, his eyes burning. “How can you be so sure? How can you say you’re prepared? Do you think the traps are some…some puzzle? I saw them. I nearly died in them. They kill you before you know you’re dead. No man can be ready for that!”

     The accusation struck Nadir like a blow. He stiffened, silent. Words rose to his tongue—truths he could never speak aloud. That he had walked those passages countless times. That he had known the man who made them like a brother, and like an enemy. That Erik’s voice still lived in his memory, whispering every design, every deathtrap. That he had spent the last year trying to forget, only to be dragged back again. But how could he explain this to Joseph, who knew only terror and grief?

     So he said nothing.

     The silence stretched long, heavy as stone. Above them, the restless beat of wings broke the air as crows wheeled low, cawing harshly. From the south, faint and far away, the bells of Paris tolled the hour, the sound swallowed by the dusk. Joseph stared at Nadir, searching his face for an answer that never came. At last he shook his head, bitter. “God help us both, then.”

     Nadir lit the lantern with a practiced flick, the glow spilling across the stones. Shadows stretched long and wavering, bending like black limbs across the graves. He lifted the light and pressed on into the cemetery’s heart, the mist curling thick about them. Joseph trailed close, his boots dragging, his breath uneven.

     Together, they combed the graves in silence, deeper into the gathering dark, each step carrying them closer to whatever door Erik had hidden among the dead.

     The night deepened until the cemetery seemed swallowed by mist and shadow, a place unmoored from the city around it. Cold fog pooled low among the headstones, coiling like pale smoke at their feet, while their lantern burned small and weak against the vast dark. They pressed on, vault after vault, mausoleum after mausoleum, but every stone door gave only to dust, mold, and silence. The blind stares of marble angels followed them, pitiless, their white arms stretched upward as though appealing to a heaven that did not answer. The yawning mouths of the tombs, black and empty, gaped like mockeries of doors—taunting them with promises of a way through that never appeared.

     By the time the moon had climbed high above the cemetery, silver light gleaming against the mist, both men were worn thin. Joseph’s heavy frame sagged with every step, his face hollow, streaked with grime and grief, his lips trembling with prayers that faltered into silence. Nadir’s countenance remained as it always did—measured, unreadable—but behind the calm, unease gnawed at him. The longer they searched, the more the weight of failure pressed against his chest, whispering that perhaps the way had been sealed forever, that perhaps Erik’s cunning had buried itself beyond recall.

     At last, Nadir stopped. He lowered the lantern until its glow sank into the mist at their feet, and with a slow, measured sigh, said, “Enough. We will find nothing more tonight.”

     Joseph sagged heavily against the iron gate as they left, his big hands gripping the bars until his knuckles blanched. When he finally spoke, his voice cracked, ragged from despair. “It’s hopeless. She’s gone. (Y/N) is gone. I should have died in her place.” His words fell out in broken fragments, hanging heavy in the damp night air, as though he could no longer bear the weight of carrying them inside himself.

     Nadir said nothing. Not until they had left the cemetery behind and stepped into the empty street, where the lamps glowed dimly through halos of fog. There, he turned, laying a firm hand on Joseph’s broad shoulder. He fixed him with a hard stare, his dark eyes cutting through the haze. “You are alive,” he said. “While you are alive, you can still fight for her. That is why you escaped. So that you could find her now. Do not waste it.”

     Joseph closed his eyes, the words striking him with the sharpness of both comfort and condemnation. He muttered something hoarse beneath his breath—a prayer, a curse, or both—and trudged beside Nadir as they made their way through the hushed, sleeping city. The cobblestones were slick with mist, their footsteps echoing against shuttered shopfronts and bolted doors. The lamps flickered with wavering halos, and all Paris seemed emptied of life, holding only their grief as they carried it back to the Persian’s apartment.

     Inside, Nadir ushered Joseph to the couch and poured him a glass of water, but did not sit. His energy was sharp, restless, unwilling to concede the night to despair. Instead, he returned at once to his desk, spreading his maps and charts across the polished wood. He lit another lamp, filling the room with a heavy glow, and then another, and then tamped tobacco into his pipe with hands that trembled only slightly. Smoke coiled upward as he bent over the spread of papers, his sharp eyes darting between the maps of Paris, the detailed blueprints of the Opera House, and the darker, older diagrams of the catacombs and sewers that webbed beneath the city like veins.

     “There has to be an overlap,” he muttered to himself, voice low around the stem of the pipe. “Somewhere between the graves and the passages. Erik would not waste a cemetery—it would be too rich in irony for him to resist.”

     Joseph stirred from the couch, his voice thin and hollow. “Erik?” he asked, the unfamiliar name foreign on his tongue.

     Nadir did not answer him. He bent lower over the maps, eyes narrowing.

     Joseph’s gaze sank again, his shoulders hunching forward. “She’s dead,” he whispered, almost to himself. “Even if you found the passage, even if you went down, she’s surely been dead this whole time.” His words dissolved into the low air, more dirge than statement.

     Nadir ignored him, his thoughts turning inward, searching memory as though rifling through the shelves of some neglected library. He pushed deeper and deeper into the recesses of his past until—suddenly, vividly—it came.

     He was back in Persia. The air smelled of spice and incense, the walls white alabaster; cool beneath his fingers. He walked through the Shah’s palace with Erik at his side—a younger Erik, his eyes alight with feverish brilliance, his hands sketching cruel designs in the air as he spoke. He had been commanded to build torture chambers: rooms of ingenious devices, of mirrors and water and fire, machines that drew screams as effortlessly as a musician drew music from strings.

     “They will never expect it!” Erik’s voice rang in memory, deep and resonant, quick with excitement. “The door to this chamber will be through a burial crypt. What irony! The living must crawl through the coffin of the dead to meet their own deaths. To walk among the corpses and then suffer as corpses themselves. A perfect jest!”

     Nadir blinked hard, dragging himself back into the present. His hand clenched slowly against the edge of the map, the paper crumpling faintly under his grip. A burial crypt. A sarcophagus. That was the clue. That was the pattern.

     He glanced toward Joseph. The man sat slumped, his head buried in his hands, whispering his daughter’s name again and again as if he might conjure her back by sound alone. His despair soaked the room like a chill draft, but Nadir barely registered it. His mind was racing.

     Joseph had spoken of clawing his way upward, stumbling out into morning air among the dead. He had described the vaults of stone, the rows of graves, the suffocating air of the underground. He had emerged, and Erik’s memory had given the answer: through a coffin, through a crypt that was no crypt at all.

     Nadir leaned back slowly, exhaling smoke into the lamp-lit haze. The pieces fit too well to ignore. Erik had built his doors in irony, layering mockery into stone. He would not have left such a conceit unused. No—he would have delighted in it. To force men to crawl out from among the dead into the daylight above. To set his house of shadows behind the lid of a sarcophagus.

     Nadir’s jaw tightened as he bent again over the maps, scanning the shaded patch where the northern graveyards lay. Somewhere in those grounds, hidden beneath a tomb, waited the door they sought.

     Behind him, Joseph’s voice broke again into hoarse whispers, “(Y/N)…forgive me…forgive me…”

     Nadir did not turn. He tamped the last ash from his pipe and extinguished the lamp over the maps, leaving only the single flame burning by the window. Tomorrow, they would return to the graves. This time, he knew what to look for.

     As he withdrew to his room, the thought lingered, cold and unyielding: if Erik had indeed hidden his passage in a tomb, then every step forward would be one taken through the realm of death itself.

Chapter Text

     That evening, (Y/N) set two steaming bowls of chicken stew on the table—one for herself, one for Erik. The scent of rich broth and herbs drifted through the room, gentling the chill that threatened to seep in from the underground corridors. She sat first. In the doorway, Erik hovered—tall, silent—caught between darkness and light, his presence at once oppressive and strangely fragile, as if he might shatter if she looked too hard.

     She lifted her eyes to the mask’s pale gleam and spoke softly.

     “Sit.”

     He obeyed as if her word had tied a cord to his spine. The chair scraped the floorboards—too loud in the hush—and he lowered himself opposite her. He did not reach for his food. His hands simply bracketed the bowl, long scarred fingers splayed against the linen tablecloth, motionless. He only watched.

     Her spoon rose and fell in a measured pattern: lift, sip, swallow. Beneath his gaze, each motion she made felt awkward, exposed. Halfway through, she faltered; letting the broth cool on her tongue.  She set the spoon down with a faint clink that pierced the quiet and forced herself to meet the shadowed hollows of his stare.

     “Why won’t you eat?” she asked. Curiosity, nothing more—but in the aftermath of their emotional storm, the question sounded sharper than she had meant it.

     Candlelight skated across porcelain; his eyes remained buried in shadow. The seconds stretched, heavy as stone. At last he moved—one hand slid forward, fingertips ghosting the rim of the bowl as if testing its reality. His head bent a fraction.

     “Some things,” he murmured, “are better done in solitude.”

     The words drifted like smoke, fragile and a little ashamed. His hand withdrew, folding into his lap.

     She raised an eyebrow, a question poised on her tongue, but decided against asking it. Instead, she finished her meal in careful mouthfuls; each one soured under the weight his yellow stare. When her bowl was empty, she rose, murmured an excuse, and carried it to the washbasin to rinse it quickly.

     “I’m going to bed.” she said, her voice carrying across the quiet.

     He did not answer. He did not move. He sat sentinel at the table, mask turned toward her, eyes catching the candlelight and reflecting it. She felt that gaze follow as she dried the bowl, set it aside, and ventured down the corridor to her room, fully exhausted.

     At her door, she placed her hand on the brass knob…and paused. From the darkened room behind her came a sound—faint, hesitant, unmistakable.

     The soft clink of a spoon against a bowl.

     The next morning, she found him hunched over the piano, lean body bent close to the keys as though he meant to wrestle the music into submission. His sleeves were rolled high, pale forearms taut with strain, tendons rising sharp beneath his thin skin. His feet braced hard against the damper pedal to suspend a rumbling chord that shuddered through the cavern like distant thunder. The sound rattled against her ribs—dark, oppressive, unyielding. And there, beneath the storm, she saw the telltale seep of blood staining the bandages at his feet.

     She sighed, retrieved the basin from the washroom, and set it down with quiet finality next to the fire; voice low.

     “Sit.”

     The command slid into the space between them, soft but firm. He stilled, and then obeyed, though reluctance stiffened each movement. He rose from the bench with the gait of a man unwilling to betray weakness, dragging himself toward the newly repaired armchair.

     She knelt before him as he sat, her hands steady as she unwound the soiled wrappings. The smell of iron and old salve mingled with the hearth’s smoke, sharp and acrid. His body jerked when the warm cloth touched the raw, exposed flesh, calves twitching as if to flee. Toes curled against the floor, straining to escape her ministrations, but he forced them still, locking his knees in rigid defiance.

     His throat caught on a hiss – brief, muffled, but undeniable. She worked carefully, washing the angry, weeping wounds and applying salve in slow, even strokes. The tremor in his hands betrayed him—knuckles white, fingers gripping the chair’s arms as though it were the only thing keeping him rooted.

     “Almost done,” she murmured—automatic, the habit of one tending hurt. She knew he probably despised such reassurances, but the words slipped free all the same. His silence was taut, strung like a violin string coiled too tight; ready to snap. Yet, he endured.

     At last she wound fresh linens around his battered feet, smoothing the cloth flat with the careful pressure of her palms. For a heartbeat, he looked at her—mask tilted, yellow eyes catching the light. There was no anger in them, no resentment, only a startled wideness with something perilously close to gratitude flickering in their depths.

     And then it was gone. He pulled quickly from her reach, limped back to the bench, and within moments his fingers were flying across the keys once more, scattering notes like shards of glass.

     By the second evening, the house bore the marks of their uneasy truce. Splintered wood and debris no longer lay thick across the floors, though shadows still pressed close from the corners. Together, they had wrestled the furniture back into place, their movements awkward—he reluctant to follow her direction, she wary of brushing too near. Pieces broken beyond repair were dragged to the lake and cast into the black water, each ruin swallowed in hollow splash and ripple. The chime of shattered glass, the rasp of broom bristles across stone, and the soft whispering of scattered music gathered into piles all wove themselves into a strange new chorus.

     When at last they raised the splintered remains of the final smashed chair, his sleeve caught and tore. The sharp rip startled him more than the cut beneath, and he flinched as though struck. She reached for him without hesitation, handing him another shirt and tugging gently at the torn garment in his hand even as his long fingers curled back in resistance. For a moment he held on, knuckles rigid—but then he yielded, letting her draw the ruined shirt from him.

     She sat cross-legged before the fire, where shadow and flame wove restless patterns across the Persian carpet. A needle glinted between her fingers as she bent over her work, the shirt spread across her knees, its torn cloth yawning like a wound. Her hand moved in steady rhythm—darting in, sliding out—drawing the frayed edges together until the fabric obeyed, each stitch small and precise.

     He sat across from her, folded into the couch with rigid stillness. The firelight played across the mask, softening and hardening its curve with every flicker of hungry flame. As always, it was his gaze she felt most keenly. He watched the rise and fall of the needle as though it were a performance staged for him alone—each stitch a note, each seam a refrain in some private symphony.

     The weight of it pressed against her shoulders. Her skin prickled; her breath caught between heartbeats. She glanced up, once, twice—only to find his eyes waiting, unwavering, fixed on her like a starving man before a feast he dared not touch. He was motionless, carved in shadow, yet the intensity radiating from him left her chest tight.

     When at last she tied the final knot and smoothed the seam flat beneath her thumb, the cloth whole again, a sound escaped him. A long, shuddering breath, dragged from somewhere deep. It trembled in the quiet like a confession unspoken—an admission that the sight of the mended cloth had reached further into him than he had ever meant to show.

     The next evening, it was he who prepared the meal. The scent reached her first—rich herbs and caramelized sugar with the sharp tang of wine cutting through the heaviness of damp stone and fireplace smoke. When she entered the dining room, she found the table transformed, laid out as though for a celebration. A roasted fowl gleamed at its center, its skin golden in the candlelight. Bowls of jewel-toned fruit shimmered under their glaze, silverware caught the firelight in ruthless polish. Nothing was plain. Every dish bore the proof of his meticulous hands, excess crafted into a kind of devotion; unsettling in its care.

     She sat, and she ate, though unease coiled in her chest, warning that this meal could end like the last he had set before her. Each bite sank heavy, the richness cloying, the sweetness setting heavy in her stomach. The perfume of the wine thickened the air until it seemed she was drinking it with every breath, each inhalation another swallow she could not refuse.

     Across from her, he reclined in his chair with studied posture—legs angled, one long arm draped along the rest as if at ease. But his tension betrayed him. His shoulders sat too high, his chest too tight, as though his body strained against its own guise. He watched each movement of her fork, each pause between swallows, studying her as if every gesture were an answer to a question he had not asked aloud.

     His scarred fingers tapped a rhythm against the tablecloth, not steady enough for patience, not wild enough for abandon. (Y/N) wondered if it was nerves, or if he was keeping time with some melody only he could hear.

     The silence stretched until it seemed deliberate, its weight pressing against her chest. Then his voice cut through—smooth, deliberate, each word balanced on precision.

     “You will sing for me.”

     Her hand froze halfway to her mouth. The fork trembled; a slice of fruit slipped free, falling to stain the cloth.

     “…Sing?”

     “Yes.” His tone left no room for refusal, yet it softened at the edges, coaxing, almost tender. “You do have a voice, do you not? Let us teach it to soar.”

     He leaned forward, and the lamplight carved his mask into something at once regal and terrible. His eyes burned, unwavering. “I will show you how to breathe properly. How to draw sound from the very core of your being. How to shape it until it blooms into something greater than yourself.”

     The restless tapping of his fingers stilled. They curled inward slowly, as though cradling a rare butterfly, too delicate to release. His voice dropped lower, reverent. “With time…with me…it will be radiant.”

     The words hung between them, thick and inescapable. They were not an invitation. They were a decree. A gift wrapped in chains. (Y/N)’s chest tightened. She saw already what he did not say: that every lesson would bind her tighter, every breath would be measured against his, every note trained to obedience. Beauty, too, could be a cage—and she was already in one.

     She lowered her gaze, her fork sinking back to the jeweled fruit. The food glittered too richly to stomach. She swallowed hard, and silence stretched, taut as a wire. Words crowded her tongue, but none were safe. Refusal was useless. Acceptance was surrender. So, she let her silence answer.

     Across the table, Erik tilted his head. A small motion, precise, like the adjustment of a rosined bow on strings. Behind the mask, his eyes gleamed in the lamplight—unreadable, yet burning. Triumph, perhaps. Or longing.

     Or both.

     That evening was the first time he played for her. The notes struck the piano with the violence of a blow, reverberating through stone and darkness until the chamber itself seemed to quake. They came in torrents—violent, jagged, a storm of sound that battered the air like thunder breaking against a cliff. Each chord clashed like steel on steel, anger and anguish made audible, flayed raw.

     But slowly—so slowly, it was like watching storm clouds peel back to reveal a fragile seam of sky—the fury unraveled. The violence dissolved thread by thread, transmuting into something stripped bare, aching. The melody thinned, fragile in its persistence, trembling with longing, a cry stretched tight across the darkened room. Each phrase lingered, reaching, pleading, desperate for something just beyond its grasp. And in that yearning, she heard the truth: it was reaching for…her.

     She sat on the sofa, hands clasped white in her lap, eyes fixed on the black scenery outside the window. Beyond the stone shore, the lake lay in shadow, vast and fathomless, its surface touched only by the faint shimmer of reflected flame. Ripples stirred like the slow rise and fall of a sleeper’s breath. She anchored herself in that darkness, willing her body still, as though rigid immobility might keep the music from sinking deeper into her chest.

     And yet—against her better judgment—she turned. Just once. A glance over her shoulder, quick as a heartbeat.

     He was watching her.

     Even as his hands tore across the keys with ruthless precision, his head had shifted, the mask angled toward her. Lamplight carved its curve into something regal, terrible. His body played, but his eyes—his entire being—was fixed on her. That intensity struck sharper than the music itself. This was no performance. It was an offering, a demand, a plea. And, he was waiting for her answer.

     At her glance, the music swelled as though her eyes had poured fuel into its fire. The melody blossomed with terrible force, chords unfurling like wings, filling every shadowed corner. It became perilously close to a love song—dangerous in its tenderness, in its insistence. Each note struck her, a vow unspoken, pressed into sound: binding, suffocating, impossible to refuse.

     She could not deny the beauty of it; it pierced her to her soul, awakened something fragile in her she could not name. And yet, it terrified her. Each chord was a link in a chain forged between them; a bond she had not chosen.

     She tore her gaze away, fixing it again on the lake’s dark face. The shimmering waves blurred before her eyes, though no tears spilled. Behind her, the song swelled and broke and rose again, relentless as the black tide outside.

     No one else in the world could conjure such feeling from an instrument. That truth carved itself into her bones with a clarity that was nearly holy.

     The next morning began at Erik’s insistence. He had risen early, his restless energy already humming through the house like the faint vibration of his organ when he played too violently. Breakfast passed in uneasy silence—she ate warily beneath his watchful gaze, while he lingered at the edge of the table, hovering as though unwilling to sit.

     When she finished eating, she sensed the shift in him. It flickered in the twitch of his hands, in the fever-bright yellow gleam of his eyes. The very air seemed charged, alive with static, as if a storm had gathered in the stone-walled chambers.

     When at last the dishes were cleared, he declared her lessons would begin; his voice trembling with an eagerness bordering on mania.

     “Now!” he said, eyes burning as he beckoned her to the drawing room. The piano loomed like an altar, the chair he had set for her placed in the shadow of his reverence and command. His hands shook as he shuffled the sheets of music, though he tried to bury the tremor in the rustle of paper.

     “Breathe.” he ordered sharply, before she had even seated herself. His hand struck against her ribs, quick and corrective, and then pressed more firmly against her sides, insistent. “No. Stand. Not like that—expand here! Do you think one can sing on half-spent air? Again!”

     The suddenness startled her. Her lungs stuttered, her body recoiled beneath his touch, but she forced herself to obey. When she faltered, his voice cracked like a whip: “Pathetic! Do you mean to strangle your own song before it can be born? Again!”

     Her temper flared. The urge to walk out surged hot and fast—she wanted to snap that she was no pupil, no disciple bound to his will. Opening her mouth to reprimand him, she met his gaze. The ferocity had fractured, and in its place flickered something desperate, frantic. Behind the mask, his eyes pierced her with a desperation so raw it unnerved (Y/N), as though her resistance had torn away the only happiness he possessed. That despair silenced her rebellion. She could not risk it. She drew another breath and tried again.

     The change was immediate. His tone softened, coaxing now, almost tender. “Yes…better. Again. Fill the ribs, steady the flow. That is it…” He stepped closer, his long hands settling firmly against her back, guiding the expansion of her lungs. She felt the warmth of his breath near her ear as he demonstrated the rhythm, his chest rising and falling with exaggerated control. The shiver that raced her spine was involuntary. He caught it.

     The lesson wore on. He drilled her without mercy—scales, intervals, runs of notes that tangled her tongue and caught in her throat. Each misstep drew sharpness, his temper flashing bright. When she missed a pitch, his fist came down hard on the piano’s edge, the crack resounding like a gunshot. She flinched, pulse spiking, her throat seizing shut.

     Yet just as swiftly, his fury ebbed. His voice bent low, imploring. “No, no…forgive me. Again. You can do it. You must do it—for me.” His eyes searched hers, gleaming fragile as glass. His zealous need for whatever this was pressed against her, heavy and insistent.

     She tried again. When her voice carried true, the praise that spilled from him was radiant, almost childlike. He clapped his hands once above the keys in delight, pride shining in him like a flame. “Yes! Better. Do you hear it? Do you feel it?” The triumph in his voice cut sharp, leaving her breathless.

     The rest of the lesson blurred into a rhythm she came to know well: harshness, then coaxing; rage, then fragile joy. He veered in his instruction as wildly as his music. Every note mirrored his erratic teaching, raw and unfiltered, his genius and torment and excitement pouring into something too immense for the chamber – or for (Y/N) - to contain.

     By the time he dismissed her, her throat was raw, her body taut with strain. She longed for silence, for solitude. His eyes glowed behind the mask, alight with triumph, as though her exhaustion had been the price of proof. He approached her from around the piano, breathing hard.

     “Yes!” he exclaimed, breathless with fervor. “Yes—thank you. This…this is a gift beyond measure.” His eyes burned through the mask, fixing her as though she were the only soul in the world. “Music demands perfection—and I will shape you into it. You will be perfect.”

     She gave no answer, only let her gaze fall to the floor. His words tangled in her mind, impossible to parse—half praise, or perhaps half threat - and wholly unsettling.

     The evening closed heavy. (Y/N)’s throat still ached from the morning’s lessons—raw from scales, from his sharp corrections that had driven her anger to nearly breaking through. Erik’s energy did not wane. He sat hunched over the piano, mask gleaming in the firelight, his long fingers coaxing a dancing melody from the keys.

     This piece unfurled fast and full of hopeful yearning; tender as a confession half-dared. Each phrase was drawn from his breath itself, threads of longing spun into melody—reaching, always reaching.

     She sat by the hearth, bent over another torn hem, needle clasped between stiff fingers. She told herself not to listen, not to let the music slip into her. But it pressed against her regardless, insistent as the tide, each chord pulling a feeling out of her she did not mean to give.

     When the final note trembled into silence, she raised her head, with a sudden request bright in her mind.

     “If you wish to teach me to sing,” she said, her voice low, but steady, “then I want something in return.”

     He stilled, his hands hovering above the keys.

     “No.” The refusal came firm, but casual. “Music is not bartered. It is not something to use for your gain. It is beauty—pure, untouchable. It is for love, for joy. To twist it into gain is to corrupt it.” His fingers flexed above the keys, wings poised for flight yet refusing to take it. “I will not.”

     Her hand clenched around the fabric in her lap, but she forced herself to soften. “Not gain.” she pressed, softer now. “If you would teach me music, then also teach me words. I want to learn to read.”

     Silence stretched, heavy as stone. She braced for rage, for a stiff correction, for a scoff. Instead, he moved suddenly, rising from the bench with a sweep of his coat. His steps were abrupt, almost frantic.

     He crossed to the shelves near his piano, his shadow looming over the spines. His hand cut sharply through the air, beckoning. “Come.”

     She hesitated. Weariness dragged at her limbs, her throat burning with fatigue, but the command drew her forward. She set aside her mending, rose, and crossed to him. His gaze tracked her every step.

     At the shelves, his long hand swept reverently across the books. “Choose.”

     Her chest twisted. These volumes were locked boxes, treasures sealed by symbols she did not know. Her hand lifted, faltered, then fell. “How am I supposed to choose,” she asked, frustration creeping into her voice, “if I don’t even know what they are about?”

     A pause. When his reply came, it was soft and threaded with strange conviction.

     “Choose the one that speaks to you. A book is more than simply words. Feel it—the weight, the binding, the scent of its paper, the design of its cover. The right one always calls to you.”

     She blinked, startled by the fervor of his tone. A laugh escaped her, thin and uneasy. “You make it sound like something mystical.”

     “Sometimes it is.” he murmured, firelight carving hollows into the mask. His eyes glinted gold as they fixed on her.

     Her hand rose again, slower, brushing along the well-worn spines. One by one she pulled them free, weighed them in her palms, only to return them after a moment of consideration. And then—blue cloth, bright as a jewel, shining faintly in the light. Ivy curled in gold leaf along its edges, letters gleaming like fire. She drew it out, struck by the strange glow it seemed to cast against her skin.

     “Oh! This one.” she said, almost to herself.

     Erik stilled. Something dangerous flickered in his eyes. He knew this book—the fevered pages, the blurred line between art and obscenity. Passion, longing, naked bodies twined without shame. Not meant for innocent hands. His lips parted in protest.

     But then he saw how carefully she cradled it, how her fingers lingered on the gilt ivy as though she already felt its pulse. Reckless hope stirred in him: that she had not chosen it by chance, but because some hidden part of her longed for what it held.

     “If that is the one you want,” he said at last, voice steady though his pulse thundered, “then that is the one we will read.”

     She turned, half-smiling, uneasy but warmed by his validation of her choice. She pressed the book to her chest, unaware of the fire she had kindled.

     With ceremonial care, he took it from her hands and carried it to the couch. “Sit.” he said, low and commanding. She obeyed, curling into the cushions, a blanket wrapped tight around her shoulders. Her body sagged with exhaustion, but she sat close, ready to learn. He seemed galvanized, every motion taut with eagerness.

     The gilt ivy shimmered as he opened the book across his knees. “We begin with the letters.” he intoned, tapping the first page. “Each one has a sound. Each sound builds into words. Once you know their shapes - their voices - there will be no barrier between you and the page.” His tone sharpened, and she wondered if he spoke of a certain kind of freedom – or possession.

     He guided her through the alphabet with clipped precision. “A. Ah. B. Buh. C. Cuh.” Her voice faltered as she repeated after him, uncertain, but when she stumbled he corrected patiently. And when she succeeded—his praise startled her in its gentleness.

     “Good, very good.” he murmured. “Again.”

     Minutes stretched, exhaustion dragging at her as his fervor pressed on.

     “Now,” he said, low, “we sound it out. One word at a time.”

     Her gaze swam over the tangle of letters. He broke them down and encouraged her to repeat until the syllables fit together. At last, halting and raw, a word took form on her tongue.

     Her eyelids drooped, her body heavy. Yet still she pressed on until the first line had been read haltingly in her voice.

     “Again tomorrow.” Erik said at last eyeing her exhaustion and closing the book with care. His eyes shone as though she had wrought a miracle.

     She nodded faintly, too weary to resist. Wrapped in the blanket, eyes slipping shut, she let the sounds linger—the rustle of pages, the scent of ink and dust, the uneven rhythm of his breath behind the mask.

     The first gift appeared with the morning. When she woke, she found a rose set neatly on her nightstand, its thorns trimmed, its petals opening wide as though it had bloomed in defiance of the darkness that filled these chambers. She lay still for a long moment, staring at it. The gesture should have been sweet, even tender—but dread crept through her, knowing it had been placed there while she slept, violating the sanctity of her privacy.

     That unease carried her into the day. In the drawing room she found him at the piano, hands moving absently over the keys, sounding out fragments of thought rather than song. The rose still pressed on her mind, and she held the question longer than she meant to before letting it slip out.

     “Why did you leave it?” she asked, careful to keep her anger controlled. “The flower on my table. While I was sleeping?”

     He did not look at her immediately. His masked profile remained bent toward the keyboard, but his voice came soft, almost dismissive. “It is customary for a singer to receive flowers after a performance.”

     She gave a small, disbelieving laugh, shaking her head. “A performance? That was no performance. That was a very rough first lesson.”

     His hands stilled on the keys. The silence stretched, brittle as glass. He did not answer. For a moment she thought he might rise, or lash out, or attempt to defend himself. Instead, he remained perfectly still, the hollows of the mask turned away from her, as though retreat itself were answer enough.

     So the days unfolded, carrying her into a rhythm that became familiar: breakfast in uneasy quiet, followed by hours of relentless instruction. One morning’s lesson pressed her to the brink of refusal—his sharp words cut, his hand slashed the air in furious correction each time her pitch faltered. She wanted to stop, to snap at him, but the instant she drew back, his fury shattered into something worse: desolate despair, as if her refusal would tear open the only hope he clung to.

     That look frightened her more than his anger. So she tried again, forcing her voice into the shape he demanded. When she succeeded—if only for a fleeting note—his whole frame lit with fragile delight.

     When at last he turned from drills to the piano, the air in the chamber shifted. Candle flames bent low as Erik struck the first chord, a sound so resonant it seemed to vibrate through stone and bone alike. His golden eyes fixed on her, burning with such intensity that her throat tightened before she had sung a single note.

     “Here,” he murmured, his hand lifting to mark her entry in the score. “Sing with me.”

     She hesitated, lips parted, no sound emerging. But his gaze was command enough, pulling her forward. She drew a tentative breath and let her voice rise. Thin, wavering, fragile. A thread of sound barely strong enough to reach the air.

     Then his voice entered.

     It poured over hers like molten metal—dark, commanding, resonant enough to fill every hollow of the chamber. Where her note wavered, his steadied it; where she faltered, he caught it and carried her. Their two voices entwined together, his strength enfolding her frailty until she felt her voice grow surer, her breath steadier.

     Her chest ached, not with strain but with the startling fullness of it. For the first time, the music swelled within her, not as a demand or command, but as something shared. His voice did not silence hers, it lifted it, held it, cradled it. She felt wrapped in sound, almost as though his arms had closed around her body, steadying, holding, binding. The power of it made her shiver. For a fleeting moment, she felt not trapped, but embraced.

     Erik’s face had transformed. His mask gleamed in the lamplight, severe and unyielding, but behind it his eyes glowed like molten gold, radiant in this shared glory. He sang not simply as a partner, but as something like a god reaching to envelop her in his divinity.

     When the final chord lingered into silence, she could hardly breathe. The echo of it reverberated inside her ribs, warm and terrible, as though the music had carved its claim into her very bones.

     Her hands rose to her chest, trembling. Erik lowered his hands from the keys with exquisite slowness, his gaze locked to hers. His voice, when it came, was ragged, reverent, edged with something close to awe.

     “Yes.” he whispered. “Do you feel it? This is what it means to be one in music. To breathe together. To be bound together in infinity. Nothing else matters. Nothing.”

     She lowered her gaze, flushed, heart hammering, ashamed of the warmth curling in her chest. He, meanwhile, stood silent, almost stricken, as if something irrevocable had just been sealed. To him, the duet was no mere lesson. It was consummation: her voice joining his, her breath carried within his own, a union more binding than touch.

     Her throat worked around a dry swallow.

     By the time he released her for their midday meal, she was lost in the snarl of her own thoughts—confusion knotting tight around the strange bloom of attraction she could neither welcome nor deny. They ate together, though not together: she at the table, fork dipping and rising in quiet rhythm; he opposite, silent, watchful. His gaze followed every small motion—the scrape of metal against the bowl, the measured chew, the swallow—as though even these most ordinary gestures were music enough to anchor him.

     When at last she set her fork down, he leaned slightly forward, gloved fingers folded together upon the table. The mask gleamed in the muted light, its hollows unblinking.

     “I have been working on another gift…I admit.” he said, his voice low, deliberate. “This time, I’m not leaving it in your room to find.”

     From his coat pocket, he drew out a small wooden box. He placed it carefully before her, sliding it across the polished wood until it rested by her plate. The box was of rich mahogany, its surface smooth as silk beneath the light. But it was the detail that arrested her—the top and sides covered in impossibly delicate patterns, geometric stars and tessellated shapes, all inlaid with ivory, ebony, and brass. Each piece was so fine, so precise, it was difficult to imagine human hands had set them in place at all.

     She drew a quiet breath, fingertips grazing the lid. In the firelight the patterns seemed to shift and multiply, unfolding endlessly the longer she gazed. The box held not only wood and inlay, but the weight of countless hours—patience and precision pressed into every line.

     “Khatamkari,” Erik said, and there was a faint edge of pride in his voice. “It is a style from Persia. I studied it for years, when I had the time and the solitude to devote myself to the craft. Every inlay is a mosaic, built from fragments smaller than a fingernail. Precision, patience, control—there is nothing quite like it.”

     She looked up at him, startled by the sudden intensity with which he spoke, the rare warmth that crept into his tone. But just as quickly, his voice cooled again, guarded as he added, “It is only a box. A small token. You may use it for your keepsakes—whatever little things you hold dear.”

     Her hands lingered on the lid, unsettled. The box was beautiful, exquisite beyond anything she had ever owned. And yet its perfection, coupled with his unyielding gaze, made her stomach tighten. It was not merely a token—it was his presence, his skill, his obsession carved into something she could not refuse without wounding him.

     She murmured her thanks, though the words felt thin. The weight of the gift seemed heavier than the wood itself, as though it carried a meaning she dared not name aloud.

     Afterward, Erik produced the book once more. Her limbs ached with weariness, her throat still raw from song, yet his quiet insistence allowed no refusal. He was gentle then—almost tender—and the softness unsettled her more deeply than his rage ever had.

     He sat beside her on the couch, close enough that the wool blanket pooled across her lap touched the folds of his coat. The gilt-edged volume balanced between them, its blue cloth cover glowing faintly in the lamplight. His voice, low and deliberate, guided her through the lines—not cutting, but coaxing. He let her falter, backtrack, even laugh at herself when her tongue tangled over the syllables.

     “Again,” he would murmur, but the word came without barbs. It sounded almost like an offering, a hand extended. His finger traced the lines, and when her hand faltered beside his, he let their fingertips brush as they moved together across the page. The touch seared her, sharper than it had any right to. She told herself it was nothing. But the scent of him—rosewater, dust and paper, something sharper beneath—curled around her, mingling with the warmth of the fire. She was aware of his gaze, fixed not on the book, but on her mouth as she shaped each sound. The heat of it burned.

     When she stumbled over a line of dialogue between the lovers, she heard the faintest chuckle and whisper under his breath—a low string of syllables in a tongue she did not know. She turned.

     “What did you say?”

     He stilled, his whole body tightening, as though she had caught him mid-crime. For a moment she thought he would deny her an answer. But then his shoulders dropped, and his gaze slid from her face to the far wall, shadowed and distant.

     “Persian,” he said quietly. “My tongue betrays me when I am…unthinking.”

     She repeated the word softly, the syllables strange on her lips. “Persian. You know Persian?”

     His hand tightened on the book’s edge, the mask lowering. “I do. I lived there. For years.”

     Her curiosity, unguarded, flared. “What was it like?”

     The silence stretched. He shifted restlessly, the weight of memory visible in his shoulders. At last, in a voice low and deliberate, he began: “It was not happiness. I have never known such a thing. But it was…useful. Stable. My hands, my mind—they had purpose. The Shah’s court was cruel, but orderly. They saw me as a tool, and I was content to be sharpened.”

     “Shah?” she asked.

     “A Shah,” he said, his voice low and deliberate, “is what the Persians call their king. Not merely a ruler, but a sovereign whose power is both earthly and divine, the shadow of God upon the earth. For centuries, the title carried weight enough to command empires—men bowed not only to the man, but to the idea. A Shah was patron of poets and architects, keeper of armies, master of cities glittering like jewels in the desert. To speak the word is to conjure a world where a single command could raise a palace…or raze one to dust.”

     The words carried his usual dramatic flair, but were stripped of feeling. Beneath them, she sensed tremor, shadow.

      “Oh.” She paused, letting his words sink in. “What was it like outside of…the court?”

     Something eased in him, just slightly. His head tilted back, gaze lifting to the ceiling where firelight flickered across the cavern rock. His voice changed, softened, the edge dissolving into something almost reverent.

     “The sky,” he said. “You cannot imagine it. Vast. Endless. Clearer than crystal, sharper than glass. At night the stars burned so bright they blinded. Constellations wheeling overhead like choirs of fire, unbroken by cloud or smoke. The desert swallows all else—the noise, the stench, the breath of men—but the sky remains…pure. I would look up and think…perhaps…perhaps there is something beyond all this.”

     She watched him, transfixed. His voice was bare, fragile in its wonder, a thread of awe unspooling past the ruin of him. For an instant, she glimpsed not her captor, but a man who had once gazed at an infinite horizon and felt the pull of peace. Her chest tightened, not knowing if it was pity—or something more dangerous.

     When his gaze fell back to her, the moment dissolved. He tapped the page, brusque again. “Read.”

     But…his voice still carried the echo of that desert sky.

     The book grew heavier in her lap as they pressed on. She stumbled less, the words smoothing into sense, and then into heat. The lovers on the page quarreled, reconciled, and at last—her eyes darted forward—they leaned together in an ardent kiss, their mouths meeting, vows whispered in breathless haste.

     Her voice faltered. The scandal of the passage set her cheeks burning, but Erik’s tone was soft, coaxing. “Go on.”

     She forced herself forward, each halting sentence hotter than the last. She was acutely aware of the closeness between them—his shoulder brushing hers, the faint rasp of his breath beneath the mask. Her tongue stumbled over words of mouths pressing, hands clutching, sighs swallowed in passion until she faltered. He resumed the passage where she trailed off.

     “’For one suspended moment he lingered, as though fearful the spell would break. Then, with sudden fervor, his lips found hers. The kiss was no chaste token but an outpouring of the heart, ardent and ungovernable. It was the cry of the soul made flesh, a communion of grief and rapture, sorrow and desire. She clung to him as though the world itself might vanish, and he held her with all the passion of a man who had discovered paradise and feared it might dissolve at dawn.’” He paused to turn the page, and then continued.

     “‘In that embrace time seemed to falter; every breath was eternity, every heartbeat thunder. The earth fell away, the heavens stood still, and there was only the burning seal of their lips, consecrating them in a vow neither had spoken but both understood.’”

     When his voice faded at the passage’s end, she realized she had leaned closer, shoulder brushing his as she peered at the scandalous page. Heat rushed into her face, but when she turned, pulse quickening, he was already watching her. His mask hovered near enough that the firelight gilded the porcelain’s curve and struck sparks of gold in his eyes. For a breathless instant, something unguarded flickered there—raw, perilous.

     The air seemed to thicken. The crackle of the fire, the faint stir of pages in the draft—these fell away until there was only the insistent hammer of her own pulse.

     “You read beautifully,” she managed at last, her voice scarcely more than a whisper.

     His reply came softer than she had ever heard it, reverent, frayed at the edges. “You are learning so well. So quickly—under my guidance.”

     The praise should have been ordinary. But now, after those words, after the lovers’ embrace still echoing in their minds, it carried a weight that unsettled her, pierced her.

     Her gaze dropped, unbidden, to the veil of black cloth over his mouth. The thought came swift, sharp, dangerous: what it would feel like to lean that last inch, to press her lips to his. Heat swept through her, and she snapped her gaze back to his eyes—only to find them fixed on her face, intent, unblinking, as though he had seen the thought flicker through her.

     For one heartbeat, the world stilled. She felt the pull of it, the edge of something vast, a chasm she might tumble into with only the smallest step.

     She almost moved. Almost.

     Then she tore her eyes away, forcing a laugh that snagged in her throat. “I should go to bed.” she said quickly, rising too fast, nearly tangling in the blanket. The book slipped from her lap with a soft thud. She smoothed her skirts with shaking hands, hating that he could see them tremble.

     Erik inclined his head, his voice still gentle. “Yes. Rest, then. You have done well, as always.”

     She did not answer. She only hurried down the hall, shutting her chamber door with more force than intended. Leaning back against it, she released the breath she had been holding, her chest shuddering. The echo of his eyes, his voice, the almost-kiss still burned in her, too close, too dangerous.

Chapter Text

     The panic came as soon as (Y/N) sank against the Louis-Philippe room door—fierce, sudden, choking. Her heart hammered as though she had fled the gallows. What had she done? What had she thought? The memory of his eyes—burning, fragile, intent—clawed at her chest until she wanted to tear her heart out. For one dreadful, impossible instant she had wanted… God help her, she had wanted.

     Her hands flew to her face, desperate to blot out the thought, to crush it back into silence. Love him? Love the man who had dragged her into this labyrinth, who had ensnared her like prey, who had wounded and imprisoned her? Her tormentor. Her gaoler. Madness! Madness to even imagine her lips against his.

     And yet—

     Her gaze faltered across the chamber, drawn to details she had not meant to see. The hearth glowed steady, warmth pooling into every corner. On the table, a vase of flowers stood vibrant and fresh, stems newly cut, their water clear as crystal. The remnants of lunch lingered by the fire: a tray that spoke of broth and roasted vegetables, of bread soft enough to tear with her hands.

     She staggered to the bed and sank down, fingers curling into the coverlet. The bedding yielded warm and soft beneath her palms.

     Here, there was food. Warmth. A strange kind of safety. He had not struck her at all, and had not threatened to since the night at the lake. He let her wander freely within the bounds of the house. He gave her books, music, clothes, company— even gifts she had not asked for, but…could not deny. In return, all she had to do was tend to him: his wounds, his meals, his tempests, his music. Keep him docile. Keep him… content.

     And if his gaze lingered too long, if his hands trembled when they brushed hers, if his music swelled with aching chords shaped only for her—what would it cost, truly, to let it stand? To slip into a gown cut low; to sit at his side and read those scandalous lines in that book while he drank in every word, to smile softly and let some small, coquettish phrase fall from her lips?

     Her chest tightened. She bent forward, elbows braced to her knees, face hidden in her hands. What harm? whispered that desperate corner of her mind. He had already consumed her life, every hour of it.

     Would it be such a great step to let him consume her heart as well?

     The thought unsettled her, sharp as glass beneath the skin. To yield was to make her home in the belly of the beast, to name her chains comfort, to trick herself into believing she had chosen them. Was that survival—or surrender?

     The fire popped, scattering sparks. Shadows leapt across the walls, and from beyond the door came the faintest thread of music—drifting notes, ghostlike, soft as a lullaby.

     Her eyes shut tight and her hands knotted in her lap. Why did she long for his music to soothe her, to ease her into sleep at night? Would it lull her further still—into something she could never take back?

     The dreamlike vision returned unbidden: what if he leaned close to her, if the mask and veil slipped, if his mouth found hers? Would his lips tremble as his hands always did? Would he be hesitant, tender… or would the violent hunger that haunted his music claim her instead?

     Her breath caught, heat flooding her cheeks. Shame pricked her skin as she pressed her palms hard to her face, desperate to scrub the thought away before it rooted deeper.

     What was wrong with her?

     And yet—even as she tried to banish it—the image lingered: his mouth on hers, breath tangled with her own, the taste of him—wine-tinged, perhaps—the weight of his body close. Her pulse quickened; a warm, traitorous ache spread through her stomach.

     Her body had betrayed her with a simple, terrible truth: she wanted to know.

     Round and round her thoughts circled, frantic as an injured bird battering itself against stone. Her father…if he had not died in Erik’s snares, then surely the catacombs had swallowed him by now. She was alone. Forever bound here. Every exit was sealed with traps and terror. What door remained? What awaited her above but hunger, a workhouse, ruin?

     Then why not make the cage livable? Why not soften the bars? Here there was food, shelter, warmth. She had flowers on the table. Music in the air. He already looked at her not only as captive, but as companion. Better to bend—better to live within the shape of his dream—than to break and be destroyed by it.

     But the thought slid further, darker. Why stop at survival? If she leaned into his fantasy—smiled at the right moments, let his hand linger, allowed his touch—would life not be easier still? She could sip his wine by the fire, wear the silks he offered, bask in the hunger in his eyes. She could let him play until the music gentled into tenderness. …She could take him to bed.

     Why not give him what he so clearly longed for? Would it be so terrible to surrender, if it turned his torment and wrath into devotion? If it bought her gentleness? Perhaps…even love—or something like it.

     She recoiled, clutching the blanket tight around her shoulders. How could she even imagine such things—herself naked and writhing beneath him, gasping, undone? Yet the temptation gnawed, whispering with every beat of her heart.

     …What are you to do when I am gone?

     Perhaps… she could only do exactly what she had feared: to live out a man’s fantasy as a means to survive.

     But… she wanted.

     Her mind spun until it hollowed her out. At last, exhaustion pressed heavier than shame. Her body yielded where her mind would not. Eyes wet with tears, lashes heavy, she curled into the blanket like a child clinging to safety.

     From beyond her door drifted music—soft, tentative, achingly tender. The violent storms he so often hurled from the keys had fallen silent; for nearly a day now only melodies of longing had unfurled in their place, spun delicate and shimmering, fragile as blown glass.

     She sank into uneasy sleep with that music weaving through her dreams. And, as slumber claimed her, one last thought whispered – treacherous, sweet: How could she be wrong to make the best of her situation?

     The first thing (Y/N) noticed upon waking was the chair in front of the hearth, near her bed. It sat at a different angle than it did the night before, its carved legs canted just enough to suggest someone had moved it - and had not troubled to return it precisely. Her breath caught. She pushed herself upright, eyes tracing the familiar outline of the chamber, her pulse quickening with the thought that Erik had been there again while she slept.

     It was not the first time. How often had it happened, and she never knew? Disturbed, she remembered the rose laid carefully on her nightstand days earlier, its petals unfurled, placed so close that he must have stood at her bedside while she dreamed. Did he touch her? Or simply watch, as he always did? The thought of his presence in those unguarded hours sent a shiver through her—half fear, half something she dared not name.

     The unease coiled tighter, for she had begun—almost against her will—to toy with the notion of yielding to him. Not from affection, but from the strange, perilous comfort he offered in captivity. Yet the thought of him watching as she slept—his masked figure looming in the dark, skeletal hand brushing against her cheek while she lay defenseless—sent her heart racing with dread.

     (Y/N) rose and dressed, refusing to linger on the turned chair or the memory of the flower, forcing herself not to imagine his angular shadow in the darkness of her room. With a heavy sigh, she opened the door.

     He was waiting at the end of the corridor.

     In his hands he held a dark glass bottle, its cork sealed and neck dusty, as though drawn from some forgotten recess. Firelight from the distant drawing room caught its surface as he raised it slightly, a tentative offering.

     “Come.” he said. His voice was measured, though a faint urgency wove beneath the calm. “Walk with me.”

     The words startled her - he had never invited her beyond the house itself. His gaze fixed on her with familiar intensity, the mask unyielding, but the eyes behind it bright with expectation.

     For a moment she faltered, unease pressing down like a weight. The chair. The flower. The trespass of her sleep. And now this—wine, and an invitation to walk as though they were companions instead of captor and captive. Yet some part of her ached for air beyond these walls, for something that felt less like confinement.

     She drew a steadying breath and placed her hand against the door frame as if to anchor herself. “All right.” she said softly.

     The mask inclined in a deliberate nod. Without another word, he turned, the bottle cradled in one arm, his cape sweeping behind him like a living shadow, and led her down the dim hall. Their steps echoed together in the hush, carrying her deeper into the house and into the uncertainty of what this “walk” might mean.

     She followed in silence, her thoughts restless, her tongue heavy. Twice, she felt words rise — a thanks, perhaps, or some token of kindness to ease the strangeness - but they withered before leaving her lips. She simply kept pace, her skirts whispering over carpet, the hush between them filled only by the echo of their tread and the cavern’s low, brooding hum.

     When they reached the drawing room, he turned to her, eyes sweeping over her with a sharp, assessing glance. His gaze lingered on the thin fabric of her dress; the hollows of his mask tilted in reproach.

     “You have no coat.”

     Her instinct was to shrug, to dismiss the matter. But he had already undone the clasp at his throat. The heavy folds of his cloak slid from his shoulders with a soft rustle, and he stepped toward her with the inevitability of a tide.

     “There is no need—” (Y/N) began, hands lifting in protest

     He ignored it. The cloak settled around her before she could retreat, fastened firmly at her chest. Its weight pressed close, still warm from his body. She stilled, her breath catching as his scent enveloped her—rosewater faint but lingering, mingled with the papery musk of old books and the damp mineral tang of stone. It was not merely a cloak. It was him, clinging to her skin, seeping into her breath.

     She lowered her gaze, fighting the heat that crept into her throat. The gesture might have seemed tender, even chivalrous, yet it bore the gravity of command—his will laid across her shoulders as tangibly as the fabric itself.

     And yet… she found she liked the scent of rosewater.

     He stepped back only far enough to draw open the door, his hand firm on the handle, waiting with quiet insistence. The hinges groaned as the wood swung wide, and a draft of cold air swept in, raising gooseflesh along her arms.

     Gathering the folds of the cloak tight about her, (Y/N) stepped past him into the dim cavern.

     The cavern air hung cool and damp, tinged with the mineral tang of groundwater as they reached the dock. The lake stretched into darkness, its surface still as glass, broken only by wavering bands of candlelight that painted restless gold across the rock.

     Erik slowed, then turned toward her with a formality so startling it was absurd in that hollow beneath the earth. He bent his arm and extended it, as though inviting her to promenade through a grand salon rather than along the cold stone shore of black water.

     She hesitated. The weight of his cloak pressed heavy across her shoulders, her fingers tightening on its folds as though to anchor herself. To take his arm felt like assent, a choice she was not sure she wished to make. Yet his gaze held hers—unyielding, patient—and at last she laid her hand lightly upon his sleeve. He adjusted at once, angling his arm to steady her steps, his body a steady presence at her side. Heat rose unbidden to her cheeks, betraying her reluctance, and she turned quickly away, watching the water scatter their reflections into broken fragments that trailed in the current.

     For a while they walked in silence, the hush of the cavern wrapping close around them. When his voice came, it was softened by that hush, tentative yet eager.

     “Tell me—are you comfortable in your room? Do you have what you need? Toiletries, soap, a comb? And the dinners—what meals would you prefer? What do you like to drink?”

     The questions tumbled out, one after another, as though he had been holding them back for hours. She blinked, and a small laugh escaped her, unguarded though edged with disbelief. “That is far too many questions for me to answer the moment I wake,” she said, shaking her head lightly.

     His arm stiffened beneath her hand. The mask tipped downward, and his voice fell to a murmur. “Forgive me. I… became carried away. In my mind, I was taking inventory—of the house, of your comfort. It seems my thoughts outran my tongue.”

     The words hung between them, oddly candid. She searched his yellow eyes in the wavering light and found no rage there, only a strange earnestness. Quickly she turned her gaze aside, her pulse still quick. Guarded though she remained, some trace of warmth lingered, tugging against her unease.

     The lake stretched before them, black and rippling, their joined reflections shivering across its surface. She drew the cloak tighter around herself, its folds brushing against his sleeve where her hand settled.

     “I am comfortable.” she said at last, her voice measured. “Thank you for your concern.”

     His arm shifted beneath her touch, sleeve taut as his shoulders rose. The silence that followed was weighted, expectant.

     “Surely there is something you desire.” he pressed gently, though with a note of insistence. “Something you would like?”

     Her eyes stayed on the water, the flickering lights scattering across its face. “I have all I need.”

      Their steps fell out of rhythm, his breath more audible in the stillness. At last, she conceded. “Perhaps… a dress. One I know another wo—one I choose for myself.”

     At once his frame seemed to quicken beside her. “Yes! Of course. A new wardrobe. And a coat. Shoes, jewelry, if you wish—”

     She turned her head slightly, her hand firm on his arm. “No. Just one dress. And a pair of comfortable shoes. That is enough.”

     Again his stride faltered, the dissonance returning. The path stretched ahead, the water mirroring their silhouettes, but the weight of what was unsaid pressed close.

     “Thank you, Erik,” she said, her hand tightening faintly on his sleeve. “You are kind—for considering my comfort.”

     Something shifted at once. His arm eased beneath her touch, and when she glanced up, the lamplight caught a softened gleam in his eyes. The word kind seemed to settle there, fragile and luminous, as though her simple acknowledgment had remade him.

     They walked on, and though the silence deepened, it was gentler than before, companionable. The cavern seemed to soften around them, the hush of water against stone a steady undercurrent, the light from the lanterns burnishing his mask to a muted gold.

     “…Kind.” he echoed at last, his voice low, almost wondering. “It is not a word I have often been given.” His head tilted toward her, eyes wide with wonder. “Do you mean it?”

     Her breath caught at the boyish note in his tone. She nodded, her eyes fixed on the shimmering water. “Yes. I meant it.”

     He drew a breath, deep and steady, as though her words had settled deep within him. His arm shifted beneath her hand, steadying her as the path narrowed, his grip protective and sure. “Then… I thank you.” he said softly. “Just know: whatever you desire shall be yours.”

     The promise pressed at her, overwhelming, yet she did not draw back. Instead, she stole a sidelong glance—the rigid elegance of his posture, the gleam of his mask, the intensity in his gaze fixed ahead. That warmth stirred again in her chest, tangled with unease, leaving her unsure whether it was solace or danger she brushed against.

     The cavern widened, the walls falling away to reveal a vast sweep of water, dark and gleaming, their silhouettes mirrored upon its surface. For a breath it seemed they walked not on stone but across the lake itself, each step gliding over shifting glass. The weight of his cloak pressed close around her, his arm steady beneath her hand, his nearness radiating a heat that left no space unclaimed.

     (Y/N) paused, gaze drawn forward. In the wavering glow a shoreline assembled itself: candles—dozens—set in sweeping arcs, their flames doubling on the black water, a tremulous constellation brought down to earth. At the center: a blanket, two glasses, a small parcel of food, as though some dream, half-remembered and impossibly tender, had been summoned into being.

     Erik released her arm with a precise flourish and gestured for her to sit. She lowered herself on the blanket cautiously, the weight of his cloak pooling around her, while he uncorked the bottle with a deft twist. The pop echoed faintly across the cavern, followed by the trickle of liquid filling the glass he placed into her hand.

     It was rich, deep, and gleaming in the firelight—a warm amber that seemed almost to glow from within. She turned the glass slightly, watching the light shift through it, and then glanced up at him with a smile. “It’s the same color as your eyes.” she said, before she knew she had spoken.

     He stilled. The second glass hovered. The mask tipped; the smallest fracture in his composure.

     “Such a beautiful color.” she added, half to herself, turning the glass to catch the light again. She lifted it toward her mouth—then saw the rigid line of him and hesitated. Silence thinned. Had she erred? His shoulders held like drawn wire; a laugh escaped him—soft, sharp, without mirth.

     “My eyes,” he repeated, the words low, oddly strained. The liquid in his glass trembled in his hand. “They are…a grotesque trick of nature. Nothing more.”

     The words coiled into the quiet. He lowered himself beside her—stiffly, deliberately—his gaze fixed as though her answer were a test. It struck her then that what she had offered as a simple compliment had instead become a trespass—a step too near some raw place he could not bear laid open. The candles seemed to dim beneath his stare; the glass in her hand grew heavy with meaning she had not meant to claim.

     She opened her mouth, the urge to soothe rising quick and unbidden—the truth perched there (they were beautiful; she had meant it). But to press now might rouse the old storms. She closed her lips instead and let the rim cool her mouth. The amber slid warm and sweet across her tongue, a small refuge from the tightening of the air.

     For a moment, she let the candles and the lake absorb his simmering presence. The flames wrote brief arcs on black water, doubling and breaking, lovely if not for the drum of her pulse. She chose a gentler response. “What is your favorite piece of music?” she asked, lifting her eyes to his in the glow.

     The question eased something. His posture slackened by a degree, as if the word music tugged him back from some precipice. He set his glass down with care and angled the mask toward her. “My favorite?” The cavern listened with him—the drip of distant water, the whisper of air in stone. He thought for a moment. Then, firmer: “There are too many to name a single sovereign. But—Mozart’s Requiem. Bone laid bare, yet still glory. Defiance. Its incompleteness outstrips perfection.”

     Reverence changed his voice; menace drained from it, replaced by the dangerous devotion beauty drew from him. She felt the knot inside her loosen. Candles gilded mask and water and stone until it seemed the music he named might rise from the rock itself.

     She let the quiet breathe. His eyes, turned to the lake, caught the candlelight and smoldered to molten gold; heat flushed her cheeks and she looked down. “I’m sorry,” she said at last, hesitant. “I’m not educated. I don’t know anything about it.”

     His head turned sharply; the reply came smooth, assured. “There is nothing to apologize for. You have me as your teacher now. You will learn—Mozart, Beethoven, Gounod, Verdi—and not only learn, but sing.”

     The words felt too grand to belong to her. She drew the cloak closer, as if fabric could soften the weight of his belief.

     “You are brilliant,” he went on, low, unveiling rather than praising. “Despite lack of schooling, you grasp quickly. Under my guidance you will transcend the ordinary.”

     Her fingers tightened on the stem. She had braced for correction, not canonization. She hid behind the glass; the rim muted her confession. “No one… has ever spoken to me like that.”

     The air seemed to ripple. He leaned closer; candlelight pooled on porcelain. Silence gathered, thick, intimate. He looked at her as if the simple admission remade the room. “Never?” His voice was gentle, keen-edged. “No one has told you what you are? What you could be?” A softening, then fervor again: “Then they were blind. Or cowards. Or envious.”

     Closer still—his presence a pressure. “I see you,” he whispered, wonder bleeding into desperation. “Do not doubt it. I will teach you your worth until you cannot deny it.”

     Warmth rose—wine and words—until laughter slipped free, bright and unguarded, a girlish spark in the cavern’s hush.

      “Oh, stop,” she teased, eyes lowered. “You’ll have me far too full of myself if you keep on like that.”

     Erik went still, measuring the sound. Was it mockery? Invitation? His eyes tracked the curve of her mouth, as if it spoke a private language. She smiled again—small, meant for him alone—and the sight pierced: so simple a grace, yet one he had never held. The mask inclined; hope leapt like flame.

     “Do you know what you do when you smile?” he said, voice low, reverent, threaded with heat. “You turn stone to sunlight. I could live a lifetime in that glow and not tire.”

     Color climbed her face. “You must stop,” she said, playful still—but she felt the slip inside: warmth, ease, the quiet yielding. Careful. She straightened, pulled the cloak close, and her smile faded; replaced by the carefulness that kept her steady in this world.

     He felt it at once. His shoulders pricked with confusion; in a breath she had gone from open to closed, and he stood at the threshold with the door barred.

      “Why do you turn from me?” The question came hushed, unsteady. “You gave me light—then hid it.” He reached, hesitant, then steadier—gloved fingers covering hers. “Please. Do not retreat. When we sing you give yourself to the music; I feel it—I feel you. Why withdraw when I speak truth? That you are extraordinary. That you are…” The word failed; his head bowed. The flames climbed the porcelain; his eyes shone too bright. “You do not know what it is to be starved of this. To see the world recoil until you stop searching…asking. Then—” his hand tightened, careful, “—you smile at me.”

     The cavern hushed, the lake listening. His words hovered—half plea, half prayer. Do not take it away.

     A tremor ran through her. Flight rose like a bird. Do not flinch. She steadied the glass. Breathless, almost laughing, she sought a gentler seam. “More wine, please?”

     The spell broke with her soft request. He blinked, recovered the bottle, poured with ceremonial care. She drank too quickly, heat blooming; fear dulled but did not vanish. The sweetness turned sickening again; her body betrayed her with its answering warmth.

     He watched, very still. She hid behind the glass. “I’m sorry for the coldness,” she said, quick. “I’ve… never been treated so well by a man.”

     Erik’s gaze lingered on her for another suspended moment, as though searching for something else he could not quite seize. Then, without a word, he slowly loosened his hand from hers. The sudden absence of his touch left her fingers strangely cold. He turned entirely away from her, reaching for his own glass with a careful deliberation. She expected him only to hold it, his usual gesture of propriety.

     But then he angled his body further, shifted the veil over his jaw, and very quickly took a furtive sip—an ordinary, human act performed like contraband. She looked away at once, granting privacy he could not ask for.

     Silence spread—brittle as frost. She weighed his vows, his impossible promises. Let it stand, she told herself. Hadn’t she decided? (Y/N) turned back to him once he was settled again.

     “If you mean to go on treating me so,” she said softly, “we should know each other better.”

     His head lifted sharply; the hollows of the mask caught the candlelight.

     “A game,” she ventured. “We take turns with questions. No lies. No boundaries.”

     The last word struck. He went still, shoulders drawing in, as if she had brushed a raw edge. For a breath she thought he would refuse. Then his eyes gleamed—wary, curious—a flicker of fire in the gold. He inclined his head, measured, even as his hand tightened on the glass until the crystal shivered.

     “No boundaries…” he repeated, tasting the danger. “There are questions I will not answer,” he said at last, iron beneath velvet. “Some things are mine.”

     The words set a line in stone. She felt their weight, felt the coil of tension in him, and let the urge to argue pass. She bowed her head in quiet assent. “Of course. I will respect that.”

     Something eased. The hard angle of his posture softened; the iron in his voice unwound. Though the mask gave little, a gentler light came into his eyes.

     “You… accept this?” he asked, cautious, as if unsettled by the mercy.

     She allowed a smile, fingers steadying on her glass. “Yes. Some things must remain private. I will not take that from you.”

     He studied her a moment, gold intent and searching, then leaned back and let out a breath that seemed long held. “Then we will play,” he murmured. “On those terms.”

     The cavern loosened with the words; the silence lost its brittleness, the firelight warmed. He raised his glass—not to drink, but in a small, deliberate salute. Flame caught in the amber, a shard of sunlight trapped in crystal.

     She mirrored his motion, raising her glass so that the candlelight caught in the amber and set it glowing.

     He turned his own glass lightly in his hand, golden eyes fixed upon her. “Tea, wine, or coffee?”

     The question was so simple it startled her. She blinked, then laughed softly, the sound slipping out like a secret. “Wine and coffee,” she admitted quickly, almost shyly, as though confessing some forbidden indulgence.

     The mask inclined. “Ah. Strong tastes, then.” His tone carried a thread of approval, and his gaze lingered on her as though committing the detail to memory. After a pause he added, quieter: “It is your turn. But before you ask—look to the lake for me.”

     She obeyed; cloth whispered; a quiet swallow; composure restored. She turned back. “What is your favorite book?”

     He tilted his head at her question, the mask catching a line of gold. “Like music,” he said gravely, “there are too many books dear to me for a single answer. Each one has been my companion in solitude. How could I choose one over another?” His voice dropped, softer, almost inward. “Some were lanterns in the dark. Some, knives. Each holds a piece of me.”

     She studied him in silence, the lake’s trembling reflection gilding the curve of porcelain. Emboldened by wine, she leaned forward with a sly curve of her lips. “Then tell me,” she pressed, “what are you doing with that sordid blue book you insist on teaching me from?”

     The question hung between them, charged. His gaze fixed on her, golden and unblinking—and then, to her surprise, a low chuckle escaped him, strange and fleeting in the cavern. “Ah,” he murmured, shaking his head faintly, “you have already forgotten the rules.”

     Her smile faltered.

     “It is my turn,” he reminded her—not harsh, but gently reproving, the cadence smooth as silk. “You asked again before I could.”

     The faint amusement in his voice both unsettled and disarmed her, and she felt her cheeks warm despite herself.

     She let out a long, humming note of mock complaint, the sound echoing softly in the cavern. It was teasing, but laced with quiet challenge. “Very well,” she said at last, tilting her chin in defiance. “If you won’t answer, then at least obey. Drink your wine.”

     Her tone carried enough firmness to border on command, though the faint curve of her lips softened it into something almost playful.

     He stilled, mask gleaming in the candlelight, eyes narrowing as if measuring whether to resist. Then, with the same deliberate ceremony as before, he turned fully aside, lifting the glass in one gloved hand. She looked away at once, fixing her gaze on the trembling ribbons of gold skimming the lake’s dark surface.

     The faint rustle of cloth, the muted swallow—then silence reclaimed the cavern. When she finally glanced back, he was composed again, seated with rigid poise, the glass resting easily in his hand as though nothing at all had transpired.

     His eyes lingered on her, weighing, testing, as though to see if she would break the unspoken pact by naming what she had witnessed. When she remained silent, his posture eased, and in the flicker of candlelight there passed across his gaze a glimmer that might almost have been gratitude.

     He steered the moment away with practiced grace, his voice smooth, quiet, intent. “What are your favorite flowers?” he asked, with the same gravity he might have given to a confession, as though her answer carried the weight of revelation.

     It was disarming in its simplicity. His gaze held her fast, as though the answer mattered more than she could ever guess.

     (Y/N) drew a soft breath, her eyes gentling as memory stirred. “When I was a girl, my father and I lived in the country,” she began, her voice touched with a wistful lilt. “In early summer—through all of June—the wildflowers would come. They painted the hills in every color: reds and yellows, blues, whites…a hundred shades, tangled together like a living tapestry.” A faint smile softened her mouth. “I used to wander the fields until my skirts were heavy with blossoms, my hands full of bouquets to scatter about the house, to brighten the table.”

     Her voice caught, then rushed onward in an unsteady laugh. “Joseph would always scold me for it,” she added, though the sound wavered. “‘Wasting time,’ he said, ‘when there was work to be done.’… But I could never help myself.”

     The smile withered. The words faltered, cut short as if snagged on something jagged in her chest. Grief welled, sudden and sharp, closing her throat. She lowered her gaze to the rim of her glass, clutching it tight as though pressure alone could hold back the tears threatening to rise. Don’t think of him. Don’t remember. Pretend nothing happened. Pretend he isn’t gone.

     But Erik was watching her. He had listened with rapt intensity, his gaze drinking in the light that had animated her face—and when it dimmed, his whole body seemed to jolt. The mask shifted, angled sharply toward her, and the gold in his eyes flared with sudden alarm.

     “You—” His voice caught, rougher than before. “What is it? What struck you?” He leaned forward, searching her face with that desperate scrutiny she had come to know too well, as though her silence itself might undo him.

     The cavern hushed around them, candlelight trembling in restless arcs. She pressed her lips together, fighting the sting of tears and the terrible weight of his attention.

     Her throat tightened, but she forced a small, dismissive wave of her hand, as though batting away nothing more than a gnat. “It’s nothing,” she murmured, snatching up her glass. The stem trembled faintly in her grasp as she lifted it, and she drained it in a single swallow, willing the wine’s warmth to drown the ache rising in her chest.

     She would not look at him. Her eyes stayed fixed on the candlelight glimmering across the black water, her lips pressed tight against the rim of the glass. She swallowed hard, as if sheer force might bury the grief deeper, beneath fire and silence.

     But his eyes narrowed, the gold in them flashing sharp as a blade in the candlelight.

     “Do not do that,” he said, low—not harsh, but threaded with urgency. “Do not brush me aside as though I am blind, as though I cannot see the grief in you.”

     He leaned closer, elbows braced against his knees, the mask glinting as the flames swayed. “I heard it in your voice. I saw it in your face. You spoke of your father, and then you broke.” His gaze locked onto hers, fierce, unrelenting, as though he could pin her in place by will alone. “Do not swallow it down and pretend nothing struck you. I will not allow you to vanish into silence before me.”

     The words fell heavy, severity threaded with plea. His gloved hand twitched once against his knee, aching toward her but halting, uncertain, as though to reach might shatter the moment.

     “You will not carry such sorrow alone,” he said at last, softer—nearly reverent. “Not while you are here. Not while I have breath to give you comfort.”

     Her voice broke the charged silence with sudden swiftness, as though she feared what he might demand if she hesitated. “I don’t want to feel grief right now,” she said, the words tumbling over one another. Her hand tightened around the stem of her glass, knuckles whitening in the candlelight. She lifted her chin, forcing herself to meet the blaze of his golden eyes. “I—I can’t talk about… about Papa right now. Please… just ask me another question. Please.”

     Her gaze fled at once, fixing on the lake where the candlelight quivered across its surface in ribbons of gold and black. The reflection blurred as her lashes lowered. She pulled the heavy folds of his cloak tighter around her shoulders, burying herself in its weight as though it could shield her from his stare.

     Across from her, Erik did not move. His posture remained taut, rigid, as if balanced on the knife’s edge between prying further into her sorrow or granting her plea. At last, after a silence stretched thin as glass, his shoulders lowered a fraction. The rigidity eased, if only slightly, as though he had decided—for now—to obey. He leaned back just enough to keep her within his gaze, his voice dropping into a gentler register.

     “If you could return to one moment in your life,” he asked, deliberate, steady, “to relive it exactly as it was—where would you go?”

     Her breath drew in sharply, her fingers loosening on the glass. The question settled deep in her chest, tugging memory to the surface. “There was a festival in the town square once.” she said at last, her voice soft with recollection. “Midsummer. Lanterns hung from every window, and music filled the streets until it seemed the very stones were singing. I danced until my feet ached, ribbons in my hair, laughter everywhere. For a night, the whole world felt… alive.”

     The smile that touched her lips faltered almost at once, leaving her staring into the black sheen of the lake. “If I could return anywhere, it would be there. Just for the joy of it.”

     Silence fell. Then, Erik let out a breath, half-sigh, half-laugh, as though her memory both cut and consoled him.

     “A festival,” he echoed, low. “Crowds pressing close, music in every corner, laughter louder than bells. And you—” His gaze sharpened, as if seeing her in that remembered square. “You shone in it, did you not? With ribbons in your hair, dancing, smiling, alive.”

     He stilled, and the cavern seemed to hush with him. When he spoke again, his tone had softened to something raw, unguarded. “I cannot give you the crowd, nor the square lit with lanterns. But music…” His gloved hand flexed once against the curve of his glass. “Music I can give you in abundance. If you will let me, I will weave for you a festival in sound so radiant, you will not mourn the other.”

     She regarded him across the blanket, her brows knitting ever so slightly. His conviction unsettled her—the way he spoke as though joy itself could be rewritten to belong to him alone. She lifted her glass, only to realize it was already empty, and lowered it again with a faint, uneasy pause. Forcing herself to meet his gaze, she said softly, “Then tell me the same. If you could return to any moment in your life, where would you go?”

     The candles wavered between them, their light gilding the porcelain curve of his mask. He held her eyes in silence, long enough that she wondered if he would answer at all. Then he shook his head once, clipped, final.

     “There is nothing,” he said. His voice was cool, flat as stone. “Nothing I would revisit. Ever.”

     The starkness of it chilled her. She shifted, trying to smooth her expression, though unease pricked at her. “Not even Persia?” she asked gently, searching his face. “I thought… the way you spoke of it before, when you were looking at the sky—”

     His gaze hardened. The gold in his eyes dulled, retreating into shadow. He did not speak, did not move. Only the faint ripple of the lake filled the silence where his answer should have been.

     She felt the weight of the wall he had set before her, cold and unyielding. Lowering her eyes, she busied herself with the empty glass in her lap, pretending at composure rather than watch him retreat into silence. The candles burned on, their flames wavering in the hush, but he offered nothing more.

     She let the silence stretch a moment longer before drawing in a careful breath. “Well,” she said at last, her tone lighter than she felt, her eyes fixed on the black water rather than his face, “it seems we both have pain we’d rather not drag into the open. Something in common.”

     The words lingered between them—not unkind, but distant, a line drawn to mark the boundary they both meant to keep. Her lips curved faintly, a smile meant to soften, though it did not reach her eyes.

     “You should finish yours,” she added, gesturing toward the untouched wine in his hand. “Then pour yourself another. Otherwise, I’ll begin to feel very foolish, sitting here drinking this much on my own.”

     The teasing note in her voice was delicate—almost brittle—but deliberate, a careful effort to steer them away from the jagged edge they had brushed against. She reached for the bottle, fingertips grazing its neck, testing whether he would allow her the liberty or insist again on the ritual of pouring.

     Across from her, he did not move. The glass in his hand caught the candlelight, the mask angled so she could not easily read him. Only his eyes betrayed the turmoil beneath—bright, restless, torn between offense at her deflection and the sharp, startling pleasure of hearing her speak of their mutual pain as though it bound them.

     He lowered his gaze to the amber in his glass, watching it fracture the firelight into molten shards. A long, taut silence stretched, until at last he turned away and drained it—slow, careful swallows, each one deliberate, as though to prove he had nothing to hide. When he set the empty glass down, his hand moved with the same measured precision. Then he reached for the bottle, brushing her hand aside with a flick of impatience that was more ritual than rudeness. He poured himself another measure, and without asking, refilled hers as well, the dark stream glinting gold as it caught the firelight.

     Only then did he look back at her. The mask gleamed, but his eyes were steady, intent, carrying a fervor that made her pulse stumble. “If it eases you,” he said quietly, “I will drink with you. If it spares you from feeling alone at my side, then I will drink as you do.”

     He nudged her glass gently toward her, the gesture controlled yet curiously careful, as though her acceptance mattered far more than the wine itself.

     He lifted his glass slowly, angling it so the candlelight turned the wine within to molten gold. For a long moment he stared into it, silent, the pale curve of his mask catching the glow. Then his gaze slid back to her—piercing, unblinking, flaying her with its intensity.

     “You said something before,” he murmured. His voice was steady, but beneath it ran a tremor, as though he feared the answer as much as he craved it. “When you first looked into the wine.”

     The glass trembled faintly in his hand as he echoed her words. “You said it was the same color as my eyes. That it was a…‘beautiful color.’”

     The word beautiful hung between them, heavy, dangerous. He leaned forward, the firelight gilding the sharp edges of porcelain, the hollows of his gaze burning bright. “Did you mean it?”

     Her fingers tightened around the stem of her glass, buying herself a breath. “Would you even be able to accept my answer,” she asked carefully, “if I told you truly what I think?”

     For an instant his eyes narrowed, unreadable. Then, to her surprise, the tension beneath the veil shifted—his mouth curving faintly, almost mischievously. He tilted his head, studying her with patient, unsettling precision.

     “That,” he said slowly, savoring his words, “is another question.”

     The reprimand was soft, but it landed like the edge of a blade. No anger—only a playful reminder of their bargain. “You forget yourself again. It is my turn. You cannot twist my question back upon me.”

     A glint lingered in his eyes, amusement twined with control, as though he relished catching her in yet another breach. He swirled the glass once, then leaned closer, his voice dropping to a murmur that brushed the charged air between them.

     “You owe me an answer. No evasion. Did you mean it?”

     She drew in a breath, the protest rising fast—she could refuse, could claim her right to silence—but something in his voice, in the danger of his hunger, pressed her toward truth. She steadied her glass against her knees and lifted her gaze.

     “Yes,” she said quietly, her voice weighted with more than she intended. “I meant it.”

     His eyes sharpened, locked wholly on her as she pressed on. “Your eyes are striking. Deep, bright… expressive. They look like gold.” She faltered, then forced the words free before she could retreat. “And I have always admired the color of gold.”

     The silence that followed trembled, fragile and dangerous. Candlelight poured into his gaze until it gleamed as bright as the wine in their glasses. He seemed dazed, struck harder than he had braced for. His glass hung suspended, his entire frame leaning toward her with a strange, breathless intensity. The flickering light turned his eyes exactly as she had named them—molten, radiant, impossible to look away from.

     “You think them striking?” he whispered, reverent disbelief lacing the words. “Bright. Expressive. Gold…” He lingered on the word with a tremor of wonder, as though tasting it for the first time. Carefully, he set his glass aside, every movement deliberate, as if too sudden a gesture might shatter the fragile moment.

     “No one has ever spoken of them so,” he went on, leaning nearer, his voice low, fervent. “eyes too monstrous, too unnatural—that I have heard all my life. But not… gold.”

     His gloved hand twitched against his knee, curling tight as though restraining the urge to reach for her. He drew a sharp, unsteady breath, releasing it with a faint shiver.

     “Gold….” he repeated again, thick now with hunger, wonder, and need. His eyes blazed, desperate, undone. “You… you don’t know what you do to me.”

     His voice broke into something nearer a whisper, raw and perilous in its vulnerability.

     Before she could reply, he turned from her with sudden force, the mask flashing in and out of the candlelight in a single sweep. He raised his glass and drained it in one long, unhesitating pull. The swallow caught; he sputtered, shoulders jolting with suppressed coughs. Collecting himself, he set the empty vessel down with deliberate precision, though his hand trembled faintly against the stone, and reached at once for the bottle. Dark liquid streamed into the crystal, glinting in the firelight like a blade.

     She watched him, unsettled by the abrupt shift—the way he had hovered on the brink of something tender, only to wrench himself away with the violence of a man smothering flame beneath his own hands. Her pulse quickened, the unease coiling tighter until the words slipped from her unbidden.

     “There it is again,” she whispered, almost to herself. “Why have people always thought of you as a monster?”

     The question froze the air. He stiffened, glass in hand, shoulders taut beneath the folds of his coat. When he turned, his eyes blazed bitter gold.

     “Why?” His voice cracked, jagged. “Why, indeed? Perhaps you would know better than any—you, who have also named me the same.”

     The sudden change in him struck like a blow—raw, unguarded, his gaze flashing wild with accusation. Then, just as quickly, it broke. His shoulders dropped, the fire drained from his stance, and he bowed his head as though ashamed of his own eruption.

     “No.” His voice fell low and ragged, stripped of its bite. “No, that was unworthy of me.” He drew a long, uneven breath, the glass trembling in his hand before he lowered it carefully to the blanket. “I should not have said that. Not to you.”

     The apology hung between them, fragile as the wavering flames that surrounded them.

     She inclined her head, solemn, the gesture carrying both acceptance and weariness. “I deserved that,” she said quietly, the words dropping into the silence like stones into deep water. Folding her hands in her lap, she lowered her gaze to the dark lake and let the stillness settle over them.

     For a time, he let it stretch, watching her with that unblinking intensity that never seemed to leave him. At last he exhaled sharply through his nose, the sound decisive, as if forcing himself past the moment.

     “One more question each,” he said at last, his voice deliberate, clipped with restraint. His eyes flicked up to hers, gleaming with something unreadable. “And then we shall finish the game—for now.”

     The firmness of his pronouncement settled the air. She straightened slightly, smoothing the folds of his cloak across her lap, and inclined her head in assent. “Very well,” she murmured, her tone calm though her pulse quickened beneath it.

     His gaze lingered on her with heavy insistence, as though weighing every word she had given him against the silence that pressed between them now. His glass sat untouched at his side, hands folded with tense precision on his knee. At last, he leaned forward, the mask catching the firelight so that the porcelain gleamed pale while his eyes burned molten.

     “You said,” he began, low and deliberate, “that you had never been pursued. Never been…treated…by a man as I treat you.” His tone tightened, the words drawn out as though quoting scripture. “Why is that?”

     The question landed with startling force, not shouted but carved into the air by its very calmness. He let it linger, his gaze fixed and unblinking, golden eyes demanding an answer she could not easily give. “Is it because men are blind?” he pressed. His stillness was coiled, his restraint trembling like a bowstring held taut. The candlelight etched his figure in shadow and flame, his stare bearing down until it felt almost unbearable. “Tell me,” he urged, his voice dropping, frayed at the edges, “why you believe no man has ever desired you.”

     Her lips parted, but no words came. A startled, almost breathless sound escaped instead. “Oh.” The single syllable trembled in the air, fragile, uncertain—knocked loose by the sheer weight of his question.

     She shifted, fingers tightening around the stem of her glass, gaze darting between him and the dark shimmer of the lake. “That is…” she faltered, voice catching. “That is a very intimate question to ask me.” A faint laugh slipped through—soft, brittle, unsteady. “It seems the wine is getting the better of us both.”

    She turned toward the water, the heavy folds of his cloak slipping further around her legs. The candlelight broke across the rippling black, scattering into shards of gold. Her head swayed faintly, the dizziness of drink tugging her toward silence.

     “There have been men,” she admitted at last, her voice soft, halting. “Men who only wanted…one thing. When they thought they might have it, they lingered. But if I denied them—or once they had their fill—they left quickly enough.” She stared into her glass, her reflection warped in the amber depths. “They never treated me as anything more valuable than that. Not…not like you do.”

     Her admission trembled into the air like a fragile thread, her next words spilling after it, reluctant, raw. “And that—it frightens me…as much as it thrills me. What it could mean.” She had not meant to confess it aloud, and yet there it was.

     At the mention of other men, something flared across his face—dark, dangerous. His chest rose and fell in shallow, stifled bursts, the rhythm tight with strain. His gaze burned, gold hardening into molten anger, until suddenly—violently—he wrenched his eyes away.

     His hand seized the glass, turned so she could not see him, and he flung it to his mouth in one brutal swallow, as though the wine itself might smother the thought before it consumed him. The echo of a cough escaped, raw and stifled, reverberating against the cavern walls like the aftershock of a blow.

     The motion was swift, merciless in its finality. He snatched the bottle next, jammed the cork in with a punishing twist, and set it down hard upon the blanket. The glass clinked against stone with the weight of judgment. The gesture rang of jealousy laid bare—an unspoken verdict that whatever had been touched, shared, or given to another was intolerable, a stain he could not bear in his presence.

     Her eyes followed the movement of his hands with a slow, bleary detachment. The wine had warmed her blood, dulling the edges of thought, softening sharpness into haze. She could not quite grasp what had ignited his sudden flare, only that it thickened the air between them until it pressed on her chest. With a weary sigh she tipped back the last of her glass, the burn sliding down her throat like surrender, and eased onto one elbow before letting herself sink fully against the blanket.

     The stone beneath her was unyielding, but the cloak he had draped across her earlier softened it, cushioning her from the worst of the hardness. Her gaze drifted upward, unfocused, to the cavern ceiling where shadows sprawled long and jagged in the trembling candlelight. For a moment she lost herself there, watching the scattered gold dance against the dark stone as if they were constellations she would never know.

     When her voice finally came, it was soft, almost musing, fragile in the hush. “May I have my one last question?”

      He did not answer with words. Only a sharp flick of his hand dismissed her, a wave as curt as it was cutting. The sting of it tightened her throat, and she turned her eyes back to the ceiling, lips pressed into silence. The sound of rustling cloth broke the pause as he reached for the bundle of food—bread, fruit, small comforts arranged with the same precise care he gave to everything.

     She let the quiet linger until it thickened, then broke it at last, her voice low and drifting, as though confessing a secret to the dark above. “I dreamed of the Persian night sky last night.”

     The motion of his hands stilled at once.

     “It was still.” she continued, fragile but steady. “So vast, so peaceful. The stars were like fire scattered across purple velvet. It was…beautiful.”

     When she dared to look at him, his entire frame had gone taut. His head lifted sharply, the hollow eyes of the mask fixed on her with such intensity that a tremor rippled through her chest. The gold in his gaze blazed, lit from within, and for an instant she thought she had given him something greater than any gift she could have laid upon the blanket.

     He looked at her as though she had placed the world itself in his hands, as though her words—her dream—were proof that he had taken root inside her, lived within her even as she slept. The mask caught the candlelight, its porcelain edges gleaming, but it was his eyes that held her fast—burning with awe, longing, and a devotion so zealous it threatened to consume them both.

     Erik sat very still, the corked bottle and empty glasses forgotten at his side. The alcohol hummed in his blood, softening the sharpness of jealousy’s edge, but nothing dulled the force with which his gaze bound itself to her. She lay stretched across the blanket, wrapped in his cloak, the firelight bending itself to her form as though every flame in the cavern existed for her alone.

     Her chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm, the motion hypnotic in its simplicity. Each breath seemed to catch the candle glow, lifting her form as though the light itself moved through her. Her eyes, heavy with wine, had softened; she regarded him not with suspicion, not with the wary calculation he had come to expect, but with something gentler—unguarded, unmeant perhaps, yet devastating all the same. That look held him captive more surely than chains ever could.

     Her hair spilled loose across the blanket, a halo of (H/C) threaded with glints of gold where the firelight kissed it. Wild, unstudied, it framed her face in a beauty that might have belonged to a dream, or an angel glimpsed by a sinner on the edge of death. His breath caught, sharp and sudden, and for an instant he forgot how to draw air again.

     He had known beauty in his life—in the architecture of stars overhead, in the intricacies of mathematics, in the music that had kept him alive—but never like this. Never so close. Never so fragile, so alive, so within his reach. The cavern fell away: the lake, the stone, the shadows—none of it mattered. There was only her, encircled by trembling rings of candlelight, the glow gilding her skin as though the darkness itself had conspired to paint her there for him.

     Enraptured, he let silence claim him, terrified that if he moved, if he spoke, the vision would dissolve into smoke. So he only stared, breathless, consumed—as though the simple act of watching her breathe was the most exquisite and terrible thing he had ever known.

     For one unbearable, exquisite moment, he let himself believe. That she was beautiful. That she was here for him. That her softness was not a trap, nor a ploy. That she might…one day…learn to love him.

     But belief, fragile as glass, could never hold. His chest tightened, suspicion coiling up with cruel familiarity, choking the tender thought before it could take root. He knew too well the tricks of longing—the way it painted illusions over what was real. He was not seeing her; he was seeing only what he wanted. She had already glimpsed the mask, the temper, the gnawing beast beneath his skin. She had called him monster, once—truth spat in terror. Why should she think otherwise now?

     The inevitability pressed heavy on him, suffocating: sooner or later, she would turn away, as all the world had done. And then the vision before him—the warmth, the softness, the impossible nearness—would vanish, leaving him only with silence, and the familiar company of his own ruin.

     He drew in a thin breath, steadying himself, and then pushed upright. Every movement was deliberate, almost brittle with control, as he leaned over her. When he spoke, his voice was softened to a murmur, careful not to startle.

     “Come,” he said, extending a gloved hand. “It grows late. Let us return.”

     She stirred sluggishly, heavy with wine and warmth, her lashes fluttering before she blinked up at him in a daze. Obediently, almost dreamlike, she let him guide her to her feet. The walk back through the tunnels stretched in silence, shadows bowing around the dim flame he carried. She swayed against him for balance, her steps uneven, her head tilting briefly toward his shoulder. He bore her weight with rigid precision, his frame taut, his silence heavier than stone. He dared not speak—for fear that his voice might betray the storm locked behind his teeth.

     By the time they reached the house, her weariness had thickened. She sank onto the couch without protest, curling into its cushions, drawing his cloak tighter around her shoulders as though to burrow into its lingering warmth. Within moments, her breathing deepened, steady and dreamless.

     He lingered, standing over her, hands twitching uselessly at his sides. The sight of her—wrapped in his garment, her face softened by sleep—struck like a wound and a benediction both. For a long while he did not move, caught between hunger and reverence, until at last he turned away. His retreat into the kitchen was grim and purposeful, his footsteps echoing with a restraint that cut sharper than any outburst.

     The pounding in her head dragged her up from uneasy sleep, each throb a hammer driving nails behind her eyes. Her mouth was dry as ash, her stomach twisted and sour. Every part of her ached, her limbs heavy with wine and exhaustion.

     (Y/N) sat hunched on the edge of the couch for a long while, staring at the piano across the room—silent, unmoving, its absence of sound pressing down on her. The cloak still clung to her shoulders—his cloak—and the thought warmed her even through the haze. She fumbled at the clasp, meaning to fold it, but her hands were clumsy. At last she surrendered, draping it over the arm of the couch.

     Then she smelled it: bread toasted golden, eggs softening in butter, the bitter sting of coffee. Her stomach clenched, queasy and hungry at once.

     Erik appeared in the doorway, a tray balanced carefully in his hands. His posture was stiff, knuckles white where they gripped the silver, his eyes fever-bright above the gleaming mask. Every line of him was taut, trying to pass for composed, yet something thrummed beneath the surface, restless, dangerous.

     “Oh,” he said at last, the word measured to the point of strain. “You’re awake.”

     He crossed the room quickly, each step deliberate, and set the tray down on the table with a hesitant care she had never seen from him before. But before she could find her voice, he straightened, the mask angling toward the door. He moved to leave, as though escape were the only way to preserve the fragile shell of control still holding him together.

      Her voice broke the silence just as he reached the threshold.

     “Erik—wait.”

     He froze. The line of his back went taut, his shoulders locked as if bracing for a blow. She shifted on the couch, pulling the tray toward her with stiff fingers, her gaze searching the masked profile half-turned in the light.

     “Thank you.” she said softly, sincerity threading through the haze in her voice. “For the walk. For the food and the wine.” Her eyes flicked to the coffee, steam curling upward. “I… drank far too much earlier,” she admitted with a sheepish breath. “More than I ever should have. I only hope I didn’t make a fool of myself.”

     Erik turned his head just enough for the mask to catch the lamplight, the ivory gleam sharp against the rigidity of his posture. For a moment he said nothing, as though the simple word she had offered—thank you—was more perilous than accusation. His gloved hand flexed at his side, a restless twitch betraying the stillness he fought to keep.

     “You need not trouble yourself with apologies,” he said at last, his voice low, clipped, stripped of the warmth her gratitude should have kindled.

     He lingered there in the doorway, unmoving. The silence stretched, heavy as a taut string. At last a breath escaped him, uneven at the edges, before he added, quieter, as if the words wounded him even to speak:

     “Do not imagine Erik mistakes courtesy for… for affection.”

     The last word caught in his throat, sharp as glass forced down.

     She straightened, confusion quickening her pulse, her wide eyes fixed on him. The silence pressed closer. He shifted as though to continue his retreat, yet something rooted him there—a hesitation, a battle waged behind the veil of ivory and black. When he spoke again, it was quieter, almost distant.

     “Eat. You will need your strength. And… Erik will not have you think him negligent of his responsibilities.”

     Her fingers stilled on the edge of the tray, trembling despite her effort to hold them steady. The steam from the coffee rose between them, a fragile veil of warmth that only sharpened the chill of his tone. She drew in a shallow breath, gathering courage, and let her gaze climb to his back, to the rigid line of his shoulders.

     “I… did I do something wrong?” The question slipped out, hushed, unsteady, yet clear enough to reach him.

     His head tilted just enough for the mask to catch her in profile, the faint gleam betraying the tension that had not left his frame. Whatever answer he might have given hardened instead into command.

     “Eat,” he said. The word came clipped, precise—sharp as a blade dulled only by restraint. “And drink the coffee. It will ease your head.”

     The finality in his tone left no room for argument. It was not unkind, but cold—distant—as though he could not allow himself the indulgence of sympathy. His hand shifted against the door frame, fingers curling once into a fist before forcing themselves open again. For a moment he lingered there, balanced between retreat and return. Then, abruptly, he chose escape.

     He stepped out with deliberate swiftness, the sweep of his coat brushing the doorway as he left her to the tray. The faint echo of his tread followed him down the passage, swallowed quickly by stillness until only the lapping of the lake outside remained.

     Alone, she stared at the coffee, at the careful order of food he had arranged for her—feeling wanted and dismissed in the same breath. Somewhere beyond the walls came the muted clatter of him in the kitchen, sharp, purposeful, as though the noise itself might smother what he dared not say.

     The tray sat before her like a judgment she could not answer. She forced down a few bites, each one heavier in her throat until even the thought of another made her stomach twist. Her fork drifted from eggs to toast and back again, never settling. The silence pressed closer with every moment, and though she tried to steady her breathing, her eyes burned with the threat of tears. She could not shake the fear that she had misstepped—spoken something careless, stumbled blind across some hidden fault line.

     Things had seemed fine. She had enjoyed herself—more than she had thought possible. She had begun to find peace, even comfort, in shaping her life here, in keeping Erik docile, attentive, devoted. And today… she had really enjoyed his company. More than she dared admit.

     At last she pushed the plate aside and wrapped both hands around the cup. The coffee’s warmth was a mercy, small but steady, a heat she clung to as if it might shield her from the hollow ache tightening in her chest. She sipped until it was nearly gone, focusing on the bitterness rather than the silence that stretched, too long, between his absence and her thoughts.

     When Erik returned, he said nothing of the half-touched meal. His movements were brisk, almost mechanical, as he gathered the tray. The dishes rattled faintly against one another before he carried them away, his silence as sharp as any rebuke. Moments later he reappeared, the blue book in hand, his mask fixed on her with a gaze that betrayed nothing.

     “You likely do not wish to sing today,” he said flatly, not as a question but a verdict. “Your head. You and Erik will return to the reading lesson instead.”

     He took his seat nearby, though not as close as he once would have, leaving a breadth of space that felt cold. With a snap, the book opened in his hands, the sound slicing through the quiet like the crack of a whip.

     She flinched at the sharpness, her heart skittering. Confusion gnawed at her, but she bit her tongue, unwilling to press—unwilling to risk worsening whatever unseen wound had stiffened him so. Instead, she gathered the blanket from the back of the couch, wrapping it about her shoulders like a shield.

     Erik shifted the book with mechanical precision, setting it squarely between them on the table, as though its placement itself were a matter of discipline. His fingers smoothed the page only once before halting, one fingertip pressing firmly against a line of text.

     “This.” he said, the word short, cutting, leaving no room for hesitation. The mask turned toward her, black eyeholes dark and unyielding. “Begin here. Read.”

     There was no trace of invitation in his tone, only command. His back remained rigid, posture carved from tension, every angle of him suggesting the lesson was less about words than about control—over her, over himself, over the fragile order threatening to crack between them.

     The candlelight caught the curve of the mask, throwing his face into stark shadow. His finger stayed fixed like a stake in the page, waiting, until she complied. She found the line where his touch marked their place and, haltingly, began:

     “‘Fab-ric…rust-led, the del…delicate ties of her gown l-loosening un-der…his…tr-trem-bling fin-gers.’”

     Her cheeks burned, her voice stumbling over the intimacy of the words. Erik sat rigid beside her, silent as stone, before he cut across her hesitation, his own voice swift and impatient:

     “‘He pressed kisses along the slope of her shoulder, the hollow of her throat, each one a vow spoken against her skin. She arched toward him, gasping softly, until the room itself seemed to pulse with their urgency. For him, she burned, and he gladly threw himself into her pyre.’”

     The passage fell flatly from him, as though spoken through clenched teeth. Then he went utterly still.

     She swallowed, mortified, and risked a glance. His gaze was fixed on the coals, on one seam of heat burning steady in the grate. Behind the veil, his breath rasped quiet, uneven. A small, involuntary sound escaped him—half-breathed, quickly caged.

     The cavernous hush pressed close around them. Ash drifted softly in the fire, and beyond the walls, the lake whispered. But Erik’s mind was a battlefield, torn between hunger and restraint, between the tenderness of what he longed for and the terror of being seen.

     “…Have you ever loved before?” he asked, low and sudden.

     Her head snapped toward him. He did not look at her; the mask angled to the fire, as though the face beneath needed its cover.

     The question hung—stark, perilous. Her lips parted uselessly, her pulse climbing, thudding against the blanket at her throat.

     His fingers twitched on his lap. When he spoke again, his voice had roughened, grit deepening the edges. “Tell Erik. Has there been anyone? A name you carried on your tongue. Someone who made you…burn?”

     She stared, unsettled, trying to piece what storm had taken shape inside him while she slept.

     At last he turned. Firelight slipped across porcelain, his yellow eyes catching hers through the hollows. “Do not lie.”

     Her mouth went dry. The command in his tone rattled her, yet she forced herself to inhale carefully, to glance down at her fists knotted in the blanket before lifting her eyes. “I’ll answer you,” she said, each syllable chosen with care, “if you answer me in return.” A pause, then softly: “…The game?”

     He tilted his head. Suspicion flashed—sharp, defensive—but then it shifted, slow as a hinge easing open. His fingers folded neatly on his lap, patience sharpened to a knife’s edge.

     A breath of a smile touched her mouth. The fire cracked between them.

     “Then I will begin,” he said at last, voice taut as wire. “Answer Erik. Have you ever loved before?”

     Her throat tightened; heat crept into her cheeks. “No,” she whispered at last. “I have not.”

     His eyes narrowed, weighing the words piece by piece. “You said there had been other men,” he accused.

     “Well…I never loved them. And they certainly never loved me.” She swallowed hard. “No. No man.” Her voice steadied. “I’ve not…not ‘burned’ for anyone before.”

     The truth she did not add ached against her tongue: But I think I burn for you.

     His fingers shifted restlessly; his shoulders drew taut. “No man,” he echoed, testing the phrase against himself. Hunger and suspicion warred in his gaze before, at last, he stilled.

     “Very well,” he said finally. “You have answered.” A beat passed, heavy as stone. “Ask.”

     She tightened the blanket around herself, worrying the seam between thumb and forefinger. “All right,” she said quietly, her eyes never leaving his. “What do you call love, Erik? Have you ever loved?”

     Silence pooled, thick and heavy. Firelight crawled over the curve of porcelain, leaving his eyes in shallow shadow.

     A sound tore from his chest—half laugh, half groan. “What does Erik call love?” His voice was raw, frayed at the edges. “A wound. A chain. A noose that tightens and never lets go.”

     His hands clenched white against his knees. “Yes, Erik has loved. He has burned, starved, bled for it. He gave his music, his genius, his very soul—laid it all at her feet—and still it slipped through his fingers!” His voice surged, then broke down into a venom-soft hiss. “Love is cruelty. A paradise dangled before the monster, only to be snatched away.”

     The fire popped sharply, the sound like punctuation in the hush.

     He turned his mask toward her, eyes lit with a terrible brilliance. “And yet,” he whispered, trembling now, “it is the only thing Erik still desires. Even knowing it destroys.”

     She sat very still. A wound. A chain. Of course he would name it by its sharpest edges. She smoothed the blanket, steadying her hands, then drew in a slow breath. “That isn’t all it is, Erik.”

     His head snapped toward her. “No?”

     “Love can wound, yes.” she said carefully, her voice low but firm. “But it can also shelter. Comfort. Care. It can mean choosing to stay…even when leaving would be easier.” She glanced at the flames, then back to him. “It doesn’t have to be cruelty.”

     He went rigid. A tremor rippled through him, as if her words had struck some hidden seam his mask could not shield. A broken laugh escaped—soft, jagged, as though torn from him unwilling. “Staying.” he breathed. “You speak of staying.” His hands twitched once against his knees. “Staying. Care. Comfort. Love. Words for others. Not for Erik.”

     And yet his eyes did not leave hers. Hunger—and something wounded, something desperate—burned there, as though a part of him ached to believe she might be right.

     His breath rasped unevenly. Her words lingered in him like ghosts, pressing through the cracks in his defenses.

     “It’s your turn,” she said, softer still, careful not to snap the fine thread stretched between them. “Ask me something.”

     The request stirred him like a stone dropped into still water. He did not speak at once. His jaw worked, questions grinding themselves to powder behind his teeth. At last, low and strained:

     “Why stay with Erik?”

     She sighed at the weight of his gaze, at the desperate demand beneath it. For a heartbeat she faltered, her throat tight with all the truths she could not safely say: because you would not let me go anyway. Because you dragged me back when I tried. Because I would die in the dark before I could ever find my way out.

     When she spoke, her voice was quiet, steady, though her hands tightened in her lap.

     “Because I’ve chosen to.” Each word deliberate, anchored. Her eyes did not leave his. “Because however difficult it may be, however deeply you doubt it… I would rather be here with you than anywhere else.”

     That part was true—or true enough that she got herself to believe it.

     “You think I would stay out of fear. But that isn’t why I rise each morning, Erik. It isn’t why I sing with you, or why I listen when you play.” She drew in a tremulous breath. “I stay because I want to. Because you are not as unworthy of being chosen as you think. Just like you said I am.”

     The words were too much, too dangerous, and her heart lurched at what consequence might follow. But hadn’t she already decided—to let this pursuit play out? To see where it led?

     Her lips curved in the faintest, almost pained smile. Yet the warmth in it was undeniable, despite the turmoil knotting her chest. “That is my answer. And if you ask me again tomorrow, it will be the same.”

     For a long moment he did not move. Silence thickened, as though even the fire withheld its breath. His eyes searched her face with a painful intensity, golden and unblinking, as if he could strip the skin from her words and find their truth hidden there.

     But suspicion clung to him like armor. His jaw tightened; his fists curled against his knees. The mask angled away—not dismissing, but defending, as though her answer had cut too near an old wound.

     “You say that,” he muttered at last, low and hoarse. “You say it as though it were simple. As though it cost you nothing.” His shoulders rose and fell on a strained breath, his whole frame drawn taut as a wire.

     And yet—his voice trembled at the edges, betraying him. The shield he tried to raise faltered, fractured by the look in her eyes. For all his disbelief, for all his doubt, the possibility of her sincerity shook him more than any lie could have.

     The fire cracked softly. She did not look away.

     “My turn,” she said then, her tone gentler than her words, steady enough to meet his steel. “What is your happiest memory?”

     His jaw worked, grinding against instinct and terror. A low, uneven sound escaped him—half laugh, half groan. “Happy,” he muttered, as though the word itself were obscene. “Do you even know what you ask?”

     “I only want to know.”

     Silence. Then, haltingly: “Perhaps…Persia.” His gaze shifted to the fire. “There was a time the Shah prized my work. My tricks built palaces and devices kings marveled at. Nadir…” The name thinned to almost nothing. “He treated me like a man. Not a monster. With him, I was…secure. For a time…valued.” His fingers twitched against his knees. “If that was happiness, then perhaps I knew a shadow of it.”

     A breath. Harsh. Another.

     “No.” The word snapped, breaking the thought. His head shook sharply. “There was another. Christine.”

     The name hung in the air, fragile and aching.

     “When she kissed me,” he whispered, “at the end. When she left. I had taken everything from her—her freedom, her love—and still she…” His breath caught. “Still she kissed me. And for one heartbeat I thought—” His fists tightened. “I almost believed….she saw…something worth love. Worth touch.”

     His head bowed, the porcelain mask dipping toward the firelight. “That was the closest I have ever come.”

     Christine. The name throbbed like a bruise. Heat pricked her chest, sharp and unbidden—jealousy, unexpected, unwelcome, coiling tight beneath her ribs. Would she live in the shadow of that ghost forever, if she remained? If she chose him? If she gave him anything at all?

     She pulled the blanket closer, fingers clutching the seam as though to hold herself together. She could not trust her voice. The silence stretched, wire-taut.

     At last, she whispered, “Go ahead. Ask me one.”

     His eyes flicked to hers, firelight caught in their hollows. He trembled faintly; his words came low, bitten off.

     “Then tell me…do you feel it? When you look at me? Do you burn for Erik?”

     The floor seemed to drop beneath her. Heat surged into her face. She dragged the wool higher, hiding her mouth as though it could shield her from him.

     “I—I…” Her voice faltered, then steadied by sheer force. “I think…I thought about…when we were reading the last time…”

     His head tilted sharply.

     She swallowed, breath ragged, and tore the words free like a bandage. “I thought about kissing you. I even—” shame and defiance knotted tight—“I even dreamed of it, drifting to sleep.”

     Silence suffocated the room. Her fingers dug into the blanket; her heart hammered. Erik froze, every muscle locked, as though impaled by her words. Firelight flickered across the mask; his eyes widened, fever-bright, unblinking.
For a moment, he did not even breathe.

     Then a ragged gasp split free. He recoiled half an inch, fingers curling hard against his knees. For one dizzy beat he looked like a cornered animal.
“No,” he hissed, the word fractured. His head snapped side to side. “No—you will not say such things. You will not torment Erik with—” His hand flew to the mask, then dropped, trembling. “With lies!”

     His voice cracked upward, splintering. “Do you think he does not know? You mock him—you tempt him—you coat your tongue in honey and speak of fantasies, fantasies, as if he could ever be the object of them!”

     He surged half to his feet, then halted, swaying, fists clenched, chest heaving. His long frame shook with the effort not to break.

     She shrank small under the blanket, still and uncertain, caught in the storm she had half-expected, half-feared.

     His eyes blazed. “Do not dare tell Erik you dreamed of kissing him. Do not dare—” The words splintered in his throat, turned knives against himself. He wrenched away as if they would cut him open.

     Only his ragged breathing filled the room. Slowly, dragged by some terrible gravity, he faced her again. “Because if you touch me—” His throat worked. “If you kiss me—” The mask flared in the firelight like a drawn blade. “I will never let you go.”

     The vow fell raw and irrevocable.

     Silence crashed around them. He stood trembling, caught between fury and desperate wanting. His hands twitched, restless, as he tried and failed to pace. “Choosing to stay?” he spat. “You speak as if you could lull Erik into your trap! As if he cannot hear it—the softness, the honey, every word a lie!”

     Shadows flung themselves wide and quivering behind him. “You would soothe him until what? Until you found the knife? Until you killed him?”

     She clutched the blanket tighter, eyes lowered, lips sealed.

     His voice thinned, cracked. “You…you would make Erik believe you would stay. You would…live with him.” His shoulders caved, trembling. “God help him…he wants to believe you.”

     The rage broke, ebbing like a wave against stone. He swayed toward her, caught in his own undertow.

     She rose before she knew she meant to. “Erik?” she breathed. Something pulled her forward like commandment.

     Before he could retreat into fury again, she leaned up and pressed her lips to his—a trembling kiss over the thin black veil. Nothing more than a brush.

     It broke him.

     His body jolted, then collapsed before her as if the floor had dropped away. A sound tore from him—half sob, half gasp. His hands flew out, hovering, refusing to touch, as though even that would profane the moment.
“You—” His voice cracked into a cry. “You cannot—” His eyes gleamed wet behind the mask. “You cannot know what you have just done.”

     Then desperation surged. He stood, seized her arms, trembling, words pouring out like an oath carved in blood. “I will never—do you hear?—never let you go. You have chosen. You say you will live here, with me, in peace—then it is done.”

     His hands hovered at her shoulders, shaking violently, aching to hold but not daring. His voice fell, fevered, raw. “You are Erik's. And Erik—God forgive him—Erik is yours.”

     The echo rang through her, final as stone.

     She stood steady, breath shallow, staring at him through wavering firelight, and let the truth settle in her chest like a chain and a vow at once.

     He was right. She had sealed it—with a kiss.

Chapter Text

Monsieur Delarue,

I write to you with the assurance that my work continues, though progress is slower than I would wish. I believe I have uncovered a lead that may grant me entry into the cellars of the Opera. It is an unusually sensitive matter, and I must proceed with discretion if I am to be successful.

I beg your indulgence, therefore, for a little more time. Each day brings me closer, though the cellars guard their secrets jealously. Be certain that I pursue every trace of your son with diligence, and I will not rest until this lead is pressed to its end. Yet I must also entreat you, Monsieur, to keep a realistic view of the outcome. It may be that I return your son to you alive, as we both desire; but it is also possible that I recover only his remains.

As one father to another, I need not speak at length of your suffering, for I know it well. No grief cuts deeper than the loss of a child, nor does any hope shine brighter than the thought of his return. Hold fast to that hope, Monsieur. It is not a frail comfort, but the lantern by which we must walk this darkness.

With my deepest respect,

-M. Nadir Khan

     Nadir folded the letter with deliberate care, creasing the paper into thirds before sliding it into its envelope. He worried the letter might wound M. Delarue, yet his hand had been steady, and his words had been chosen with care. He pressed the flap closed and laid it aside, to be posted at dawn—by daylight, a message of progress and patience, while he himself went to labor in the shadows.

     Across the dim apartment, Joseph crouched over their tools as though preparing for a military campaign. Lanterns were trimmed. Crowbars were wrapped in cloth to dull their scrape against stone. Coils of rope were bundled with a soldier’s precision. He handled them all with relentless urgency, touching and re-touching each piece as though the ritual itself might keep his daughter alive another night. The sharp tang of brandy clung to him, a smell stronger than the guttering candle smoke that trembled in the ornate lanterns of Nadir's apartment.

     “You’ve thought of everything?” Nadir asked, slipping the letter into his coat. His voice was calm, though his eyes lingered on Joseph’s trembling hands.

     “Everything that matters,” Joseph rasped. “Lantern, rope, crowbars—what else do we need but the will to find her? …Them.” His voice faltered on the last word, and his hand hovered at the flask on his hip before dropping again, whether from shame or from Nadir’s watchful gaze it was impossible to tell.

     “Will alone breaks no stone.” Nadir said. He pulled on his jacket and fastened it tight across his chest. “We must be careful, and we must be silent. Tonight we return to Cimetière du Nord. I believe the entrance to the passage you escaped lies hidden in a sarcophagus or mausoleum. I intend to examine them all more closely.”

     Joseph let out a bitter laugh. “A sarcophagus. A night of coffins while (Y/N) may be dying beneath our feet.”

     “Or already dead,” Nadir replied, his tone flat and unyielding. “We will know nothing until we continue. And so we go.”

     Joseph looked up at him then, eyes clouded and fierce—at once wounded, wary, and angry all at once. Nadir had not spoken with malice, but the words cut just the same. Joseph said nothing, only bent to the tools, gathering them one by one, packing them into the sacks with the clatter of iron and rope.

     Nadir moved quietly about the room, snuffing the lanterns one by one. Each flame sputtered out, shadows swelling against the walls until they pressed close. The air thickened with the weight of unspoken things—the sealed letter on Nadir’s desk, the tools that lay like instruments of sacrilege, the silence stretched taut between grief and grim resolve. At last the final flame died, leaving only the autumn moonlight spilling pale through the window.

     “Then let us go and disturb the dead.” Joseph muttered, his voice thick with brandy and despair.

     Together they stepped out into the waiting night, their boots striking the stones, their breath fogging in the cold. Behind them the apartment fell silent, its shadows empty, as they went out toward the graveyard where secrets lay sealed in stone.

     The northern streets of Paris lay hushed beneath the autumn moon, their cobblestones slick with dew, the gas lamps set few and far between. In this quarter the life of the boulevards was far away—no late-night carriages clattered past, no music or laughter drifted from the cafés. Only the soft shuffle of boots and the muted jangle of iron in their packs disturbed the silence.

     Nadir set a measured pace, his coat a shield against the chill. He moved with quiet vigilance, eyes flicking from shadow to shadow, the ferrule of his walking stick clicking lightly against the stones. The city at night was a place of informers as much as thieves, and their errand could not bear curious eyes.

     Joseph walked at his side with none of that restraint. He stumbled once on the uneven paving and muttered a curse, the sour edge of brandy clinging to every word. His lantern swung loosely in his grip, casting long, restless arcs of light across shuttered windows and the crooked mouths of alleyways. Every so often his hand strayed toward the flask hidden beneath his coat, but the cold gravity of Nadir’s presence seemed to drag it back again.

     Their route wound past blackened churches and shuttered shops, through narrow lanes where only stray cats darted between shadows. From time to time a solitary figure appeared in the distance—a watchman with a lamp, a vagrant curled in a doorway—but each encounter dissolved without incident. No one stopped them. No one dared ask what two men carried in heavy sacks so late at night.

     As they neared the cemetery gates, the air itself seemed to change. The warmth of the sleepy city gave way to a damp, earthen chill, and silence deepened until even their breathing felt loud. The tall wrought-iron fence loomed in stark silhouette against the moon, its spear-like points bristling like the lances of a silent guard. Beyond, rows of mausoleums and monuments stood pale under the silver light, their marble faces gleaming like the watchful eyes of the dead.

     Joseph’s breath quickened at the sight. His steps grew more urgent, his shoulders tensing as though he might claw through the bars with his bare hands if they denied him entry.

     Nadir raised a hand, stilling him before the gate. “Quiet now. We do not go in as thieves breaking a lock. We go in as shadows.” His voice was low and steady, a stone set against the rising tide of Joseph’s grief.

     Together they slipped through a narrow gap where the iron had bent outward, their coats brushing the cold bars. Inside, the stillness of the cemetery closed around them like a tomb. The air smelled of damp earth and moss, the whisper of leaves stirring faintly in the wind. Somewhere in the darkness a raven shifted its wings and croaked once, then fell silent. The world beyond the walls felt suddenly distant, as though they had crossed into another country where only the dead held dominion.

     The lanterns cast their thin glow over the gravel paths as the two men threaded deeper into the necropolis. Monuments rose on either side like mute sentinels—winged angels with outstretched arms, urns draped in stone veils, crypt doors sealed tight with rust. The cemetery was a labyrinth of stone and shadow, and Nadir walked it with deliberate caution, his mind fixed on the point he had traced upon his maps. Beneath this ground, the old channels of sewers and waterways converged; if there was an entrance, it would be here.

     At last he halted before a structure crouched against the northern wall: a family tomb with bronze doors tarnished to green, its inscription nearly swallowed by senescent ivy. He pointed, his expression taut. “Here. The maps indicate an old channel beneath this ground. If there is a place to begin, it is this crypt.”

     Joseph swung his lantern up, the light spilling across the weathered carving. His face tightened. “No. Not here. I told you—it was by the cherub, the one with the broken face. That’s where I came out.”

     “You were half-strangled when you fled.” Nadir replied evenly. “Your memory cannot be trusted. This”—he tapped the ivy-choked stone with a gloved hand—“is the stronger lead.”

     Joseph’s jaw clenched, his lips pressing into a thin line, but he said nothing more. He only shifted his lantern aside as Nadir pulled a crowbar from his pack. Together they wedged the iron into the seam of the bronze door. The metal groaned, a long thin scream that scraped against the silence of the dead. For long minutes they labored, shoulders straining, sweat beading on their brows despite the cold night air. At last the lock surrendered with a hollow snap, and the door creaked open on its ancient hinges.

     Lantern light spilled into a narrow chamber lined with coffins, their wood blackened and splintering, their silk linings gnawed to threads by vermin. The air rolled out to meet them, stale and thick with the stench of earth, mold, and rot. Joseph gagged, pulling his sleeve over his nose, but Nadir pressed forward.

     He stepped inside first, his boots scuffing against flagstones slick with dust. Lowering his lantern close to the ground, he crouched, eyes scanning for seams in the stone, the faintest hairline crack that might betray a hidden hatch. He pressed his palm flat against the floor, feeling for a draft, listening for the whisper of hollowness beneath.

     Nothing. The stones were silent, sealed by the weight of centuries. The air was still and oppressive, heavy with the dust of long-dead bones.

     Nadir rose at last, his expression set, and turned back toward Joseph. “Nothing. This is not the one.”

     Joseph lifted his lantern higher, his eyes darting over the rotted coffins as though expecting them to stir. A curse slipped between his teeth, and he staggered back into the night air.

     Together they forced the bronze doors shut again, the clang muffled by rust and age. Then on they went—another tomb, another crowbar biting into hinges stiff with time. More wasted effort, more dust, more silence. They fell into a grim rhythm, their lanterns bobbing between the monuments like twin will-o’-the-wisps. Each time Nadir knelt to test the floor, pressing his ear against the stone, straining for the faintest hollow echo. Each time the answer came back the same: solid, unyielding, deaf to their desperation.

     Hours slipped past. By the time the eastern sky began to pale, their hands were raw from iron, their arms leaden with exhaustion, their coats and boots thick with the reek of dust, rot, and mold. The earth had yielded no passage, only silence and the stubborn weight of the dead.

     At last Nadir lifted a hand, his voice low but firm. “Enough. If we linger longer, the groundskeeper or the police will find us.”

     Joseph spat a curse and rammed his crowbar into his pack with a clatter of iron. His eyes were hollow, rimmed red with fatigue, his mouth set in a grim line that trembled at its corners.

     They trudged back through the rows of monuments without speaking. Dew silvered the grass, the air sharp and clean after the staleness of the tombs. As they neared the broken gap in the gate, Nadir slowed, his gaze sweeping once more across the pale rows of vaults. They stood mute and inscrutable in the gray dawn, as if mocking the long night of labor that had won them nothing.

     Nadir’s expression betrayed nothing, but his thoughts were heavy. The maps had promised a channel here, yet the stones had kept their secrets. It would take more than one night to wrest them free.

     They returned the following evening, grimly resolved to cover more ground. The moon was thinner now, a sliver of silver half-hidden behind restless clouds. The air carried the sharper bite of autumn, damp and cold against their faces, and the mist clung low over the grass like a winding sheet. Joseph was already deeper in his cups before they had crossed the cemetery gate. He stumbled over the roots of a yew tree clawing at the path, cursed under his breath, and nearly dropped his lantern, so that the flame guttered wildly before steadying again.

     “This way,” Nadir said, his voice clipped, his patience worn thin. He had charted another promising cluster of tombs near the southern wall. If the first line of his maps had failed him, the next might still bear fruit. His steps were precise, his pace measured, his mind fixed on the invisible channels that must run like veins beneath the earth.

     Joseph muttered something about wasting time, but he followed with dragging feet. The graves rose and fell in the lamplight like endless rows of teeth, their carved faces blurring together: angels eroded to hollow-eyed guardians, urns sagging beneath veils of stone. To Nadir, the necropolis had become a labyrinth without end, pressing on his thoughts with the weight of silence and centuries.

     It was Joseph who halted first. He froze before a tomb half-sunken into shadow, his face pale, eyes wide in the flickering glow. He lifted a shaking hand toward the carving on its façade—a cherub, its stone face cracked and worn smooth by years of rain.

     “There,” he whispered, then louder, more urgent. “There! The cherub with the broken face. I told you—I told you this was where I came out!”

     Nadir bent low, brushing ivy from the stone with his glove, his eyes narrowing. “No,” he said firmly. “This tomb is sealed. You never passed this way.”

     Joseph shook his head violently, stumbling closer. “I remember it. I swear it—the broken face, the angel watching! This is the place. She followed me here. She’s down there!”

     Before Nadir could stop him, Joseph wrenched his crowbar free and brought it crashing down against the face of the cherub. The blow split the silence into jagged echoes. Again he struck, and again—chips of stone flying, blood smearing across the metal as his knuckles split open. His lantern quivered in his other hand, casting frantic shadows across the tomb walls.

     “Enough!” Nadir barked, seizing him by the shoulders and wrenching him back.

     Joseph sagged against him, trembling, tears streaking his grime-darkened face. “She’s down there,” he gasped, pressing his forehead against the cold stone. “She followed me into the dark—she’s calling for me.”

     “You’ll wake the whole quarter!” Nadir hissed, his eyes flaring with anger and unease. “Or worse—draw the gendarmes down upon us!”

     Joseph wrenched around, wild-eyed, his spit catching in the lantern-light. “You don’t care about her!” he shouted hoarsely. “You only care for your pay! My girl could be bones, and you’d step over her to bring your missing boy home!”

     Nadir’s patience snapped like a rope under strain. “Your grief blinds you!” he said, his tone cutting like steel. “And your drink will doom us both!”

     The words cracked through the night and lingered, bitter and unyielding. Joseph’s chest heaved, his fists trembling, but no reply came. Only his ragged breath and the restless stir of leaves disturbed the silence that followed.

     They searched no more that night. Without speaking, the two men gathered their tools, their footsteps hollow on the gravel paths. The lanterns fluttered as they trudged back through the necropolis. The iron and rope in their packs weighed heavily, yet the words they had flung at each other burdened them more, pressing like chains neither could shrug off.

     The following night found them once more at the cemetery gates, though the silence between them was thicker than the autumn fog. Behind them, the city still slept, its streets empty and cold, but within the walls of the necropolis the air felt heavier, as though the stones themselves had drunk in their anger and now brooded with it.

     Joseph spoke no word as they entered. He carried his tools with mechanical care, each movement dulled by fatigue and the dregs of brandy. The faint clink of his flask against his belt broke the hush again and again, a sound that pricked at Nadir’s nerves more sharply than the rustle of leaves or the hoot of a distant owl.

     Nadir pressed forward without pause, lantern steady, his jaw set in the grim line of silent determination. His eyes swept the paths ahead, fixed not on Joseph’s stumbling shadow but on the map he carried in his head.

     They turned toward a row of mausoleums, their facades carved with elaborate shields  and family crests that gleamed faintly in the lantern light. Nadir had marked this section in his notes. The wealthy buried their dead deep, and deep chambers meant hidden foundations. If a stair had ever been disguised, it might be here—above the underground channels he had traced across his maps.

     “This one,” Nadir said curtly, pointing to a tomb whose lintel was carved with a serpent coiled around a shield. The bronze door hung half-loose on its hinges, eaten away by age. Joseph gave a wordless nod, and together they drove the crowbar into the seam. The metal groaned, protesting, as flakes of verdigris rained down like brittle leaves.

     Inside lay a narrow chamber lined with coffins long since collapsed into dust. The stench of mildew and damp stone rolled out to meet them, sharp and stale. Joseph raised his lantern high, its glow shuddering across warped lids and broken wood, while Nadir crouched low, lantern steady in his hand. He pressed his ear to the cold floor, fingers tracing the seams, listening for any whisper of emptiness beneath. Nothing. Only the mute solidity of earth, deaf to their efforts.

     Joseph exhaled sharply, a curse breaking from his throat. “Another wasted night.” He let his crowbar fall with a clatter that rang off the walls, his shoulders sagging in defeat.

     “We do not know that until we have finished,” Nadir replied, his tone measured. Rising, he brushed dust from his gloves with a flick of restrained irritation. “We check them all.”

     And so the hours stretched, marked by a grim procession from one mausoleum to the next. Lantern-light danced across stone effigies, catching angels and saints whose features had eroded into grotesque masks. Rusted doors shrieked against their hinges, dust and cobwebs poured from splintered coffins, and the same choking smell of mildew clung to every breath. Each time Nadir knelt to test the floors, patient, methodical, pressing his palm flat to the stone in search of the faintest hollow echo. Each time Joseph grew more restless, his bitterness mounting, his movements sharper, his muttering louder.

     At one point Joseph stumbled against a broken urn and swore so loudly that the night itself seemed to recoil. The fragments clattered across the path as he kicked them into the shadows. Then he sank down onto the damp grass, burying his face in his hands. His voice came muffled, despair raw in it. “We’ll never find it. She’s already gone.”

     Nadir lowered himself opposite, setting his lantern on the ground between them. For a long moment he said nothing, letting the silence settle heavy as the fog. When he did speak, his voice was quieter than Joseph had ever heard it. “Do you think I have not known loss, Joseph? I search for Charles Delarue because I must, yes—but I search for (Y/N) as well. Not for wages. Not for duty. But because she is your blood. And because no father should be left without an answer.”

      Joseph lifted his head. His eyes were rimmed red, his face hollowed by grief, but the words seemed to soften him for a heartbeat. Then the moment passed. He fumbled for his flask, uncorked it, and drank deep. Wordlessly, he offered it across the lantern-light.

     Nadir hesitated, then shook his head. Instead, he reached into his satchel and drew out a small parcel of bread and cheese. He set it between them, and they ate in silence, the cold ground soaking through their coats, the graves around them silvered by moonlight. For a brief span of minutes they were not seekers, nor partners, nor adversaries—only two men, two fathers, weary and human.

     When at last they rose, the eastern sky was already paling. They had forced open four tombs that night, and every one had yielded nothing but the expected dead. Their tools hung heavy on their shoulders, their limbs ached with strain, yet heavier still was the gnawing certainty that the stones meant to resist them at every turn.

     As they slipped back through the gap in the gate, Nadir cast one last look behind. The cemetery stretched endless and mute, its marble faces cold in the first light of dawn. He thought of the maps folded in his coat, of the channels he had traced with such confidence, and for the first time a needle of doubt pierced the armor of his resolve.

     The next night came colder, the mist heavier. It coiled low across the ground, muffling their footfalls as they slipped once more through the cemetery gate. The moon hid behind drifting clouds, leaving their lanterns to shoulder the dark alone. By now, failure weighed on them both, but heavier still was the gnawing knowledge that time was sliding past, indifferent and unrelenting.

     Joseph moved with restless energy, his shoulders jerking, his steps uneven. His flask was lighter than the night before, and he made no attempt to hide it. The sour tang of brandy clung to his breath, thick in the mist. His eyes, red-rimmed and fever-bright, roved ceaselessly over the monuments, as though each might suddenly split open and yield his daughter to him.

     Nadir, by contrast, pressed forward in his usual measured stride, lantern steady, gaze sharp though inside him a taut wire strained. The maps in his coat had narrowed the possibilities, yet every night ended the same—in sealed stone and silence. His patience had not yet snapped, but he could feel it thinning, stretched by every fruitless heave of the crowbar.

     They turned toward the center of the cemetery, where the tombs rose close as teeth. The lantern light revealed ranks of angels, crosses, and urns, their faces blurred by moss and weathering. The stones seemed to crowd around them, closing in, forcing their path into narrower ways.

     Abruptly Joseph stopped before a squat mausoleum streaked black with decades of rain. He raised his crowbar like a standard, his voice unsteady, breath catching. “This one,” he whispered, then louder, with ragged conviction. “This one. She’s here. I feel it.”

     Nadir did not answer at once. He studied the stone, tracing its lichen-choked inscription with his eyes. There was nothing to distinguish it from a hundred others. At last he drew in a slow breath. “The maps point elsewhere. This one lies beyond the lines.”

     Joseph whirled on him, eyes fever-bright in the lantern glow. “Maps! Always your damned maps! While my girl may be rotting beneath us, you stand here squinting at ink and paper.”

     “The maps are all we have,” Nadir returned, his voice cold as stone. “Without them we are blind men scratching at walls.”

     “Better blind than faithless!” Joseph bellowed. He swung his crowbar and slammed it against the mausoleum door. The clang split the stillness like thunder, reverberating through the graves. “You care nothing for her—you care only for Delarue’s son. Admit it! My girl means nothing to you!”

     Nadir’s jaw tightened, and when he spoke, his words lashed out like a whip. “Better I care for one with sense than follow a drunkard into madness. Your grief blinds you, Joseph. Your drink makes you a danger. Do you think your daughter would thank you for this? For stumbling, cursing, wasting nights while she waits—if she waits at all?”

     The words struck harder than any blow. Joseph staggered back a step, his chest heaving, his knuckles white around the crowbar’s shaft. The cuts on his hands, raw and red from the night before, smeared fresh blood across the iron. For a heartbeat the night seemed to hold its breath.

     Then Joseph let out a guttural sound—half curse, half sob—and the crowbar slipped from his grasp. It hit the ground with a metallic crash that echoed off the stones. He turned away, shoulders quaking, his face twisted in a rage too deep for words, grief too wild to master.

     Nadir bent, retrieved the fallen tool, and slid it back into the sack without comment. There was no triumph in the act, no satisfaction—only the bitter taste of futility on his tongue. The cemetery loomed around them, vast and unyielding, its monuments rising like walls. The dead themselves continued to conspire to keep their secrets.

     The rest of the night passed in uneasy separation: Joseph pacing like a caged beast among the tombs, muttering to himself and to the graves, while Nadir pressed on alone in grim silence. He marked walls, tested floors, set his ear against cold stone again and again, listening for the faintest hollow beneath. Each time the same reply—nothing. Always nothing.

     By the time dawn crept pale across the horizon, they had nothing to show for their labors but blistered hands, aching backs, and the raw edges of a quarrel unresolved. They slipped from the cemetery in silence, the mist unraveling behind them, carrying the echo of iron and harsh words into the waking city.

     The nights bled into one another, each marked by the scrape of iron on stone and the stale breath of sealed tombs. Ten days passed, then more—time losing its edge in the monotony of lantern-light, sweat, and the clink of tools. To Nadir, the cemetery became a second map etched into memory: the ivy-choked vaults of the northern wall, the serpent-shield tombs in the south that mocked him with their stubborn silence, the rows of angels whose faces seemed to lose their humanity the longer he walked beneath their blind gazes.

     To Joseph, the place became a purgatory. Each night he drank deeper, his flask lighter, his voice rougher, his eyes more wild. He stumbled after Nadir not with discipline, but with despair, driven on by grief that gnawed him hollow.

     Every night ended the same: hands torn by crowbars, bodies aching, lungs full of dust and mildew, nothing gained but silence. Nadir’s maps grew more cluttered with scrawls and question marks, margins worn thin with corrections and doubts. He knew the old sewer lines ran beneath these grounds; he was certain a hidden passage intersected them. Yet the earth itself would not yield. If Erik had hidden an entrance here, he had buried it so cunningly that only chance—or madness—could unearth it.

     And then, on a night when the moon lay veiled behind a ceiling of clouds, they pressed into the heart of the cemetery. The mist hung thick, curling low over the grass, and even Nadir, who moved with a soldier’s vigilance, felt the silence pressing on him heavier than before. The central grounds were ringed with monuments older than the rest—stones whose inscriptions had been nearly erased by time, whose plain, weighty façades stood in contrast to the ornate crypts of the outer walls. It was a place that seemed not merely to house the dead, but to guard something sacred deeper still.

     Nadir halted before a sarcophagus that stood apart from the others. It was broad and rough-hewn, its lid unadorned—no angel, no urn, no epitaph to soften its mass. It bore no name at all. “This one….” he murmured, more to himself than to Joseph.

     Joseph lifted his lantern, the glow trembling over the pitted stone. “It’s not on your maps.” he rasped, his voice hoarse with drink and sleeplessness.

     “No,” Nadir replied, his eyes narrowing, “which is why it troubles me.” He knelt and ran his gloved hand along the base. The seams were irregular, the stone newer than those around it, as though it had been laid not to honor the dead but to bury a secret.

     They set their crowbars to the edge. The lid groaned under their combined weight, a slow grinding of stone against stone. Sweat broke across their brows as they heaved, shoulders straining, breath harsh in the mist. The sarcophagus shifted—an inch, then two. And then—

     A hollow sound. Faint, but unmistakable.

     Both men froze, staring at each other in the lantern glow.

     “There,” Joseph whispered, trembling, his eyes fever-bright. “Do you hear it? Empty. She’s down there—I knew it!”

     Nadir pressed his palm against the seam, feeling the subtle reverberation beneath. His pulse quickened—not with Joseph’s desperate hope, but with the cold confirmation that after long, wasted nights, they had found something real. “It is hollow,” he said quietly. “There is a passage below.”

     They strained again, prying harder, until the veins stood out in their temples and their arms shook with exhaustion. The stone grated, shifted a fraction more—but its weight was enormous, and the night was slipping away. Already a pale wash of dawn threaded into the mist, the east quickening with light.

     “Again!” Joseph gasped, his palms torn and bleeding anew, his whole body thrown into the effort. “We can’t leave it—we can’t—”

     Nadir seized his arm, pulling him back with iron force. “It is too late. Look at the sky.” His voice was grim, his jaw set hard. “If we are found here now, all is lost. We will return tomorrow.”

     Joseph sobbed and sagged against the sarcophagus, pressing his forehead to the cold stone. “I’m coming,” he whispered, his voice raw with grief. “Do you hear me, my girl? I’m coming.”

     Reluctantly they gathered their tools, wrapping crowbars in cloth, coiling rope with stiff, trembling fingers. Their lanterns guttered low as they trudged toward the gate, the bitter taste of triumph in their mouths, soured by the impossibility of claiming it.

     They never reached the street.

     Lanterns flared suddenly in the mist ahead, brighter and steadier than their own. Harsh voices split the silence: “There! The grave robbers!”

     Two policemen stepped forward with pistols drawn, another clutching a truncheon. Behind them, a watchman carried shackles that glinted in the lamplight. “You’ve been seen, night after night—desecrating tombs, breaking vaults. The evidence is plain enough.”

     Joseph froze. Panic flooded his face, and then he lurched sideways, bolting into the rows of graves. His lantern swung wildly, scattering light across the monuments. “No—you don’t understand!” he cried, his voice breaking.

     “Stop him!” one officer barked, leveling his pistol as another gave chase.

     Joseph whirled, crowbar raised. The iron whistled through the air, forcing the policeman back, nearly toppling him on the slick grass. “Keep back!” Joseph snarled, his voice ragged, half-mad. “You won’t take me—I have to find her!”

     The men advanced cautiously, lanterns bobbing, pistols trained. Joseph lashed out again, his blows wild and clumsy, dulled by brandy and exhaustion. His lantern slipped from his grip and clattered to the stones, the flame sputtering in the damp. He lunged once more, desperate and incoherent, before a truncheon cracked hard across his wrist. The crowbar clanged to the ground, and he collapsed to his knees, clutching his hand, cursing and sobbing in the same breath.

     Nadir had not moved. He stood with his own crowbar dropped deliberately at his feet, his hands raised. His voice cut through the chaos, sharp and commanding: “Enough, Joseph! You drunken fool—you’ll only make it worse. Stand down before they kill you!”

     Joseph looked up, sweat and tears streaking his face, the fight leaking out of him under Nadir’s words. His shoulders sagged, and he let the officers seize his arms.

     Cold irons closed around Nadir’s wrists, biting against his skin. He did not resist as the policemen herded them toward the gate, lanterns bobbing in the thinning mist. Joseph staggered beside him, muttering broken curses, his face twisted with humiliation and grief. The officers dragged him more than he walked, his boots scraping against gravel.

     Nadir kept his own steps measured. Rage coiled in him, but it was an inward, silent thing—a bitterness at being caught just as the stones had begun to yield, at Joseph’s drunken frenzy that had undoubtedly turned suspicion into certainty. His jaw locked, his gaze fixed ahead, as the cemetery gate clanged shut behind them.

     The city beyond was still half-asleep, its streets gray with the first light of dawn. Shop fronts remained shuttered, the chimneys dark, and a lone milk cart rattled by along the cobbles. The small procession cut a strange figure through the empty quarter: policemen with their prisoners in chains. A dog barked once, and then fell silent. A window creaked open; a woman’s face appeared briefly in the gloom, and then vanished back inside.

     Joseph stumbled again, nearly toppling one of the officers. His voice rose in a raw, broken plea: “You don’t understand—she’s there, my girl’s there—let me go back!”

     A truncheon slammed across his shoulder, silencing him. He fell into a ragged quiet, head bowed, breath coming in harsh, uneven gasps.

     On the street, a caged wagon waited for them, its iron bars stark against the paling sky. The horses stamped and snorted, their breath steaming in the cold dawn, hooves striking sparks from the cobbles. The policemen marched their captives to it without ceremony, boots crunching on the gravel.

     The watchman hauled the door wide, the hinges shrieking like a protest. Joseph balked, twisting once in their grip with a hoarse cry—“No, I can’t, I can’t leave her here!”—but the officers forced him forward. He stumbled hard against the bars before collapsing onto the bench inside. His forehead pressed to the iron, his breath fogging against it as he muttered her name in a low, broken chant.

     Nadir mounted the step without resistance, the irons biting at his wrists as the policemen guided him through the opening. He seated himself opposite Joseph, his back straight, his dark eyes steady, unflinching. The door clanged shut behind him, the heavy lock sliding into place with grim finality.

     Outside, the officers climbed to the driver’s bench. A crack of the reins sent the horses lunging forward, the wagon lurching into motion. Its wheels rattled over the cobbles, iron-shod and unyielding, while the lantern inside swayed with the motion, shadows crawling across the bars.

     The wagon groaned and jolted through the empty quarter, carrying its prisoners toward the commissariat as Paris slowly stirred awake around them—shutters creaked open, a baker’s door unbolted, the faint smell of wood smoke drifted on the chill air.

     Nadir did not look across at Joseph. His thoughts had turned inward, as though the rattle of chains and the shuffle of boots had summoned ghosts from another time—ghosts of a more distant grief, no less merciless. He saw again the slow wasting of his boy. Reza’s laughter had faltered first, then his words, then the light in his eyes. One by one, each flame guttered out, and Nadir had been powerless to hold it. He had spent months emptying hope like coins into a debt that would never be repaid.

     In that darkness, there had been Erik. Strange, terrible Erik—his face a sight that sent others recoiling, but whose hands conjured marvels from the air. He had sat at Reza’s side for hours, spinning riddles, weaving shadows into stories, drawing miraculous songs from his kamancheh. For a little while, the sickness loosened its grip, and Reza’s eyes brightened. To Nadir, those hours had been a mercy, a beacon glimmering against an endless night. And when the boy slept, Erik had kept vigil too, his presence a strange comfort against the suffocating silence.

     And now here he was again, shackled and shamed, a father in chains beside another—two men dragged through the streets like common thieves for daring to claw at stone in search of the children they had lost.

     The memory cut through him as sharply as the truncheon had struck Joseph’s back. He supposed he could understand the man’s ruinous desperation—understand how grief gnawed at reason and drove fathers into madness. He had lived it himself, waiting at a bedside, bargaining with fate.

     But, understanding was not forgiveness. The cold truth was this: Joseph’s lack of control had undone them both. If he had stilled his hand, held his tongue, they might have slipped away with dawn, ready to return and pry deeper into the hollow they had finally uncovered. Instead, they rode in irons toward the commissariat, their discovery left behind, their quarry sealed once more beneath unyielding stone.

     The officers turned down a narrow street that funneled toward the quarter’s jail house. The building loomed at its end, squat and grim, its barred windows glinting with the first edge of sun. The great doors stood ajar, black within, yawning wide as if to swallow whatever entered.

     Nadir drew in a long breath, pressing his bitterness down into stillness. There would be hours enough to rage later, when the walls closed in and the dark stretched unbroken. For now, he stared into the unknown as he always had—measured, controlled, his gaze fixed straight ahead. The chains at his wrists were heavy, but heavier still was the weight of memory, dragging at him with every step.

Chapter Text

     The fire burned steadily in the grate, its glow casting restless shadows across the drawing room walls. (Y/N) sat upon the rug, knees folded beneath her, while Erik lay collapsed against her lap, undone. His mask pressed cold against the folds of her skirts, and from behind it came the raw, strangled sound of a man broken beyond repair. His whole frame convulsed with sobs, each tremor shuddering through the thin fabric and into her very bones. She had seen him tremble and wail before, had witnessed his fury coil and lash like a wrathful serpent—but never this collapse, never such terror and relief tangled into one breath.

     Her hand moved instinctively, drawing slow circles across the ridges of his back, as though she soothed a wounded creature. Every motion traced the sharp tremors of his body, his ribs rising and falling beneath her palm with a desperate unevenness, the gasps of one who has nearly drowned. Each sob wrenched from him seemed to tear past his will, grief and panic breaching every defense he had built.

     She stared into the flames, their tongues leaping higher, devouring the logs, her hand maintaining its rhythm even as her mind reeled. The enormity of what she had done pressed upon her as heavily as his weight across her knees. A kiss. So small, so human a gesture—and yet in giving it she had sealed herself to him. She had seen it in his eyes before the tears: wonder, fear, rapture. He believed now that she loved him, and clung to that belief; as it was his salvation long denied.

     Oh, but the truth was forever a tangled knot of contradictions. Yes—she felt for him. Yes—against her fear, against her better reason, she had begun to feel the dangerous pull of compassion, even of desire. Of love? And yet she had also chosen, perhaps with cold calculation, to humor him as her only means of survival. That resolve now tasted of ash. In kissing him, she had not merely offered solace—she had made a promise, binding herself to him, to this subterranean labyrinth, perhaps until death.

     Her gaze lingered on the fire, on the wood consumed to embers. Erik’s secrets weighed on her: the hidden house, the labyrinth and its traps, the mask that never left his face, on the strange music that filled the air like a spell. His volatility, too—the sudden violence, the brooding silences that pressed on the walls like storms gathering in shadow. Yet she also thought of the torment that had twisted him, of the loneliness that now poured raw against her knees in shuddering sobs. All of it pressed down on her, an invisible hand that pinned her to the rug.

     Had her compassion betrayed her? Had her budding tenderness—her reckless attraction—pushed her to act too rashly? She had wanted to soothe him, to still the anguish blazing in his eyes, and so she had leaned close, brushed her lips against the veil. But that small, desperate act had cost her dearly.

     A kiss. A covenant.

     His sobbing quieted by degrees, though his shoulders still trembled beneath her hand. She looked down at the mask pressed against her lap, white and stark in the firelight, and felt a pang she could not name. Fear. Pity. Longing. All three coiled together, impossible to untangle. She swallowed hard, steadying herself, and let her palm continue its slow circles across his back, though each stroke carried her deeper into the fate she had chosen.

     God help me, she thought, echoing his own broken cry. God help us both.

     At last Erik stirred, lifting his head from her lap with a shuddering breath that rasped like a man resurrected from death. The firelight caught on the porcelain, gleaming wet where tears had streaked across its edges. He straightened but did not move further, his body drawn taut, as though any sudden gesture might snap the fragile thread that held him together.

     For a long moment he only looked at her. His eyes, red-rimmed and luminous through the hollows of the mask, drank her in with a desperation that was almost unbearable to witness. His lips shifted soundlessly behind the veil, fumbling for words that never came. Then, with a slow deliberation that seemed to fight him at every inch, he raised a trembling hand.

     His fingers hovered above her cheek, suspended as though waiting for permission. When at last they touched, the contact was a ghost of a caress, feather-light, trembling. Wonder and terror mingled in that single brush of skin. He lingered only long enough to memorize the warmth of her flesh before the hand fell away, as if scorched.

     Erik drew back sharply, his breath uneven, sitting rigid, as if listening to a chorus of voices battling in his mind. The silence between them thickened, broken only by the restless crackle of the fire. Then, with a strange, mechanical finality, he rose. His joints seemed to resist him, his body moving like a puppet tugged unwillingly by its strings.

     For a heartbeat he loomed above her, figure wavering in the glow, mask angled down in unreadable silence. His eyes glinted once, a golden flash of anguish—or of longing—before he turned abruptly. He crossed the room in quick, stifled strides, as though the weight of her presence burned him.

     At the dining room threshold he faltered, shoulders bowed, one hand clutching the door frame. The firelight etched him in stark relief: a silhouette of torment poised between retreat and return. She thought he might speak—confess, curse, beg—but no words came. Only a sharp inhale, a strangled sound in his throat, and then he slipped into the darkness beyond, leaving the room to the fire and her silence.

     After a moment, she heard his bedroom door close with a muted click. The chamber fell to silence, broken only by the restless crackle of the fire and the quick rhythm of her breath. She remained seated on the rug, her cheek still tingling from the fleeting touch of his hand. The emptiness he left behind filled her chest, heavy and hollow, and as she stared into the flames a terrible certainty settled over her: she had reached him, yes—but in reaching him she had also driven him deeper into the prison of his own fear.

      The room seemed cavernous in his absence, the hush pressing close until it filled her lungs. She sat unmoving where he had left her, skirts still creased and damp from the mask’s dead weight. Only when her vision blurred did she realize a tear had slipped free—one single line of heat tracing down her cheek.

     She had not meant to cry. In truth, she had not felt much of anything at all. Numbness dulled her nerves, a stillness that kept her upright though the enormity of her choices threatened to crush her. The tear betrayed her, and she brushed it away quickly, almost impatiently, ashamed of what it revealed. Rising stiffly, she forced herself to gather her scattered self, each movement mechanical, her body obeying where her heart refused.

     (Y/N) made her way down the familiar corridor to the Louis-Philippe room—its name absurdly grand for what was, in truth, a gilded cage. The air inside was cold, the fire in the grate burned low. She moved through her nightly ritual in silence, every task dulled, stripped of meaning. Her fingers were clumsy as she undressed, shedding dress and corset until only a thin white shift clung to her skin, whispering in the still air. The hem brushed just above her knee, baring the pale curve of her thigh to the chill of the chamber.

     She crouched before the hearth and coaxed the fire back to life. Embers glowed sullenly beneath the poker, reluctant, before the kindling caught and a thin flame unfurled upward, promising warmth to come. She lingered, transfixed by its fragile growth, before turning away to slip between the wide bed’s sheets.

     The covers swallowed her. The silk was cold against her skin, and she drew the weight of them tight around her shoulders, as if fabric alone might shield her from the heaviness of the night. But the tears came again—silent, unrelenting—soaking into the pillow beneath her cheek. She wept for Erik, for his broken sobs, for the torment etched so deep into him that even her kiss had been too much to bear. She wept for herself as well—trapped in this labyrinth of stone and silence, bound to him now whether she willed it or not, worn thin by fear, by longing, by the exhaustion of her own indecision.

     Her grief turned to her father, and pain clutched her chest anew. She imagined him lying cold and still in some forgotten corner of the cellars just above her head, lost forever. She wept for his absence, for the empty, confusing place his vanishing had left in her life.

     And beneath all of it beat a darker fear: the fear of what it meant to belong to Erik now. The kiss had given him a tether he would never release, a claim he would carry to his last breath. She feared his love as much as his fury, feared the vastness of his need, the immensity of the prison it could become.

     At last her sobs weakened into ragged breaths, and exhaustion dragged her under. She drifted into sleep with her cheeks still wet, her body curled tight beneath the covers, as though even in slumber she sought to shield herself from the terrible weight of what she had done. The fire dwindled low, shadows creeping over the gilded walls, until the Louis-Philippe room sank into silence—her tears drying into the stillness of the night.

     What woke her was not sound, but weight: a subtle shift in the mattress, the faint dip of pressure at her right side. At first she thought it part of a dream, her body slow and heavy beneath the warmth of the blankets. But the sensation persisted—steady, deliberate, insistent—as though someone leaned against her bed.

     Her eyes opened to a darkness lit only by the dancing red glow of the steady fire. The chamber lay hushed, its silence immense. Slowly, cautiously, she rolled to her side. What she saw drove the last shreds of sleep from her.

     It was Erik.

     He knelt on the floor, his thin body folded against the bed as though in supplication. His arms braced hard against the edge of the mattress, his head pressed low into the covers with such force the fabric indented beneath him. His shoulders trembled, his whole frame taut with suppressed violence. The firelight caught the mask in brief glimmers of fire on the edge of black porcelain, but most of his face was buried as if he would smother his torment in the weave of her sheets.

     She lay paralyzed, breath caught in her throat. She had no idea how long he had been there—minutes, hours—or what madness had driven him into her room like this. He made no sound save the uneven rasp of his breathing, the harsh shake that coursed through him again and again. He looked like a man at prayer, but the desperation pouring off him was no sacred thing.

     Her mind raced. What did he want? Why had he come? Uncertainty tightened her chest, yet pity wove through it unbidden, softening her dread with a grief that mirrored his. His hands clawed at the bedding, knuckles white even in the dim light, as though he gripped it to keep from coming apart entirely.

     She stayed still, caught between silence and speech, as the mattress quivered faintly beneath his weight. He pressed his head harder into the bedding, as if trying to bury himself in it, and she realized with slow, terrible clarity that he was not hiding from her—he was hiding from himself.

     (Y/N) lay like that for what felt an age, staring at the trembling figure crouched against her bed. At last, unable to bear it longer, she let her hand slip free of the covers. Slowly, cautiously, she reached out, her fingers brushing the fabric of his sleeve.

     The reaction was instant—and violent.

     Erik screamed—a strangled, high-pitched cry that scarcely sounded human—and tore away from the bed so violently the mattress lurched back into place, blankets spilling in disarray. He twisted across the floor, striking the rug as though recoiling from fire, his hands clawing at the mask as if he could tear himself out of his own skin.

     “I’m sorry! I’m sorry—I should not be here!” The words tumbled in a torrent, colliding, spilling from him in panicked gasps. He crouched low, his head bowed, arms thrown over his skull in an instinctive cower. “The monster has no right—he cannot sit at her bed, he cannot—oh God, what has he done?”

     He rocked on his knees, shuddering, the words spilling faster, fevered and relentless. “She is innocent, and he is filth. He traps her here, steals her freedom, and now he defiles her sanctuary—her room, her very bed. A monster, a thief in the night, crawling where no beast should crawl!”

     His voice cracked, rising to a desperate pitch, each syllable strangled with shame. He crawled backward, dragging himself away as though even the brush of her sheets might scald him. “Forgive him—please, forgive him! He did not mean—he only wanted—” His breath broke, and with a choked sob he struck the floor with the heel of his hand, the sound sharp in the chamber’s hush. “No! He cannot even speak it. To want is sin enough. The demon in the mask has no right to want, no right to breathe beside her.”

     He pressed his face into his palms, rocking violently now, voice muffled but urgent. “Erik is vile, Erik is wicked. She must not touch him, she must not pity him. She must not waste her tears on filth. He has already profaned her kindness—he should be struck down for daring it.”

     His shrieking words battered the air, jagged and unrelenting, echoing off the chamber’s high walls until it seemed they might shake the stones. On the bed she sat upright, frozen between dread and pity, her hand still suspended where she had reached for him. The fire sputtered low in the grate, its glow flickering across his twisted form on the floor—a man convulsed in battle with himself, naming himself demon, monster, devil; his very existence near her a profane desecration.

     The chamber was heavy with his voice, the sound of a man tearing himself apart. She pushed the covers aside and swung her legs to the floor, her bare feet sinking into the cold rug. For a moment she hesitated, heart hammering, as she watched him crouched and heaving, his hands clawing at the mask as though to rip it from his flesh; the shame of being seen were more than he could endure.

     Slowly, she lowered herself to the floor. The thin shift whispered against her skin, the firelight painting pale shadows along her arms. Every movement was careful, deliberate, like one approaching a wounded creature—wild, cornered, capable of lashing out or fleeing at the slightest misstep.

     She sat opposite him, her back straight, knees drawn close, leaving a careful stretch of rug between them. He would not look at her; his face was buried in his hands, his body bent forward in a posture half supplication, half collapse. His voice had ebbed into mutters, broken fragments of self-condemnation slipping out between ragged breaths. “Monster… filth… no right… should burn…”

     She folded her trembling hands into her lap and waited. Her breathing steadied, her gaze fixed softly on him though he could not meet it. The fire popped, a log collapsing into embers, sending a flare of light that glimmered across the black curve of his mask. Time stretched, each second taut with silence, until at last his muttering faltered. His rocking slowed. His breath, though still uneven, no longer tore from him in sobs.

     Only then did she speak. Her voice was low, careful, drawn from a place of quiet resolve. “I am sorry,” she whispered. “I should not have touched you without asking. I didn’t mean to frighten you so badly.”

     His head jerked at once, as though her apology had struck him like a whip. Still he did not raise his gaze, but his fingers clenched against the mask, and a violent shudder passed through him. She could not tell if her words soothed or sharpened the torment, but she remained where she was: steady, unmoving, unwilling to retreat, yet unwilling to press closer.

     “Are you…. Are you all right?” she asked, her gaze fixed on the rigid set of his bony shoulders. “When you fell—did you hurt yourself?”

     He did not answer her; his answer was only the uneven rasp of his breathing, the harsh drag of air in and out of his lungs. He seemed deaf to her words, as though locked in some inner cage. Then, with a faint shudder, he shifted. His hands fell from his mask to clutch at his knees, fingers white against the fabric.

     She leaned forward slightly, her own hands clasped tight in her lap. “Please tell me,” she urged softly. “You struck the floor. Did you…?”

     At last he stirred, lifting his head just enough for the firelight to catch the hollow, yellow gleam of his eyes through the black mask.

     “No,” he rasped, the word cracked and hoarse, so faint she nearly missed it. “No… not hurt. Not as Erik should be.” His lips beneath the veil twisted into something caught between a grimace and a sob. “If there were justice in this world, he would have broken himself against your floor and been done. But he… he cannot even manage that.”

     The words spilled from him like shards of glass—jagged, bitter—and he turned his head sharply aside, ashamed to let her see his face. His hands trembled where they gripped his knees, knuckles bloodless, his whole body braced as though awaiting an invisible blow.

     She longed to reach across the narrow stretch of rug between them, to steady those shaking hands, but fear held her in place. She could not know if her touch would soothe him—or shatter him again. Instead, she kept still, her voice no louder than the crackle of the fire.

     “I was only worried,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I was worried you had hurt yourself.”

     For a moment, there was nothing but the choking rasp of his breath. Slowly, unevenly, it steadied; the violence of his trembling dulled, leaving behind something heavier, quieter—like the silence after a storm when the sky still smolders but the thunder has passed. He did not look at her, but she thought his shoulders eased, just barely.

     She folded her hands tighter in her lap, forcing her voice to remain steady. At last she spoke again, quiet but insistent, words meant to pierce the fog of his torment.

     “Erik… what did you come in for?” Her gaze searched the bowed line of his ragged spine, the way his head hung low as if beneath an executioner’s axe. “Why are you so angry at yourself?”

     He did not move at first. The stillness stretched, painful and long. Then a shudder arched through his back, and his voice came in a hoarse whisper—not naming himself as a man would, but condemning himself as though from afar.

      “Erik should never have crossed her threshold,” he muttered, rocking where he sat. “Erik pollutes her room with his presence. He desecrates her sleep, her safety. What right has a corpse to kneel beside (Y/N)’s bed? What right has death to brush against the living?”

     The words tumbled faster, gathering a fevered edge. His hands rose to claw at the mask again. “Erik is filth. Erik is sin. He creeps like a rat into her chamber, stinking of the grave. He should have stayed away, in the shadows, where monsters belong.”

     She bit her lip, her throat tight as she watched him unravel, as he refused even the mercy of her gaze.

     “I… I didn’t think you—” She faltered, drew a breath, steadied herself. “I don’t think you did any harm by coming in. Why do you hate yourself for it?”

     His head snapped up a fraction, his yellow eyes blazing feverishly through the hollow cutouts of the mask. His voice rose, cracked and shrill, splitting the hush of the chamber.

     “Erik cannot keep away!” he cried. “Erik hears her breathing in the dark. Erik feels her even when she is not near. He came to kneel by her side because he is weak, because he is cursed, because he cannot exist without her now!”

     The words rang through the chamber—half confession, all self-damnation—before collapsing into a whisper. He rocked back and buried his face in his hands. “She should despise him. She should cast him out. But Erik… Erik is a coward. Erik crawls to her door and begs for what he does not deserve.”

     She stayed where she was; the floor’s chill beneath her, her heart thudding at the raw violence of his self-loathing. The questions she had asked had opened a vein and the torrent that spilled from him had left him hollow, trembling, stripped bare before her.

     When she spoke, it was after a long pause. Her words were measured, soft, shaped carefully as though the wrong tone might shatter what fragile calm he had found. “It sounds,” she murmured, tilting her head as she studied his bent figure, “as if you simply didn’t want to be alone tonight.”

     For a heartbeat he froze, struck by something both tender and terrible. His hands stilled mid-motion, clawing no longer at the mask. A shiver rippled through him, and when he finally spoke, his voice came cracked, broken into fragments.

     “Alone…” he whispered, tasting the word like poison. “Erik has always been alone. Alone in the dark, alone in the grave he carries on his shoulders.”  His chest rose and fell, each breath jagged. “But tonight—tonight Erik was weak. He wanted…”

     She drew her knees closer to her chest, the firelight brushing across the pale fabric of her shift, her skirt riding higher up her thigh. She held his gaze though he would not lift his eyes fully. “So you came here,” she said gently, “because you couldn’t bear being alone.”

     His head snapped in a sharp denial, his voice rasping. “No, no—Erik should not have come. Erik should rot in the silence; he deserves nothing else.” His words broke into a sob, raw and jagged. “But the silence devours him. It howls and claws and tears at him, louder than any scream. He thought… he thought if he could kneel here, if he could feel her nearness…it might stop for a little while.”

     Her throat tightened at the nakedness of his admission. She clasped her hands in her lap to still their trembling, torn between the instinct to reach for him and the need to protect herself. “And, did it?” she asked softly. “Did the silence stop while you were here?”

     At her question he flinched, as though she had dug her fingers into a wound too deep to bear. Slowly, haltingly, he nodded, his forehead sinking back into his palms. A long shudder wracked him, and when his voice came again, it was no more than a whisper through clenched teeth.

     “Yes… it stopped. For the first time in so long, it stopped. But it was wrong. It was shameful. Erik defiled her rest, defiled her trust.” He dragged in a shaking breath. “He should be punished for it!”

     Her chest ached with the sight before her. She longed to tell him he had not hurt her—he had not done anything that justified the way his torment consumed him. But the words stayed unspoken. She remained silent, watching him rock faintly where he knelt, his figure cast in broken shadows by the fading firelight.

     Her hands tightened again in her lap, her voice catching once before she steadied it into something soft, deliberate. “I don’t think you should be punished for that, Erik.” she said at last, the words falling into the stillness like drops into deep water.

     At once he flinched, bracing for a blow disguised as kindness. His masked face lifted a fraction, just enough for the firelight to strike the gold of his eyes. She pressed on, careful to keep her tone calm, soothing, as though coaxing a wild thing toward her hand to feed.

     “You meant no harm, Erik. And you did no harm,” she said gently. “You only wanted… to be with me. And that is not wicked. That is not something to hate yourself for.”

     For a moment he only stared, as though her words were a foreign tongue, incomprehensible. His breath rasped quick and shallow in his throat; his hands tightened convulsively against his knees.

     “Not wicked,” he echoed hoarsely, as though testing a word he had never been permitted to speak. His voice shook as he forced the syllables out. “But Erik is always wicked. Erik’s touch poisons. Erik’s presence corrupts. To be near him is to be dragged into filth.”

     She shook her head, slow, deliberate, her eyes steady upon him. “No, Erik. You came because you were lonely. You wanted company, and you chose me. That isn’t corruption. That’s human.”

     At that word, he shuddered. A tremor rippled through him from crown to heel. “Human,” he whispered, the sound almost breaking. His fingers rose to claw at the edge of his mask, and then faltered, falling away again.

     “You only sat here with me,” she went on softly, her voice an even thread. “You didn’t harm me. You didn’t wake me with anger or threats. You didn’t drag me from my bed. You only wanted to be close. That’s all. And that’s… okay.”

     The last word lingered between them, fragile as glass.

     He rocked once, twice, his head lowering until his forehead nearly touched the floor. A strangled sound tore from him, half sob, half laugh, raw with disbelief. “She says it is okay. She tells the monster it is well. She does not know what she says. She does not see—” His words broke off in a low growl, his body convulsing with a violent tremor, his hands pressing hard into the rug as though to anchor himself against the pull of his own despair.

     She leaned forward then, closing the distance by the smallest measure, her bare legs whispering against the carpet. Her heart pounded, yet her voice held steady, unwavering. “I do see,” she said softly. “I see that you’re in pain. I see that you’re afraid. And I see that tonight… you simply didn’t want to be alone.”

     For a long moment, he gave no answer. The fire cracked softly, its glow slipping over the rigid line of his hunched shoulders. At last, a shuddering breath escaped him, his body sagging as though some unseen cord had finally loosened.

     “Then… then she is merciful,” he whispered, barely more than breath. “Merciful to a thing that deserves none.”

     Something fragile stirred in the air between them—something trembling, tenuous, like a thread drawn taut that might, with the smallest care, hold instead of break.

     She studied him in the wavering half-light, her arms folded loosely around her knees, her back sagging with exhaustion. The fire had dwindled to a low cradle of embers, its warmth seeping away as the chamber stretched into silence. Erik still crouched across from her, bent under a crushing weight, his hands trembling faintly where they pressed against the rug.

     Her eyes stung with weariness. The hours had blurred together until time itself seemed to dissolve; her lids grew heavy, her body longed for rest. Yet she could not look away from him—from the strange, broken figure who had invaded her room only to collapse in shame at her bedside. He rocked faintly, brittle with exhaustion, his breaths catching like a man who had run for miles though he had gone nowhere at all.

     At last she let her voice break the quiet, soft and careful, as one might address a restless child. “Erik… when was the last time you slept?”

     He did not stir at first, as though the question had not touched him. Then his head tilted, just enough for the embers’ glow to catch the gleam of his mask. A short, bitter laugh rasped from him, hollow and sharp.

     “Sleep,” he said, his voice cracked with strain. “Erik does not sleep. Not truly. When the body yields, the mind does not. It whispers, it shrieks, it drags him through shadows darker than these caves. He sees what should be forgotten; what cannot ever be.” His fingers clawed at the carpet as he spoke, bunching the fabric in a white-knuckled grip. “And if—if by some cruelty he finds rest, he wakes only to emptiness again. Silence. Always silence.”

     The finality in his tone hollowed the air around them. He did not sound defiant—only drained, eroded by years of unrest. The chamber seemed to grow heavier with his words, filled only with the faint hiss of the glowing embers and the ragged cadence of his breath.

     Exhaustion pressed hard against her bones, but she kept her gaze fixed on him, unwilling to yield to sleep while he sat unraveling before her. “You can’t go on like that,” she whispered at last, her voice trembling with fatigue. “No one can. Even you.”

     Erik still crouched low, his hands braced hard against the carpet as though he feared he might fall through it. His shoulders rose and fell in ragged rhythm, and the pale gleam of his mask caught the fire’s flickering glow, rendering him less a man than some haunted effigy, trembling and alive against its will.

     At last she shifted, her arm unfolding from where it had been wrapped around her knees. Slowly—hesitantly—she extended her hand into the space between them, her palm open, fingers trembling in the wavering light. “Erik,” she murmured, her voice quiet but steady. “Take my hand.”

     His head jerked at the sound, startled, the very offer a fresh cruelty. The hollow sockets of the mask glinted yellow in the glow, pale and fever-bright. His breath quickened, uneven, but he did not move to touch her.

     “I’m tired too,” she continued softly, her hand still outstretched, steady in its waiting. “Too much has happened today—more than either of us can carry alone.” She swallowed against the tightness in her throat. “We should go to bed, Erik. You need rest as much as I do.”

     He shuddered, the very notion of sleep seeming to wrench through him. Yet she did not draw her hand back. She held it there, quiet and patient, offering but never forcing, the faint warmth of her skin an anchor in the gloom.

     “Come on,” she whispered, coaxing as gently as she could. “Get into bed with me. Just to sleep. No shame. No punishment. Just… sleep.”

     He flinched. His eyes widened in the mask’s shadow, glinting with fevered confusion. “Bed…” he rasped, the syllable fragile, broken. He shook his head sharply, recoiling from the gesture. “No—no, Erik cannot. Erik must not. He has already defiled her sanctum. He cannot—”

     She leaned closer, her tone firm yet tender, a hand guiding him back from the edge of his panic. “Come. Just sleep, Erik.” She steadied her voice, quiet but insistent. “You’re exhausted, and so am I. Let’s go to bed—together—so we can rest. Neither of us need to be alone.”

     The firelight painted her skin gold as her hand lingered near his, unwavering. For a long moment he only stared; the sight of her palm both salvation and damnation offered in the same breath. His fingers twitched at the carpet, curling and uncurling, a creature torn between flight and surrender.

     “Together…” he breathed at last, the word shivering out of him. His whole frame shook with its enormity. “She asks Erik to… to share her bed. To lie beside her?” His hands pressed hard against the mask, as if it might splinter beneath the pressure. “No one has ever—no one—” The admission broke into a sob, raw and fractured, and he hunched lower, caught between his eternal horror and longing.

     Her heart pounded, but she kept steady, her voice like a thread of calm through the storm. “Yes,” she said softly. “Just this once. So we can sleep. Nothing more than that. We’re both tired, Erik. Please.”

     The silence that followed pressed heavy and suffocating. Then, with a sound half-whimper, half-sigh, he raised one shaking hand. For a moment it hovered above hers, trembling like a frightened bird, uncertain whether to land. Slowly—so slowly—it lowered, settling at last into her open palm. His skin was ice-cold, the contact tentative as a ghost’s touch, but it was contact all the same.

     She closed her fingers gently around his, grounding him with the faint warmth of her touch. “Come on,” she whispered again, her exhaustion lending the words a plain, disarming honesty. “Let’s sleep.”

     His breath hitched, sharp in the stillness. He let her guide him upward, his movements jerky and uncertain, like a man learning to walk after years in chains. The firelight caught the hard angle of his black mask as he rose, flickering as one with the shadows. He swayed slightly, as if the very thought of lying down beside her threatened to break him—but he did not let go of her hand.

     Together they reached the edge of the bed. The blankets lay rumpled from her restless hours before, the fire casting its last dim warmth across the Louis-Philippe room. With her free hand, she drew back the covers, her voice steady though soft, repeating the promise as though it might hold them both together: “Let’s sleep.”

     Erik’s shoulders quivered, and for a moment she thought he would wrench away and vanish into the labyrinth of his home. But his hand, cold and trembling, remained in hers. At last, with a slow, broken nod, he allowed her to lead him closer.

     She climbed onto the mattress first, her shift whispering against her skin as she moved across the wide expanse. The firelight brushed the silk sheets with a dull shimmer, warming them faintly against the chill of the chamber. She slipped beneath the covers and pulled them back further, leaving space open at her side.

     Her hand lingered on the folded edge, holding it back as she turned her gaze toward him.

     Erik stood at the bedside as though rooted there, carved from stone. His hand had not slipped from hers until the very last instant, and now it hovered in the air, unsure, before curling protectively against his chest. The mask gleamed pale in the dim light, the hollows of his eyes unreadable. His entire frame trembled, the firelight catching each twitch of his fingers, each uneven rise and fall of his breath.

     She propped herself on one elbow, steady in her patience, her eyes resting on him. Expectancy lay between them—quiet, unspoken, undeniable. She did not press him, but the open space at her side, the turned-back sheets, the simple stillness of her posture were invitation enough.

     His gaze darted from her face to the bed, then down to the floor, restless, as though he searched the shadows for either an escape or a trick. His whole body was taut with conflict, shifting forward only to pull back again, like a man poised on the edge of a precipice.

     At last his hand twitched upward, fingers flexing toward the covers. For a heartbeat it seemed he would accept. But then, as if slapped, he snatched it back and pressed it hard to his chest. The motion was sharp, pained, desperate.

     “No…” he rasped, the word cracked and hoarse, as though torn from deep within. “She cannot mean it. She does not know what she asks!”

     But she did not move, did not flinch. Her eyes held him in quiet insistence, her hand still keeping the space open. The firelight gilded her hair and traced the slope of her shoulders, the thin fabric of her shift slipped slightly down her soft arm. There was no urgency in her expression—only exhaustion and a tender determination that refused to yield.

     The sight seemed to undo him. His head bowed, and a hoarse breath escaped—half sob, half surrender. One trembling hand braced against the bed frame, then the other. Slowly, stiffly, he lowered himself to the mattress, his body quaking with each reluctant inch, until at last he kneeled on the edge of the bed.

     (Y/N) shifted, making more space, her silence as steady as her gaze. Her heart beat hard in her chest, yet her face stayed composed, calm, her patience unwavering. Erik sat hunched, rigid, the mask turned away from her.

     The covers lay waiting, still pulled back, the invitation unbroken.

     Firelight glimmered along the curve of his mask and the pale ridges of his bare hands as they twisted together in his lap. He looked strangely undressed: narrow shoulders tense beneath the black of his open shirt, long fingers restless, flexing and knotting; caught between flight and surrender.

     For a long time he did not move. He stared at the sheets: a deadly precipice. She waited, patient, the stillness between them taut with expectation.

     At last, a deep shudder rippled through him. His fingers reached for the blankets, brushing the edge, the cloth itself dangerous. He drew them back an inch further, a cautious test against fate, and then lowered himself with agonizing slowness. One elbow braced, his body resisted every motion, mechanical, stiff, each muscle warring against the act.

     Finally, he turned onto his side, his back bowed toward her, his mask angled toward the dark. The mattress dipped beneath his weight, the covers whispering as she drew them carefully over him, mindful not to touch. His hands clutched the shirt at his chest, knuckles pale, body rigid with tension; bracing for punishment.

     For a moment he lay stiff as a corpse, breath held and mask angling slowly towards her; expecting her to cry out and push him away. Only when the silence remained unbroken did his shoulders ease slightly, though the tremor in them never stilled completely. His head sank into the pillow, the mask catching one last glint of firelight before turning into the shadows.

     He had lain at last, but everything in him remained taut with disbelief and fear— the man had been granted entry into a forbidden place, and could not yet bring himself to believe he would be allowed to stay.

     She eased herself down into the bed beside him, careful not to jostle the mattress too suddenly, letting her body sink slowly into the embrace of the cool sheets. The fabric whispered against her shift, cool at first, then gradually warmed by her skin. She lay back upon the plush pillows, keeping her posture deliberately open, her arms resting loosely atop her chest. She did not turn toward him—she knew if he caught the sight of her face so close might only heighten the storm already raging inside him. Instead, she kept to her back, her gaze tracing the dim pattern of shadows the firelight cast across the bed’s canopy above.

     The silence between them was fragile, heavy with everything unsaid. She could hear the faint tremor in his breathing, every exhale catching, every inhale uneven, as though he could not quite believe he lay here beside her. The mattress dipped gently where he had taken his place, the faintest pull of gravity drawing her toward the outline of his body. It was the closest they had ever been, and yet it felt as though a chasm still yawned between them.

     She swallowed softly, her throat dry, and let her words slip into that silence with the gentleness of a prayer. “I hope you can rest tonight, Erik.” Her voice was quiet, low enough to soothe, steady enough to reach him without pressing too hard.

     The words seemed to hang in the dark, suspended above them both. For a moment, there was no reply—only the sharp sound of his breath, as if he had been holding it. Then she heard a faint, strangled noise, half-sob, half-exhale, muffled against his pillow. He did not turn, did not move closer, but she felt the tension in the air shift, as though something inside him had broken loose at her simple wish.

     She let her eyelids flutter shut, though she did not yet surrender to sleep. Instead, she focused on the steady rhythm of her own breathing, hoping he might follow it, hoping it might offer him some anchor in the storm of his thoughts. The fire crackled and settled, the glow dimming until only embers warmed the grate.

     She focused on the weight of his presence, the trembling nearness of him, and she thought—not without fear, not without sorrow—that perhaps this was the first fragile step toward letting him believe he was no longer alone.

     Erik heard the slow rhythm of her breathing settle into sleep and drank in the faint warmth of her presence radiating across the narrow distance between them.

     But, he could not follow her.

     He lay stiff upon his side, his back curved toward her, as though even the faintest stolen glance might shatter the fragile spell that had allowed him here. His hands clutched the sheets in a desperate rhythm, fingers twitching, flexing, releasing and then tightening again—desperate to keep the moment from slipping from him.

     Silence pressed in from every corner of the Louis-Philippe room. For years, silence had been his tormentor: suffocating, merciless, filled with voices only he could hear. But this silence was different. It was softened by the whisper of her breath, by the subtle stir of her body beneath the covers, by the faint creak of the mattress when she shifted in her sleep. These small, human sounds wove themselves into a kind of fragile music, and he clung to them as proof that he had not dreamed her kindness, that she was truly there beside him.

     At last, unable to resist, he turned his head upon the pillow. The mask caught a dull glimmer from the dying embers as he turned. He stared at her, at pale light slipping across her cheek, her lashes, and the dark spill of her hair against the pillow. Sleep had smoothed her face into softness, her lips parted slightly with each slow breath. He stared with reverence— a feverish wonder that she had let him stay within reach.

     His chest ached. Every part of him ached. He told himself he would not reach out, would not risk the horror of her waking to find his hand suspended above her. So he lay still, watching. He memorized the rise and fall of her chest, the faint strand of hair shifting with her breath, the delicate pulse visible at the hollow of her throat. He seared the sight into himself as one might engrave scripture, desperate to keep it when morning tore it away.

     “She lies beside him,” he whispered to the room. “She invited him. She did not send him away....” His heart pounded at the thought, a thunderous rhythm against the gentler cadence of her breathing.

     Time unraveled. Minutes, perhaps hours—he could not tell. Only that his body, strung taut with fear and awe, began to betray him. Exhaustion crept in, slow and inexorable, dragging down his lids, steadying his breath against his will. He fought it, terrified that sleep would steal this miracle, that she would vanish like a dream if he surrendered even for a moment.

     His fatigue was merciless. His grip slackened; his hands stilled at last upon the sheets. His head sagged deeper into the pillow, her face blurring at the edges of his vision. He told himself he would rest his eyes only for a moment; that he would not truly sleep.

     The moment stretched, unraveled, dissolved. And at last Erik—despite his terror, despite the wild need to hold on—slipped into unconsciousness.

     The fire in the grate had collapsed to ash, the chamber lit only by a faint red pulse that shivered across the stone walls. For a few hours, there was nothing but the rhythm of two bodies breathing: hers soft and steady, his uneven but deep.

     Then, the stillness shattered.

     At first it was only a murmur, low and slurred, words pressed through clenched teeth. Erik shifted restlessly under the covers, his hands clutching and releasing the sheets, caught in a snare only he could see. His breath came quicker, jagged, each exhale rasping in his throat. The murmur grew to a moan, then a strangled cry—and suddenly, with a violent heave, he tore upright from the pillows, a scream ripping out of him. Raw. Guttural. A sound dragged from the deepest hollow of his warped chest.

     (Y/N) bolted upright, her heart lurching as if the cry had been torn from her own lungs. For a heartbeat she could not think—only feel the surge of fear and confusion. The room lay half-drowned in shadow, lit only by the dull red glow of the dying fire. In that flickering dimness Erik’s figure loomed beside her: hunched, shaking, his hands clamped to his head as though he would crush the nightmare out of his skull. His gasps rasped and broke, choking him. The pale gleam of the mask caught the ember light, twisted by shadow into something ghastly, inhuman.

     Her hand shot out, fingers clutching his wrist, her voice sharp with panic. “Erik—what is it? What happened?” The words tumbled out, unsteady, as her own fear tangled with the urgency of the moment. She tried to find his eyes, to see if he was hurt, if he was even truly awake.

     His arm shook violently beneath her grip, every muscle strung tight with terror. He jerked once, attempting to fling himself free, but the contact tethered him, dragging him out of the nightmare’s grip into the half-light of waking. His head snapped up. Eyes burned fever-bright behind the mask’s hollows—wild, unseeing. He thrashed once more, chest heaving, then froze, his gaze latching on her as though only then realizing she was there, awake, touching him.

     “Don’t—” The word rasped out of him, raw, breaking into a sob. “Don’t touch—don’t—” His breath hitched, each syllable stumbling over the next. “Erik dreamt—Erik saw—” He choked out violently, shaking his head again and again, as if to shake away the poison memory clinging to him.

     Her hand trembled, but she did not let go. “You’re here,” she whispered fiercely, her voice low, urgent. “With me. It’s over. It was only a dream—only a dream.” Her heart thundered so hard it left her dizzy, but she forced steadiness into her grip, into her voice, bracing herself to anchor him.

     He shook under her hand, gasping, broken - a man drowning, dragged back to the surface but still choking on the water in his lungs. The sight wrenched at her, and held out her arms. She opened them to him, a gesture instinctive, reckless, but the only answer she had to the anguish tearing through him.

     “Come here.” she whispered, the plea spilling before she could stop it. Her arms widened, her body turned toward him, offering a fragile shelter, a place to fall. She did not know if he would recoil, strike, or collapse—but she could not sit frozen while his scream still echoed in her bones.

     The mask tilted up, and through the veil of shadow his eyes met hers—wild, fever-bright, stricken with disbelief. He looked as though he could not fathom what he saw: that her arms remained open, that she had not cast him aside in disgust.

     A sound broke from him then— a raw, jagged, cry. With it, he lurched forward, surrendering as though the weight of terror and shame had crushed what little resistance he still possessed.

     He collapsed into her embrace, trembling so violently she felt it down to her bones. His masked face pressed hard into her shoulder, the porcelain edge cold through the thin fabric of her shift. His hands clutched at her with painful desperation, fingers digging into her arms and waist as though she were the only solid thing left in a collapsing world. His body was iron at first, every muscle locked, but little by little the rigidity gave way. His weight sagged into her, dragging her down with him, until the sharp tremors of his sobs shook them both.

     “Erik saw—” he gasped, the words splintering apart. “Erik saw her leave, he saw her laugh, he saw himself alone—always alone. He woke and she was gone—gone—” The last word cracked into a broken cry, muffled against her shoulder, his body bowing beneath the force of it, the memory itself crushing him.

     Her throat burned. She swallowed hard, her arms closing tighter around him, one hand rising instinctively to stroke his back again in slow, steady circles. The sound of his anguish was unbearable: raw, ragged, a wound torn open that refused to close. She hated it—not him, but the nightmare, the relentless cruelty of a world that had carved such torment into his very soul.

     Her own mind reeled as she held him. Part of her cried out in its usual warning, but another part—quieter, deeper, unyielding—could only feel the instinct to soothe, to press balm to wounds no hand had ever touched before.

     “You’re not alone,” she whispered, though she wasn’t sure he heard. “You’re here. I’m here. It was only a dream.”

     He clung tighter at those words; afraid she would vanish should he loosen his grip. His sobs thinned, softening into ragged breaths against her skin, yet the trembling did not cease. Her struggle tonight was not only against his grief, but against his exhaustion—the endless battle to coax him into peace, into something that resembled sleep. The hope of it seemed impossible, almost cruel, and yet she could not abandon it.

     She did not waste her strength fighting his shame, nor did she argue against the cruel names he muttered at himself into her shoulder. Instead, she shifted with deliberate patience, guiding him down with her. She eased back until her spine met the pillows, holding him firmly against her until his resistance gave way. His head came to rest against her chest, his temple tucked beneath her jaw, his face half-hidden in the hollow of her collarbone. One arm folded him close, protective, while her other hand smoothed the tense line of his back. In that posture he seemed smaller somehow, fragile, as though she were sheltering not a monster but a weary boy.

    And then, quietly, she began to sing.

     The sound came softly at first, uneven, little more than a hush threading through the shadows. She did not think of lessons or technique, of scales and precision, of the sharp criticisms he leveled in the practice room. She thought only of quieting him, of offering balm to a torment she could not otherwise reach. The melody was simple—barely a line of notes—but it wove through the hollow air like a fragile thread, brushing against his raw sobs.

     Her hand moved slowly, steadily along his back, over the tense ridge of his shoulders, down the long line of his spine. Beneath her palm, his body trembled, every muscle taut as though braced for breaking. His bare hands knotted the shift at her hip, twisting the fabric tight, clinging to it, the act alone kept him from flying apart.

     Inside his skull, the world was chaos. Her voice, her arms, her nearness—he could not bear them. They broke him more surely than rejection ever could. He pressed the mask hard into the crook of her neck, and in that closeness every detail assaulted him: the warmth of her skin, the faint heat of her breath stirring against his temple, the whisper of her soft hair as it brushed his ear.

     And beneath it all throbbed the forbidden awareness of her body—how his head rested partially against the soft swell of her breasts beneath the thin veil of her shift, how her bare legs touched his under the covers, how her sweet smell encircled him. The knowledge seared through him, unbearable in its intimacy. Every instinct shrieked at him to flee, to tear himself away before he succumbed completely.

     He could not.

     Her lullaby wound on, halting and tender, the rhythm of her hand steady on his back. Against the storm inside him, her presence was a tether. His chest still heaved, but the sobs no longer ripped through him—they softened into smaller tremors. His fingers, though taut and white-knuckled, loosened fraction by fraction, until they no longer strangled the fabric of her shift with his grip.

     Exhaustion gnawed at him, pitiless. The shame, the terror, the hunger raged on, his body faltering beneath their weight. Her arms did not loosen. Her voice did not break. Her quiet breathing rose and fell, a rhythm he could not help but follow. His head grew heavier against her chest, sinking into the hollow of her collarbone. Still he whispered broken apologies into her skin, still he trembled faintly—but his strength dwindled with each ragged breath.

     At last, he sagged fully into her hold. His grip slackened, his mask lay cool and unmoving against her, and his body yielded not from peace, not from trust, but because exhaustion had crushed his torment into silence. Somewhere, deep in the fractured labyrinth of his soul, a truth glimmered dimly: he had been held, sung to, soothed—not by mercy alone, but by an unthinkable love.

     Her song ebbed into silence, leaving only the faint cracking of the dying fire. She lay rigid beneath his weight, her eyes fixed on the dark canopy above, wide and wet with tears, her own breath uneven. Tomorrow would bring its own storm—she did not doubt it—but tonight she had done what seemed impossible.

     Erik was sleeping.

     For a time, the underground house lay utterly still: no sound but the faint sigh of the dying fire, no motion but the slow rise and fall of two bodies lying huddled together.

     (Y/N) stirred first, pulled from sleep by the weight pressed along her side. Her arm tingled where he had lain so heavily, the muscles stiff with strain. She shifted slightly, careful not to wake him, and for a few heartbeats she lay still, eyes half-lidded, listening. His breath was shallow against the hollow of her throat, uneven, catching faintly on each exhale as though fragments of his nightmares clung to him even in sleep.

     At last she turned her head, slow and cautious. He was close—closer than she would ever have believed possible the night before. The mask had slipped askew, exposing the hard line of his jaw, warped faintly with old scars. His lips had parted, slack in slumber, stripping him of all the studied precision and theatrical control he wielded when awake. There was no peace on his face—not fully—his brow still creased, shadows etched in the taut set of his mouth. Yet it was softer than she had ever seen him. For a moment, almost boyish. Human.

     Her chest ached at the sight, awe tightening beneath her ribs until it was almost painful. She wanted to keep watching, to hold fast to this fleeting glimpse of him unguarded, stripped of mask and menace. Yet unease rose swiftly in its wake. What did it mean that he could only rest like this — pressed into her body, bound to her presence as though her warmth alone kept the nightmares at bay? The thought unsettled her even as it stirred something she could not name. It made her feel good. It made her feel indispensable. It made her feel… special.

     Before her thoughts could carry her further, he stirred. A low sound slipped from him, half-breath, half-whimper. His body tensed sharply, hands twitching at the sheets. Then his eyes snapped open—burning, fever-bright in the dim glow of dying embers. For an instant his gaze darted across her as though he did not know her, as though she were some phantom carried over from his dream.

     His hand shot out, sudden and desperate, clamping onto her arm. She startled at the force of it, her breath catching.

     “I thought—” His voice broke raw, rasping. “I thought you were gone.”

     She blinked, her own confusion tempered by a gentler alarm, and brought her free hand to his wrist. Her touch was light, steadying. “I’m here,” she said softly. “You’re awake now. It was just another dream.”

     But he shook his head, sharp, jerking, the mask slipping further with the motion. “No. Not just a dream. She left. She laughed. They all laugh. And Erik—” His words cracked apart, splintering, before he forced them back down into silence.

     Her fingers moved instinctively against the back of his hand, soothing where he clung to her. “But I didn’t,” she whispered, her voice deliberate, a tether cast across the storm breaking in him. “I’m still here. You see?”

     The tension in his grip did not ease at once, but the wildness in his eyes flickered, faltered, dimmed. He looked at her as though struggling to reconcile the warmth beneath his hand with the cruel vision that had tormented him moments before. His breathing slowed, though it remained ragged, each inhale sharp and uneven as if dragged against resistance.

     Neither of them spoke. The silence stretched, filled only by the faint crackle of the hearth and the shallow rise and fall of their breaths. She felt the moment balance on a fragile thread—thin enough to snap into rage, grief, or retreat with the slightest misstep. She did not pull away. She let him hold her, let him see she had not vanished. In that stillness, something softened; the jagged edges of panic dulled, if only slightly.

     At last his grip slackened. His fingers loosened until they merely rested against her arm, no longer clutching with desperate force. He lowered his head again—not pressed into her shoulder, but close enough that a lock of his graying hair brushed against her neck. A shudder passed through him, echoing faintly into her chest.

     Her eyes drifted to the canopy above, weariness tugging at her, though she knew rest would not come easily for him - perhaps not ever. She wondered if he could truly find peace, or if she was only a fleeting balm pressed against a wound carved too deep to heal. For now, though, she let the fragile hour stand: two restless souls, bound by the simple, aching need to be near one another.

     Her gaze drifted back to him. The mask sat crooked, knocked askew in his thrashing. The porcelain bit into his cheek hear his crumpled ear, the tilt making it look less like a face and more like the broken shell it truly was. For a moment she only watched, her throat tight. Then, before she thought better of it, her hand rose. Slowly, carefully, she reached toward him, her fingers brushing the cool edge as she sought to right it. She meant nothing by it—only to spare him the discomfort, only to restore what had slipped.

     The moment her fingertips touched the black porcelain, he stiffened. His breath caught audibly, sharp as a knife through the silence. His whole body went rigid beneath her touch, muscles locking beneath the thin fabric of his shirt as though every nerve had caught fire.

     For a heartbeat he neither moved nor breathed, frozen while her hand lingered near his cheek—careful, deliberate—as she adjusted the mask and coaxed the veil to fall neatly over his jaw. In the quiet, the faint warmth of her skin brushed him, a touch unbearably tender in its simplicity.

     To him it was too much. That she would touch the mask—not to tear it away, not to expose or mock him, but to steady it, shield him from the indignity of its crookedness—was more than his mind could hold. His chest heaved, a single shuddering breath that came perilously close to a sob. His hands curled into the sheets at his sides, fingers clawing at the fabric as though to anchor himself against the desperate urge to recoil, to slap her hand away, to flee into the shadows where tenderness could not reach him.

      “Don’t—” he growled, the word trembling out of him, though whether it meant don’t stop or don’t dare, she could not tell.

     Her hand lingered just long enough to brush the porcelain into place, setting it straight once more, concealing what it always concealed. Then, with measured care, she drew her hand back, resting it lightly against her chest as though to steady herself after the audacity of the touch. Her gaze held his in the low glow, her voice calm, almost soothing. “It slipped. I was only setting it right.”

     Through the hollows of the mask his eyes flashed, wild, fever-bright. “She touches it as if it is nothing,” he rasped, half to her, half to himself. “As if it is not the barrier. As if it is not… him.” His voice fractured, sinking to a hoarse whisper. “She does not understand what she does.”

     She did not answer immediately. Instead, she reclined slowly into the pillow, her heartbeat quickening though her tone remained steady. “I see you,” she said at last. “And it doesn’t matter whether the mask is there or not. I only thought you’d want it whole.”

     The words struck him with more force than cruelty ever could. His head snapped away, burying the porcelain in shadow. His breath broke into shallow bursts, ragged and uneven, her kindness wounding him deeper than any scorn. One trembling hand lifted, shielding the edge of the mask from her touch, from her gaze, from her mercy.

     And yet, though every muscle trembled with the instinct to flee, he did not rise. He remained beside her, trapped between the unbearable weight of her gesture and the exhaustion that chained him to the bed.

     The silence stretched thin, taut as wire, her words still suspended in the charged air. He stayed rigid, turned from her, a statue carved in anguish, while she listened to the uneven rasp of his breathing and the faint hiss of the dying fire.

     She knew if the silence thickened further, it would continue to consume them both. So she forced herself to act, to break the spell of night and all its haunting echoes. Slowly, she pushed back the blankets and sat upright, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear. Her voice was quiet, but steadied with purpose, clinging to the ordinary as if it might anchor them.

     “We should get up,” she murmured, glancing toward the grate where the embers glowed faintly. “The fire needs stoking. And we’ll both need breakfast. The day won’t wait for us.”

     He did not answer. He sat half-turned from her, the mask catching only the faintest flicker of light, his stillness brittle and unnatural, as though the wrong word—or even her absence—might shatter him into dust.

     She pressed on, her tone light, almost casual, though her heart pounded against her ribs. “And afterward… if you’d like… perhaps you could play for me? Or, we might continue with our singing lessons—whichever you prefer.” Her fingers smoothed the coverlet as she spoke, as though the suggestion were nothing more than an ordinary start to an ordinary day for an ordinary couple.

     His head snapped up, eyes wide with disbelief, the rawness in them stark through the mask’s hollows. For an instant he looked as though she had spoken gibberish—as though he could not fathom how she might sit there and speak of firewood and breakfast and music after the night he had torn open before her.

     “You—” His voice cracked, low and strangled. “She speaks of breakfast. Of lessons. After what Erik has done. After she has seen—” He broke off, a trembling hand flying to the edge of his mask. His chest rose and fell too fast, his whole frame quaking with the strain. “Does she not know? Does she not understand that he is—”

     She cut across his spiraling, her voice quiet but firm. “I understand you’re tired, Erik. And hungry. And that music is the one thing that steadies you when nothing else can. That’s all I meant.”

     Her calmness seemed to unravel him further. He shifted on the edge of the bed, fists tightening against his knees, shoulders bowed as though warding off some invisible blow. His gaze darted over her face, wild, searching—as if he expected to find mockery there, or revulsion, or pity too sharp to bear. Yet all he found was patience, a quiet resolve, a refusal to flinch.

      “You speak as though it were nothing!” he shouted, the words breaking in his throat. “As though Erik’s shame, Erik’s filth, Erik’s screams could be washed away with -.” His fingers clawed against his knees, his body trembling with the force of it. “She opens her arms, she shares her bed, she touches his mask, she speaks of lessons—ah, cruel, so cruel—”

     She drew a slow breath, steadying herself against the storm of his torment. “I speak of those things because they are what we can do. Now, we cannot live only in the nightmare of last night, Erik. We must wake. We must eat. We must sing. That is how we go on.”

     Her words cut through his frenzy, striking something deeper than argument. He stared at her in silence, trembling still, lips parted as if to protest—yet no sound came. The mask hid much, but not the raw bewilderment in his eyes, nor the exhaustion dragging him down, leaving him suspended between disbelief and the fragile thread of hope she offered.

     She rose then, smoothing her shift and gathering the courage to stand tall, as though to prove to them both that this day could be like any other, if only they made it so. She turned toward the hearth to tend the fire, leaving him seated on the bed, undone by the strangeness of her—by her ability to treat his torment not as a monster to recoil from, but as a shadow to be briefly addressed, and then gently led onward into normalcy.

     And though every fiber of him screamed that he did not deserve it, he could not stop watching her—shattered, bewildered—each ordinary gesture were more unthinkable than any kiss.

     (Y/N) slipped into her robe, the fabric soft against her shift, tying it loosely at her waist. She did not dress further, nor did she attempt to make the moment anything other than what it was: a fragile pause between the torment of the night and the uncertainty of the day. The robe hung open at her throat, the chamber’s cool air brushing her skin as she crossed the rug to him.

     He still sat hunched on the edge, hands knotted in the sheets, shoulders drawn tight to brace himself against her approach. The mask obscured him, but the tremor that coursed through his body betrayed him more than his face ever could.

     She paused briefly, gathering herself, and then reached out. Her hand rose gently, without hesitation, to cradle his face where porcelain met flesh. Her palm warmed the cold edge of his skin, her thumb brushing the veil along his jaw before she bent closer. She pressed her lips, light as a sigh, to the crown of his head, just above the mask’s edge.

     It was meant as a blessing, a reassurance, no more than that. She drew back slowly, her hand beginning to slip away, offering him the space she thought he needed.

     He moved like lightning.

     His hands shot up, one seizing her wrist with sudden, brutal force. His other arm coiled around her waist and pulled her forward. Before she could catch her breath, he crushed his mouth to hers through the thin veil.

     The fabric was the only barrier between them, and it did nothing to blunt the ferocity of him. His kiss was not gentle—it was desperate, frantic, as the world itself might collapse if he did not brand himself into her lips at once. The porcelain of his mask pressed cold and unyielding against her cheek, while his breath came hot and ragged across her skin. His fingers trembled where they clutched her, the violence of his need undermined by the fragility of his shaking hands.

     She gasped against him, caught between the instinct to recoil and the shock of such raw hunger. Her free hand braced against his shoulder, feeling the rigid tension beneath the loose cloth of his shirt, every muscle was drawn taut as iron. His grip only tightened; her escape would mean annihilation.

     It was overwhelming—his trembling, the cold press of porcelain, the kiss itself, poured out with the ferocity of a drowning man clinging to the last breath of air. There was no rhythm, no tenderness, only urgency and despair, a frightening depth of longing that consumed him—and threatened to consume her with it.

     Her heart pounded, her breath snagging in her throat. The weight of what he was doing pressed heavy upon her—not a tender request, but a desperate claim, born of torment and fear. For a moment the world narrowed to the tremor of his hands, the heat of his mouth against the veil, the unyielding lock of his arm around her waist.

     And then she understood—he was not kissing her to simply take. He was kissing her because he could not believe she had given. His mind, broken and bewildered, sought to seize proof of her touch before it slipped away, before the mercy of her lips vanished like a dream.

     It was not passion alone that drove him, but terror: terror that she might never touch him again.

     With a ragged sound, he tore himself back, suddenly wrenched from something he craved and feared in equal measure. His hand lingered trembling at her waist, his masked face turned aside in shame at the violence of his own need. His breath came fast and shallow, rustling the veil between them, while the chamber itself seemed to pulse with the echo of what had just passed.

     She did not move. Her body felt strung tight, her lips tingling where his mouth had pressed, her pulse wild in her throat. She ought to have recoiled, to have fled from the cold porcelain and the bruising strength of his grip. Yet to her astonishment, she did not.

     Instead, a soft, incredulous laugh slipped free, breathless and unbidden. Her lips curved into a bright smile, and she found herself staring at him—the tense slope of his shoulders, the way his bare hands twisted against her robe, the stark line of his bowed head. Firelight glimmered across the dark mask, catching its rigid planes, but he did not look at her.

     Silence stretched, heavy as stone. She could not tear her gaze away. Warmth coiled low in her belly, insistent, unsettling, fed by the roughness of his kiss, the raw urgency in it, the trembling of his body pressed against hers. Oh…her want was undeniable.

     At last, her answer to the sudden kiss rose in a whisper, fragile yet steady. “I… would like to kiss you without the veil in the way.”

     The admission trembled in the air, bold and dangerous, a first true step across a threshold from which there could be no retreat. Heat spread through her cheeks as she spoke it, her throat tightening, yet she did not look away. She met his shocked silence with her gaze, holding it, waiting—uncertain whether he would recoil in horror, accuse her of cruelty, or seize her again with the same desperate hunger. She hoped it was the latter.

     Erik’s shoulders jolted as though she struck him. His head snapped up, golden eyes blazing through the mask’s hollows, wide with disbelief. For a moment he was voiceless, his breath rasping, his hand quivering where it clutched at her. Sounds escaped him—half sob, half laugh; strangled and raw. His fingers rose toward the veil, hovering, hesitant, as if afraid her words were only a trick of his fevered mind.

     All the while she watched him, heart pounding, savoring the warmth still coiling low in her stomach.

     For a long, unbearable moment Erik only stared, motionless save for the tremor running through his shoulders. His hands twitched against her, then clenched into fists, knuckles whitening as though he might hold himself together by sheer force. A sound tore from him—not laughter, not weeping, but something ragged and broken that seemed ripped straight out of his chest.

     He dropped suddenly before her, collapsing at her feet. His hands clutched at her robe with frantic strength, his head bowed so violently that the mask pressed hard against the floor. His voice came in a torrent, strangled and uneven, each word seeming to scorch his throat.

     “No—no, she cannot mean it, she cannot! She does not know what she says!” His fingers dug into her thighs now, trembling with fevered intensity. “She cannot kiss this. She cannot bear to see! The filth, the ruin—God has cursed it, cursed me-!” He shook his head wildly, the porcelain scraping faintly against the floor. “She would recoil, she would spit, she would scream—oh, cruel, cruel, if she toys with him so!”

     His words unraveled faster, breaking into sobs. “Take it back—say she did not mean it! Say she was only kind, only merciful, only soothing his madness. Erik can survive pity. But he cannot survive hope. Not hope, not the thought that she could ever…” His voice cracked, swallowed by a hoarse, wordless cry.

     Her breath caught at the sight of him undone so utterly, collapsed like a penitent at her feet. All she could do was watch how violently his desire warred against his self-loathing. At last she reached down, hands trembling, hovering uncertainly before daring to rest against his hair, the cold edge of the mask beneath her palm. His sobs dulled only slightly, still racking his frame and for a moment, she was afraid he might splinter apart at her touch.

     “Erik,” she whispered, her throat tightening around his name, though she knew not whether she meant to comfort, to deny, or to insist.

     He lifted his head only a fraction, enough for her to glimpse the fevered gleam of his eyes through the mask’s hollows. “Do not damn me with this mercy!” he choked out, desperate, torn. “Say you did not mean it. Take it back before I believe. Because if I believe—” His voice broke again, collapsing into silence, the last words drowned in a sob.

     He pressed his face into the folds of her robe, clutching her as though she were both executioner and savior. For a long moment she said nothing, her hands still resting against him, feeling each violent tremor that shuddered through his frame. His words poured without end—broken, fevered, dragging them both deeper into the pit of his torment until she could feel it pressing into her own chest, heavy as water, threatening to drown her alongside him. Compassion twisted inside her, aching and fierce. But beneath it—quieter, sharper—rose another feeling: a flicker of impatience.

      She had asked for something simple, something human. And in return she was met, as ever, with a torrent of self-condemnation, misery so consuming that every fragile step forward crumbled back into ruin.

     She breathed once, deep and steady, forcing the irritation from her face, from her hands. When she spoke, her voice was calm—gentle, but firmer than before. “Erik,” she murmured, leaning just enough to be heard above the frantic rasp of his breath. “Enough. We cannot stay here—neither of us. If we let this grief consume us, it will swallow us whole.”

     His head jerked against her lap, as though her denial of his suffering were a fresh wound. Before he could spiral further, she pressed on.

     “You need to stop,” she said, clear and gentle. “Take a break. Get dressed. Play music for me. I will start breakfast. That is what we can do now.” Her hand slipped down, prying gently at the fingers tangled so fiercely in her robe. “We can’t sit here in torment. We must go on.”

     He resisted, his grip iron, his breath hot against the fabric. She did not fight him, only pressed her fingertips lightly to his knuckles, patient, steady, insistent. “Come with me,” she urged softly. “Let me go. Let us rise. There is work to be done, Erik, and you cannot hide in despair forever.”

     At last, his hands slackened. His fingers slid away, trembling, leaving the folds of her robe crushed and creased where he had clung to them. He sat back on his heels; his head bent low, the mask turned toward the floor as though ashamed of having yielded.

     She smoothed the fabric where his grasp had left it wrinkled, and then angled her head to catch the line of his hidden gaze. Her voice was quieter now, but firm with its finality. “It is up to you,” she said, “if you ever decide to kiss me without the veil. That is your gift to give, not mine to take. But now, the day has begun, and we must meet it together.”

     Her words lingered in the silence, sharp as steel against the fragility of the moment. She did not wait for his answer. Rising slowly, she drew her robe close and crossed the chamber toward the hearth, where the embers lay waiting to be coaxed further into flame. Behind her, the weight of his silence pressed still—broken, bewildered, yet forced now to reckon with the truth she had left him.

Chapter Text

     The Parisian jail was quiet—eerily so, and emptier than Nadir had imagined. The corridors yawned hollow, their silence broken only by the steady drip of water, each drop echoing like the slow tick of a clock. The iron bars of the cells caught the brilliant light of dawn, their slick sheen betraying the damp that seeped from every crack in the stone. The air hung heavy with mildew and rust, thick with the stale scent of lives abandoned behind locked doors. Such places did not merely hold their occupants—they consumed them, swallowing flesh and spirit alike, until even memory was left to rot in the dark.

     Nadir sat on the narrow bench of his cell, hands folded loosely in his lap, head tipped back against the chill wall. His half-lidded eyes stared into nothing, dulled by sleeplessness. These places were too familiar. The damp quiet pressed on him like a memory, carrying him back to Persia—to endless hours in antechambers outside execution halls, waiting for summonses that never ended in mercy. He remembered nights straining for the faintest sound: the whisper of a blade sliding from its sheath, the soft tread of an assassin he knew too well gliding through alabaster corridors. Even when silence stretched unbroken, he had never been free of those echoes. Silence always carried the weight of blood.

     And now, even in Paris, that shadow clung to him still—the phantom glimmer of a golden mask in the gloom, a cloak unfurling like black wings at the edge of sight. Though the man himself was absent, Erik’s presence pressed upon him nonetheless, heavy as the desert heat that once smothered Mazenderan. Nadir thought of curling banners rippling above the Shah’s palace, of dust and jasmine hanging thick in the air, of the quiet terror etched into the faces of courtiers. And always, at the center, Erik—monster and marvel in equal measure—shaping wonders no mortal hand could rival, and devising cruelties no mortal soul could endure.

     He remembered Erik’s hands most of all. They were not merely human—too deft, too merciless, too certain in every motion. Fingers that could summon life from an instrument with impossible grace, then snuff it out of a man without hesitation. They had carved both beauty and horror, shaping cathedrals of sound, wonders of stone and steel, and in the same breath staining themselves in red. The Shah had exalted such gifts—and reveled in the power that their fear inspired, a power that bent courtiers and country alike beneath its shadow.

     Then there was Nadir—ever entangled, ever human—bearing the weight of caring when he should have borne the strength to condemn. He had been the reluctant custodian, shielding Erik when the world would have cast him down, guarding a secret that festered and spread. Every silence, every protection, had helped carve the shadow deeper. The burden he carried was not only of knowledge, but of guilt—a complicity that gnawed at his conscience and would not die.          

     The cold stone pressed against his back, dragging a sigh from him, heavy with the weight of years. Life, he thought, moved in cruel circles. The gilded cages of Persia had only given way to rusted iron in Paris, yet the sense of inevitability never changed. Wherever Erik walked, prisons followed—prisons of marble, of song, of devotion—and Nadir was always trapped in their shadows. The Northern Cemetery was no different from the pits he had watched fill at Mazenderan. The names changed, the uniforms altered, but the pattern endured. The Shah’s executioners, the French police—their cells and gallows, their bars and chains—were all cut from the same design. And at the heart of it, casting his inescapable shadow, stood Erik.

     The rattle of keys at the far end of the corridor pulled him from the spiral of his thoughts. Footsteps followed—deliberate, heavy—punctuated by the faint rustle of papers. A guard emerged from the gloom, eyes sharp with suspicion, accusation already written into his expression before a word had passed his lips.

     Nadir lifted his head, the fatigue of sleepless nights clouding his gaze. The moment felt inevitable, as inevitable as the roles men assumed again and again: judge, prisoner, executioner. The guard halted at the bars, unlocked them with a practiced hand, and jerked his chin in silent command.

      “Right. Let’s get to it, then” the man said gruffly, snapping the cold iron cuffs around Nadir’s wrists. The bite of metal was familiar, almost routine. Without resistance, Nadir rose and obeyed, falling into step behind the guard as the corridor swallowed them both.

     The passages stretched narrow and dim, lanterns spilling weak light across walls filmed with damp. The guard’s boots struck a steady rhythm ahead of him, each step a measured drumbeat leading them deeper into the jail’s hollow belly. Behind them, the silence of his cell closed like a door, and with it the thoughts he had tried to bury swelled back, relentless.

     Regret walked beside him, heavier than the chains at his wrists. Erik—once no phantom killer, but a brilliant young man imprisoned in a body and face the world reviled. A creature born into cruelty, shaped by torment, whose genius burned too brightly to be left untouched. Nadir had convinced himself that kindness was duty, that sparing Erik again and again was an act of mercy. He had pulled him from punishments, softened the judgment of others, and intervened when Erik’s own fury threatened to consume him. Each time, he had believed he was saving a life.

     Eventually, the years ground away all illusions. That wounded boy hardened into something darker, more deliberate. Sympathy grew difficult as Erik’s inventions turned crueler, his horrors no longer the wild lashings of pain but the chosen tools of a sharpened will. And still, Nadir could not let go. Habit, pity, fear—perhaps even love—kept him chained to the man. He had been Erik’s shield, his excuse, his silent advocate, long after the cause was lost.

     The guard turned a corner, and the passage widened. Lantern light brightened, revealing plastered walls and wooden doors—the jail’s innards giving way to its offices and interrogation rooms. It was not the prospect of defending himself once more that pressed on Nadir’s shoulders, but the feeling that every step carried him closer to a reckoning he had postponed for decades.

     How many would still live if he had let the Shah’s executioner finish his work? How many graves in Persia would stand empty, how many in Paris would never have been dug? Erik’s brilliance had always demanded blood. If Nadir had not interceded—if he had let the boy meet his fate then, allowed him to be punished for his dangerous knowledge instead of shielding him again and again by misplaced compassion—what shape might the world bear now, free of the specter that haunted it?

     The guard’s boots struck solidly against the stone as they neared another set of office doors, the sound reverberating in Nadir’s skull like distant thunder. His own life, he knew, might have been smaller, lonelier, stripped of the strange companionship Erik had thrown upon him. Yet, it would have been freer—freer of regret, freer of the suffocating press of ghosts. And perhaps, in that world, he would not now be walking into another chamber of judgment, carrying memories and guilt that no walls, no locks, no chains could ever contain.

     The guard pushed open a door on the right, and the stale air of the corridor gave way to the sharper tang of ink, paper, and tobacco. Behind the desk, Detective Jules Bernard rose at once, his dark coat falling into place as though he had been eagerly waiting. Recognition lit his eyes, and though his manner bore the weight of authority, there was warmth behind it still.

     “Mon Dieu, in cuffs? Come now,” Jules said, half reproach and half jest as he shot a glance at the guard. “Do you not recognize a man who has done the city more good than half its recruits? Remove them. At once.”

     The guard muttered under his breath but obeyed, the iron slipping from Nadir’s wrists with a grating clink. Nadir rubbed at the sore skin absently and inclined his head. “He was only doing his job.” he said evenly, sparing the guard a measure of dignity. Jules waved it off and dismissed the man with a flick of his hand, the door shutting behind him with a dull thud.

     Left alone, Jules stepped forward with a smile and extended his hand. “It has been some years since the Montmartre affair. I did not expect to see you again in such circumstances, my friend.”

     Nadir clasped his hand, feeling the firm, familiar grip. “Nor I, Jules.”

     “Sit, sit,” Jules urged, gesturing to the chair opposite. He eased back into his own seat, shuffled a few papers, but kept his eyes fixed on Nadir. His tone was pleasant, almost conversational, yet his words carried weight. “Tell me, Nadir—what could you have been doing in the Cimetière du Nord at such an hour? Graves tampered with, tombs opened, trespassing night after night. Surely you were not there to rob the dead?”

     Nadir’s voice was steady, though fatigue dragged at it. “I have been hired to find the missing Charles Delarue. As to how I came to that cemetery in pursuit of him… that is a long story.”

     Jules leaned back, folding his hands together. The corner of his mouth twitched with something between amusement and warning. “We have the morning,” he said lightly. “Let us hear it.”

     The words were genial, almost indulgent, but beneath them Nadir heard the iron. It was not an invitation but a warning: the truth must be told, and told well, if he wished to avoid a trial and the walls of a cell closing in once more.

      “As I said, I was looking for Charles Delarue,” Nadir began, his voice low but unwavering. “The young man vanished in the Opera after he started working in its cellars, yes? The place is already riddled with passages, cellars and waterways. I had reason to believe he might have stumbled into one of them and gotten lost while down there. His father tells me he never returned home.”

     Jules leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers as he considered. His expression was polite, but his gaze carried the weight of scrutiny. “So, why the cemetery? Why graves and tombs, when a man could simply walk into the Opera if he wished to look beneath it?”

     Nadir folded his hands on the desk, posture precise, as though willing his restraint to be seen. “One cannot these days, Jules. It hasn’t been that simple. Every entrance from within the building is locked and barred. I was not permitted passage—neither by the managers, nor by the guards and gendarmes who patrol it. They made it perfectly clear as well that I never would be. I had to search elsewhere.”

     Jules’ brow lifted, a faint smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “And you thought a cemetery was the answer?”

     “I thought,” Nadir said, his tone sharpening just slightly, “that the cemetery might hide what the Opera House itself would not reveal. You know Paris is laced with tunnels, Jules, passages long forgotten by most. Charles Delarue disappeared under the Opera. If, while working, he vanished within the cellars or their tunnels, then the cemetery was one of the few places left where I might gain entry to find him. I’m sure you’ve been looking over my charts, you can see where I thought to look and why.”

     The detective began to tap a pen lightly against his papers, the sound clicking in the silence between them. His eyes stayed fixed on Nadir. “So you chose to dig through graves?” he sternly repeated.

     “I chose to follow the first and only lead I had,” Nadir replied, leaning forward now, his voice firmer. “If there is even the faintest chance that a missing man is trapped below ground, what would you have me do? Wait for the earth to give him back on its own? I did not go to desecrate, Jules. I went because every other way was closed to me, and time weighs heavily on the missing.”

     Jules let the silence stretch, pen balanced lightly in his fingers, smile still easy. But his gaze never softened, sharp as glass, and the warning in it pressed heavy in the room: Nadir’s words had better be enough.

     The pen stilled. Jules narrowed his eyes, just enough to shift the tone of the air. “And…the drunkard with you?” he asked at last. “The one my men saw clawing at the graves? Joseph Martin.”

     Nadir did not flinch, though he felt the weight of the name settle in the room. He sat a fraction straighter, bracing himself. “Yes. Joseph Martin.”

     Jules arched a brow, skepticism plain. “And what possible part could a man like that play in your search for Charles Delarue? A missing man is one matter. A drunken vandal’s antics are quite another.”

     Nadir drew a slow breath before speaking, each word deliberate. “Joseph Martin is no grave robber or vandal, Jules, whatever it may have looked like to your men. He is my chief witness to Charles Delarue’s disappearance, and an aggrieved father in his own right. His daughter vanished not long ago around the Opera House—stolen from him, much as Charles was taken from his family. You may call him desperate, even reckless, but he is no criminal. He was searching, as I was searching—for his girl, (Y/N), and for Charles.”

     The detective’s pen scratched faintly against the paper, his sharp gaze never leaving Nadir. “Desperation. Desperation does not excuse breaking into tombs in the dead of night.”

     “Perhaps not,” Nadir allowed, his tone firm yet urgent. “But desperation explains it. You must understand, monsieur: when a child is missing, a father will go anywhere, claw through anything, if there is even the faintest chance of finding them alive. Martin was not desecrating graves for greed or sport. He acted out of hope and - .”

     Jules let the pen rest, tapping it against the desk. “Hope can be a dangerous excuse.”

     “Hope,” Nadir countered softly, “is often the only excuse left to men like us. And, Jules…he was acting under my request for his help.”

     The office was silent save for the faint ticking of a pocket watch. Jules studied him, eyes narrowed, weighing every word, every inflection. The genial smile had faded, but his scrutiny only sharpened. “So then,” he said at last, “two men prowling a cemetery at night, disturbing the dead, both bound together by grief and duty. You would have me believe this is nothing more than…coincidence? Poor timing? Poor…planning?”

     “It is not coincidence,” Nadir replied, his gaze steady. “It is loss. It is duty. These things drive us both into places we would never otherwise go. And if you condemn us for that, monsieur, then you must also condemn every parent who has searched a darkened street, calling for a child who never came home.”

     Jules leaned back once more, steepling his fingers. His expression softened only slightly, but the warning still burned in his eyes. “Careful, Nadir. Passion makes for fine speeches, but the law requires evidence. If you wish to persuade me, give me something more solid than grief and duty.”

     Nadir inclined his head, the fatigue of sleepless nights pressing more heavily on him. “I have a letter from Henri Delarue, Charles’ father, hiring me to find his son. It is in my desk at home, along with our subsequent correspondence. I am certain Monsieur Delarue would be more than willing to confirm this to you directly. As for Joseph—he has no one but his missing daughter and me to speak for him. But—” Nadir leaned forward, his voice cutting in like steel, “what stolen valuables have you found on us? Any at all?”

     Jules leaned back farther, the pen balanced idly between his fingers. He gave a slow, deliberate nod, as if weighing the words. “None,” he admitted at last. “No jewelry, no coins, no trinkets. Nothing taken from the graves.”

     Nadir allowed himself the smallest exhale, though his gaze did not waver. “Then you see, monsieur. Whatever suspicions brought us here, profit was never our purpose. There are no stolen goods because there was never theft in our intent.”

     Jules’ eyes narrowed, testing the strength of the conviction across from him. “Intent is a fine thing to claim,” he said slowly. “But intent is invisible. The law concerns itself with what men do. The desecration of graves is crime enough, regardless of whether you walked away with baubles or not.”

     Nadir leaned forward, resting his wrists lightly on the desk, the sleeves of his coat still creased where the cuffs had bitten into them. His voice was calm, but each word carried the raw weight of exhaustion. “And what did I do, Jules? I searched the only place left to me, because I was denied passage into the Opera where my client’s son disappeared. I pursued the trail of a desperate father because the authorities had no answers to give him. If the law condemns that, then let it condemn me openly—but let it do so with honesty, not by dressing me as a thief I never was.” His gaze locked with Bernard’s, unyielding. “And let the law answer, too, for its own failures—why it failed Charles Delarue, and why it failed (Y/N) Martin. Why has the law failed to find them?”

     Jules drummed his fingers against the tabletop, the rhythm sharp, impatient, then stopped all at once. His expression shifted, the genial mask sliding neatly back into place. Yet beneath it lingered something else—an edge of reluctant respect, or perhaps unease at how plainly the words had been spoken. “You speak well, monsieur,” he said at last, his mouth curling faintly. “Perhaps too well for your own good.”

     Nadir did not smile. “I speak plainly. It is all I have left.”

     Jules regarded him in silence for a long moment, then nodded, slower this time. “Very well. I will have word sent to Monsieur Delarue. If his account matches yours, it will weigh heavily in your favor. As for Martin…” His gaze sharpened, the warmth draining from it. “I have little more than your word to weigh against the sight of him with crowbar in hand. And your word, Monsieur, is already compromised. You were there beside him.”

     Jules leaned forward, folding his hands over the desk. “You must see the difficulty, Nadir. A drunkard clawing at graves in the middle of the night—it reads poorly in my reports. To release him on testimony from another suspect? That reads worse still. The magistrate will want proof.”

     Nadir did not flinch. “At worst, Joseph Martin is guilty of desecration—vandalism. To drag him before a magistrate for something so small would waste your time, his time, and the court’s patience. You know as well as I that such a case will be thrown back in your lap, and the bench will resent you for squandering their docket on desperation instead of crime. This is a matter that can, and should, be settled here.”

     Nadir leaned forward then, his dark eyes locking with Jules’, his voice low but unyielding. “You wish to preserve your name? Then preserve it with sense. Burden the courts with a grieving father, and they will curse your diligence as folly. Handle it here, quietly, as it deserves—and you save your reputation as well as your time. Martin’s grief is punishment enough. Let the law show restraint, not cruelty.”

     For the first time, Jules’ composure wavered—just a flicker, but enough to crack the stillness of his face. His eyes fell to the papers before him, fingers resting motionless upon their edges. The silence stretched taut between them, heavy as a noose, its weight deciding whether Joseph Martin would walk free or vanish into the machinery of Parisian justice.

     Jules remained quiet for a long while, his gaze lowered to the pen he turned idly between his fingers. The faint click of metal against wood filled the room, a steady metronome where words should have been. From time to time his eyes drifted toward the window, where autumn sunlight spilled across the glass—bright, unyielding—gilding the desk in a burnished glow that only sharpened the silence. His stillness was not hesitation but calculation: the posture of a man measuring risk, balancing the security of his reputation against the tug of instinct.

     Nadir did not move, patient as stone. He knew better than to disturb the quiet with pleas. Jules Bernard was not a man to be hurried; persuasion, once offered, had to be left to ripen in its own time.

     At last Jules exhaled, slow and deliberate, and set the pen aside. He leaned back in his chair, his eyes returning to Nadir—sharp, but not unkind. “You and I have crossed paths before, Monsieur Khan. Montmartre, you recall. Your assistance then was…invaluable.” A wry smile curved his mouth, though it never touched his eyes. “I do not make a habit of bending rules for sentiment. But I am not blind to debts. Nor to the men who repay them.”

     He tapped the desk once, crisp as a gavel, a decision struck. “So. Here is what I will do. You and your companion will not stand trial. There is no evidence of theft, and I have no wish to clog the magistrate’s bench with what amounts to little more than grief and broken stone. I will see it handled here, quietly. You will both pay a fine for vandalism—enough to satisfy the letter of the law. And in return, I expect your word that neither of you will set foot in that cemetery again.”

     Nadir inclined his head, the faintest trace of relief in the movement. “You have my word, Jules. And, my gratitude.”

     Jules’s smile broadened, though his tone stayed iron-clad. “Good. Then remind Martin of the same when he wakes from whatever grief-and liquor-stricken stupor he wallows in. I’ll not be so indulgent twice.”

     “I will see to it.” Nadir replied evenly. His voice carried no protest, only the weight of weary acceptance.

     For a moment the two men regarded one another across the desk—one with the satisfaction of order restored, the other with the quiet resignation of a man who had narrowly stepped aside from disaster. Then Jules reached for his ledger, drew a single line across the page, and shut it with a snap that echoed like a verdict.

     “Then it is settled,” he said, his genial cadence restored. “You are free to go, Nadir. Both of you. But do not mistake leniency for weakness. Should I hear of your shadows haunting my cemeteries again, you will not find me so generous.”

     Nadir rose slowly, bowing his head in acknowledgment. “Understood.”

     When he turned toward the door, the iron weight of the night’s ordeal pressed more heavily on him than the cuffs ever had. He had won freedom—his own, and Joseph’s—but at the cost of another debt to shoulder.

     The jail doors groaned as they opened, their hinges shrieking like they resented their task. Nadir stepped out first into the bite of autumn air, the sudden brightness narrowing his eyes after so many hours in shadow. His lantern hung at his side once more, his pack slung across his shoulder, and the ferrule of his walking stick struck the cobblestones with a crisp, defiant ring.

     Behind him came the guard, Joseph in tow, both men hollow-eyed, faces lined with fatigue. Without ceremony, the guard thrust an envelope into each of their hands, the paper stiff, sealed with red wax, as cold and impersonal as the justice it represented.

     “Your debts,” the man said flatly. “Cleared once the sums are paid. Don’t find yourselves back here.” He turned on his heel, shutting the doors with a clang that reverberated down the street.

     Joseph scowled at the envelope, brows furrowing deep as he tore at the seal. “Bastards—” he began, unfolding it with a trembling hand.

     “Enough,” Nadir cut him off, snatching the paper from his grip with a sharp sigh. He tucked both envelopes into his own pocket before Joseph could make a scene. “It is done. Paid, and finished.”

     Joseph stared at him, eyes red-rimmed from drink and sleepless nights, his mouth tightening into a grim line. As they started down the street, his voice rasped low, hoarse with exhaustion and fury. “We’re going back to the cemetery, then?”

     Nadir’s patience snapped. “No.” The word cracked like a whip. “We are not. That was one of the conditions of our release. Would you risk both our freedoms for nothing?”

     Joseph’s jaw clenched, shoulders squaring as he slowed his stride. “What freedom?” he spat, his voice rising sharp enough to cut the morning air. “What is freedom to me if my daughter lies rotting beneath those stones? You call that freedom? It means nothing!” His face twisted with desperation, eyes blazing. Abruptly, he turned on his heel and began striding back toward the graveyard, as if grief itself dragged him by the throat.

     Nadir exhaled through his nose, struggling to hold composure. “Joseph!” he called after him, his voice clipped, stern. “There are other ways. We can think—speak to Delarue, appeal to Bernard again. There are paths that do not end in a cell!”

     Joseph gave no sign of hearing. His boots struck harder against the cobblestones, each step a drumbeat of mounting fury.

     A curse hissed from Nadir’s lips. He surged forward, caught Joseph by the arm, and shoved him back hard enough to stagger. “You will not throw this away!” His voice, usually tempered, thundered now with unguarded anger. “Do you think I risked everything for you just to watch you crawl back into the jaws that nearly closed on us? Fool!”

     Joseph reeled, fists curling, his breath hot and ragged. “You think you know grief, Nadir? You think you know what it is to have to think about burying a child? You have no right—no right—to stop me!”

     Their words clashed sharper than steel, the air between them sparking with rage and sorrow. For a heartbeat it seemed they might come to blows, two men bound more by despair than alliance. Nadir’s chest rose and fell, his fury warring with restraint. At last he ground the words out, harsh but steady: “If you go back now, you damn yourself—and me with you. Is that what you want? To rot in a cell while your daughter’s fate remains a mystery?”

     Joseph was deaf to reason. His grief had hollowed him, his rage driven him past all persuasion. He wrenched himself free of Nadir’s grasp and stormed down the street, his boots carrying him toward the cemetery with the blind determination of a man for whom no cost was too high.

     Nadir stood rooted for a long moment, his hands trembling with fury and helplessness. Then, with a weary curse, he forced himself forward—not to join Joseph in his madness, but because he knew better than to let him face the graveyard alone.

     The iron gates shrieked as Joseph shoved them wide, the sound scattering a flock of crows from the skeletal trees above. Daylight slanted across leaning tombstones, striping the ground with long shadows, as though even the sun recoiled from touching the place. Nadir followed at a distance, jaw locked, fists curling tight at his sides. Rage simmered in him—at Joseph’s recklessness, at his own inability to restrain him, at the curse of being dragged once more beneath this cemetery’s shadow.

     Joseph pressed on, unheeding. His boots ground over gravel with the cadence of a man marching into battle. He spared no glance for the mourners lingering at the far lane, their whispers carrying faintly on the air. His eyes were fixed only on the half-pried sarcophagus—stone lid skewed aside, earth scattered from the desperate labor of the night before. Dust and the sour reek of disturbed soil clung thick in the air.

     Nadir reached him just as Joseph leaned over the gaping mouth. He seized his arm and yanked him back with more force than caution. “Stay where you are,” he snapped, voice low and sharp as drawn steel. “You will not set foot in there again. I will go down. I will find your daughter and Charles Delarue. You will remain here, and you will keep watch. Do you understand?”

     Joseph spun, his face flushed, eyes bloodshot with sleeplessness and drink. “No!” he roared, the sound ringing off the tombs. “No—you don’t give me orders! You don’t care about her. You never did. All you care about is your pay, your pride—strutting before Jules Bernard and Henri Delarue, playing the hero while the rest of us rot! That’s what this is to you: coin, reputation, glory!” His fists trembled at his sides, spit flying with each word. “She’s my blood, Nadir. Mine. And you’d leave me standing guard like a dog while you claim her for yourself?”

     Nadir’s patience snapped. He shoved Joseph back, his voice lashing out like a blade. “Fool! You were lucky once—only once—to crawl out alive. Do you think it will happen again? Those tunnels are not built for mercy. They are built to maim, to kill, to grind men into nothing. Brutal. Efficient. Thorough. You step into them again and you will not come out. Not this time. Not ever.”

     Joseph staggered under the shove, chest heaving, fury flickering in his eyes. His anger did not fade—it sharpened, turned inward, honed into suspicion. Slowly, he straightened, his gaze narrowing to slits. For a moment the air between them held only the rasp of their breath and the harsh caw of circling crows.

     Then, quieter, cutting all the deeper for its restraint, Joseph asked, “And how is it you know so much about those passages? About their traps?” His voice was a blade now, every syllable dripping with mistrust. “What is it you’re not telling me, Nadir? What have you seen—or done—that makes you so certain?”

     Joseph’s words struck like a blade, and Nadir felt the heat of his anger drain away, leaving only a hollow ache in its wake. For the briefest moment he was no longer in a Parisian graveyard but back in Mazenderan—back in glittering halls where shadows moved at the Shah’s command, back in suffocating tunnels where Erik’s brilliance and cruelty were etched into stone. He remembered the traps: ingenious, merciless, designed not only to kill but to mock the very idea of escape. He remembered the man who had made them—and his own hand in keeping that man alive when perhaps the world would have been kinder if he had not.

     The memories surged, threatening to claw their way free, but Nadir forced them down with ruthless discipline. This was not the place, nor the time, nor the man with whom he could ever share such truths. Joseph, raw with grief, could never understand. He would never forgive.

     Nadir steadied his breath and met Joseph’s narrowed eyes. His voice, when it came, was calm, clipped, controlled. “I was a soldier, Joseph. Persia, the East—you learn to recognize the work of men who delight in cruelty, who carve death into walls as though it were art. I have walked passages like these, and I have buried men who were not fortunate enough to escape them. That is why I speak with certainty. Not to keep you from your daughter—but to keep you from being torn apart by contraptions built to slaughter.”

     Suspicion lingered in Joseph’s gaze, but so too did the gravity of Nadir’s conviction. The silence between them thickened, the open sarcophagus looming like a mouth waiting to swallow them both. Nadir prayed the explanation would hold, even as Erik’s shadow pressed heavy on his mind, whispering truths too poisonous to ever be spoken aloud.

     Joseph’s eyes did not soften. His voice, roughened by grief and sharpened by mistrust, cut through the silence. “Why would there be traps at all, Nadir? Who buries death in walls, who hides blades and pits beneath a cemetery? What are they guarding?”

     Nadir forced his features into weary pragmatism, shaping the lie with the ease of long practice. “Why?” he echoed, voice low, steady. “Because Paris is not all churches and bones, Joseph. There is wealth buried here, treasures men were willing to die to protect. Old noble houses, forgotten guilds, even the Opera itself—they guard their dead and their secrets jealously. Tomb robbers have stalked these passages for centuries. Some traps were set not for phantoms, but for thieves. Set to make sure no one who trespassed left again.”

     He drew a measured breath, letting the words sink in, weighty as truth. “That is why I told you—you were lucky once. You will not be a second time. It matters little who laid the snares or why. What matters is that they exist, and they do not care whether you seek treasure or your child. They will kill you all the same.”

     Nadir stepped closer, his voice softening but losing none of its weight. “Do not make yourself a casualty of your own recklessness. Do not make your daughter suffer that. If you want her found, let me go. Let me be the one who carries that risk.”

     Joseph’s eyes narrowed, torn between fury and the fragile thread of reason. Behind them, the half-open sarcophagus gaped wide, silent and waiting like a mouth eager to swallow.

     The storm in Joseph broke as suddenly as it had risen. His chest still heaved, his breath ragged, but his fists fell open at his sides, shoulders sagging beneath the crushing weight of despair. The fire in his eyes dimmed, leaving only fear—the kind of fear that hollowed a man from the inside out. He turned his head aside, as if ashamed to let Nadir see him undone.

     Silence stretched between them, broken only by the harsh cry of a crow wheeling above and the restless hiss of autumn leaves scraping across the gravestones. At last Joseph’s voice came, hoarse and splintered. “If she is down there… if she’s—” He could not finish. The word strangled in his throat. He shook his head sharply, as though the thought itself might break him. “God help me, I cannot do it. Not again.”

     Nadir laid a steady hand on his shoulder—unyielding, anchoring him against the undertow of grief. “Then let me.” he said. The words carried no boast, no pride—only the immovable weight of grim resolve. With practiced precision he struck a match on the stone tomb, coaxing the lantern to life. Its flame flared, and then steadied, the glow fragile against the midday light. In his other hand he raised his walking stick until his fist and the thick shaft stood level with his eyes. His grip whitened on the polished wood, the stick no longer a mere tool but oath, shield, and weapon all at once.

     “Listen carefully.” His gaze cut like tempered steel. “You will wait here. If I do not return within six hours, you leave. You will not follow me. Do you understand? If need be, you go to Detective Jules Bernard. You tell him everything you know. That is your duty if I fall.”

     Joseph’s lips parted, but Nadir pressed on, relentless. “If the police come before I return, you say only what they already know—that you were desperate, that you followed me here like a fool. Nothing more. The less they suspect, the safer this remains.”

     He stepped closer still, lowering his voice until it carried the weight of command. “And if I do not return at all, you will not waste your life on grief. You will not crawl into this pit after me. You will take what you know and place it in Jules Bernard’s hands. Do not let both of us vanish into silence.”

Joseph blinked hard, eyes stinging, his face a map of anguish. “And if she’s gone?” he whispered, barely able to shape the words. “If my girl is already—”

Nadir’s jaw tightened, but his reply came swift, unflinching. “Then I will bring you proof. I will not leave her lost in shadows. You have my word, Joseph—under any circumstance, I will find her. I swear it.”

     The oath rang in the cold air, heavy and unbreakable. For a long moment Joseph searched his face, measuring whether the promise could bear the weight of both their hopes. At last, slowly, he gave a single jerking nod, his whole body trembling with the cost of surrender.

     Nadir inclined his head in return, then turned toward the sarcophagus. The half-shifted slab loomed like a threshold, its mouth yawning black into the earth. He gripped his walking stick firmly before him, drew in a steadying breath, and without another word lowered himself into the hidden passage.

     Daylight clung to his shoulders for a fleeting instant before the shadows swallowed him whole. Joseph stood rooted at the edge, staring after him, the sound of his daughter’s name burning unsaid in his throat.

     The air below was colder than the graveyard above—damp, stale, and heavy with the sour tang of stone long shut away from sun or wind. Nadir eased himself down, lantern raised high. Its flame trembled, casting long, unsteady shadows that crawled over the walls. The light gilded the slick sheen of moss and mortar, and the close-set walls seemed to press inward, eager to engulf him.

     His walking stick tapped ahead of each step, measured and precise. Any stone out of place, any seam too neat, any hollow note underfoot—he prodded it first. And always, as though by ritual, he drew the stick back to level with his eyes, his grip whitening on the shaft, prepared to strike or ward off whatever the dark might spring against him.

The ceiling hung low, dripping into stagnant puddles that mirrored the lantern’s glow like fractured glass. The silence was suffocating—thick, watchful, as though the tunnels themselves were holding their breath, waiting for him to falter.

     The first traps revealed themselves quickly, their malice already spent. A frayed length of twine dangled from a bent nail, the noose it once held snapped in a clumsy rush. Further on, a jagged frame jutted from the wall, its sharpened stakes triggered and left exposed like the ribs of a carcass. Nadir crouched, examining the splintered wood with a grim frown. Joseph’s panic had carried him through this gauntlet, and fortune—whether sheer chance or the ferocity of a father’s will—had spared him. Nadir’s jaw tightened as he rose. It was nothing short of a miracle the man had crawled back out alive.

     He pressed onward, counting each pace against the beat of his heart, gauging slope and direction with soldier’s discipline. At every fracture line in the stone, every uneven patch, every hollow echo, the stick tested first, and then returned swiftly to his shoulder. The tunnels wound endlessly, forcing him at times to twist sideways to pass, and at others opening into cavernous hollows where the lantern’s light drowned before it touched the far wall. His breath fogged in the cold, and the scrape of his stick on stone echoed like phantom footsteps closing in behind him.

     At last, after what felt like an age, his reckoning told him he had reached the distance between the graveyard and the Opera’s cellars. The passage narrowed again, bent sharply, and ended at a panel of fitted stone. Nadir pressed his palm against it, cautious, fingers searching for the hidden catch. The mechanism yielded with a reluctant sigh, stone grating against stone as the door eased open.

     Stale air rushed past him, thick with dust, mildew, and the faint tang of rot. The lantern’s glow spilled into a vast chamber beyond—he had unsealed a false panel in the north wall of Cellar Four.

     He slipped through, lantern raised, and let the stone grind shut behind him. The echo rolled like a tomb sealing, and silence fell swiftly back, absolute. The air here was rank with stagnant water and mold, thick enough to sting his throat. Dust drifted in lazy clouds, glittering in the lantern light like ash in a furnace draft. Broken crates slumped in the corners, their damp wood collapsing into mulch. Here and there, the rusted jaws of rat-traps gaped faintly, long abandoned yet still grinning with menace.

     Nadir moved with deliberate care, his stick tapping the ground in sharp, measured strokes. Each strike was followed by a pause, listening, weighing the sound. If the stone rang solid, he pressed on. If the note rang hollow, if seams cut too neatly across the floor or the texture shifted, he probed further with meticulous caution. And always, once satisfied, he drew the stick back up to the level of his eyes, knuckles pale against polished wood, ready to strike or defend in an instant. Tap—test—ready.

At first, Cellar Four offered only refuse: scraps of rotted cloth, a page half-pulped by damp, a shattered wine bottle glittering dully where the light caught it. But a few paces deeper, the stick tapped a hollow note. Nadir crouched, lowering the lantern. The faint seams of a false floor revealed themselves, subtle but unmistakable. He pried carefully at the edge until one stone sagged downward with a sigh, opening onto a void that swallowed the light. No echo answered from below. A pit, bottomless—or deep enough that no man could survive its fall. He grunted, levered the slab back into place, and wedged it tight so it would not collapse again.

     Further along, the stick struck a raised stone, barely higher than its neighbors. Nadir froze. A thin trace of powder clung to its cracks. He recognized it at once: an old trick. A pressure plate designed to shatter a vial of poison gas. Keeping wide, he pried the stone loose with his stick and crushed the vial within. A sharp, acrid sting burned his nostrils and throat as the fumes escaped, then thinned quickly into the air.

     At the far end of the cellar, the lantern revealed a solitary chair standing square in the open, absurdly out of place in the otherwise bare chamber. Nadir’s grip on the stick tightened. Chairs were never left here by accident. He tested the floor leading up to it, found nothing, then extended the stick and nudged the chair’s back.

     The detonation was immediate. The chair exploded with a hollow crack, wood splintering outward in a hail of jagged shards. Smoke and dust curled through the air as fragments clattered across stone. Nadir stepped back swiftly, shielding his face until the haze cleared. His heart hammered, but his hands were steady. Suspicion alone had spared him.

     Only then did he press forward, slipping through the narrow archway that funneled him towards the third cellar.

     Between the third and fourth cellars, the floor betrayed him. The tap of his stick rang hollow—wrong. He froze, lantern lifted high, and prodded carefully. Steel gleamed in the light: a sprung leg-trap, its jaws gaping wide, teeth crusted in brown-black rot. Beside it lay a heavy cudgel, its iron head dark and matted. The stones beneath were spattered with the dried ghost of old blood.

     Nadir crouched low, the lantern’s glow pooling in the stain. He knew this trap—remembered Erik’s cold voice in Persia, describing it with a craftsman’s pride. Catch a man by the leg, drag him down, and let the cudgel fall. Bone split, brains dashed across the stone. The memory twisted his stomach. He rose swiftly and pressed on, his grip tightening on the stick until his knuckles burned white.

     In Cellar Three, the dangers lingered. The lantern revealed a nearly invisible cord strung low across a corner, waiting for the careless. Nadir’s stick caught it first, tugging the loop taut. He crouched, unspooling the Punjab lasso with steady hands, coiling it neatly before cutting the trigger free. His breath fogged faintly in the chill, but his hands never shook.

     Further in, the probing stick found the faint seam of a false wall. Nadir rapped it once with his knuckles, then stepped aside and pressed it with the stick. The panel gave. Steel hissed through the dark—three knives shot out, burying themselves in the far wall. Their hilts quivered, echoes fading into silence. Nadir exhaled slowly, then dismantled what remained of the mechanism with surgical precision.

     Tap—test—ready. The rhythm carried him deeper.

     At last he reached Cellar Two. Relief flickered in him—thin, fleeting. By every plan, every boast Erik had ever given him, this space was safe. The Opera’s workmen passed freely here. No traps. No snares. Beyond the third cellar, Erik’s reach ends.

     The lantern’s glow swept over the damp stone, caught a pale shred of cloth—then the slack gray curve of a face. Nadir froze. His breath caught, chest tightening as his gaze fixed on the figure slumped against the wall.

     Charles Delarue.

     The boy’s body hung grotesquely suspended, a cord biting deep into his throat, head lolling at an impossible angle. Skin stretched waxen and gray, mottled with the sick colors of decay. Clothes stiffened, darkened where rot had seeped through the fabric.

     Nadir’s hand clenched around the walking stick until the polished wood groaned. He forced himself forward, lantern raised, though bile pressed hot against his throat. The sickly-sweet reek of death choked him—but worse was the sheer wrongness.

     A Punjab lasso in the second cellar.

     There were not meant to be traps here. None. He had memorized Erik’s every word, every arrogant boast, every meticulous line of his designs. The third cellar was the boundary. Above it, safety. He had trusted that boundary like scripture. And now Charles’s corpse mocked it—dangling in the lantern glow, his slack mouth opened silent accusation, proof that the rules had changed.

     Dread surged through him, icy and merciless. If there was a snare here, where none should have been, then Erik had lied. Or worse—someone’s hand was shaping the catacombs still. But, how? And to what end?

     A shiver rippled through him, colder than the graveyard air above. In the slack ruin of Charles’s body he imagined another figure, another face—her face. (Y/N), ensnared by cords she would never have seen, her body broken by devices she could never have imagined. His chest constricted until every breath hurt, and for an instant the lantern quivered in his grip.

     Erik had never confessed all of his designs. Secrets he hoarded like treasures, traps he would never entrust even to Nadir. If one of those lay waiting here—hidden, patient, lethal—what chance did she have if she had wandered this far?

     Nadir forced his lungs to move, shallow, steady, though the reek of Charles’s decay filled them like poison. He dragged his gaze from the boy’s face to the mechanism itself, willing his mind to dissect it, to reduce horror to parts and design. Yet beneath the surface of calculation, the truth circled like a vulture: Erik had at some point redrawn the boundaries, and Nadir was walking blind again through a labyrinth spun from his genius and his cruelty.

     He pressed the end of his stick hard into the floor, grounding himself, though his knuckles stood out white against the polished wood.

     “You bastard.” he whispered into the silence.

     Beneath that bitter word laid the darker suspicion he could not quiet: that (Y/N) was long ago caught in one of Erik’s unseen designs, and that, as with Charles, he was far too late.

Chapter Text

     The kitchen air was soft and golden, fragrant with the yeasty warmth of fresh bread and the gentle hiss of eggs in the pan on the stove. (Y/N) stood with the sleeves of her silken robe rolled neatly past her elbows, a ribbon pulling her hair back from her face, humming a tune she half-remembered from childhood. The sound felt almost impossible here, in this labyrinth of stone and shadow beneath the Opera, yet it carried on easily, light and steady, as if sunlight itself had found a way to seep into the walls.

     Her movements had grown natural in the small space, her hands working with familiar rhythm, her body radiating warmth that owed little to the fire in the stove. She was intent on keeping breakfast simple—bread crisped over the grate, eggs, perhaps a piece of fruit? A small indulgence stirred at her anyway, the craving for something sweet.

     Beneath the rhythm of her hands, her thoughts would not keep still. Her lips still tingled with memory, so sharply that more than once she pressed the back of her wrist to them, as though she might trap the sensation there—the heat of him, the fierce, unrelenting urgency of his mouth against hers. Even through the veil it had been searing, desperate, more than she had ever known. Frightening and tender, heartbreaking and exalting all at once, and the fabric of the veil on his mask seemed to make him even more desperate. She had never known a man to kiss as though the very world would collapse if he stopped.

     The eggs hissed as she stirred them, and her smile softened. She thought of him in sleep, how fragile he had seemed cradled against her, how his sobs had wracked his body while she soothed him with quiet touches, forehead pressed to her chest. She had kissed his head in the morning, meaning it as nothing more than a small comfort, but he had seized on it like a drowning man clinging to driftwood, dragging her deeper into him with that wild, bruising kiss.

     She set the bread to toast over the coals and leaned a hip against the counter, her humming growing a shade louder, fuller, no longer something accidental but deliberate—a sound of contentment. She let herself believe this nearness between them might not vanish like mist; that perhaps the day ahead would not end in shadows or grief. Breakfast was a small thing, ordinary, yet it felt like a triumph: to cook for him, to coax him to eat, to pretend for one morning they might share the rhythm of an ordinary life.

     Still, a question tugged at her—perhaps she ought to slow her feelings, rein herself back. Her heart was moving too quickly, and she felt dizzy this morning with the speed of it. And yet the thought of retreat felt impossible. Some part of her longed to dive headlong into him, into this strange and perilous intimacy he offered her, fragile as glass and fierce as fire.

     He made her feel needed. Treasured. Beautiful, even. She read it in the language of his body; felt it in the trembling of his hands when they touched hers, in the desperate press of his mouth through the veil, in the way he clung to her while he slept. Her thoughts slipped back to the dinner he had prepared, the glow of candlelight, the way his golden eyes lingered on her in that blue dress.

     That dress becomes you.

     The words echoed still, spare but certain and she had seen the truth of them in his heavy gaze. She wished she hadn’t felt so revolted by him. She wished her heart knew the truth of him then.

     There was brilliance in him, dazzling and inexhaustible. His genius in music left her breathless, but it was his eagerness to share it—his patience, his quiet devotion—that truly enchanted her. She had never known anyone so hungry to give, so delighted by each small spark of her understanding, as though her learning were a gift to him.

     Then there were the ways he provided for her, unexpected and practical, as though some part of him had long been preparing for her presence. The cupboards never emptied: there was always fresh food, good bread, a carafe of wine waiting at hand, firewood stacked neatly in the corner. The little house beneath the earth was never barren. Even its comforts astonished her—the hot water that poured at the turn of a knob, the shelves stocked with soaps and lotions she had never imagined finding here, buried in stone.

     It was as though he had anticipated every possible need, thought of each small want before she could even name it herself.

     Yes. She could see herself making a home here. She could imagine sinking into his life, letting it enclose her, and never longing for the world above again.

     Her mind slipped further than she meant it to. She thought of his lips, strange and trembling, and wondered what it would be like to kiss them without the veil, without even the mask. She had never seen his full face—what if…? No. The question dissolved almost as soon as it formed. It did not matter. What mattered were the eyes she had seen: golden, fierce, and tender, gazing at her as though she were the only soul in the world.

     She imagined those eyes gazing at her, his mouth open against her own, no barrier left between them but breath. She imagined the weight of him over her, the heat of skin against skin in firelight, the shocking intimacy of their bodies tangled together without restraint. The thought stole her breath, warmth coiling low in her stomach.

     A nice daydream. But it carried her too far.

     A sharp, acrid scent pulled her back. She blinked, startled, and turned with a small cry. The bread was blackened at the edges, smoke curling upward from the grate. She snatched it out quickly, fanning at the air with her hand, cheeks burning with embarrassment.

     Her humming faltered, the spell broken, though the smile lingered at her lips despite the ruined toast. The warmth in her chest remained untouched, glowing brighter than the fire, stubborn against smoke or shadows.

     Erik meanwhile, sat hunched on the edge of the organ bench, shoulders bowed, hands slack between his knees. Though the house was warm, his chambers felt cold, and the unfeeling stone pressed in around him. He could still feel her arms—her hand smoothing through his coarse hair as though he were something precious, fragile, cherished. Not a corpse. The memory coiled hot and unbearable inside him, burning until his chest ached, until his whole body trembled.

     With effort, he rose and crossed in front of the tall mirror where he always dressed. Its frame still loomed, ornate but skeletal; the glass had long since been gutted by his self-loathing, every shard torn out and destroyed. Beside it, a small table gleamed with rigid symmetry: mask with its attached veil aligned like a relic, a cravat folded with precision. Order was his anchor, the only bulwark against the storm within. He clung to it because if that broke, the chaos inside of him would spill out unchecked. He was desperate to keep that from happening; to keep from any more unpleasantries.

     He could be good for (Y/N). He could show her he was ever the gentleman. He could be perfectly agreeable, though lately he had been prone to hysterics. He needed to be careful to keep that under control. He could not bear for her to despise him because of his behavior.

     He began with his shirt, fastening each button slowly, deliberately, as though the measured pace could force his heart into obedience. Every fastening became a statement: I am calm. I am composed. I am master of myself. Yet his fingers betrayed him, trembling so badly they slipped the holes, snagged the thread. He paused, pressing both palms flat to the table until the tremor eased.

     His mind would not obey. It reeled backward into the night: her lips on his, the veil crushed between them, her breath hot against him. The taste lingered—desperation, urgency, the helpless violence of need so sharp he would have finally dropped dead if she pulled away. And her voice—steady, gentle, merciful: Next time, without the veil.

     The words struck like a blade. He gripped the edge of the table so hard the wood creaked. Next time. Without the veil.

     He wanted it. God help him, he wanted it more than he had ever wanted anything in all of his years. To feel her lips against his bare mouth, her breath mingling with his, her arms around his unshielded self. The longing cut through him like fire, stealing the strength from his legs.

     Longing curdled into terror. He saw it too vividly: her gasp, her recoil, her eyes gone wide with horror the instant she beheld the truth of him. He heard her voice breaking, raw with revulsion, pleading to be released from his touch. The past surged up like a wound torn open—Christine’s face twisted with dread, her scream lodging like glass in his ears, her nails raking bloody lines across his ruined skin as he forced her hands against him, desperate for her to know, to feel what he was.

     With a strangled sound, he pressed his fists into his eyes, as if he could drive the memory back into darkness. But the visions clung to him, merciless, etched into every nerve.

     He forced on his waistcoat, tugging each seam into place, every fold exact. His motions were sharp, soldierly, an iron discipline drilled against the panic in his chest. Even so, the tremor lingered in his pulse, thundering too fast, too wild.

     At last, he lifted the mask. His hands lingered over it a moment, as though in silent prayer, before fitting it to his face with reverent precision. The cool lining pressed close, settling against his skin like a second flesh he had worn longer than his own. He drew the veil down into place, its dark fabric falling to shroud the wasted ruin beneath, a shield interposed once more between him and the world. Only then, as the armor sealed him in, did he dare to draw a steadying breath.

     Alas, the armor seemed to no longer fit as it once had. Last night, she had wrapped her arms around him, had soothed him through sobs he could not cage. In that fragile, impossible moment, he had surrendered more of himself than he had ever dared, perhaps…not even to his angel. To Christine. There was no undoing it now.

     He tied his cravat in a flawless knot, set his coat with exacting care across his shoulders. When he left this room, he would walk as Erik—the Opera Ghost, the master of his Palais Garnier; the genius. No trace of the man undone by this woman’s arms would remain. She would not see how badly he shook inside. She would not know that she had already unraveled him.

     His soles struck the stone floor with soundless precision as he left his chamber, coat fastened, veil drawn smooth. He forced his stride into measured steadiness, willing the ordered rhythm to disguise the thunder of his pulse.

     The air caught at him as he approached the kitchen—an acrid bite that grew sharper with each step. Smoke.

     The kitchen door stood ajar, a thin haze curling into the dining room. Inside, (Y/N) bent over the grate, fanning furiously, her cheeks flushed with heat and frustration. Her robe had fallen open, revealing the pale folds of her bedclothes beneath, while she muttered under her breath as though the fire itself might be shamed into obedience. On the table, a charred slice of toast smoldered in silence, an unspoken accusation. Her ribbon had slipped loose, letting one dark strand tumble free to cling stubbornly against her damp temple.

     He paused in the doorway. For a long moment he only watched—the absurd, ordinary chaos of her. The squeak of surprise when she singed her hand, the stubborn set of her shoulders as she tried to salvage breakfast, the faint echo of her humming cut short.

     To Erik, it was unbearably intimate. A woman flushed and flustered in her kitchen—his kitchen—her presence warming it in ways fire never could. He could scarcely breathe for the strangeness of it. A strangled breath escaped him.

     “Is this… our morning repast?” His voice came quieter than he meant, rough with spent emotion and the strain of control.

     She whirled, mortified, eyes wide. “Oh! I—well, it was toast…” She held up the blackened piece, and then cringed at her own words. “I might have… been distracted.”

     Her embarrassment should have steadied him, should have restored his footing. Instead, something twisted hot in his chest at the word. Distracted by what? Was she prying? What could she have been prying into?

     He stepped inside, the smoke clinging acrid to his veil, and without touching her reached past, plucking the pan from the grate with precise care. He set it aside to cool, every motion clipped, controlled.

     “You will choke Erik with your culinary experiments,” he said. The words might have sounded sharp, but the tremor beneath them betrayed him.

     She laughed—bright, unguarded—and the sound pierced him more than any insult could have. For all his armor, for all the precision with which he had dressed himself, he felt suddenly raw again, stripped bare in the smoke of burnt toast and her warmth, with her standing flushed and smiling before him.

     (Y/N) pressed a hand to her mouth, fighting to smother the laughter bubbling in her chest. The toast was irredeemable, blackened to coal, but the sight of him standing there—towering, immaculate in suit and mask, looking as though the smoke itself had dared to insult him—made the giggles harder to contain.

     She bit the inside of her cheek until it hurt. If she let herself go, she would dissolve into helpless laughter like a schoolgirl with her first crush, and that was the very last thing she wanted, was to appear silly and empty-headed.

     So she drew her shoulders back, lifted her chin, and with as much solemnity as she could muster declared, “Well, if Monsieur wishes a finer breakfast, he is welcome to cook it himself.” Her voice wavered on the last word, betraying her. A bubble of mirth pressed against her throat, her eyes bright and sparkling with suppressed glee. Compose yourself, she scolded inwardly. Don’t flutter. Don’t be ridiculous. And yet she wanted to laugh, to tease, to let him see how glad she was simply to breathe the same air as him.

     Erik’s pulse lurched at her words. He wanted to retreat, to slam the door between them, to claw back what little mastery he still possessed. This playfulness—this warmth—he did not know how to bear it.

     “Perhaps he should,” he snapped, or tried to. The words came sharp and clean, but brittle as glass, ready to splinter. “After all, Erik provides the food while others… misuse it.” His gaze flicked, quick and damning, to the charred slice on the table.

     (Y/N) caught it, and a laugh escaped her before she could stop it—soft, delighted, unafraid. Her heart thudded wildly. She ought not to push him further, not when he stood already on the edge of panic. Yet there was something disarming, almost tender, in seeing him ruffled not by deep grief or searing rage, but by something so small, so absurd, as burnt toast.

     Erik’s fingers twitched at his sides, aching to clench, to touch her, to flee. She laughs at you, the old voice hissed in his skull. She laughs, and you stand here like a fool. But another voice—quieter, newer—breathed back: She laughs because she is unafraid. She is happy. Each breath became a battlefield between the two.

     (Y/N), still struggling with her smile, only deepened the absurd theater of the moment—setting the blackened toast down on the table with a little flourish, as though she were presenting it to a king. The acrid scent clung to the air, and as she looked down at the charred edges her mirth ebbed into a sudden flush of shame. She busied herself straightening the plate, the folds of her apron, anything to avoid the weight of his piercing gaze.

     “Well,” she began at last, clearing her throat, “how desperately do you want toast, after all?” The words came lighter than she intended, and rushed too quickly. She filled the silence with more, tumbling out in a nervous stream. “I could try again. It was only carelessness—I wasn’t watching closely enough. I could slice another loaf and this time I’ll stand guard over the coals like a soldier at his post.”

     Her hands would not be still. They shifted restlessly, stacking and unstacking the same plates, as though each word required a gesture to carry it into the air. “Or… if you’d rather something else, I could fry potatoes instead. Nice and crisp, I know how to do that properly. Or bacon—yes, I could sear bacon, the smell alone would improve things.”

     She risked a glance at him and then quickly looked away, heat climbing her throat. Why am I babbling?

     Erik’s silence pressed against her like a physical weight. The kitchen seemed to shrink around it, filled not only with smoke but with the trembling tension of his restraint. He stood so rigidly still, yet she could feel the panic vibrating beneath it, as if he might vanish in the next breath—retreat back into stone and shadows where nothing could reach him. The thought spurred her on all the more.

     “Of course,” she added, her voice softening, “I know you don’t… wish to eat with me. I understand.” Her fingers tapped nervously against the counter, quick and uneven. “But I was thinking that one of us could sit in the drawing room, and the other in the dining room? They aren’t far apart. We could almost pretend—almost—as though we were eating together. We could speak, at least, even if not face to face.”

     A small, nervous laugh slipped out of her, self-deprecating, as though to soften the absurdity. “And afterwards… if you’d like, we could practice. Music, perhaps. Or reading. You promised once you would teach me anything I wished to learn. I think—” She hesitated, lips pressed tight, then forced herself onward, “I think I should like to keep learning with you. If you’ll allow it.”

     The kitchen had gone very still. The smoke from the ruined toast drifted upward in lazy threads, catching the shafts of light that cut across the counter from the brightness of the lamps. Her chest rose and fell quickly now, the words spent. She could not bring herself to meet his gaze. Instead she folded her hands before her, steadying herself, bracing for his silence to crush her.

     Inside the veil, Erik’s breath caught. The war within him raged—the panic urging him to flee, to lock the door against her gentle persistence, and another voice, smaller, fragile, pleading that he stay, that he not squander this strange gift she offered so freely.

     “Erik requires none of this performance,” he said at last. His tone cracked like a whip, sharper than he intended, brittle with strain. “Eat where you wish. Erik will endure.” His eyes flicked once toward the scorched bread, then away, as though scorning it might also shield him from his own hunger. “If she insists on… prattling at him, then so be it.”

     Her fingers tightened on the edge of the counter, but she did not flinch. He is afraid, she thought. And this is how he hides it. She held her ground, looking at him with quiet steadiness, her expression soft.

     Something faltered in him beneath her gentle silence. His voice cracked, breaking apart at the edges. “Erik… does not require anything,” he muttered, clipped, defensive—but less certain. His hands flexed at his sides, then stilled. “Potatoes will suffice.” A beat passed, heavy with something unspoken. Then, low, almost grudging: “And Erik will sit. In the dining room. If she insists on speaking to him.”

     (Y/N) smiled — small, careful, but it lit her eyes all the same. Relief swelled hot in her chest, though she swallowed it quickly, unwilling to let too much show.

     He caught it anyway. That glow, so simple and unguarded, struck him like a physical blow. For a breathless instant, the mask, the veil, the armor he had forged for himself dissolved beneath it. Her small smile unraveled him.

     She turned back to the counter, granting him the dignity of not watching too closely. Her chest ached at the rawness in his tone, but she knew better than to let it. Instead, she took up a potato, set her knife against its skin, and said lightly, almost as though it were an oath: “Then potatoes it shall be.”

     Erik straightened, spine snapping rigid, his hands trembling where they clenched in the folds of his coat. He told himself he had regained control. He told himself he was master again. He even told himself he could not stand babbling women. Oh… but the truth was undeniable; she had pried open something he could never close. Without another glance, he turned and swept from the kitchen, each step too precise, too fast, as though precision could disguise the panic beneath it.

     The acrid smoke clung to him, sour and heavy in the folds of his coat. Worse still was the echo of her voice, bright and warm, offering him everything as though it cost her nothing. He could not bear it. Not when the hollow inside him yawned wider with every breath, hungry and raw.

     The drawing room swallowed him whole. He crossed it in three long strides and collapsed into his chair by the fire, the velvet sighing beneath him as if mocking the weight he carried. His hands moved at once to the mask. For a moment he froze, knuckles white, as though to remove it would mean surrender. But the pressure in his skull was unbearable. With a broken sound between a gasp and a growl, he tore it away.

     The mask dropped into his hands, and he bent over it like a worshiper clutching the relic of a faith he no longer believed in. His elbows dug into his knees, his shoulders hunched low, and the firelight painted merciless shadows across the ruined shapes of his face. The silence was not soothing here as he hoped it would be — it roared in his ears, louder than music, louder than memory.

     He sat clutching the mask until the edges cut into his palms.

     He could not do this.

     His breath came ragged, harsh, rattling through the hollow in his chest. He pressed the mask harder to his brow, as if the cold porcelain might sear away the heat of shame burning beneath his skin. She will see. She will see what you are, and she will recoil. The voice — that old, familiar tormentor — whispered through him. Yet beneath it, softer but more insistent, another murmur rose: She smiled at you. She offered you the morning as though it belonged to you both.

     He shook his head violently, rejecting both voices. No. He must not believe. He must not hope. Hope had always been the cruelest illusion of all.

      By the fire’s light he hunched, clutching the mask as though it were a talisman, the last fragile scrap of mastery he could still lay claim to. He had fled the kitchen, fled her bright laughter and her nervous chatter, but there was no fleeing the truth. She had cracked the seal of his solitude, and now the floodwaters pressed against him, threatening to drown everything he was.

     Alone in the drawing room, voice breaking against the silence, he whispered into the mask cradled in his trembling hands.

     “I cannot… I cannot do this.”

     The kitchen felt cavernous without him. Smoke still hovered in the air, and she flapped a towel around uselessly, trying to clear it; cheeks hot with shame. She had laughed at him—not cruelly, never cruelly—but what if he thought she had? What if she had pushed too hard, teased too boldly, and driven him back into his shadows? Oh she knew not to prattle on like she did, and she did it anyway.

     Her hands could not be still. She picked up the knife, set it down again. Rolled a potato between her palms, set it aside, and then seized it once more. Calm yourself, she told herself sternly. You’ll burn something again if you don’t steady yourself. Yet her nerves spun in circles, faster and faster. Every word she had spoken replayed in her mind, louder, more foolish with each echo. “Monsieur wishes a finer breakfast”—oh, how childish, how ridiculous. She sounded like some love-struck girl playing at cleverness.

     At last she forced the knife through the potato’s skin, letting the scrape of the blade steady her. He is fragile. He is not like other men. You cannot overwhelm him with every silly thought that bubbles up in your head.

     And yet… hadn’t he stayed longer than she thought he would? He could have vanished at once, retreated the instant the smoke reached his nose. Instead, he lingered. He had watched her. He had answered her. Not easily, perhaps, and not warmly—but he had answered.

     She sliced the potato into thin, even coins, laying them carefully in the pan with a splash of oil. At once they hissed and sizzled, the sound filling the small kitchen, the smell rising warm and savory. They both needed this: something homely and ordinary. She exhaled, her shoulders loosening. Perhaps this would be a gesture of care he could not mistake. She imagined setting the plate near his chair in the drawing room, offering it without pressure, letting him decide how near he could bear her.

     As the potatoes browned, her thoughts curled back inward — to the heat lingering in her cheeks, the restless flutter in her stomach, and the faint tingle on her lips whenever she remembered his kiss. She must learn to master herself, to keep her excitement from spilling over him like floodwater. Do not be overwhelming. Do not become noise, she told herself. Be steady. Be kind. Let him come at his pace.

     The potatoes hissed and popped, steady as a heartbeat, and it settled her nerves. She leaned her hip against the counter, arms folding loosely, watching the edges turn golden in the pan. A breath slipped out of her, soft and low, and before she knew it she was humming again. At first only a shapeless tune — the kind her mother once hummed while mending stockings — but soon, the shape of a melody emerged. A melody she had heard from Erik, coaxed from the piano keys only a few nights before.

     The sound soothed her. The worry in her chest melted, note by note. While she hummed, she did not have to pick apart every word she had spoken. The music steadied her hands, lightened her thoughts. She turned the potatoes with care, the golden slices glistening in the pan, and the tune grew brighter without her willing it.

     Still, even as she hummed, color rose to her cheeks. Could he hear her? Would he recognize the melody as his own? Would he know she hummed it because it reminded her of him — because she carried his music with her? Could it wound him, that she dared to lay claim to a piece of his genius in so clumsy, small a way?

     Her voice faltered, the hum stuttering, but she pressed on, steadying the thread of sound. Better to let it flow than to brood. Better to let her heart spill quietly into the air than to choke it down until she grew stiff with embarrassment created from her imagination.

     A smile tugged faintly at her lips, her pulse quickening at a new thought: He provides the food, and I burn it. He makes music, and I steal scraps of it for humming in the kitchen. She had things she could provide for him, too.  Perhaps this was what it meant, after all, to live together: not perfection, but the trading of small pieces of themselves until the edges blurred.

     The tune lingered, soft and sure.

     Meanwhile, Erik hunched miserably in his chair, the fire casting molten light across his warped hands where they clenched the mask. His breath dragged shallow and ragged, as though the air itself had left the room. He was undone, continuously stripped bare by the memory of her arms around him, her lips pressed to his, her laughter breaking through the darkness. It rattled inside him like an anguished scream echoing in these endless cellars.

     He told himself to master it, to seize control, to draw the veil of discipline tight across his mind—but there was no armor against what she had given him. She had made him feel…needed. Treasured. Desired. She had made him hope. And now want burned in him like fire through dry reeds, consuming everything in its path. His body ached with it, his chest swollen with need, his mouth starved with hunger, even his skin raw with the memory of her nearness. It was too much. Far too much.

     And then—like a knife of sweetness twisted into his chest—she began to hum. Not some trifle, not a tune plucked idly from the air, but his. A song born in solitude, coaxed from the keys when his mind was far too loud, never really meant for another voice. The melodies drifted down the corridor, muffled by stone walls, yet sharp enough to pierce him to the core.

     His head jerked up, eyes wide, terror seizing him. She was humming him. She had taken the one thing he had ever believed untainted—his music—and carried it on her lips as though it belonged to her as well. Hope and horror collided in his chest until he could scarcely draw breath.

     “Stop.” he whispered hoarsely, though she could not hear. His hands crushed the mask so tightly its edges bit into his palms once again. She will kill you, the old voice shrieked. She will kill you with kindness, with laughter, with the unbearable sound of your own soul sung tenderly back to you.

     Beneath the terror throbbed the truth, darker and hotter: he did not want her to stop. He wanted her to keep singing his soul until it shattered him, until he lay in ashes at her feet, stripped of every defense. Obliterated. The thought shamed him. It thrilled him. It unmade him all over again.

     He bent forward, pressing the mask hard against his face, firelight blazing red through the thin veil. His whole body shook. He could not do this.

     In the kitchen, the potatoes gave their final hiss as she lifted them from the pan. Golden, crisp at the edges, fragrant with oil and salt—at least these had not betrayed her. She laid them carefully on a plate, arranging them with unnecessary precision, as if the neatness might still her trembling hands. One plate for him first. Always for him first.

     She drew a long breath, straightened her shoulders, and smoothed her expression into calm composure. She would not flutter. She would not chatter. She would carry the food with dignity, as though this were any other morning in any other household—as though her heart were not racing like a wild thing inside her chest. She will not. Overwhelm. Him.

     The corridor stretched before her longer than it ever had, every step measured, the warmth of the plate seeping through her hands. She nudged the door open with her hip, stepped inside—and stopped.

     Erik sat hunched in the firelight, his silhouette painted in gold and shadow. Tremors ran visibly through him. His mask was clutched hard against his face, as though he feared it might fall away at the slightest breath. The sight rooted her in place. Her throat tightened, and all her rehearsed composure scattered like dust.

     How was she to approach him like this? To move forward felt like trespass. To retreat felt like betrayal. The weight of the plate in her hands grew unbearable. For an instant she nearly turned back, but instinct—deep, insistent—told her that retreat would wound him more deeply than any of her hateful words she spewed at him ever could.

     So she went forward. Slowly. Carefully. Without a word, she crossed to the side table near his chair and set the plate down with quiet precision, the act reverent, as though she were laying an offering upon an altar. She did not reach for him. She did not try to soothe. She only let the gesture stand: a presence, a promise. I am here.

     Then she turned, closed her robe, and sank into the couch across from him. She wrapped her arms around herself to hide their sudden trembling. She lifted her chin, steadied her breath, and spoke nothing.

     The silence thickened, heavy as the fire’s heat. She did not dare to break it. He would when he could. Until then, she would wait.

     The fire roared, a furnace that should have steadied him, but Erik heard only the wild drum of blood in his ears. He pressed the mask so hard to his brow that the cold edge bit the skin; he welcomed the pain as an anchor, something physical to hold him upright when everything inside wanted to unmoor. He hoped it would cut; he hoped it would mark him in a way that was easier to bear than the soft, terrible thing he felt whenever she was near. Maybe it could make him uglier, and that way she could hurry up and hate him.

     He knew she had entered before he felt the weight of the plate on the side table — the small shifting of air, the hush of her steps, the warmth of the dish she’d brought. He did not look. He could not. To raise his head and let her gaze fall on the ruin of his face felt like betrayal of the last scraps of himself; he would rather be struck down. Yet to sit like this, locked and mute, was its own slow undoing.

     He forced the breath out through clenched teeth until it rasped. The words he managed were broken and brittle as glass: “Erik does not… wish to be looked at.” Shame threaded through them, but they came regardless. He tried to harden the edge to keep her away. “She will… remain where she is. She will not come closer.” His knuckles whitened where they gripped the mask; the porcelain continued cutting into his palms.

     Silence answered him, thick and heavy. He could not tell if she obeyed or if she merely feigned it; he dared not risk turning to look at her. Still, he felt her—her patience like another weight in the room, quieter and more devastating than any scorn.

     “Do not make Erik—” His voice fractured. He crushed the mask to his temple until the seam finally gouged his flesh. A wet, ragged sound escaped him. “Do not make him….” The words hung in the air, ugly and honest, and the fire cracked as if in answer. He remained hunched, every muscle taut, a captive of his own fear and of the raw intimacy of her presence.

     Her reply came soft and steady, chosen as if to be a balm rather than a command. “I won’t move,” she said. “Not unless you wish me gone. Then I’ll leave.” She did not speak loudly; there was no theatricality in it, only an offered steadiness that sounded impossibly huge in the charged silence.

     She adjusted herself only slightly—an almost invisible shift of posture so she no longer faced him squarely. Not a turning away in rejection, but a courteous averting of her attention: respect for the limit he set and for the shame he carried. Her hands folded in her lap, her gaze lowered to the floor, and she held herself very still.

     The mask pressed deeper, continuing to cut a bloody line into his brow. He had braced himself for entreaty, for pity, for anything—but not this: not the quiet, immovable gift of her patience. It was too much and not nearly enough, and in that contradiction he felt more exposed than he had since the earliest cruelties of his life.

     He trembled, raw and disoriented. Perhaps she should leave. He knew if he asked her to leave, she would obey. The thought of it — the silence of the room, her footsteps fading down the corridor, her voice gone — opened a hollow in him so vast he nearly cried out.

     Still he could not release the mask. She cannot see. She must not see. He was paralyzed.

     The fire spat, sparks flaring then dying. The scent of roasted potatoes lingered, maddening in its warmth, domestic and human in a way that mocked him. Erik closed his eyes, choking on the nearness of it all — her voice, her patience, and the unbearable fact that she was still here. She was still here. She was here for him. He was not alone.

     He sat bound to the chair, unmoving while the fire snapped and hissed. At last, with rigid, deliberate movements, he lowered the mask and fitted it back into place. The lining bit into the torn flesh along his brow, stinging, but he did not flinch. Pain was a relief, familiar and earned. What he could not endure was the silence weighted with her patience for him.

     The mask settled like a tombstone. His breathing steadied, shallow but even, as if he could will the storm inside him to stillness. He lowered his hands to his knees, forcing them into stillness, as though he were carved from stone. His gaze turned to the plate she had left him. The smell was wonderful — warm oil, crisp potato, the tang of salt. Ordinary things, homely things; things he had never imagined to be laid before him.

     For a long time he did not move. He stared at the dish as though it were a snare, as though the golden slices would spring up to mock him for pretending he could be a man who sat and ate with his wife like others. His fingers twitched, once, twice, before he forced his arm to lift. It was like raising a limb made of lead. The fork lay beside the plate, and to reach for it felt like agony.

     His hand hovered, trembling, refusing him. Sweat slicked his brow beneath the mask. The act itself — to lift food to his mouth — was unbearable. Not because of hunger, but because it was hers. She had made it for him, carefully, nervously, happily, with her soft joy woven into every motion. It was too much.

     The iron doors he had slammed over his heart groaned under the weight. His chest heaved, his fingers flexed and clawed, unable to complete the gesture. The food blurred. The fire flared too bright. It was far too hot in the room. Her attention seared him, he wanted her gone and he couldn’t stand her being away from him all at once.

     Then the doors burst.

     With a roar torn from the pit of him, Erik surged to his feet. The chair screeched against the floor as he wrenched upright. His hands ripped the mask from his face so violently the veil tore in his grip. Without hesitation, he hurled it into the fire. Black porcelain clanged against the grate, sparks leapt, and the flames seized it hungrily. The mask cracked, split down its false symmetry, the pieces glowing and warping in the blaze until it shattered with a ringing fracture.

    “Do you think it is kindness?” he roared, his back to her, shoulders heaving. His voice scraped the air raw, filled the room like thunder. “Do you think you can sit there with your soft words and your patience and not kill me with them?” The firelight painted his strange profile in violent red and orange, but he never turned, never let her see more than a silhouette.

     “You cook for me, and you hum my music, and you look at me as though—” His voice broke, cracked into something almost like a sob. He clutched at his head with his bare hands, pressing against his temples. “- as though Erik could be a man. As though Erik could be yours.”

     The flames devoured the mask with greedy crackles, sparks leaping as though they, too, wanted to destroy the rest of him. He stood before it like a man being consumed, the fire’s glow burning across the stark lines of his body.

     “Do you know what Erik thinks of when you smile?” His voice fell low, hoarse, edged with desperation. “He thinks of you in his bed—naked—your arms around him, your lips on his mouth, as if you could ever bear that horror. He thinks of you here, in this room, every morning, every night, as though you were his wife. He thinks—” His breath tore ragged, his chest heaving. “—he thinks you could love him!”

     The last words broke loose in a howl, shattering against the walls, reverberating through the room until silence crashed back, heavy and suffocating. He bent his head, gasping, as though the confession itself had gutted him.

     “He told you to not make him believe!” he whispered, raw, broken, to the fire. “Disobedient woman, it will always be a lie. We can pretend—with food, with words, with music. We can pretend until we die. But you will never love Erik.” His hands curled into fists, trembling violently, his voice hollowing into emptiness. “And Erik… Erik will die loving you.”

     He did not turn. He could not. He stood rigid, a black figure against the blaze of his own torment.

     (Y/N) sat frozen on the couch, her nails biting crescents into her palms. His voice still reverberated in the stone, thunder echoing through the chamber, while the mask spat and cracked in the fire like a living thing dying. Her throat ached with unshed tears. She bit her lip hard, fiercely, for if she wept, if she let him glimpse fear in her face, it would make everything worse.

     Her mind raced in circles. Had she gone too far? Had her humming, her teasing, her burnt-toast offerings pushed him past some invisible line? She had only meant to have fun, to draw him closer to something human, to give him a rhythm of life. Now he stood before the fire; she had unmade him with kindness, her gentleness had been a blade. The thought stabbed through her. Did I break him? Did I ruin this without knowing?

     Yet—beneath the dread, beneath the ache—another truth swelled, guilty and undeniable. He wanted her. He had said it. He had torn himself open and bared the want: her body, her arms, her lips, and her presence as wife; as his beloved. The knowledge seared through her, terrifying, dizzying, impossible to ignore.

     She dared not speak it. Not now. To give voice to her own longing, to let hope spill further into him, would drive him deeper into rage. The thread between them was too fragile to bear it. So she held her silence, clinging to it as though it were the only gift she could give.

     His passion was a storm without anchor. To meet it with her own would be to drown them both.

     Her teeth dug into her lip until it ached. She forced her body into stillness, forced her breath into calm. Do not cry. Do not plead. Do not rush forward with promises he cannot yet believe. Hold steady. He will come to you.

     So she sat, eyes fixed on the floor, her body angled faintly away as before. She was presence without intrusion, patience without demand. She neither fled nor pressed closer. She did not speak his name. She did not risk any spark of encouragement that might drive him further into ruin. She simply waited, her heart hammering, hoping that the weight of her stillness would reach him where words could not.

     By the hearth, his shoulders heaved, each ragged breath stoking the fire’s roar. The flames mocked him, devouring the shattered mask as though it had been no more than kindling. “Well? Cruel woman? What have you to say for yourself?!”

     Into the storm, she whispered: “Tell me what to do, Erik. Please. Tell me how to love you without destroying you.”

      “You will sit there and pity him?” His voice turned on her, thick with venom. “ Do you imagine yourself strong enough to dwell in his shadows, to share his tomb? What game is this?!” A jagged laugh ripped from him, harsh, animal. “You mock him with your plea —a kindness that cuts like a whip! There you sit, calm, silent, waiting, as if you could endure the weight of his want. Do you think it is mercy to let him dream?!”

     The words lashed at her. On the couch, she bit down harder, pain filling her mouth. Every nerve screamed to flinch, to recoil, but she forced herself to stillness, gaze steady on the rug rather than his hunched back. Her heart thudded against her ribs until she thought it might break free. He thinks I mock him. He thinks I torment him. Tears stung her eyes, but she swallowed them down.

     “You are cruel,” Erik spat, his voice ragged, unraveling under the strain of his fury. “Cruel to sit there and give him hope! Cruel to let him imagine he could be yours!”

     His hands lashed out, sweeping the trinkets from the mantel in a violent crash of shells and glass. Then they fell back, clutching the carved wood as though it were the only thing holding him upright. His head bowed low, shoulders shuddering, and when he spoke again his voice cracked, hollow and broken:

     “Cruel… because now he cannot stop imagining it.”

     The silence that followed was not empty. It trembled with the violence of what had just been spoken, broken only by the fire chewing hungrily on porcelain, the mask spitting in the flames as though it resented its end.

     “I cannot stop,” he whispered, the words falling from him like a confession torn out by force. The fury drained away, leaving only emptiness. His voice was raw, uneven, trembling as his body trembled. “I cannot stop wanting you.” His knuckles whitened against the mantel, his frame rigid as though only willpower kept him upright. “You break me open with every word, every look. You undo me with burnt bread and laughter. I am nothing but weakness before you.”

     (Y/N)’s vision blurred; her throat ached with unshed tears. Her whole body leaned forward, aching to close the distance, but she held herself still, biting her fist to trap the impulse. If she touched him now—if she poured her love over him—it would crush him beneath the weight of it. She dared not move.

     “Erik…cannot stop,” Erik said again, softer this time, almost childlike, as he confessed to the fire instead of to her. “And he is terrified.” He bowed his head into one trembling hand, the other clutching the mantel for dear life. “If you stay, you will kill him with your mercy. If you go—” His voice cracked, unraveling.

     The fire snapped, sparks tumbling up the chimney, casting his quivering shadow large and thin across the wall next to her. He did not turn. He could not. Behind him, she sat in silence, her body rigid with restraint, her heart thundering against her ribs. She longed to rise, to hold him, to whisper that he was wrong, that he was not dreaming alone. But she knew: one wrong move, one word too much, and she would lose him.

     So she waited, still as stone, her tears locked behind her eyes. Her presence was the only answer she dared give. And Erik, trembling before the fire, felt that silence bind him—fragile, merciful, inescapable—as if she had chained him with gentleness.

     I cannot stop wanting you.

     The words rang inside her like wound and balm both, proof that his hunger matched her own, yet burdened with despair that it must destroy them. Her nails dug into her palms. Her breath shook, but her voice—when it came—was low, careful, and steady as a thread drawn through silk.

     “Then, don’t stop, Erik.”

     The words startled her even as they left her mouth, but she pressed on, her tone softening into the stillness.

     “If you want, then want. I will not punish you for it. I will not laugh. I will not leave.”

     He froze. He had braced for denial, for weeping, for her voice to sharpen with fear or curdle with pity. But not this. Not quiet permission. The fire roared too bright, too hot, behind his eyes. His grip on the mantel tightened until his knuckles burned.

      “You cannot mean it.” he hissed, the words shattering from his throat like glass under strain. Yet even as he spoke, his body betrayed him — leaning, ever so slightly, toward her now.

      She does not forbid me to want her. The thought poisoned him, burned him, dazzled him all at once.

     (Y/N) sat motionless, her fingers locked together in her lap until her knuckles ached. Inside, her pulse hammered against her ribs, but outwardly she radiated nothing but composure. She fixed her gaze on the fire now, but never on his back, granting him the dignity of not being watched while he unraveled.

     “I mean only what I’ve said,” she murmured, her voice steady though her throat was tight. “I will not shame you for wanting. Let it be. And….” She drew a deep breath, “I hope you can learn…I want you, too.”

     The words struck him like stones cast into a black pool, sinking deep, stirring currents he could not master. His body shook with the effort of holding himself upright, his hands clawing the mantel as if stone alone kept him from toppling headlong into the flames. Fury still hissed in his blood, sharp and corrosive — but beneath it swelled something worse, something unbearable: relief.

     He wanted to collapse to the floor and weep at her feet. He wanted to seize her in his arms, to kiss her until breath itself gave out. He wanted to run, run as far away as his legs could carry him from this house, this cellar, this city forever. He wanted everything at once. He stood rigid, quivering, trapped between annihilation and salvation.

     Behind him, her admission hung in the air like an unseen thread binding them together: I want you, too.

     Erik’s nails scraped against the mantel, his breath dragging harsh and ragged into the veil. Her words circled in his skull like a litany: Then don’t stop. I want you, too.

     For a blazing instant, rage flared again — the urge to whirl on her, to scorch her with accusation, to spit the words mocking whore like venom. His body shuddered with it. He twisted, just enough for the firelight to carve his warped profile in cruel shadow — and then he faltered.

     She was not mocking. Not coaxing, not pleading, not recoiling. She sat as before: her hands folded, her body turned slightly aside to grant him space, her face serene, steady. No judgment. No pity. There was only the quiet courage of permission.

     The fury drained from him like blood spilling from a wound. His mouth worked uselessly, no sound emerging; only the harsh, ragged gulps of his chest came out. The storm had spent itself. He could not rage against such gentleness — he had no weapons left.

     For one trembling instant, calm broke over him. Fragile, terrifying, it swept through like a breath of air in a sealed tomb. Her words lingered, slipping into the hollow places of him, stilling the frantic hammering of his thoughts.

     The reprieve lasted no longer than a heartbeat. Awareness struck him like a blade. He was bare. The mask was gone, shattered in the fire, burning with a hiss and snap of porcelain and flame. The firelight touched his face, unforgiving, exposing. His hands flew up in horror, clutching, shielding, but they were too wide, too clumsy. The blaze was too bright, her eyes too near.

     Panic poured through him. He froze where he stood, shoulders hunched, palms pressed desperately to his ruined face. If he turned, if he faltered even an inch, she would see. And if she saw, everything would end. He had been mad to throw the mask away, mad to bare himself even to the fire.

     The silence behind him was unbearable. Was she watching? Was her gaze already on him, full of revulsion? Did her throat tighten with disgust even now, fists clenched to keep from crying out?

     The fire cracked, spitting sparks, and he nearly flinched. His voice broke out raw, muffled behind his hands, torn from the pit of him.

     “Do not look!”

     The words landed like a curse, cracking through the air, thick with shame. He pressed his palms harder into his face, as though he could drive himself back into shadow by force alone. His whole frame shook, rigid as iron, the heat of the fire licking at his coat while the remains of the mask crumbled into ash.

     (Y/N) drew in a steadying breath. Her pulse pounded so hard she thought he might hear it, but she forced her voice soft, even.

     “It’s all right, Erik,” she whispered. “I haven’t seen anything.”

     He clamped his hands tighter against his face, his shoulders rigid as stone. She could feel his terror like a weight in the air, thick as the smoke curling from the hearth. But…there was one thing she could do.

      She moved slowly, carefully, each step deliberate. Rising from the couch, she kept her hands open, empty, visible at her sides. No sudden gesture, nothing that could strike him as threat. She reached for the throw blanket draped over the cushions. With careful precision she lifted it, drew it over her head and shoulders, and pulled the folds low until her face was entirely veiled.

     Hidden beneath the fabric, she squeezed her eyes shut, and let her voice drift out; calm and steady.

     “Now,” she said, quiet but firm, “you can be certain. I won’t see. Go — fetch another mask. I will stay right here until you tell me to move.”

     She tugged the blanket lower, the folds falling heavy over her face. “There,” she murmured, her voice muffled beneath the wool. “You see? I can’t peek. I won’t. Take as long as you need. I won’t move until you tell me to.”

     At the hearth, Erik trembled. His chest seized as he turned and stared at the cocoon she had made, the blanket drawn over her like a vow. The fire spat, sparks crackling, and Erik staggered back from the mantel, hands still plastered to his face. Each step landed soft, hesitant, as though the very floor might betray him. She did not stir. She did not lift the blanket. She waited.

     For once, the choice was his.

     The realization split him open. She had veiled herself for his sake, blinded herself willingly, and it hollowed him with a pain so sharp he heaved a deep sob. For a suspended heartbeat he stood there, ruined face pressed hard beneath his palms, the fire blazing at his back. Then, with another guttural, broken sound, he turned. He fled into the corridor beyond the dining room, and soon the slam of his chamber door reverberated through the walls like a blow.

     On the couch, beneath the blanket, she sat motionless. The wool scratched against her cheek, the darkness pressing heavy, her breath loud in her ears. Her palms pressed flat against her lap to keep them from trembling, her nails biting crescents into her skin. Tears burned behind her eyes but she swallowed them down.

     Stay calm. Hold steady.

     The silence stretched. Only the roar of the fire, the distant drip of water through stone, and her own pulse hammering in her throat filled the void he had left. There, hidden in the dark of her self-made veil, she prayed: that this act of trust, this surrender of her sight, would soothe him… and not destroy him.

     Then — footsteps: swift, uneven, and frantic against the floor. Her breath caught, but she forced it steady, holding herself beneath the blanket’s weight. The air shifted as he entered — smoke still clinging faintly to him from the fireplace, the cold edge of the corridor following.

     Hands touched her shoulders. Restless hands, fluttering, clutching, retreating; terrified of contact. His fingertips quivered against the fabric of her robe’s sleeve, the touch of a man both starving and afraid of the meal before him. She longed to fling off the blanket, to catch his hands, to press them hard to her heart and say here, here, I am here — but she held fast.

     “Is it… is it alright now?” she asked, voice muffled under the folds, steady as she could make it though the tremor wove through her words.

     His answer came ragged, a whisper dragged raw from his throat. “Not yet. There is… one more thing Erik must do.”

     The blanket shifted. With agonizing care, he lifted it just enough to bare her mouth, her nose, the curve of her chin. She kept her eyes sealed shut, granting him the safety he needed, the control he demanded. His breath ghosted across her lips — uneven, hot, and shaking. He lingered there, every nerve in his body caught between terror and desire.

     And then, finally, he bent. His bare mouth pressed to hers.

     Not a desperate crushing, not a frantic claim through cloth, but gentle and trembling. Reverent. His lips quaked against hers, almost too soft, almost too fleeting, yet alive in a way that pierced her to the marrow. His whole body shuddered as though the act itself might destroy him, and still he lingered.

     Her heart leapt. Tears suddenly slipped hot down her cheeks, dampening the wool, but they were not fear — they were joy, release, wonder. She kissed him back gently, a mirror of his trembling, giving him the answer he feared most and craved most: she did not turn away. She did not recoil. She met him. She returned the kiss.

     When at last he drew back, his breath shook raggedly against her skin. The blanket still hung heavy, veiling her eyes, veiling his terror. And for that fragile moment, it was enough.

     Despite her fight for composure, a smile broke across her face, bright and radiant, spilling out from under the blanket like sunlight breaking through storm clouds.

     Her hands moved before thought could stop them. Tentative at first, fingers brushing his hair where it bowed under her touch — then bolder, cupping his head, cradling him, pulling him closer. She wanted to anchor him, not with words but with warmth, flesh, the undeniable truth of touch.

     The sound he made cracked through her, a choked breath that nearly broke into a sob. His body flinched, every instinct screaming to recoil, to flee, to tear himself away before she could touch the ruin he knew himself to be. But then—her weeping smile reached him, and the way she held him was not pity, not revulsion, but something fierce and tender, stronger than his fear.

     He surrendered.

     His lips trembled as he bent forward again, meeting hers once more. The kiss deepened, not frantic now but aching, vulnerable, full of everything he could not say. His hands shook where they clutched her shoulders for balance. Her tears mingled with his, salt against salt, and neither of them pulled away.

     And then — she understood. Her fingertips, wandering up to his temple, met only skin: no hard rim of leather, no cold seam of porcelain. The realization descended on her like a physical weight, and it stole her breath: he was not merely veil-less in that moment — the mask itself was gone.

     Her heart hammered so loud she thought he must hear it. She did not open her eyes, did not lift the wool; did not risk fracturing the fragile hush by seeing. She tightened her hold instead, lowering her mouth to his with even more tenderness, as if to say without sound: it does not matter. I will love you all the same.

     Erik shuddered into her. Terror and need warred through him—every muscle begging flight—yet her arms held him, her kiss spoke a mercy his own mind could not grasp. For a single, suspended heartbeat he let himself be held.

     When he pulled back it was with a convulsion that rattled his frame. His breath came ragged and thin; his hands scrabbled at his face for purchase as if to force the old order back. “Please,” he whispered, the sound raw and broken, “please — give Erik a moment.”

     He staggered away as if the room had tilted; the warmth he left faded like a receding tide. She remained beneath the blanket, every sense straining for him: the rasp of his breath, the faint scrape of cloth, the sound of him shifting around in front of her.

     Soon, his fingers found the edge of the blanket, tentative and shaking so that the wool trembled against her hair. Cool air ghosted her face but she kept her eyes closed. She would not betray him with a glance. She would not steal his safety. A sob rose in her throat at the trust of it —that he had asked for this small mercy, and that she had granted it.

     He could not hold his restraint. With a sound that was half-sob, half-curse, he swept her forward and crushed her to him. He gathered her with desperate, clinging strength; his body shook against hers, breath stuttering beneath the returned veil, the phantom weight of the mask pressing at her temple.

     Her arms closed around him instantly; instinctively. She pressed her cheek to his shoulder, still damp with tears, and held him tight as he clung. He sobbed against her neck, each breath rattling as though it tore his chest apart, trembling so violently she thought they both might collapse.

     Her body moved without thought, guided by instinct rather than decision. Still clinging to him, still wrapped in the trembling force of his embrace, she tilted her face into the crook of his neck. The cloth of his cravat brushed her cheek, faintly scented of smoke and something musky, something distinctly him. She pressed her face there, inhaled, and then her lips brushed his throat in a fleeting kiss.

     Perhaps it was meant as affection — a tender, wordless promise that she was here, that she would not leave him. One kiss then became another, and another. Each touch of her mouth lingered longer, deepened in pressure, and with every kiss her breath warmed his skin. The tremor in her lips was not from fear now, but from need, from the rush of feeling that could not be contained.

     Her hands slid upward from his shoulders, one curling into the hair at the back of his skull, the other pressing firmly against his back, pulling him closer still. Her mouth moved from the base of his jaw to the soft hollow beneath his crumpled ear, her kisses quickly becoming bolder; more insistent. She opened her lips against him, letting the faintest graze of her teeth follow, and she shivered as she felt his whole frame jolt.

     Erik shuddered violently. His breath caught, chest stuttering beneath the layers of fabric. His hands clamped reflexively at her arms, but he did not push her away. He did not stop her. His entire body felt as though it had been set aflame, a familiar, shameful heat coiling low in his stomach with every press of her mouth. His throat worked, swallowing hard against the broken sounds threatening to escape him.

     Stop her, some part of him hissed. This is dangerous. This is madness. You will ruin it, you will ruin her. The kisses poured over him like fire and balm, and he was undone by the softness of them, undone by the hunger burning just beneath her tenderness.

     “(Y/N)…” he said weakly, “you – this is….You shouldn’t….”

     Her lips pressed harder, slower, her breath heavy now against his skin, and he nearly doubled under the sensation. The heat in him coiled tighter, spread lower, and became unbearable in its intensity, every nerve alight with a need he had tried for so long to cut out of himself. Still he let her continue, his body rigid with shame and wonder, his mind crying out that he should stop her even as his heart and flesh betrayed him utterly.

     In the fire’s glow, pressed together in that trembling embrace, he was lost — lost to her mouth, to her mercy, to the terrible sweetness of being wanted.

     A moan ripped from him before he could stop it — raw, guttural, torn from someplace deeper than voice, deeper than thought. The sound horrified him, yet the moment it escaped, he felt her lips curve into a smile against his throat. The heat of her mouth lingered there, and her smile was not cruel, not mocking — it was joy, it was want.

     That undid him.

     With a shuddering breath, he acted before he could lose his nerve. His arms tightened around her waist; desperation lent him a strength he did not know he had. In one sudden motion he swept her up against his chest. She gasped, clinging instinctively to his shoulders as he carried her swiftly through the house. His stride was uneven, urgent, like a man rushing headlong into battle with no thought of survival.

     The Louis-Philippe room unfolded around them — hushed, dim, silk draperies and polished wood glowing faintly in the firelight that filled the room. He set her down upon the bed with reverence so sharp it ached, as though she were both too precious to touch and too dangerous to keep. His trembling hands lingered on her waist a heartbeat longer, then recoiled, as if even that contact risked shattering him.

     Rigid above her, his breath rasped harshly beneath the veil. Every fiber of him strained beneath the weight of decision: desire driving him forward, shame yanking him back. His hands hovered, twitching near her skin but never daring to close the distance. He felt himself a statue cut from fear, unable to move without cracking.

     She saw it—the terror locking him in place, the golden eyes that stared at her like she was a precipice he both longed for and dreaded. Her heart thudded painfully, but she did not falter. Slowly, she rose onto her knees, keeping her gaze steady on his. She could not let him drown in silence.

     Her fingers found the top button of his vest.

     “Erik,” she whispered, her voice soft but certain, a caress turned into a vow. “It’s alright. Come here.”

     The words struck him like a blade and a balm both. He wanted to recoil, to scream at her not to touch what she could not bear, but the sound caught in his throat, strangled, useless. His chest heaved against the press of his lungs as her hands worked carefully down the row, freeing each button with unhurried precision. His armor gave way beneath her fingers, and he shook, breathless, waiting for revulsion that did not come.

     She slid the black fabric from his shoulders, slow and deliberate, letting it fall to the carpet with a soft sigh. Her hands lingered at his sides, warm and steady. She wanted him to feel her patience, to feel that she did not recoil, that she would not. Beneath his shirt, his chest rose and fell too fast, the labored breathing of a man caught between fleeing and surrender.

     Leaning forward, she brushed her lips against the veil—just a whisper of contact, softer than breath. “I want you,” she murmured.

     He nearly collapsed. The words were impossible, poisonous, holy. She cannot mean them, he thought wildly, and yet the sound of them poured through him, hollowing him out until he was weak with the deadly ache of belief. His knees buckled and at last he let himself collapse to the bed.

     The mattress dipped under his weight, the frame groaning faintly as he braced above her. His body trembled, every muscle poised between flight and surrender. His terror screamed to retreat, to vanish back into stone and shadows. But instinct betrayed him; instinct pressed him forward, aching.

     She lifted one hand, slow, careful, deliberate, and pressed her palm gently to his chest. What she felt, she had already seen hints of: it was not made of smooth strength. She felt his body flinch under her touch, his breath hitch sharply, as though even that gentlest contact threatened to end him completely.

     She did not pull away. Her palm stayed, steady against the strange terrain of his body, a silent vow written in warmth: I will not recoil. I will not abandon.

     He stared down at her, terror a wildfire in his veins, and for the first time in his life, he let the fire burn.

     “Erik,” she whispered, tilting her face up toward him. Her eyes sought his through mask and shadow, steady, unflinching. “Are you… are you okay?”

     The words struck him harder than scorn, harder than pity. Are you okay? No one had ever asked. No one had ever cared if the corpse behind the mask could be anything but terror. His throat closed; his lips parted but no answer came. He wanted to laugh, to sob, to crush her mouth beneath his, to run, to vanish — all at once.

     His body shuddered, lowering instinctively toward her before he wrenched himself back, trembling, suspended. He forced his eyes shut as though darkness might steady him, as though shutting her out could dam the chaos in his body. But air came ragged, failing, and at last the words tore loose from him, raw and pleading.

     “No,” he rasped, the sound jagged, broken. His chest quivered beneath her hand, every malformed muscle convulsing with strain. “No… but I cannot stop.”

     Her fingers spread over his breast, her palm pressing firmer to his heart as if to quiet its frantic beating. Through the blur of her tears she smiled — faint, fragile, but sure. An anchor, she was steady where he could not be.

     “Then don’t,” she murmured, voice soft as a vow. “Don’t stop, Erik.”

     The sound of his name in her mouth nearly split him in two.

     Her lips returned to him — to the straining muscles of his throat, the hollow where his pulse hammered. At first they were tender, as they had been before, but quickly they grew hungry, more insistent. Each kiss lingered, pressed harder, and burned hotter. Her breath fanned against his skin, and his whole body buckled, straining against itself.

     His body trembled with the effort of holding himself above her, caught in the brutal tug-of-war between instinct and terror. His chest rose and fell in ragged gasps, each breath betraying how undone he was beneath the persistence of her mouth. Every kiss left him weaker; every touch stripped away the armor he had lived inside for decades.

     Her hands slid lower, slow, deliberate, as though each inch mattered. Her fingertips brushed the row of buttons at his shirt, and she paused, waiting — giving him room to stop her, to pull away. She felt the rigid tension in his body, the way his breath stuttered as if bracing for a blow. Yet no protest came.

     One by one, she freed the buttons, each slip of ivory from cloth was like peeling back another barrier he had built against the world. He could not stop her. He could not move at all. His body betrayed him, holding still, helpless as the fabric gave way.

     The firelight touched what he had hidden all his life. His chest rose and fell sharply, exposed: pectorals warped, twisted unevenly across bone that had never found its rightful shape. The breastbone scooped hollow, carved cruelly inward; the muscles split and jagged until they knit together again near his diaphragm. His chest was not sculpted by nature for desire, but broken, marked, a map of death drawn into horrible flesh.

     He recoiled with a cry, his shame a lightning bolt through him. His arms tensed, shoulders jerking back as though he might shield himself, hide, claw the ruined truth back under fabric. His breath rasped harsh, panic hollowing the sound.

     She saw it. For a heartbeat her breath caught — not with horror, but with something deeper, quieter. Sorrow at the cruelty written in his body, awe at his bare vulnerability, tenderness so fierce it stung her throat. Her fingers stilled at his sides, holding him steady, refusing to let him slip away. This is him, her mind whispered. This is what he feared to show me. And still, I want him. Still, I love him.

     Her head dipped. Her lips trailed lower — first returning to his neck, then slipping to the fragile ridge of his collarbone, and then, unbearably, to the edge of that hollow breast, to the beginning of the warped muscle itself.

     His body convulsed as if burned. He jerked back, chest wrenched from her mouth, terror exploding raw and feral through his frame. A broken, guttural sound tore from his throat before he could choke it back, the sound of a man already expecting pain.

      She did not retreat.

     Her hands closed at his sides, not to hold him captive but to root him, to tell him he was not adrift. “Shh… Erik,” she whispered. “It’s alright. It’s alright.”

     Her mouth returned, tender and deliberate, pressing a gentle kiss into the very place he loathed, the flesh he believed unworthy of touch. Her lips lingered there in defiance of his shame, speaking without words: I will not turn from you.

     The terror continued in him, but through it something rarer, almost unbearable, began to break through. Her mouth was warm, reverent, where he had braced only for disgust. Her touch steadied him, reminded him that she was still beneath him, still choosing him, still holding fast when he could no longer hold himself. His gasps slowed, just slightly, ragged breaths evening out by a fraction. Disbelief still tore at him, but beneath it a fragile thread tugged him closer to calm.

     She trailed another kiss along the ridge of his chest, slower this time, mapping the warped path of flesh with reverence. And Erik, undone by the unbearable mercy of it, forced himself not to flee. He let her perfect lips linger on the ruin.

     His whole body quaked above her. He hovered, rigid, every muscle shrieking with the effort to hold himself there. Terror battered inside his ribs like a trapped bird, colliding with the shameful rush of heat that coiled low in his belly, surging downward until it throbbed painfully in his groin; his trousers suddenly, painfully too tight. This was madness, blasphemy, a fever-dream he had no right to — and yet he was allowing it to consume him.

     He buckled suddenly. With a shudder he sagged, bracing one elbow beside her while his other hand clawed desperately at the tie on her robe. His long fingers scrabbled clumsily against the silken fabric, shaking so violently he could scarcely find any sort of hold. Fear and want tangled together until he could hardly breathe, his mind dissolving into raw instinct.

     She stilled. Her lips lifted from the hollow of his chest just long enough to see what he was doing — to feel the frantic wildness in his touch. For an instant her heart clenched with the sharp edge of fear for him, for how close he stood to breaking. But then warmth rose through it, steadying her. A small, breathless laugh escaped her, not mocking but tender and aching. She caught his hands in hers, stilling them, and pressed gently at his shoulder to lift his weight.

     “Let me,” she whispered, her voice low and sure, more vow than invitation. “Let me help.”

     Her hands reached down, working at the stubborn tie. Soon, the robe came off, leaving only her shift. Above her, Erik buried his trembling face against the curve of her neck, his breath hot and ragged on her skin. His lips brushed her there, muted against the cursed fabric of the veil. He tried — God, he tried — to kiss her as she kissed him, to pour back even a fragment of the fire she gave him, but the cloth muffled it, smothered it.

     A guttural growl tore out of him, raw frustration breaking loose. His hands flew to his face, seizing the veil. And with a savage wrench, he ripped it free, tearing it from its moorings on the mask. The fabric fluttered to the floor, forgotten, as his breath crashed open and bare against her skin.

     She gasped—not in fear, but in excitement. More of him was bare now, more than she had ever seen. The firelight carved shadows across warped, gaunt muscles clinging too strangely to his jawbone. Faint scars stretched around the corners of his mouth, and his lips—thin, trembling—were marred by a cleft splitting the upper lip on the left side, trailing upward toward his nose until it disappeared under the mask.

     For a heartbeat she only stared, chest heaving, her eyes wide with the weight of what he had already dared to bare. Then Erik lunged forward, unable to endure her gaze a moment longer. He buried himself in the crook of her neck like a man starved, his mouth feverish and unpracticed against her skin.

     She startled at the suddenness, her soft wince breaking into laughter that trembled between gasps. Her hands flew to his hair, tangling, steadying, and holding him as his lips moved clumsily along her throat. The hunger of it, the frantic press of his mouth, was messy and wild — yet so unguarded it made her dizzy with affection and arousal.

     Breath caught high in her chest as her thoughts returned to her own frustratingly modest state, urgency and frustration tangling with the heat of his mouth. “Erik,” she whispered, breathless with effort. “Just… a moment—”

     Erik heard the strain in her voice and it ignited him further. Maddened by her request, he pressed harder, lips bruising against her throat, the sharp edge of his teeth grazing her pulse. He sucked, marked, needing more, and needing everything. Each kiss was frantic, reckless, as though he could devour the fear that still gnawed at the edges of him by devouring her.

     Her heart raced to match his, her laughter catching and breaking into a gasp as his mouth seared fire into her skin. At last her hands stopped trying to reach for her shift; she let them fly again to his head, clutching him tight, fingers threading through his hair with desperate strength. A sound she could not contain tore from her — a moan, hushed and raw, trembled out into the charged air.

     The moment it vibrated against his mouth, Erik shuddered, and something inside him cracked wide open. A strangled moan wrenched free of his throat. His hands, frantic and trembling, flew everywhere at once. One clawed uselessly at the cursed shift, pulling at seams that would not break, while the other shoved her skirt upward in a fevered rush. He could not think, could not control himself, could not stop. There was only this: her body, that sinful moan, and the unbearable need to tear down every barrier that kept her from him.

     Fabric snagged under his grasp, his breath ragged in her ear as he groaned her name. His fingers slipped beneath the folds of her shift, searing where they grazed her skin. He was past thought now — beyond terror, beyond shame. There was only her, and the maddening cloth that separated them and the frantic need to strip it all away until nothing remained but her heat against his.

     Her voice cut through the storm, soft but sure:

     “Erik—wait. Let’s… let’s do this properly.”

     At first, he could not hear her. His hands clawed at her clothes like a drowning man clinging to wreckage; panic and hunger welded into one. When her palms pressed firmly against his chest to push him off, his whole body flinched back as though struck. A wounded sound escaped him — and at once her touch softened, smoothing over his warped, damp chest.

     “Shh. Just a minute,” she whispered with a small chuckle, coaxing steadiness into him with each touch. Slowly, his breath began to follow hers, ragged but less frantic.

     Her trembling fingers found the laces holding her shift on her body. A quick tug, and the garment gave way, sliding open across her skin. Relief surged — but so did a sudden panic. Her breath caught as the fabric slackened; suddenly shy, she clutched it to her chest, cheeks burning.

     Erik froze, his eyes huge with the anticipation of what he would see, his mouth parted in jagged breaths, his whole frame quivering like a man on the cliff’s edge, one step from ruin and salvation both.

     Deliberately, she rose onto her knees before him. Touching his chin, she guided his face to hers, pressing the lightest kiss to the cleft in his upper lip. His body jolted at the touch, a strangled sound breaking in his throat. Before he could retreat, she deepened it, mouth to mouth, her warmth and his tears mingling with their shuddering breath.

     His hands lifted, hesitant, trembling, closing around her wrists where she still held the bodice shut. He did not push them away, only clung there, shaking with the unbearable weight of what she offered him. Her heart ached for him — for the years of fear that had left him starved of this simplest intimacy.

     She drew in a steadying breath, then let go. The fabric slipped, sliding down her shoulders, baring the curve of her torso. His hands followed, not pulling but guiding, helping the cloth fall inch by inch until it pooled at her hips in a heap.

     The firelight gilded her bare skin, casting gold over every trembling contour. She leaned back slightly on her elbows, offering herself not just in body but in trust; in calm invitation.

     Erik’s eyes burned, wide and unblinking, as though the sight was nothing short of a miracle. His throat worked convulsively, his breath harsh and uneven. His hands hovered at his sides, flexing helplessly, torn between terror and desperate need to touch. She saw it in him — the battle, the gathering of every shattered fragment of courage before he dared move at all.

     Her gaze softened in the firelight, steady and unflinching. She spoke no words, but the tender nod she gave struck him harder than any declaration. It told him he was free — free to take, free to want, free to lose himself in her without fear of being cast aside.

     A sob rose sharp in his throat; he swallowed it down, but the sound rattled out of him anyway. His hand trembled as it reached for her, fingers curling into the folds of fabric still clinging about her hips and legs. Each tug was jerky, hesitant, as though he half-expected her to strike him away at any second.

     She leaned forward instead, closing the space between them with a kiss. Her lips were steady, coaxing, meant to tether him back from the edge of panic. Her breath carried no judgment, only warmth, only her quiet vow that he was not alone. For a heartbeat he yielded to it, trembling against her mouth, before pulling back with a ragged sound, golden eyes wide on her face. Fear burned there as much as desire, and he searched her gaze like a man bracing for execution.

     He could not bear to look at her body. He stared at her eyes, waiting for the inevitable recoil, the gasp, the flinch — the disgust that had hunted him all his life. Surely once the gown slipped lower, once she saw him reflected in the intimacy of her own nakedness, the illusion would break.

     But, none of it came.

     Her eyes did not waver. She made no move to reclaim the fabric, no sharp intake of breath, no falter in her composure. She let him go on.

     The shift gave way under his trembling hands, inch by inch, until the last fold whispered past her calves. It pooled on the floor with the soft sound of a sigh. His breath followed suit — ragged, unbelieving — as she lay back against the pillows, wholly unveiled.

     The fire gilded her in molten gold: the proud line of her collarbones, the rise and fall of her full breasts, the curve of her waist, the gentle swell of hips that trembled faintly with each breath. She was nervous too — he could see it in the quick rise of her chest, in the faint quiver of her lips — but there was no shame in it, no retreat. She offered herself to him openly, utterly.

     Erik could not look away. His body quaked as though strung on wires, suspended between awe and terror. The hunger that had driven him here roared, but his hands hovered useless at his sides, too afraid that even the brush of a fingertip might destroy her, shatter this miracle.

     And she, gazing up at him with her body bare and waiting, gave the smallest tilt of her head. A silent invitation. A promise. She was ready — not only for his desire but for his fear, for all of him, however he came.

     The sob he had been holding broke loose, low and harsh, shaking his whole frame. For the first time in his life, all that he wanted lay before him, not torn from him and not begged nor stolen, but offered. The wonder and terror of it hollowed him to the core.

     With the halting reverence of a man stepping onto holy ground, Erik lowered himself over her. His arms trembled, his body bowed as though before an altar. His breath spilled ragged across her skin, worship and fear mingling in every shudder.

     His gaze darted wildly, unable to anchor. The soft curve of her stomach, rising and falling with quick breaths; the sweep of her hips, golden in the firelight; the length of her legs, shifting slightly against the sheets; the trembling rise of her breasts, heaving with anticipation; the gentleness of her lips, still parted from their last kiss; the tumble of her hair spilling across the pillows like a halo.

     It was too much. He had starved on scraps all his life, fed only on fantasies that mocked him with their distance. Now he was drowning in abundance. Every inch of her called to him, every breath, every subtle shift. He did not know where to look, where to begin, or how to even survive the immensity of what she offered.

     And his hands — those trembling, cursed, twisted hands — hovered helplessly above her soft skin. They clenched and opened, clenched and opened, desperate yet afraid. Where can he touch? Her shoulder? Her waist? Her thigh? The thought of pressing his palm against the heat of her body made him quake harder.

     She saw it; the frantic skitter of his gaze, the panic in his eyes. Her heart clenched with a fierce tenderness. He was a man dying of thirst at the river’s edge, terrified to kneel and drink.

     “Erik,” she whispered, steady though her pulse thundered. She caught one of his hands in hers, guiding it slowly, deliberately, to rest upon her chest. His palm met the warmth of her skin, alive and yielding. “Start here.”

     His hand shook where she placed it, fingers curling slightly as though afraid she might vanish beneath his touch. His golden eyes snapped to her face — wide, uncomprehending, and aching with desperation. She smiled softly, letting him see in her stillness, in her gaze, that he had permission.

     A long, shuddering breath escaped him. Slowly, reverently, he let his hand remain, anchoring himself to this impossible truth: she had allowed him to see her, to touch her…to begin.

     Her lips parted, inviting him closer. Restraint crumbled. He went down, pressing his mouth to hers with sudden, startling need. The kiss was urgent, trembling, raw. His tongue hesitated, seeking entry — and when she opened for him, when she welcomed him in, a groan tore low from his throat, undone by the taste of her. He drank deeply from her, savoring every breath, every sweet, devastating brush of her warmth.

     Her fingers curled in his coarse hair, pulling him closer, her chest rising sharply against his, her body already knowing how to answer his hunger. Her moan slipped between their mouths, and the sound only deepened his desperation, sent his kiss rougher, hotter.

     At last he tore himself back for air, gasping, his breath ragged against her cheek. He could not stay away. His mouth fell lower, tracing her jaw, her throat, then down to her collarbones. He lingered at each hollow, lips reverent, tasting the salt of her skin as though each drop of her sweat were sacred.

     Her body arched subtly beneath him, breath catching with each kiss. Her hands clutched his bony shoulders, guiding and steadying him, urging him lower even as her own nerves trembled with anticipation. Every touch of his lips sent shivers coursing through her, and she welcomed them, welcomed him.

     Erik obeyed. His mouth traced downward, following the fragile ridge of her breastbone, each kiss soft, tentative, burning with reverence. He kissed her as though he feared the fire in him might scorch her, yet he could not stop.

     At the swell of her breasts he faltered, trembling, frozen above her. His lips hovered, terror rooting him in place. What if this was the moment she recoiled? What if his touch desecrated rather than sanctified? His whole body shook with the weight of it.

     She did not pull back. Her chest lifted with a soft breath, a silent offering. Her eyes softened, her lips parted — and that was enough. With a broken sound, he bent to her at last.

     He pressed a kiss, feather-light, to the delicious curve of her breast. Then, another. And another. Each trembling kiss was followed by words — broken Persian endearments falling from his lips like prayer.

     “Janam…” My life.
     “Nafasam…” My breath.
     “Eshgham…” My love.
     “Shadim…” My joy.

     Her heart clenched at the sound of them, each syllable cracked and reverent. He was worshiping her, as if each kiss were a confession of sins and each word a plea for absolution. She cupped the back of his head, anchoring him as his mouth mapped her, her own breath growing ragged beneath the tenderness of his desperation.

     His voice quavered, thick with awe and terror, but he could not stop. Again and again he whispered the words, until they blurred into a litany of need. His mouth trailed lower, down the soft plane of her stomach. He pressed his lips there reverently, pausing to breathe her in, his prayers muffled against the heat of her skin.

     She moaned softly, her fingers tightening in his hair. The sound undid him. He shuddered, overwhelmed, his whispered words tumbling out faster, ragged.

     “Eshgham … Eshgham … Eshgham …”

     The firelight gilded his dark hair as he moved lower, tracing the delicate slopes of her hips, the smoothness of her thighs. His hands trembled as they spread over her. Each kiss was slow, reverent, his breath deepening with every press of his mouth.

     The scent of her rose up to him — warm, heady and intoxicating. He inhaled sharply, almost choking on the sheer reality of it, on the proof that she was here, that this was no phantom dream. His lips lingered at her inner thigh as he sat breathing her scent. His lips trembled against the tender skin, pressing kiss after kiss as the words poured out of him, helpless, fervent, and unceasing:

     “Janam … Nafasam … Shadim … Eshgham…”

     He could not stop. He could not have stopped if his life depended on it. He was lost to her now, utterly consumed, drinking her in with lips, with breath, with every broken word of devotion that tumbled from him. And beneath his trembling mouth, her body quivered in answer, alive, waiting, opening to him, her breath stuttering with each kiss.

     Erik’s mouth wandered back up her body, slow and trembling; he could scarcely believe he was permitted to retrace the sacred path of her flesh. He pressed his lips over the gentle slope of her hips, up the plane of her belly, across her ribs, and returned to her breasts. He lingered there, shuddering, his lips brushing the tender buds of her nipples as if in awe of their very existence. His voice cracked, Persian endearments spilling out in a torrent, each word torn raw from his chest; a continued prayer said through tears.

     “Dooset daram… I love you. Asal-am… my honey. Azizam… my darling. Eshgham… my love. Nafasam… my breath. Janam… my life. Dooset daram… dooset daram!”

      His voice broke, the words collapsing into half-sobs, as though his love itself was too vast, too brutal to be contained within him.

     Her heart clenched. Every whispered word filled her with warmth so fierce it ached, and yet the desperation in his voice brought tears to her eyes. She longed to still him, to cradle him, to tell him he was already enough — but instead she answered by reaching for him, her trembling hands tugging at the hem of his shirt. The fabric bunched beneath her fingers, stubborn, but at last she pulled it free. He hardly noticed, lost in the storm of her body, his mouth pressing frantically to her throat, her jaw, the hollow beneath her ear.

     Instinct betrayed him. His body shifted, weight settling fully over her, his hips pressing her thighs open to him. His heat shocked her, a gasp tearing from (Y/N)’s lips, pleasure sparking bright where their bodies aligned.

     Her arms slid around him, eager to hold him closer, to feel him fully against her. Her hands wandered across his back — and stilled. Beneath her fingertips she felt not only taut, shifting muscle, but deep ridges. They were thick scars, gouged long ago into his flesh; some were raised like rope, others had sunken into hollows. Her fingers traced the terrible map of them, and she felt his body flinch beneath her touch, as though even her gentleness reopened old wounds.

     Her throat tightened, pity threatening, but she steadied her hands. Slowly, deliberately, she traced each scar with reverence, as though it were another piece of him she would not allow him to hide. Her lips parted, but she spoke no words — she let her touch speak instead. I will not recoil. I will not turn from this. You are not monstrous to me.

     As her palms smoothed over the wreckage of his back, his whole body shuddered, torn between terror and disbelief at her acceptance, his mouth breaking against her skin with a sound that was half sob, half prayer.

     Her touch slid, careful as a benediction, around to the plane of his stomach, fingers feathering over muscles that trembled beneath her hands. She meant to soothe him, to free him exactly as she had let herself be freed; her hand moved toward the fastening at his trousers with a slow deliberation born of patience.

     A raw sound tore from him — half moan, half cry from shock — and his whole body convulsed as if the contact had scorched him. His hips twitched; his breath hitched into ragged, uneven pulls. For a second his eyes squeezed shut and his forehead came to rest against hers as though he needed that small, human pressure to keep himself from falling apart. “Don’t—” he choked, the word strangled off as he clutched at her shoulders.

     She stilled, every movement measured to make room for him. Her gaze did not flinch; it stayed soft and patient. When she whispered his name it was a tether, not an answer, and the sound of it seemed to steady him enough that he did not flee. He hovered there, tremulous and raw, every scar and broken line of him exposed beneath her hand.

     She let her fingers lift from the waistband and instead framed his face. Her palms rested against his temples; her thumbs brushed at the hairline where his coarse black hair thinned and silvered. The motion was grounding, intimate in the smallest way: no demand, no hurry. She threaded her fingers through the thick strands and stroked, the rhythm of her touch slow and sure.

     She tilted her face upward until her lips ghosted the warm skin at his temple. “You tell me what you want to do, Erik,” she breathed, voice low and steady, a promise wrapped in a question. “We can stop, if that’s what you want.” When she pulled back just enough to meet his eyes, she kept her expression open and unafraid, even as her own heart hammered under her ribs.

     He looked at her as if the offer were some impossible mercy.

     “I want you,” she said, the words spilling out between uneven breaths. “Oh, Erik… I want you.” Her hands tightened in his hair, holding him as if to anchor him to the present, pressing a kiss into the dark tangle of it like a benediction. “If you want me, take me.”

     The simple sentence struck him harder than any violence. His shoulders jerked as if struck; a breath broke from him, small and raw but unmistakable. He swallowed, the motion violent in his throat. He lowered his face until his forehead brushed hers, breath mingling with breath.

     She smiled as her hands left his hair and settled back to his shoulders, steadying him, offering strength without pressing. He let his fingers trace the line of her ribs, clumsy and reverent. A fragile accord had been set: he could want her, and she would not punish him for it. He could accept her, and she would not demand more than he could bear. That quiet permission — given and taken in the same trembling instant — steadied them both enough to begin.

     His breath came ragged, frantic, his forehead dropping to hers as though the weight of it was too much to bear. Her scent filled his lungs, her warmth surrounded him, her words rang in his ears like absolution. His hips pressed instinctively into the cradle of her thighs, his body answering before his mind could. His lips trembled, parted, searching for words.

     “(Y/N)….” he choked, his voice broken, unfamiliar with the sound of his own desire spoken aloud. His hands tightened on her shoulders, clutching as though she were the only thing keeping him anchored to the earth. Another sob tore through him, and he buried his face against her neck, gasping into her skin.

     Her fingers threaded through his hair with infinite care, her touch stroking calm over his chaos. Her own body trembled, her pulse a wild drum beneath her calm voice. “Then have me,” she whispered against his ear, her breath shivering as it touched him. “I’m yours, Erik. I always will be.”

     The words struck like lightning through him, terror and rapture colliding so violently he thought he might break apart beneath the force of it.

     His head snapped up, golden eyes wide and wild, searching her face with raw desperation. He needed proof again, needed to see it not only in her words but in her eyes, her body, the very air between them. Was she certain? Did she mean it? Would she take it back the instant he moved too far? Her answer was there: the softness of her smile, the warmth that never wavered in her gaze, the arch of her body beneath him as she lifted herself toward his weight in silent invitation.

     A strangled sound ripped from his throat, half-moan, half-sob, and then his hands flew downward. His fingers fumbled at the ties of his trousers, frantic, clumsy with desperation. His hands shook so violently that each fastening seemed to defy him, sweat beading at his temple as he struggled. She watched him, heart swelling painfully — half aching at his panic, half aching with need of her own.

     At last the stubborn fastenings yielded, and he shoved the fabric down with frantic urgency, nearly stumbling in his haste. He kicked free, the heavy trousers tumbling to the floor with a muffled thump. The sight of him — usually so controlled, so precise — undone, frantic, trembling, and fighting with his pants drew from her an irrepressible laugh, soft and bright.

     The sound pierced him — a shard of shame that froze his hands in mid-motion — until it melted, transformed, as her laughter broke into an encouraging groan, hushed and aching with want. She shifted beneath him, thighs parting wider, her hands clutching at his arms, her fingers digging into trembling muscle as she pulled him down to her.

     The shock of her body welcoming him stole his breath. He gasped, the sound sharp and broken, his chest jerking with it. The head of him pressed against her, sliding clumsily along the slick heat of her folds, catching at her entrance. The sensation jolted through him like lightning, so intense he nearly collapsed from it. His hips bucked, helpless, his need overwhelming fear, his breath tearing in ragged bursts as he felt himself nudge and rub against her, clumsy but insistent.

     Beneath him, she gasped too — her own body shivering at the blunt friction, her legs tightening instinctively around his hips to hold him there, to keep him close. The heat of him against her, the trembling of his body above hers, the desperate, broken sounds falling from his mouth — it filled her with a dizzying mixture of tenderness and want.

     The sound of her gasps coursed through him, each one searing down his spine until his whole frame shook with it. He pressed forward again, harder this time, as though his very survival depended on entering her. Shame, terror, and ecstasy clashed inside him, unbearable.

     She tilted her head, pulling his lips to her throat, where his breath fell hot and trembling against her skin. She could feel his heartbeat pounding against her chest, wild and uneven, and through her own moans she whispered steady words, a vow made flesh:

     “It’s alright, Erik… it’s alright. Oh, please take me.”

     His chest convulsed, and before he could stop it, a tear slid hot from beneath the mask’s edge. It fell to her skin, salt against the soft rise of her breast. She gasped — not in fear, but in wonder — at the intimacy of it, the proof of how completely he was undone by her.

     The shift of her hips beneath him dragged him forward once more. His body betrayed him — a desperate thrust, uncontrolled — and the blunt head of him caught, then pressed into her entrance. The slick heat of her body enveloped him, and Erik convulsed as if struck by lightning. A sob tore from his chest, raw and broken. Terror flared — too much, too much, it cannot be real — and he froze, quaking, certain he had just ruined everything.

     She did not recoil. She did not release him. Instead, her thighs lifted, wrapping him in, drawing him closer. Her body guided where his faltered, urging him deeper, inch by trembling inch. Her arms locked around him, her legs steady and insistent. Her whole body was a firm command: do not flee. You are here. You are wanted.

     Erik, trapped between panic and rapture, clung to her as though she were the only thing keeping him from shattering, his sobs breaking into her shoulder even as his body slid deeper into the miracle of hers.

     Her scent wrapped around him, dizzying, and her breathless laughter fluttered warm against his ear. Every part of her consumed him — the taste still lingering on his tongue, the sound of her moans rising and breaking, the softness of her body yielding, and the impossible heat that drew him deeper.

     With a shudder that rattled them both, he was inside her fully. Buried to the hilt, enveloped in slick, living warmth, surrounded by what he had never dared to imagine as his. His golden eyes flew wide, her own squeezed shut as a cry escaped both their throats — his torn, strangled, hers caught between gasp and moan as their bodies joined.

     It was too much. For him, the mercy of being let in; for her, the delicious intrusion of his raw, trembling weight inside her. He sobbed, undone, and she clutched him tighter, as though her arms alone could keep him from breaking apart. In that instant, they were both lost — to fear, to wonder, to the staggering reality of being one.

     His hips stuttered, instinct pulling him back, then pushing forward again. The motion was clumsy, halting, like a man learning the shape of desire in real time. She felt every tremor in him, every shaky thrust, and arched gently to meet it, her body answering even where his mind faltered. The rhythm that formed was uneven, fragile, but it was theirs.

     His arms shook where they braced above her, his chest heaved with every labored breath. Each thrust wrung him out, his golden eyes flickering open and shut, overwhelmed. And beneath him she smiled — soft, radiant, steadying his chaos. To her, his clumsiness was not a failing but a revelation, proof of how deeply he felt.

     Her hands wandered, tender and hungry, stroking the tense cords of his back, the tremble in his arms. Her lips pressed wherever they could find him — the sharp plane of his scarredjaw, the hollow of his throat where his pulse thundered, and the trembling jagged landscape of his chest. Each kiss said what words could not: you are wanted, you are mine, you are beautiful here.

     The devotion in her touch ignited him. A groan tore from him, raw, frightening even to his own ears, but she drew him down harder, welcomed it. Her thighs lifted to cradle him closer, guiding his clumsy rhythm into something steadier. His body shook, but hers steadied, answering each movement with her own.

     His mouth sought hers again and again, frantic, reverent, until he had to break away, burying his sobs against her shoulder, her collarbone, her breast. She whispered his name, each syllable a balm against the tremor of his body moving within hers. Together, their breaths tangled, their sounds mingling — moans and sobs, gasps and sighs — until it was impossible to know which belonged to whom.

     And, when words failed him in French, Persian rose instead — his truest tongue, the language of prayer. Between ragged thrusts he spilled them over her skin, broken endearments pressed to her lips, her throat, her hair. Each syllable shivered through her body as surely as his touch, his whispered litany binding them tighter than flesh alone.

      “Dooset daram… I love you. Eshgham… my love. Nafasam… my breath. Ganjam… my treasure. Janam… my life. Azizam… my darling. Mahboobam… my beloved.”

     He whispered the words over and over, sometimes with reverence, sometimes with frantic urgency, as if syllables alone might bind her to him, keep her from vanishing like a dream. His voice cracked, hoarse and low, yet still he worshipped her with every breath.

     With every broken phrase, she felt him inside her, his rhythm shifting, faltering, and then finding a steadier insistence. Each thrust pushed him deeper into her body, deeper into the impossible truth that she wanted him here. The sound of their joining filled the air, tangled with his litany, and each motion struck her like a pulse — devotion not just spoken, but carved into her flesh by his trembling body.

     His hands groped for anchor until they found her rib cage. Fingers spread wide, he clutched at the fragile rise and fall of her chest as if her breathing alone kept him alive. Beneath his grasp, she gasped, her brows knitting, lips parting as waves of pleasure coursed through her. The sound of her voice breaking with his name struck him like lightning; he bent, helpless, pressing a trembling kiss to the column of her throat even as his hips drove harder into hers.

     Her back arched, her breasts lifting, bouncing with the rhythm he barely controlled. He groaned at the sight, undone by the living proof that she was giving herself freely. She clutched at his arms in return, nails dragging lines down trembling muscle, her thighs rising to cradle his hips, urging him deeper. Her heat welcomed him, her slickness bound him, and his sobs spilled hot against her throat.

     Still he whispered between thrusts, broken words tumbling out: “My love… my breath… my treasure… my life…” until the syllables dissolved into groans, his body overtaking his voice. Each plea vibrated against her skin, each thrust made her answer with moans that filled his ears and drove him further into madness.

     The rhythm grew harder, sharper, his weight pressing her into the mattress. She felt the bed creak beneath them, the slap of flesh on flesh. A strangled cry broke free as his hand slid from her ribs, rising to cup her throat. He froze — terror surging — but her gasp was not fear. It was pleasure, sharp and startled, and the sound undid him.

     His palm tightened, reverent, trembling as he felt the fragile thrum of her pulse beneath his fingers. That life, that fire, beating against his hand while his body buried itself inside her, made his chest ache with a reverence so fierce it bordered on ruin. She arched into it, her breasts straining upward, her body opening wider around him, answering every desperate thrust with a writhing answer of her own.

     His hips snapped harder, jagged, the rhythm breaking into urgency. Each stroke was a prayer, each groan a plea, his golden eyes blazing down at her as if he could not comprehend that she endured, that she wanted him still. He kissed her face in frantic devotion — her jaw, her cheek, the corner of her lips — until her cries pierced the air, and her body writhed with waves of pleasure that shook them both.

     Her moan tore through him like a blade and a blessing at once. He clutched her throat tighter, not to command, but to anchor himself in her breath, her life, her gift of herself. His words poured out helplessly, burning against her skin:

     “Eshgham… my love. Nafasam… my breath. Janam… my life. Mahboobam… my beloved. Dooset daram, dooset daram —“

     Each phrase collided with his hard thrusts, his kisses, his sobs, until the rhythm faltered and surged, carrying them both to the trembling edge where desire and devotion were one.

     Her body moved beneath him, back bowing as she writhed in pleasure, her breasts rising against his chest with every desperate gasp. The sound of her voice, the heat of her body gripping him tighter with each thrust, drove him beyond the fragile edge of control.

     His hips shuddered once, twice, and then pressed deep, and the world narrowed to the hot, impossible place where they met. The moment he filled her — whole and utterly there — something in him fractured and spilled outward. A raw cry tore from his throat, rough and ragged, the sound of a man both undone and absolved. His breath came in jagged, urgent pulls; every exhale rattled against her skin like a confession.

     She felt him quake inside her, felt the tremor move through his limbs into her own body. Where his release struck, his whole frame convulsed; wave after white-hot wave rolled through him, each one taking a little more of him until there was nothing left but the echo of it. He sobbed into her shoulder, into the hollow of her neck, and she tightened her arms, holding him as if she could keep him from splintering.

     For Erik, the sensation was beyond thought — a collapsing of old iron bars; a drowning and deliverance all at once. Shame and terror and a fierce, fierce joy crashed through him so violently he could not tell where he ended and she began. He clung to her as if to shore himself against the sea, his tears warm and sudden on her skin, his whole body trembling with the force of what he had done.

     She met him with steadiness. Her thighs locked around his hips, drawing him close; her hands tangled in his hair, anchoring him. Beneath her palms she felt every tense ridge, every tremor. When his sobs shook through him, she pressed him deeper into her; unrepelled, welcome, whole-heartedly present.

     When the climax ebbed, his strength left him like a spent tide. He folded forward, collapsing against her, mask buried into the hollow of her shoulder, limbs gone suddenly limp. His breath came in wavering, exhausted rasps; his body still twitched with every sensation. (Y/N) held him close, feeling the hot, wet evidence of their joining slick against her thighs and the sheets, uncomfortable and messy and real. For a crooked second she thought of leaving, of slipping away to wash and to tidy, but the sight of him, so broken and so utterly human in her arms, made her stay. Let him rest, she decided; let him believe this is not a mistake.

     His Persian words spilled again and again in soft, trembling syllables — Eshgham, Janam, Dooset daram — prayers and praises pressed to her ear and mouth and breast. Each one unhooked something inside her. Tears blurred her vision with a startling, grateful ache: these were words he had never offered another soul. They were given to her; raw and unmediated, and that knowledge burned with warmth that was sacred.

     She answered him without grand speech. Her hands smoothed the tremor from his back; her lips found the crown of his head, the temple, the curve of his ear, leaving small, grounding kisses. “Erik,” she murmured into the damp hair at his brow, “You are not unworthy. You are not a beast, or a corpse, you are certainly a man.” Her voice was small, fierce, and sure. When she said, more softly, “You felt so good… you did good, Erik,” the simple honesty of it struck him harder than any vow.

     He let that hit him like rain. A new, helpless sob tore free, part shame, part awe. He pressed himself closer, as if by burying his face in her he might keep himself whole. He could not yet meet her eyes; terror still flared at the thought of pity or recoil. So he clung to the contours of her face with trembling fingers, tracing her cheekbone, memorizing the line of her jaw as if to burn the certainty of her into his memory.

     She kept holding him, hands never idle: combing damp strands from his forehead, tracing slow circles down his spine, pressing kisses into the places where his mask brushed her skin. Each touch was an unspoken liturgy — here, you are safe; here, you are wanted. Slowly, inexorably, the jagged edges of his shaking eased. His sobs grew softer, then quieter; the ragged tremors that had rattled through him lost their rawest edge and steadied into the small, residual quivers of a man finally allowed to release.

     When at last sleep took him, it was not the sleep of peace at once, but the brittle kind borne of having given everything and having been kept. He slumped into a debtless exhaustion, his mask awkward at her shoulder, his hand still resting against her cheek as though, even in slumber, he could not bear to let the contact go.

      She watched him with a new, fierce, luminous love — and took him in: the thin planes of his ribs, the map of scars, the way his hair thinned and threaded with grey, and the cleft of his upper lip. She traced those marks with slow fingers, reverent and tender. In the quiet she allowed herself a private truth: this was not the consummation of a broken transaction like she was worried it could be. This was the first time she had wanted a man with her whole being, not for comfort or out of loneliness, but because she had chosen him. The thought made her chest swell until it hurt.

     Practical discomfort nudged at the edges — the sticky warmth between her thighs, the linen clinging in unwanted places — and yet she softened rather than moved. To disturb him now would be to fracture the fragile thing they had sewn together with touch and words. So she stayed, adjusting with pin-small shifts so as not to wake him.

     She bent to his crown and whispered, soft and secret in the hush of the Louis-Philippe room, “Sleep, my Erik. Sleep, my genius, my strange, beautiful man. I’ll keep you safe.” Her lips lingered on his scalp; her palm smoothed his hair. The words were small, ordinary, and everything.

     He breathed on, slow and erratic at first, then loosening into a steadier, shallower rhythm. The final shudder passed from his limbs. At last his grip on her cheek softened; his hand slackened but did not fall away. He slept, and she sat there, holding him — listening to the fragile music of his breath, the soft rustle of the sheets, and the settled creak of the bed.

     Outside, the house kept its typical hush; inside, in that small, messy aftermath, something vast and new had shifted. She let her head fall back, eyes on the dim cloth canopy, and smiled through new tears. She had given him what no one else had: a place to be human. In that gift, and in his trembling acceptance, both of them had been remade.

Chapter Text

     (Y/N) woke slowly, her body humming with the memory of Erik—the press of him, the heat of him. Her cheek sank into the rumpled pillow, still fragrant with rosewater and the masculine warmth of his skin. She lingered in that sweet, tender haze; reaching instinctively for the man who had held her through the night.

     Her hand only met empty silk sheets.

     The bed was long cooled, and the silence of the house pressed down on her with a weight she did not recognize. His absence struck her at once, sharp and strange. Her eyes opened fully. Indeed, Erik was gone.

     She sat up, clutching the bedding to her chest as if it might shield her from the sharp, growing ache of worry. He had been there when her eyes closed—she remembered the steady softening of his breath, the desperate way his hand had lingered against her cheek, trembling with tenderness until, at last, he surrendered to sleep. She had thought—no, she had trusted—that he would still be there when she woke.

     Her fingers moved clumsily, fumbling for her robe. The thin fabric whispered around her shoulders as she rose. The cold stone floor bit into her bare feet, shocking her with its chill as she stepped into the corridor. No music spilled faintly through the air. There was no restless pacing across the floor, no low muttering of invention or discontent. The silence pressed in too heavily, as if the very walls missed his ceaseless motion.

     “Erik?” Her voice was tentative, almost fragile, as she pushed open the door to his bedroom. The chamber was just as it always was—a wreck of scattered sheets, toppled books, and half-finished contrivances, chaos incarnate—yet it was wrong. Untouched. It bore no mark of his presence that morning.

     She moved quickly, her pulse rising. The kitchen was cold, the dining room barren. Her voice called louder now, striking against the walls and returning to her with hollow echoes. No answer. No trace.

     “Erik!” The name tore sharper from her as she crossed into the drawing room. It was vacant. His shadow did not inhabit the armchair by the fire, nor wait hunched at the piano bench, nor stalk its restless path across the floor. The emptiness gaped at her, vast and unbearable, and she felt it gnaw at the edges of her chest. He was gone.

     Worry continued to rise within her as she pushed against the heavy front door and stepped out into the cavern’s breath. The air was damp and cool, carrying the familiar mineral tang of stone and the faint must of water. The underground lake stretched before her, black and fathomless, its surface stirred only by the faint lapping of waves. Lantern-light quivered across it in fragile ribbons, breaking against the shore.

     Her eyes searched, straining for any sign of him—for the tall, angular silhouette pacing the water’s edge or for the flicker of his shadow hunched at the dock, lost in thought. The shoreline was empty. The dock stood bare, and the boat was gone.

     Her heart stuttered. She clutched her robe tight against her body, as though that thin defense could steady her, but her pulse surged high and unsteady in her throat. He had left.

     She tried to think—he could not be far. He must have gone to do some “work”, she told herself; clinging to that word as though it was a lifeline. Work. That was all he ever called it, that vague and slippery excuse for leaving the house. Was it music? Did he need to tend to some hidden mechanism in the shadows? To lay more traps in places she would never know? Or was it merely an errand born of his restless, mercurial mind? He was a man built of secrets, and she was still learning to live beside them. She held to the thought as tightly as she could: he could not be far. He never was.

     The stillness pressed closer, feeding doubt into her chest. Her thoughts betrayed her with merciless imaginings: that last night had been too much for him, too perilous, too tender. That he had woken in the small hours, overcome by his own terror and shame, and fled back into the tunnels, retreating to the safety of solitude. What if he had left her, unable to bear the weight of her nearness?

     The ache in her chest deepened, sharp and unbearable. She pressed a cold hand to her lips, breathing as though each breath cost her dearly. Love, she had always believed, was meant to soothe. For him—a man who had never known it—would it only ever break?

     (Y/N) lingered at the water’s edge as the cold of the stone shore beneath her bare feet seeped up into her bones. Her chest rose and fell in shallow, uneven breaths until she at last forced herself to turn away. She pulled her robe tighter to her, as though that action might guard her from the ache curling sharp beneath her ribs.

     Back inside, the heavy door closed with a groan, the iron latch falling into place with a finality that made her heart flutter uneasily. It was only a momentary absence, she told herself, nothing more. She reminded herself again that Erik had gone to do…whatever it was he did; tasks in the labyrinth, errands never explained. There was no reason to be worried, no reason at all. She repeated these words to herself like a prayer, clinging to them until they began to steady her.

     She retreated back to the Louis-Philippe room where she lingered a moment, staring at the sheets still tangled, the evidence of last night soaked into the fabric. Heat tightened her throat. A bath—yes, that would help. She turned away sharply and slipped into the adjoining chamber. With a practiced flick she struck a match, then another, touching each flame to the sconces in turn until the tiled room bloomed with a wavering glow, shadows shivering across the walls.

     She caught her reflection in the mirror and faltered. Her hair hung in wild snarls, her lips were still swollen and pink, and her throat bore the tender bloom of his touch—marks pressed in the shape of possession, where his hand and mouth had lingered. The robe slipped from one shoulder, baring the evidence more starkly, and she pulled it hastily back into place. A flush surged hot across her cheeks, a sudden shame prickling sharp.

     (Y/N) busied her hands with the spigot. The porcelain tub groaned as she turned it, hot water rushing forth in a steady torrent. Steam curled upward in heavy veils until the mirror clouded over and the edges of the chamber dissolved into haze. She let the robe slip from her shoulders and stepped carefully into the rising bath. The heat closed around her at once—glorious, consuming—drawing the ache from her hips and soothing the soreness that throbbed when she moved her legs. She sank lower by degrees, until only her face broke the surface, her hair unfurling around her in (H/C), silken ribbons that drifted with each ripple.

     The water erased it all: the sweat, the heat of skin pressed hard against skin, the sticky traces of him still dried along the insides of her thighs. She reached for the lavender soap and scrubbed until her flesh glowed pink under her hands. She scoured away the stubborn, mingled scents – faint fireplace smoke, musk and him – washing off the memory of their joining itself.

     When at last she rose, the bath lay drained and cooling behind her, steam fading into the tiled air. Her limbs felt lighter, stripped of sweat and heaviness, her body newly scoured and bare. Water streamed from her hair in long, dripping ropes that clung to her back. She drew a soft towel around herself, blotting away the damp in slow, deliberate strokes, before slipping into one of the plainer gowns from the wardrobe. The fabric fell modestly into place, each button fastened, every tie pulled taut with steady hands. She gathered her hair and bound it back neatly, taming the last evidence of disarray.

     It felt almost absurd—this air of order, this borrowed costume of propriety—layered over the memory of last night’s surrender. Beneath the modest gown her skin still burned, raw and tender, a secret her careful dressing could never truly conceal.

     The house waited in silence, cavernous and empty. She could not sit still. If Erik had work to do, then so did she. Better to keep her hands moving, to drown thought in small labors, than to sit and listen to the echo of her own unease.

     The sheets came first—stripped, bundled into a heap, then replaced with fresh sheets pulled smooth and tight. Their clothes lay where they had been cast aside in haste: her shift tangled near the bed, his black coat collapsed like a shadow on the rug. She gathered them, piece by piece, folding what was hers, hanging what was his, every motion measured and deliberate, as though each crease pressed back the disorder of her thoughts; as though she might fold her worry into silence.

     Her tidying spread outward like ripples across still water. In the drawing room, music lay strewn over the piano – scores and scratchings written in his chaotic, red hand. She gathered them into careful stacks, smoothing their edges, and set them to rest on the piano’s lacquered top as though they were relics. Books left open in chairs or slumped near the hearth were closed with quiet reverence, and slid back onto their shelves. In the kitchen, she sighed, disgusted as she realized yesterday’s food had been left out, untouched. The food was discarded; the dishes were washed, dried, and put away. She wiped the counters until they gleamed, polished the kettle, and swept the cold hearth.

     Her body moved on instinct, but her thoughts churned in endless, fevered circles. Why had he left? The question settled in her like a stone, heavy and unyielding. Perhaps she had pushed him too far. Perhaps last night had been something he had not truly wanted – some madness she coaxed from him against his own will. But…she remembered the hunger in his touch, the ferocity in his thrusts, the needy certainty with which he claimed her. That could not have been feigned or forced. Could it?

     Still, doubt gnawed. What if it had been only performance – his greatest mask, even in intimacy? What if he had woken to unbearable regret, fleeing now in the dark to escape her foolishness, her need? Her hands stilled on the dishcloth, her heart hammering painfully at the thought.

     She forced herself back into motion. Plates were stacked with precision, the table wiped once, then again, though it already shone. Anything to keep her hands from trembling, anything to drown out the chaos of her mind. Every corner of the kitchen and dining room was already orderly, spotless, yet she found excuses to linger, to polish, to fold, to arrange.

     With each task finished, her fragile certainty frayed a little more—until only the question remained, sharp and merciless.

     Why had he left her alone on the very morning after he had first claimed her?

     (Y/N) stood in the kitchen, palms braced against the counter’s edge, her gaze fixed on the neat rows of jars and tins Erik had arranged and labeled with such exacting care. Hunger tugged at her in theory, but her stomach was knotted too tightly for food. The very thought of lifting a fork, of chewing and swallowing made her chest constrict.

     I should feed him, she thought. What would Erik want when he came home? …If he came home?

     She opened a drawer, and then shut it again with a soft snap. Should she even cook for him? She had no idea when he would return. A hot meal left waiting could only go cold, a waste, perhaps even an offense. Worse—what if he despised her fussing? What if such small offerings only reminded him how foreign she was in his house of shadows and silence?

     What if last night had been a mistake? She didn’t even know if he was all right—or if now he hated her. But why would he hate her? He had wanted it. Hadn’t he? He had wanted her, right? Her hands twisted the dishcloth until its damp fibers bit into her skin, the pain a sharp anchor against the flood of doubt.

     Then –

     The faintest sound. The front door stirred, its hinges groaning low and heavy, the closing with a mute, deliberate click.

     Her heart leapt, her pulse surging with a dizzying rush of relief.

     He was home at last.

     Erik slipped through the front door with the soundless precision of a shadow, easing it shut until the iron latch gave only the faintest click. For a moment he did not breathe. The house felt brittle, as though even the weight of air in his lungs might shatter it. His eyes darted through the gloom, searching—always searching—for her.

     The drawing room. She would be there. Surely she would be waiting by the piano, peering at the keys as though they might surrender their secrets to her, or curled upon the couch with that blue book, stifling giggles when the words grew indecent. The room was empty. The chair sat bare, the fire in hearth dwindling. The scores he had left scattered were stacked neatly on the piano, books returned to their place on the bookshelf. Her touch was certainly visible everywhere. Where was she?

     A sick weight dropped into his chest, heavy as lead.

     I knew it.

     The thought rolled through him like the tolling of a funeral bell. Of course she would not be here. Of course she would not stay. He had given her too much—his body, his ruin, his hunger—and by morning she must have seen the enormity of what she had done. How could she endure it? How could anyone?

     He drifted further in, gloved fingers trailing the piano’s polished edge as though touch might conjure her. The silence was terrible—the silence of abandonment, that most familiar of sounds. She had fled. She must have. What else could she do? Could she truly be expected to play at happiness for his sake, locked in the dark with the corpse who had defiled her?

     The thought split through him like an axe. His jaw tightened, teeth grinding. He pressed a hand to his chest to crush the chaos there—and felt instead the hard edge of the evidence of his hasty decision in his breast pocket.

     The box.

     Small, black, unbearable. It pressed against his ribs heavier than stone, heavier than the Opera itself. He had bought it with trembling hands, certain the jeweler must see his shame, his absurd hope. A token. Redemption. A future. Like a fool, he had dared to briefly imagine her accepting it—accepting him.

     Now it mocked him.

     His fingers curled over the pocket, feeling the cruel ridges of it through the fabric. His throat burned. What madness had convinced him she might understand such a thing?

     The vision rose before him: her eyes wide with horror, her steps retreating into shadow, her voice breaking in a cry no one could answer. He saw her fleeing into the tunnels, desperate to escape the monster who dared to love her—the phantom crawling from his pit after her like a demon, offering nothing but a cage dressed as devotion.

     He pressed his back to the piano and sank against it, breath ragged, the box searing into his chest. He shut his eyes and waited for the truth to strike, sharp and final.

     Of course she was gone. He should have known she would not be here when he returned.

     The door between kitchen and dining room creaked softly as (Y/N) leaned into the threshold, her hair still damp from her bath, her face suddenly alight with hope.

     “Erik?”

     Her voice trembled, bright with relief, as though the sound of the front door had flung open a floodgate within her. He was home—safe, returned to her at last. She moved quickly; giddy, like a schoolgirl rushing to greet her crush, a smile breaking across her lips like sunlight.

     She entered the drawing room ready to fling herself into his arms, to kiss away the dreadful doubts that had gnawed at her all morning. But, the sight of him halted her in her tracks.

     He was not waiting with arms spread wide. He sagged against the piano as though the instrument alone kept him upright, his cloak pooling about him like a shroud. His head hung low, mask catching a stray glimmer of firelight while the rest of his face was lost to shadow. Then his eyes—those unearthly yellow eyes—flicked to hers. They held suspicion, hunger, anguish, all fused into a single unbearable expression. He looked at her as though she were an intruder trespassing on his sanctum—and in the same instant, as though she were the only breath that could keep him alive.

     Her steps faltered, her smile dimming as quickly as it had bloomed. Perhaps she had truly hurt him. Perhaps she had pushed him too far. The thought struck like guilt, sharp and sudden. She stopped short, hands half-raised before falling uselessly to her sides.

     “Erik… what’s wrong?”

     The silence stretched, taut as a drawn wire, vibrating with the threat of breaking. Her pulse thundered in her throat, each second an eternity. At last his voice came, hoarse and hollow, as though dredged from the bottom of a cavern:

     “…You’re still here.”

     The words should have been nothing—plain observation, simple fact. Yet the way he spoke them, raw with disbelief, struck her strangely. Did he say it in relief? Astonishment? Or regret? Did he wish she had gone? Her chest tightened, her brow furrowed in confusion.

     “Of course I’m still here.” she whispered back, hesitant.

     He braced an elbow on the piano, levering himself upright. The motion was stiff, weighted, as some invisible, impossible burden bent his spine. His gaze clung to her, fierce and unblinking, raking over her face with the sharpness of a blade and the rawness of an open wound—as though searching for the faintest betrayal, the smallest proof she might vanish if he dared to blink.

     Her breath caught under that look. Relief curdled into something fragile, perilous—like a glass thread stretched thin, one wrong movement away from shattering.

     “Why?”

     His voice was flat, stripped of whatever joy her presence might have offered. (Y/N) clasped her hands together, shifting uneasily beneath the weight of it. Tears threatened to rise, and she swallowed hard.

     “Why didn’t you run when you had the chance?” Erik ground out, the words jagged and bitter. “You should have. Any sane woman would have. You should have fled into the tunnels and never looked back.”

     The bitter conviction in his words sent a shiver down her spine. She wanted to reach for him, to hold him and anchor him here with her, but the severity of his tone rooted her in place. His eyes burned – restless, uncertain – watching her as though she hovered on the verge of running now, about to confirm the dread already clawing at his heart.

     Her lips parted, her breath came quick. How could she possibly answer such pain? She shook her head slowly, voice trembling at the edges. “Why would I run, Erik? I have no reason to.”

     She saw the disbelief flare in him – the hunger to trust her knotted inseparably with the certainty that she was only a fleeting dream. She lingered in front of him, their words still suspended between them. Her heart stumbled, and for one fraught instant she considered retreating, letting him collapse further into his own misery until he exhausted himself enough to calm down, but no. She steadied herself with a small, useless smoothing of her dress and stepped closer, as though nothing at all were amiss.

     “Where were you?” she asked softly, tilting her head, trying to catch his gaze, to soften the rigid way he pressed himself against the piano. “When I woke, you were gone. I…I’ve been missing you.”

     The words slipped out fragile, unguarded, a confession born of the long morning she had spent scrubbing dishes and wringing her hands.

     Erik flinched as though struck by thunder.

     His eyes widened, yellow burning stark against the deep hollows of shadow. Missed him? The word reverberated through him. His body went rigid, the black box in his coat pocket searing against his ribs, branding him with its returning, cruel hope. Missed him—him—the monster she should despise, the corpse she should fear.

     “You… missed me?” His voice rasped, fraying between disbelief and desperate need.

     Oh, she heard it: his terror, his fragile yearning, in the raw scrape of that question, as though her answer will unmake him.

     She nodded and stepped closer, until the candlelight kissed her damp hair and spread a soft sheen across her face. “Yes. I was worried when I didn’t find you here. The house felt so empty without you.”

     Her hand lifted, hovered in hesitation, and then settled on the sleeve of his coat – a fragile test of the distance he was guarding so fiercely.

     Inside, Erik’s mind recoiled and exploded with yearning all at once. Every instinct screamed illusion – that she will laugh cruelly, or suddenly recoil in disgust, or betray her revulsion with a single glance. Yet…her eyes were soft, her touch hesitant but real. She had missed him truly, and the simple truth rattled him more than any insult could.

     He swallowed hard; his mouth was dry as desert sand. The black box in his pocket continued to throb with its own terrible life, pressing against his ribs until it mocked him with its promise. Could she truly mean it? Or, was this only her way of softening him, lulling him into fragile peace until she found her chance to flee?

     (Y/N), unsettled by his silence, tightened her grip on his arm to anchor him. “Next time, tell me before you go. I—” She faltered, heat rising to her cheeks at admitting such a silly, love-sick thing, but pressed on. “I didn’t like waking up without you.”

     Erik’s breath caught audibly. For the first time since stepping through the door, he looked at her not as an intruder or flight risk, but as something perilously close to home.

     Still, his voice trembled when he whispered, “You cannot mean that.”

     She smiled at him, her eyes glistening with unguarded warmth. “Erik, I do.”

     There they stood, caught between disbelief and fragile hope – she, determined to weave him back into the rhythm of ordinary life; he, trembling before the possibility that she had not dreamed of escape at all, but of his return.

     Erik’s breath lingered sharp and uneven in his chest, but his eyes smoothed suddenly, as though he had shuttered all the windows of his soul at once. He straightened from the piano, towering over her with the rigid precision of a man holding himself together by sheer force of will.

     “You should not say those things.” he murmured. The words were quiet, but edged in steel. His eyes neither softened nor flared; he looked at her as though she were a vision glimpsed at a distance, beautiful but perilous to touch.

     (Y/N) blinked, her hand still resting on the dark fold of his sleeve. “But I mean them,” she whispered, as if offering him a fragile truth he only had to reach out and claim. “I missed you. I don’t want you to—”

     “Enough.” His voice flickered, betraying the strain beneath the mask. The word dropped like a stone into water, small but final and the air between them seemed to recoil.

     Her lips parted, stung, but she did not look away. His eyes were veiled now, their golden fire dimmed, his voice stripped of all warmth. Inside, the black box seared against his ribs, mocking every tender syllable she spoke.

     How could she mean it? How could anyone?

     He turned his head aside, as though even to look at her while she said such things was dangerous. “You should not tell me you miss me,” he went on, voice steady, distant, like ice over deep water. “You do not know what you are saying. You cannot.”

     The silence that followed seemed to magnify every small sound—the faint crackle of the fireplace, the lapping of water on the black shore outside, the fragile catch of their breath.

     Still she remained, her hand at his sleeve, refusing dismissal. Her fingers pressed a little tighter, as if the smallest action might keep him from drifting farther away. His words had cut at her like shards of glass, but she swallowed and steadied her voice.

     “Erik… did I do something wrong?”

     The question trembled into the air, small and uncertain, yet it echoed through the room. She searched his face desperately, her eyes wide and wet with confusion, her lips parted as though she feared the answer even while she longed for it.

     “If I did—if I hurt you, or offended you somehow—please, just tell me.” Her voice wavered, but she pressed on, unable to bear the gulf yawning wider between them. “I don’t understand why you’re upset. But…if you told me, I would do everything I could to fix it. I’ll try hard, I promise. I just…” She faltered, swallowing against the ache rising in her throat. “I just want to -”

     Erik felt her words like claws across raw flesh. Each one scraped open a place he had started to struggle to keep sealed; each one made him ache in a way he had taught himself not to acknowledge. She offered herself with such terrible, simple sincerity—she who would mend ruin with kindness, who would stitch broken things with nothing more than the thread of her love—and the thought of it made his heart lurch, treacherous and unbidden. Yet another voice—darker, more certain—hissed that she was deluded, that she was ignorant; dressing a corpse in silk and calling it alive.

     He inhaled slowly, the breath an effort to keep the hurricane behind his mask from spilling out. His eyes flicked from the soft pressure of her hand on his sleeve to the tremor at her lips, drinking in the nakedness of her plea. The black box in his pocket felt like a millstone, dragging against his ribs; the weight of the thing pressing cold and relentless against his sternum.

     “Do you truly not see?” he said at last, his voice iron-lined and kept deliberately low, as if gentleness might unmoor him. “There is nothing for you to fix. Nothing you can mend. I am what I am.”

     Confusion sharpened in her face, blooming instantly into hurt. “Erik, what did I do to hurt you?” Her question was small, bewildered; it reached for him like a child's hand in a crowd.

     He turned his face away, unable to let her see the flare of something close to fury in his eyes. “You cannot help me,” he went on, words clipped with a cruelty he barely recognized as his. “No one can. Least of all you.”

     Her grip on his sleeve did not let go. “Erik, you’re not answering me!” She did not let him go; her fingers tightened, fragile and stubborn, as if she could anchor him by sheer will. He felt himself begin to fray at the edges—torn between the urge to flee before she could be hurt further and the pull that kept him held like a linchpin.

     Her voice folded softer then, as if she were lowering herself into dangerous water. Her chest seemed to ache aloud with the words she forced from it. “Is it because of last night? Because we… we made love?”

     The question hung in the air, crystalline and tremulous. Her hand left his sleeve to clutch her own arm, knuckles blanching as she waited. “Did I—did I push you into something you didn’t want? Did I hurt you without knowing?” The confession spilled forward like something she could not hold: “If that’s it—if I forced you… if I was blind and selfish—then I am so sorry. I would never… I only wanted—” Her sentence broke, collapsing into a breathless hush.

     She searched his face for any fissure that might let truth through: a slackening of the jaw, a shadow behind his eyes, an answering whine. He sat like a sculpture, still and inhuman, lamplight scoring the hard plane of his masked cheek. Every second he did not answer sharpened the certainty in her—cruel and unforgiving—that she had taken what he had not meant to give.

     “I thought you wanted me,” she whispered, the words splintering with shame. “You made me believe you did. But if you didn’t—if I only imagined it—then tell me. Please, tell me. I can’t bear not knowing. I can’t bear the thought that I hurt you when all I wanted was to be with you.”

     Her words struck Erik like hammer-blows. Memory surged through him, unbidden and merciless—her hands clutching his, her lips grazing the hollow of his throat, the tremor of her body as he moved against her. He had wanted her with a hunger that still devoured him, a need so fierce it threatened to buckle his knees even now. And yet to hear her doubt—her fragile belief that she had stolen something from him—made something in him collapse, crushed by the weight of shame and fury alike.

     How could she not see? That she had held every thread of him in her grasp. That he had yielded utterly, trembling as a condemned man begging for mercy at her altar. That in truth, she—she—had been the one with power, and he the one undone beneath it.

     His hand twitched at his side, aching to seize her, to banish her doubt with proof of the desire still raging through his blood. He held himself rigid, every muscle locked against the perilous pull of her voice. His heart pounded a wild, ungovernable rhythm that betrayed what his mask concealed.

     When he found his voice, it was stripped of anger, stripped of ornament, laid bare with only weariness—the resignation of a man who could not allow himself what he most craved.
“You did not force me,” he said, each word jagged and almost breathless. “But you should not want what I gave you.”

     She stared at him, confusion shadowing her face. For a heartbeat no sound emerged, only her eyes searched desperately across the mask for something to hold onto. He turned his head aside, unwilling—afraid—to face whatever she might give back in that look: fear, pity, or worst of all, love. The silence that swelled between them grew oppressive, thick with all the words neither of them could yet shape aloud.

     Her brows drew together, a faint crease deepening as she studied him. She could not untangle his meaning; she heard only rejection where she had laid her heart open. The air pressed tight, stifling, until Erik exhaled heavily, the sound raw.

     Deliberately, with movements that seemed ritualistic, he tugged at the fingers of his gloves, peeling them off one by one. He set them neatly aside, as though the order of the act could keep chaos from swallowing him whole. Then, with equal care, he shrugged out of his cloak, folding it across the arm of a chair. Each small gesture bought him another moment of composure.

     Finally, his voice came, brusque but not unkind.

     “Sit.” he said, the command clipped, carrying none of his usual menace—only the brittle edge of a man bracing himself for what must come next.

     Her heart fluttered like a trapped bird, but she obeyed, perching lightly on the couch. Her fingers twisted together in her lap until her knuckles blanched, and her wide, anxious eyes never left him. She sat as though a single breath might tip the world into ruin, waiting for him to speak.

     Erik began to pace. His long strides carried him back and forth before the piano, the hem of his coat whispering against his legs, the sound of his shoes striking stone echoing hollowly through the chamber. His hands betrayed his unrest—clasped tightly behind his back, then dragged before him, rising at last to pinch the bridge of his nose in a gesture of wearied restraint. But no words came. He had thought himself prepared, he had rehearsed phrases in the sleepless dark, yet under her gaze each syllable crumbled to ash.

     He had left her. Risen from the bed still warm with her presence, abandoned the fragile peace of her sleeping form to vanish into the labyrinth. Not to punish her, not even to punish himself, but to act with desperate urgency—to seize the one thing he thought might redeem the ruin he had wrought. Now that truth sat in his pocket, small and black, heavy as guilt, mocking him with its reality.

     He had damned her.

     First, by daring to touch her at all. His hands curled into fists as he paced, each step dragging across stone. That trespass could never be undone, no matter her willingness, no matter her whispered consent in the heat of the night. He was what he was: a grotesque parody of a man, a horror dressed in flesh. His touch could only corrupt; nothing could cleanse that stain.

     Second, he had stolen her outside of marriage—taken what should have been preserved until freely and rightfully given beneath God’s sanction. He had left her vulnerable to the cruel light of the world, to whispers, to scorn, to the merciless judgment of those who would brand her wanton if ever the truth came to light. That, at least, he could attempt to mend. If she must be damned, then let him make it the smallest damnation possible.

     But, how? How to shape the words aloud without scaring her away?

     His footsteps carved a restless path, the polished lid of the piano throwing back fractured gleams of firelight. He glanced at her—only once—and then tore his gaze away as though the sight burned him. She sat forward on the couch, eyes wide, brows drawn, and her entire body tense as though braced for a blow.

     His jaw locked; his hand twitched toward the black box in his coat pocket as if the thing itself were piercing his ribs. He knew he would have to tell her—that he must speak before the weight of it crushed him from the inside—but the sentence would not form.

     So he paced, turn after turn, the room growing smaller with each step. She sat utterly still on the couch, fingers pressed together as though in prayer, breath shallow, each withheld second widening the worry in her eyes until it was almost unbearable.

     “I have damned you.” He finally managed.

     The words were not declamatory; they fell flat and final, precise as a verdict. They landed between them like a stone, and she felt it strike her belly with a hollow shock.

     “Twofold.”

     Her intake of breath sounded like a small thing, urgent and sharp. Dread poured through her, bright and cold. “Erik—” she began.

     He raised a hand—gentle, inexorable—cutting her off before her voice could rush him with consolation. “The first,” he said, voice low and steady as iron, “is what I did by touching you—by giving you my…body.” He did not soften it. No evasion, no romantic gloss. “I will not hide behind the language of tenderness. I am what I am: a creature wearing a man’s shape. My hands are the hands of a monster. To place them on you, to take from you what should have been guarded from me—that was theft, not love. A stain that will not be scrubbed away.” His voice cracked on the last word; the confession was raw, offered only to her. “No absolution exists for that. No vows, no words spoken beneath lamplight can undo the violation of my nature. I should have protected you from myself. I failed.”

     The world seemed to tilt for her. Warmth and memory—his weight against her, the hitch of his breath when she had moved—shifted suddenly into a cold, unfamiliar light. The word violation tasted brutal in the mouth. “Erik—” she whispered, small and disbelieving, “you—”

     He let out a breath that was at once impatient and exhausted. “Do not look at me with pity,” he said sharply. “Do not offer forgiveness as though it were some easy thing to bestow. I do not deserve comfort, or the shelter of your naïveté. I tell you this because you ought to know the debt I have laid upon you.”

     The sentence hung heavy between them—an honest, terrible accounting. In his face something that had been stone for years tilted, fissured, and for a moment no armor remained.

      “And the second,” he said finally, voice low enough that the words seemed to scrape the air, “is this: by taking you I have torn you out from whatever protection the world pretends to offer. People do not look for consent or want. They see only what was taken, and by whom. I am not your husband; to them, that is all that will matter. They will call you ruined. They will measure you by their cruelty, not by the truth of last night.”

     Her breath hitched; heat flared hot and angry beneath her skin. She could see it—faces turned, the quick, poisonous arithmetic of gossip—humiliation and fury rising in equal measure. “I don’t care what others think,” she snapped, sharper than she meant. “I—”

     He raised a hand, and this time it rested there, gentling her storm. She fell silent beneath the steadiness of it. “You cannot bargain with their cruelty,” he said quietly. “You cannot stand in front of the world and command that it see with new eyes—because it will not. I will not let them break you. If I have damned you once, I will not stand idle and let the world finish what I began. If there is any wrong I can try to right, any armor I can set around you to blunt their knives, I will place it there.”

     He pulled back his lapel and, with a motion that made her heart stutter, slipped a hand into the inner lining of his coat. The movement was small, furtive, as if the very thing he drew forth shamed him as much as it sustained him. A little black box—unassuming and terrible all at once—came to rest on the coffee table between them. He slid it forward.

     She stared. The box sat like both indictment and supplication. Her fingers twitched toward it and then drew back; behind that lid pressed a thousand impossible futures, each one crowding the next.

     Erik watched her watch it. “It will not unmake what I did,” he said quickly, as if fearing misunderstanding. “These wounds—no vow, no ring—will close them. I know this. But the world measures by its own savage rules. If something can be measured, perhaps it can, at least, be mitigated. If marriage will spare you the worst of their cruelty—if it will shield you from their gossip and their scorn—then I will marry you. Not to feign innocence. Not to claim I am worthy. But to take responsibility for what my selfishness has brought upon you.”

     Her thoughts reeled. Marry him? The word clanged practical, abrupt, and crude against the dark poetry of everything he had ever spoken to her. And yet there it was—plain, immovable—embodied in the little black box glinting between them. It lay heavy with a future she could scarcely bear to reach for. Her own words echoed traitorously in her mind: Let it stand.

     “Do you understand?” His voice pulled her back—raw, imploring, and stripped of its usual armor.

     The world shrank to lamplight and shadow, to the two of them and the perilous hush between. Her fingers trembled above the box, hesitant, as if even a touch might scald her skin. At last she drew a steadying breath and lifted it from the table. The faint creak of the hinge sounded unnaturally loud in the silence as she opened it.

     Her breath caught—and fell away in a hush of disbelief.

     Inside was no modest ring, no humble circle of silver or brass. The ring that stared back at her was dazzling, unearthly. A flawless gold band cradled a diamond so pure it seemed to catch a star in its heart. The light struck it, and the stone shattered it back in piercing splinters—cold fire, bright as the North Star caught in velvet night.

     Her chest clenched. This could not be meant for her. Such a treasure belonged to the hand of a duchess, a princess, a woman who was glided in silks and dined beneath crystal chandeliers. Not her—not the rat-catcher’s daughter, plain and unadorned, a girl who had no claim to finery – or even to purity. To imagine it on her finger was unthinkable.

     Her lips parted, faltered, closed again. They opened once more without sound. Words eluded her, scrambled by the impossible glitter before her and the truth of who she was.

     Across from her, Erik watched with unblinking intensity, every line of his body taut, his golden eyes sharp as a predator’s fixed on its prey. He read each flicker across her face—the shock, the hesitation, the disbelief—and each one gnawed at him like bloody teeth. Of course she was horrified. Horrified at binding herself to a monster, horrified by the grotesque extravagance of the ring itself, a jewel so brazenly fine it mocked the reality of what he was.

     The silence stretched brittle as glass. His chest rose and fell in shallow bursts, but he did not break it. He could not. It was her silence to fill, her verdict to render, and he stood suspended in it, a man already half-condemned.

     At last she whispered, voice small and uneven. “How much…. How much did you spend on this?”

     The question landed oddly—innocent, practical—against the vertiginous glamour of the ring. A harsh, almost disbelieving scoff escaped him; his lip curled, pride and embarrassment both tangled into something like impatience. “A fair amount,” he said, barely dismissing it with a flick of his hand. Then, softer and rawer: “More than I should have.”

     The confession hung between them, salted with shame and the stubborn weight of a sacrifice he would not admit aloud. He looked at her with something like defiance, as if daring her to call it folly, to confirm the truth he feared most—that she could never imagine herself adorned with such a thing, or with him.

     Her fingers tightened around the box. The cool weight steadied her even as awe, guilt, and a sudden, foolish elation crowded her chest. The diamond threw the lamplight in a hundred tiny, searing stars until her vision blurred. She ought to balk; she ought to recoil at the rush of events. They had tumbled—kiss, confession, surrender—each step faster than the last. Marriage should terrify her; the idea of binding herself so quickly should be absurd. But…isn’t this what she wanted?

     She leaned nearer, study and wonder in her voice. “What is it made of? Is that… gold? Real gold?” Her lips trembled, reluctant to speak the next thing. “And the center—Erik, is that… what I think it is?”

     A sharp, impatient sound left him; his hand sliced the air as if to bat away the questions. “Yes. It is gold.” The word came clipped, as if the notion of anything less wounded him. He tapped the flat of his finger above the stone, eyes flicking to hers. “And yes. It is a diamond.”

     The enormity of it struck her again, fresh and dizzying. Before she could find another syllable, his voice rose—steadying, inexorable—like wind gathering across the cavern.

     “We had—” He paused once, the bluntness of the phrase making the air seem thin. “We had…sex, and we are not married.” Each word was measured, hard as a blade. “I have left you exposed—to judgment, to whispers, to scorn. The world is merciless to women, and to those without a shield. I will not have you suffer for my selfishness. Not for what I am.”

     His hand clenched; veins and tendons standing out under the skin. Shame and resolve warred in his eyes, an ugly, brilliant thing—terrible and resolute. “So I will make it right,” he said, voice low but absolute. “I will take responsibility. I will claim you as my wife and shelter you, as I should have done before I ever touched you. I will not be the cause of your ruin.”

     The words landed, heavy and decisive, and in their wake the lamplight seemed to lean closer, as if the room itself waited to see whether she would take the small black box and, with it, the consequence of her answer.

     His voice faltered—only a hair’s breadth, but enough: a tiny crack of stone giving way under relentless weight. “Especially not because of something so horribly selfish—for me, of all creatures—to do.”

     (Y/N)’s hands moved before she could think to stop them. She closed the little box with a sound so soft it might have been a sob; the velvet caught at her fingers, and for a moment the ring’s cold light vanished. The sight of him then—tight-jawed, rigid with a resolve that looked like punishment—pierced her with a guilt she had not expected to carry. She saw, suddenly, the cost of her nearness reflected in the set of his shoulders, and a hot, helpless sorrow rose in her chest.

     “I… I’m sorry, Erik.” The words came out raw, unexpected even to her. Her eyes flicked from the box to the shadowed planes of his face, and she felt that fierce intensity there—the hunger and the torment braided together—sear through her. “I never meant for this to weigh so heavily on you. I never meant to put so much on your conscience.” The apology tumbled out of her, earnest and stumbling.

     She rushed on, words tripping over one another. “Last night—I didn’t want you to suffer for it. I didn’t want you to wake full of regret, full of torment. I thought…” Her voice broke, and then steadied as she tried to name her certainty. “I thought it was something we both wanted. I thought—” She broke off, clutching the black box as if it might yield some answer between the velvet folds.

     Tears slipped loose and ran cool down her cheeks. “I never imagined you would see it as ruin,” she said, shame and bewilderment braided. “I didn’t think you would go out alone and spend a fortune on something so precious, just to atone for what I never thought needed forgiving.” Her voice softened until it was almost a whisper. “I didn’t mean for you to carry this weight, Erik. I didn’t want you to—” She breathed in, fingers trembling as she opened the box again; the diamond winked up at her, a tiny star trapped against the black. “—to think you had to buy me this. I never wanted you to give me something so beautiful when I know it cost you more than you’ll ever admit.”

     She lifted her face, eyes wet with guilt and a tenderness that felt like a blade and a balm at once. “I don’t want you tormented. I don’t want you to believe last night was wrong. I don’t want this—” Her hand tightened over the box until her knuckles blanched. “—to destroy you.”

     He did not move. For a long moment he looked like a statue hewn from the cavern itself—still, implacable, the shadows pooling around him. When he spoke it was with a voice thinned by restraint, frayed at the edges but absolute. “Do not apologize.” His eyes found hers, fever-bright, dangerous in the way a man is when he attempts to contain a breaking thing. “Do not ever apologize for what I have done.”

     He pushed back from the table so abruptly the wood groaned, then began to pace, his strides long but uneven, driven by a force he could not contain. “You speak as if this burden were yours to carry, as if you had sinned.” A bitter laugh rasped through him, harsh and joyless. “It was mine. All of it.”

     He stopped, turning on her as though the air itself demanded he face her. His hand lifted, a finger half-raised to accuse—only to falter, closing instead over his chest, gripping the fabric above his heart. “You offered yourself in innocence. And I—” His breath caught, jagged. “I took. I should have stayed my hand. I should have turned away. Instead—” His voice snagged; his mask tilted down toward the floor, ashamed.

     Her eyes glistened in the lamplight, and rather than soothe him, they seemed to strike him like sparks on oil. He moved a step closer, and then halted abruptly, recoiling from his own impulse as if afraid his very nearness might scorch her. His voice dropped, taut and cold, threaded with urgency. “Do not think your tears ease me. They make it worse. To see you weep when it should be me undone—when I should pay for what I’ve done—it is unbearable.”

     A sound escaped her then, fragile and strange, half sob and half laugh, breaking in the cavernous hush. The ring weighed heavy in her lap, the diamond scattering cruel splinters of light over her vision. She turned it slowly in its box, as if she were studying some unfamiliar planet whose orbit she had suddenly been cast into. The facets flared across her damp cheeks in long, spear-like flashes.

     “I—” She swallowed hard; the words tangled like threads. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” The admission came soft, and childlike in its wonder. “I’ve never held real gold. I’ve never even seen a diamond. It feels like it belongs to someone else—some lady in silk with a carriage and servants. I don’t deserve this.”

     Her gaze lifted to him, raw and searching, gratitude and shame twisting together in her eyes. “Why would you buy this for me? Why spend so much for—for me?”

     For a heartbeat, his eyes hardened, his features sharpened with anger turned inward. Then, as if some dam broke, he closed the distance between them. His words came like a blade, honed not to wound but to confess.

     “Of course you deserve it.” he said abruptly, the rebuke sharper than any reassurance. “Do not tell me otherwise.”

     His long fingers hovered near hers, trembling but not daring to close the space, as though the smallest touch might rupture something sacred and fragile. “You deserve that ring.” Each word fell deliberate, hammered into place. “You deserve more than that simple trinket; you deserve more than anything I could ever give you. You deserve a man who is not this—this thing that I am. You deserve a husband of warmth, of flesh, not this corpse sitting before you.”

     She stared down at the jewel, breath uneven, the diamond’s fractured fire breaking across her lashes. The brilliance scattered as chaotically as her thoughts—ring, proposal, marriage, all crashing at once. Gold and diamond, tokens she had never touched until now. Erik’s shame, thick and suffocating. Erik’s self-hatred, brutal, unrelenting, like another presence in the room.

     The silence swelled, a tangible weight pressing against her skin. It grew so heavy she felt she might be crushed beneath it. At last, Erik shifted where he stood, as though the burden of her silence—the possibility of refusal—was more than even he could bear.

     He began to pace. His shoes struck the stone in uneven rhythms, each step reverberating off the cavern walls. His coat flared and whispered with every turn, a restless shadow that mirrored the storm inside him. His skeletal hands opened, clenched, twitched—grasping after words he could not voice, gestures he could not finish. Once or twice his hand lifted as if to reach for her, only to falter, dropping uselessly back to his side.

     At last, as though the distance between them had become unbearable, he dragged the piano bench forward and sat opposite her again. The wood groaned under his weight, low and aching. His long hands folded and unfolded ceaselessly, fingers knotting, pulling apart, knotting again like trapped creatures desperate for release. Every second of her silence stripped another layer from him. His mask, his posture, even the shallow flutter of his breath betrayed the fragile man beneath the performance. His yellow gaze clung to her with the desperation of a condemned prisoner awaiting judgment.

     Her eyes widened, glistening—drawn first to the black velvet box, then to him, as if she might drown in both. Her lashes quivered with tears she would not yet yield. Her lips parted, closed, parted again without sound. At last she raised her gaze to his: raw, unguarded, piercing through every defense he had ever built. Slowly, deliberately, she extended the cursed little box back toward him.

     For a heartbeat she thought she saw relief—faint, fleeting—pass through his eyes, as though he had braced for refusal and now prepared to gather the box back into his coat, to disappear with it as if it had never been. But then his expression shattered. The almost-hope became something ruined, terrible. His features crumpled, stricken; his golden eyes flared wide and wet. A broken, strangled sound slipped from his lips.

     His hand shot out, trembling so violently it seemed uncertain whether he reached for the box or tried to shield himself from the blow he was sure would follow. The tendons stood sharp along his wrist, his long fingers clawing the air like a man summoned to collect his last fragile scrap of hope and return it to the void.

     Tears stung her eyes. (Y/N) could not endure that look—the raw, unmasked anguish that twisted his body. Her throat burned with the sudden, desperate need to ease it. With a motion that felt reckless and inevitable all at once, she lifted her free hand—her left hand—and held it out to him, palm down, bridging the space between them.

     Every muscle in him went taut. He stared at her in stunned disbelief: at the box quaking in his grasp, at the soft hand she offered, then back again, as if the laws of the world had shifted beneath his feet. Silence stretched thick as glass, fragile and suffocating, broken only by the quick, sharp cadence of their breathing. Her cheeks glistened; the tears she had held back slid free at last, yet her arm did not falter. She held her hand steady despite the thunder in her chest, feeling his bewildered gaze press against her.

     She could not bear the stillness. At last her voice slipped into it—small, trembling, stitched with nerves and a resolve she barely understood but knew to be true.
“Erik…” Her eyes searched the shadowed hollow of his mask. “Are you going to put the ring on my finger?”

     His breath hitched as though struck. The truth of her actions pierced through the fog like sudden light: she was not refusing him. She was not returning the ring in rejection. She was accepting. She was saying yes.

     The realization broke over him with aching force. He could not breathe. After years of silence, darkness, and solitude—after being nothing but phantom and monster—he was given something that rang in him like a hymn: a wife. The sound of it echoed within, strange and holy.

     His throat worked convulsively. His fingers twitched against the velvet box, as he hung suspended between fear and wonder; the life he had endured and the life she now offered narrowed to the tremulous bridge of her outstretched hand.

     He looked once more into the box. The diamond burned there—cold, fierce—as if it had trapped a stolen star. For a long moment he could only stare, his breath ragged, as if even lifting it would demand the last of his strength. A single tear traced the hollow of his cheek beneath the mask and disappeared into the darkness of his coat.

     Then, with the care of one handling a sacred relic, he plucked the ring free. The band trembled between his long fingers, unsteady from reverence and fear. Guided by something stronger than his terror, he moved. Slowly, soundlessly, he sank to his knees before her. The rug received him; his coat spilled black around him. For the first time in his life, Erik bowed as a welcome suitor. He did not dare look up—not yet. His world had narrowed to the warmth of her hand and the golden band trembling above it.

     Her palm met his—soft, warm, alive. He cradled it as though it were the most fragile treasure he had ever been granted, his thumb brushing tenderly across her knuckles. His hands shook as he guided the ring along the curve of her finger. The band slipped over her skin, snug and sure, until it came to rest where it belonged, gleaming as though it had always been destined for that place.

     Small, unassuming, unyielding, it caught the lamplight and cast it back—a stubborn little sun, burning steady between them.

     Neither of them spoke; neither dared.

     The jewel burned in the lamplight with a gravity that seemed to pull the air between them taut, and for a long, suspended moment their hearts beat in the same small, reverent rhythm. Slowly, as if afraid that even a quick glance might snap the fragile thing they had made, their eyes lifted from the diamond and found each other.

     Her gaze was luminous—awestruck and trembling, threaded with shock and something gentler, something like love. His burned golden, rimmed with wet, lit from within by disbelief and the first tentative filaments of hope. Warmth unfurled in her chest that pushed the panic back a little; her smile came then, quiet and certain, no longer the half-question it had been.

     “Yes.” The single word slipped from her, soft yet steady. “Yes, Erik. I will marry you.”

     She raised her hand and let it rest against his cheek, fingertips brushing the cold edge of the mask and finding—just behind it—the dull warmth of his jaw. “I will marry you,” she repeated, firmer now, her eyes bright with an earnestness that steadied him. “The wonderful, mysterious, confusing man that you are.” He stared at her—shaking, unbelieving—his entire frame trembling at the impossible, holy truth of what she had said.

     She let the silence stretch, tasting it, and then drew in a slow, careful breath. “Erik.” Her voice softened. “I only have one condition.”

     He snapped his head up as if jolted, eyes burning with an anxious hunger that skirted fear, forever braced for catastrophe. “Anything!” he answered at once, before thought could temper him—raw, absolute. “Anything you ask—name it, and it is yours. I will not refuse you. How could I?”

     The intensity of his vow made something ache in her chest; his devotion was so absolute it bordered on frightening. A small laugh escaped her—soft and incredulous, like light filtering through cloth—and she brushed a damp tendril of hair from her face. For a moment her fingers tightened in his and then loosened again, the squeeze exchanged like a private promise.

     “You needn’t look so terrified,” she murmured, smiling. “My condition is not heavy.”

     He leaned forward as though bracing for the worst. She held him with her eyes—steady, kind—and in that steadying look he felt the courage to lower his guard, just a little.

     “Do not make what happened between us into only torment,” she said, voice low and steady. “Do not carry it as a penance that belongs to you alone. It was neither sin nor theft. It was ours—something beautiful. If we are to marry, we must share its weight, and its joy. We will not let it turn to poison.”

     Erik stared at her, stricken, trembling with a tide of feeling he could neither master nor name. The diamond on her hand burned between them like a small, defiant star— a silent witness—and for the first time in his life he felt the terrifying, unearthly possibility that he was permitted to live.           

     Her declaration was no burden to him; it was a gift, and the truth of it left him shaken, undone.

     For a long moment he said nothing—only stared, the old war inside him stilled for an instant by something like astonishment. Then, as if to break the hush, her voice—soft and edged with a sudden mischief—fell into the air like a pebble dropped into still water.

     “And…now that we will be wed,” she murmured, the corners of her mouth tipping, “we can do that as many times as we like.”

     For a fraction of a second his whole body recoiled, an involuntary retreat—like a man stepping back from a cliff when the ground seems to give beneath his feet. He pulled his hand from hers as if burned; the ring glittered on her finger, both accusation and invitation. The old corrosive logic that had long governed him rose up like bile: he had already taken what should have been sacred. He could not—must not—ask her to step again into that peril. To ask her to endure him once more felt unthinkable.

     “Do not…” His voice cracked, brittle, each word folding inward like a clenched fist. “You must not—” He broke off, because the very sound of forbidding her, of condemning something she had freely given, sounded absurd even to his own ears. It was not the world’s judgment he feared now so much as hers.

     She watched him, cheeks still wet, but the shine in her eyes had sharpened into impatience rather than hurt—a small, very human impatience at his melodrama. She lifted her chin, set her jaw, and the expression that came was part challenge, part coaxing smile.

     “Erik,” she said, gentle but firm, “will you keep telling me what I may and may not ask of my own husband? Have you forgotten how we touched? How it felt?”

     His body jolted as though struck, the memory hitting with merciless clarity: her palms splayed against his chest, the trembling breath that carried his name, and the way she had yielded— unguarded, unmeasured, and free of fear. The truth of it ached.

      “I want to keep doing it because it was good, because it was ours. That is my choice, Erik—not something you did to me.”

     Her certainty struck him like sunlight through fog. The knowledge that she chose him knowingly was almost too bright to hold. It did not wash the shame away, but it split it, leaving fissures where perhaps something else could take root.

     “You ask me,” he said, voice low and rough, “to let what we shared be a memory of joy, rather than guilt I bear alone.”

     “You asked me to be your wife,” she returned, voice steady though small. “That means I ask you to let me share what you carry. If you shut me out, then you have not asked me for marriage at all.” Her fingers closed on his with a gentle, unyielding pressure. “Let it be part of us—one piece among many.”

     He looked at her then, really looked: damp hair clinging to her temple, tear-marks glinting silver in the lamplight, the crooked, stubborn curve of her mouth. Something in him that had long since calcified cracked with a wary, terrified hope. He had no right to this—no claim; no merit—yet still the image of her reached inside him and would not be denied.

     Slowly, with a reverence that was sacramental, he drew her hand to his lips and kissed it—a brief, worshipful benediction, the gesture of a man touching something holy he has thought himself unworthy to hold.

     “Then—” His breath shook. “Then we shall not let it be only my torment.” The vow was ragged, uneven, and fragile as glass.

     Her smile broke bright and sudden; relieved. She leaned forward and kissed him, brief and decisive, on the cheek of his mask. It was not a grand seal, but a promise, an answer.

     When she drew back, her eyes gleamed with playful tenderness. “Good,” she murmured, “because we do have a great deal of practice to catch up on.”

     Erik’s reply came soft; he was startled by his own tenderness, as though some rare current had slipped his control. “You wicked thing.” he said, almost playful, the ghost of a smile tugging at his mouth.

     She looked down and realized—he was still kneeling before her, the black spill of his coat pooled around him, shoulders trembling beneath the weight of all that had just passed. Gently, she reached for him and urged him up. He rose hesitantly, the motion awkward, vulnerable; his wide eyes searched hers as if bracing for some unspoken test. She tugged him toward the couch, tugged at his hands until he yielded and sat, awkward in his dignity, folding himself into the cushions as though uncertain how much of his body was permitted such ordinary comfort. The couch took him in and sighed around them.

     She settled beside him, smoothing the lap of her dress. The lamplight struck the diamond on her finger, scattering points of fire across the faded upholstery. She shifted so she could see him more fully, her hand still warm within his.

     “Would you want to go to a chapel, Erik?” she asked softly. “To be married there?”

     He stilled. The lamp’s flicker touched the hard edges of his mask, tracing its sharp planes. For a long moment he said nothing. Then, slowly, he turned his head toward her, and the sudden, searching intensity in his gaze pierced her through—it was that relentless way he had of looking at her, as though dissecting down to her very marrow.

     “Is that what you want?” he asked at last, voice hushed but weighted like stone. “Because if it is, then we will. If that is your wish, I will do it.”

     She gave a startled laugh, half-exasperated, half-fond, shaking her head as she squeezed his hand tighter. “That isn’t what I asked. I asked what you wanted. I already know you’d do it for me—but what do you want, Erik?”

     Her laughter lingered in the air, soft but insistent, and it caught in his chest like a snare. He stared at her, torn between disbelief and awe that she could laugh in the face of such a question.

     “I am a creature cast aside by God,” he said, each syllable stripped to bone, laid bare like a wound. His eyes flared gold in the lamplight, and then narrowed against the sudden ache of the truth. “Do you think I do not know it? That I have not heard it, again and again? Felt it, in the way the world recoils from me? What place has a corpse at the altar of the Almighty?”

     His hand twitched in hers as though to pull away, but she held fast—steady, firm, defying the shame he tried to thrust between them.

     He pressed on, voice taut and bitter. “If we stand in a chapel, they will stare. They will gawk. Their whispers will follow us like dogs. You will hear their ridicule, feel their eyes upon you; bear their judgment. They will not see vows. They will see a grotesque thing dragging a poor woman into a farce of a holy union.”

     The silence that followed felt dense as stone, each echo of his confession still vibrating in the air. He bowed his head, shoulders drawn tight, and when he spoke again his voice was lower, fraying at the edges.

     “But…if that is what you wish—if you will have it no other way—then I will endure it. I will stand there and let them pierce me with their stares, and I will not flinch, if it means you have the ceremony you want.”

     (Y/N) stayed quiet for a long moment, thumb brushing the back of his hand with a gentle, calming motion as if to still the storm she felt within him. The awful sentence—a creature cast aside by God—hung between them, heavy and searing. At last she drew a breath and shook her head, speaking softly but with a steadiness that made him lift his eyes to her.

     “No,” she said. “I don’t want a church ceremony.”

     His breath caught, surprised. He had been braced for her to insist on the altar he feared most; the hard edge in his gaze wavered and something boyish slid into it—uncertainty, wonder. She leaned closer, voice gentler still. “If it pains you so, if it means whispers and stares, then I don’t want it. I don’t need an altar to know what this means. I don’t need a crowd to witness my vow. It’s enough that you see me. That we see each other.”

     He swallowed, throat working; the grace of her refusal pressed against him with an unexpected tenderness. She let the silence breathe, then, practical and cautious, added, “Should we have a priest come, then? Here—discreetly. Someone who will not gossip. It doesn’t have to be in a chapel. It can be here, in your house, where you are not shunned.”

     Her suggestion hung like a small, steady lantern: sanctification without spectacle, a promise made to each other and to whatever mercy might listen in the dark. “Is that what you want?” he asked, gold eyes searching her face with an intensity that carried all his fear.

     She gave a long, weary breath. Her free hand rose, fingertips finding the cool porcelain of his mask. The gesture was at once tender and commanding, a quiet authority that cut through his spiraling doubt. “You silly man,” she murmured, the words lightening the room though her gaze never wavered. “I’ve told you before and I’ll tell you again—I am asking what you want.”

     Her thumb traced the place where mask met skin, steadiness against his turmoil. “Do not twist my question into something else. I will follow where you lead, Erik. But I need to know where your heart lies. Not the world’s, not God’s, not mine—yours. Do you want a priest here? Do you want vows spoken in your home? What do you want?”

     He opened his mouth as if to protest, but the protest fell into a different sound—a broken, startled laugh that was half disbelief and half gratitude. “Silly…” he echoed, the word strange and reverent on his tongue. “You dare call me that?” The edge that might have been melted into something almost like wonder.

     Her hand stayed at the seam of his mask, and that small contact did what words had failed to do: it unspooled him just enough. He exhaled, a tremor running through the breath. “No one has ever—” He stopped himself, swallowing the concession before it became too naked to bear. When he spoke again his voice was quieter, threaded with brittle humor. “Perhaps I am a ‘silly man’, then, to argue with you when you are so infuriatingly insistent.”

     A shadow of a smile tugged at his mouth—shy, half-formed. He lowered his gaze, the candlelight skimming the plane of the mask, and finally let the truth settle into speech. “A priest….” he said slowly, tasting the word. “To invite him here, into… this.” His eyes swept the room—the stone, the furniture, the quiet evidence of his exile—as if seeing it anew through someone else’s eye. He flinched at the thought of scrutiny. “This house is my prison; my sanctuary. To have a priest stand beneath these ceilings, to watch his eyes roam across my walls, my life… I could hardly bear it.”

     He drew in a sharp breath, his eyes flashing back to hers with a restless, almost frantic light. “And yet… what else is there? What other way is there to be married?” The last word cracked as it left him, more confession than question. “We cannot speak vows without witness. We cannot write our names in a book of our own making. If we are to be husband and wife before God and the world, then someone must come. Someone must see.”

     His hands flexed against hers, trembling with the weight of what he confessed. “I despise it. I despise the thought of opening these doors, of letting another man stand here in judgment over me even as he blesses us. But I know no other path. I cannot conjure legitimacy from shadows and stone. If there is to be a marriage, then—” His voice caught; he bowed his head with a ragged exhale. “—then a priest must come, and I must endure.”

   (Y/N) sat back slightly, though she kept hold of his hands, her brows knitting together as she thought. His words carved a hollow place in her chest—his shame at exposing his home, his desperation at having no other solution. She let the silence breathe, and then parted her lips with slow, deliberate care.

     “Erik,” she said softly, “what if… we did hold our own service?”

     He stiffened, confusion flashing in his golden eyes, his lips parting as if to object. But she pressed gently onward, her tone steady and warm. “What if we wrote our own vows? What if we spoke them here, in the quiet, with no gawking eyes, no whispers? Do we truly need a priest for God to hear us? Surely He would bear witness if our words are true.”

     His breath hitched, though he remained silent. His gaze searched hers, restless and hungry for something to cling to.

     She leaned closer, thumb stroking the back of his hand. “We would not be the first to pledge ourselves without altar or bells. It could be ours—something private, unspoiled. We could give each other everything that matters without intrusion.”

     He parted his lips as if to argue, but no words came. She could see the war in him: the instinct to cling to legitimacy, battling against the yearning for the quiet dignity she offered.

     So she added, more practical now, “If you fear the world will not accept it without record… then perhaps there is another way. One person—a witness you trust - could hear our vows here, then later carry our names to a priest, write them into the parish book. No ceremony, no spectacle. Only paper. We would be spared the eyes of strangers, yet still protected from their scorn.”

     Her voice softened further, coaxing. “Do you have anyone like that, Erik? Anyone whose silence you can trust?”

     His fingers tightened faintly in hers. For a long moment he looked away, his profile sharp against the lamplight. Silence stretched, long enough that she feared he would never answer. Then, at last, his voice came—low, grudging, laced with reluctance.

     “…There is… the Daroga.”

     (Y/N)’s brows lifted, curiosity flickering through her worry. “The Daroga?” she echoed, leaning closer. “Who is that, this mysterious Daroga you speak of?” Her tone was gentle, coaxing, almost playful, as though she might charm the secret from him.

     Erik’s jaw locked beneath the mask, and his gaze fixed on the floor, hard and unyielding. Whatever her question stirred in him, he walled it off, sealing it behind the same iron defenses with which he hid all his deepest wounds. His silence was deliberate, armored—and absolute.

     Her hand brushed his sleeve; still he said nothing. His lips pressed into a thin line, breath slow and measured as if any careless sound might undo him.

     “Well then…” she said softly, voice threaded with quiet resolve. “It appears the best course is to do it ourselves.” Her eyes warmed as they searched his. “And perhaps from there we can work out the rest — the papers, the priest, the world’s judgments. They can come later. For now… what matters is us.”

     She tilted her head. The diamond at her finger caught the lamplight and spattered tiny stars across the worn upholstery between them. “What do you think, Erik? Would that be enough for you? For us?”

     He sat as though the question vibrated through him like a struck string. His fingers twitched against hers, then closed around her hand with a grip that was half fear, half need.

     “What do I think?” he said at last, the words drawn from a depth that made them sound heavy and true. He watched the ring’s fire for a long moment, lost in its brilliance. Then, he drew in a sharp breath. “I think… it is more than I ever dared dream. To speak vows here, with only you and me—no ridicule, no watching eyes—that would be mercy.” His throat worked around something jagged. “To claim you and to be claimed by you, without an altar or a priest… yes. Yes, I would have it so if I could.”

     His grip eased, timid now, and he finished in a whisper: “Tell me, my love—if we speak our vows here, with no one else, would you feel bound? Would you feel it real? Or, would you feel robbed of what should have been yours?”

     “Erik,” she answered, calm settling into her voice, “if we say our vows here—in this room, with only ourselves—then it will be real to me. It doesn’t matter if a priest stamps a book or a clerk later writes our names, the thing that makes marriage true is not paper. It is the promises. It is choosing one another when no one watches. I will be your wife because I mean it, not because a stranger declares it over incense and rites.”

     She hesitated, smile fragile and private. “Besides—which one of us was ever moved by the smell of sanctified candles, anyway?” The laugh that followed was small and honest and it eased something in the air.

     Then her face softened, and something quieter, darker, slid into her tone. “I don’t have anyone to witness us either,” she said plainly, looking down. “My father….” Her voice came out flat, rehearsed into ordinary pain; still tonight it unlatched an old absence. “He used to bring me to church when I was small, until he stopped. He gave up on hymns, then on everything else. I don’t even know the sound of most prayers anymore. I don’t know what people mean when they speak of sin and absolution.”

     She let the silence hold that small, private grief between them then drew his hand a fraction closer as if to anchor them both.

     She lifted her eyes to him, clear and unashamed. “I do not need the ritual to believe what is in my heart, Erik. I do not need absolution spoken over incense. I need someone who will stand with me and call me wife when I wake in the morning.”

     Her hand closed on his, a small, fierce pressure. “It feels right—oddly right—that we should find our marriage away from all that. Away from altars that turned their faces from you, away from crowds that would hurl their judgments. It makes sense that we would make our own covenant—quiet, stubborn and private. The world that tore us apart cannot touch this small, honest thing we choose now.”

     Erik’s throat worked. A sudden, private regret flickered across his features—regret that he had not remembered her father earlier, regret at how his own torment had blinded him to the shards of her life outside his walls. The apology lodged in him, heavy and unspoken. He squeezed her hand, a small mortal touch, and looked at her with such raw, fierce attention that it felt almost like a benediction. A sound—no more than a murmur—escaped him: maybe a yes, maybe thank you, maybe sorry, all folded into one.

     She shifted closer, her fingers still in his, the change turning her voice brisker, lighter with a sudden nervous energy. “Now—when should we wed?” The question leapt out of her, bright and irrepressible, and a flush of excitement and panic swept her face. She glanced down at herself, horrified and delighted all at once. “What will we wear? I haven’t a proper gown, Erik! I don’t have a wedding dress—only your cast-off things. I can’t be married in those!”

     Her words tumbled—white gowns and aisle-light, then stone walls and shadowed corridors—images clashing with the makeshift life she kept under the earth. “What will we do? How will we…?” She trailed off, eyes wide with a mixture of terror and delight, standing at the edge of something vast. The diamond on her finger spun tiny constellations when she worried it between her thumb and forefinger. “Tell me, Erik—what does a bride wear when the ceremony is only ours?”

     He watched her with warmth that surprised him—something soft and tender rising at the sight of her fluster. A small smile, almost imperceptible, tugged at his mouth beneath the mask. “Do not trouble yourself, my dear,” he said, voice low and steadier now. “You shall have something fitting. I will bring it to you.”

     Her frown arrived at once—sharp, protective. “No, Erik. I will not have you spend more on me, not after what you spent on the ring –“

     He brushed her protest away with a wave that was equal parts dismissal and promise. “Nonsense.” he said, quiet and absolute. “Do not fret for me. I have my ways.” His gaze met hers, unflinching. “You need not know how—only that I will do it. For you. For us.”

     There was no room for argument once the resolve set into him. She saw it in his jaw, in the steadiness of his hand over hers, and let her shoulders fall. “Very well,” she murmured, surrender and gratitude braided together. “If you say so, then I trust you.”

     A breath of relief passed through him though his face changed little. He inclined his head, accepting her trust like a vow. Then, softer, curious, he asked the question that mattered: “As for when… what do you want? When shall it be?”

     (Y/N) tilted her head, lips pursed as if testing an answer on her tongue. After a long, rueful laugh she shook her head. “I don’t even know what month it is,” she admitted, voice soft. “What season? I can’t possibly plan— I don’t even know what today means beyond this moment, awake with you.” Her gaze drifted to the ring on her finger, watching the lamplight fracture in the stone. “I don’t know the days anymore.”

     Erik regarded her with that stillness that measured everything, then leaned back and folded his hands. “It is nearly November,” he said, simply.

     At once her face fell. The color drained; for a heartbeat she looked as if something sharp had pierced the small warmth they’d been building. He froze, bewildered—why should the page of a calendar hollow out the light on her face? He felt a stab of helplessness. “What does it matter?” he asked quietly, though an edge crept in. “If it is October or the depth of winter—here we are together. Here, in this house, you are mine and I am yours. That is all that should count.” He searched her face, desperate to understand why not knowing the time seemed to wound her.

     She was quiet a long moment, fingers worrying the ring as memories unspooled—a litany of small, ordinary things that had once told her what time it was.

     “I miss the seasons,” she said at last, very small. “I miss watching the first flakes, the city changing when snow softens the noise. I miss wet earth in spring, chestnuts roasting in the damp. I used to know when the markets switched their wares, when hawkers carried different fruit—little things that made time sensible.” Her laugh was ragged. “I miss people. Their faces in the market. Dogs dragging their owners. The way a city hums. Here it’s only stone and firelight and water; the days melt together. It leaves me unmoored. How…how will we even know when our marriage anniversary is?”

     He watched her, and what moved across his face was an unfamiliar map of feeling: guilt at the edges, pity like a tide, and under both something softer. He tightened his fingers around hers as if anchoring her to him by flesh and bone. When she looked up, tears bright but held, he answered simply and bluntly: “I will know.”

     The spare promise was too small for what she needed, yet she willed his tone—low, certain, ferocious—still the flurry inside her. She let it pass with a surrendering breath and smoothed her skirts with a trembling hand. “Very well,” she said. “Then perhaps we shall hold the ceremony when everything is ready; when you have the gown, and when we have our vows.”

     The thought—our vows, our ceremony—made her pulse flutter. After a moment, a new, shy idea rose in her voice. “Erik… do you think we could exchange our vows on the shore? Where we had our picnic?” She pictured it as she spoke: smooth black stone, the lake like glass, hundreds of candles mirrored in the water so that they seemed to float among the stars. “With all those candles… it was so beautiful. It felt like a dream. Couldn’t that be our altar?”

     “You…” He leaned forward, studying her with an intensity that was no longer suspicion but something like astonishment. “You valued that moment? Truly? I— I had no idea.” His voice dropped, reverent.

     (Y/N) felt heat rise to her cheeks and a laugh, awkward and sweet, escaped her. She brushed a stray hair back with a nervous hand. “Oh, Erik…” she murmured, eyes bright with amusement and a touch of embarrassment. “I was so nervous that night—I didn’t mean to drink so much.” She ducked her head, laughing again. “But yes. It was beautiful. Even with my clumsy nerves, it was.”

     She looked up, smiling more genuinely now. “And that little question game—weirdly, I loved it. I didn’t expect to, but I did. It made me feel…close to you.”

     The candlelight softened her face; for a heartbeat the cellar’s shadows fell away and only that memory remained—the black water, the hundred candles, their conversation threaded with something they had both left unspoken. Erik watched her, and the feeling that twisted inside him was not simply pain but a sweet ache: that for all his darkness, life could still yield him her.

     He straightened then, sudden and decisive, as if the choice had already been made in his heart. “Yes. Of course.” The words came almost fiercely. “How could I refuse you? If that is where you wish to wed, then that is where we shall be wed. The lake, the candles, the water to witness us—yes. Perfect.”

     He took her hands briefly, feverish with an idea, and then released them as plans cascaded through him faster than he could speak. His eyes shone and his movements grew wild as ideas unfurled before him. “I will see to everything—the candles, the gown, the vows. You will need nothing but your words.” The edge in his voice was exhilaration. He began to pace again in long, eager strides.

     “All you must do is write your vows,” he insisted, one gloved hand already sketching shapes in the air as if he could see her script. “Vows in your hand—sacred. I— I must find a gown, something worthy of you. The candles—I'll test the wax; make sure the flames hold against the damp. Music—composed for you, not a borrowed aria but a hymn. Food—wine, a small feast. The shore must be swept; every stone in its place—”

     “Erik—” she tried, voice light, amused.

     He did not slow. “A platform—yes—and symmetric candles, otherwise the reflections - ”

     “Erik.” she said more firmly, tugging his sleeve.

     He only sped on, half-talking to himself now. Finally she seized his arm with both hands. “Erik!”

     He stopped so abruptly his head snapped up, surprise plain in his golden eyes.

     She looked away, cheeks flushing with the sudden boldness of her interruption. Her voice, when it came, was small and sheepish. “Wait. Before you plan everything—before you demand I write my vows…” She hesitated, then let the confession tumble out. “…You forget—I don’t know how to write.”

     Erik’s lips pressed together; the bright, fevered light in his eyes dimmed to something fragile when her confession settled between them. For a long moment he only studied her bowed head, the tremble of her lashes. Then a small sound escaped him—half sigh, half gentle tsk.

     He raised a hesitant hand, fingers hovering as if the air itself might bruise, and with a shy courage let them fall to brush her hair. The touch was clumsy, careful—an unpracticed offering. “Then perhaps,” he murmured, voice softened by tenderness, “that will be the next thing we learn together.” His hand lingered a heartbeat and withdrew, a faint tremor betraying his unease at his own daring.

     He weighed a breath, and then bent nearer so she would hear. “Whatever brings your vows is perfect. Your voice—your truth—is all that matters. Ink is not required.”

     Before her thanks could take shape, he patted her shoulder briskly—as if shooing away the heaviness her admission had left. “Enough of that,” he said, gentler than the words sounded, and turned away. His coat swept the doorway; his voice drifted back in quick, intent fragments: candles—platform—music—gown.

     The house slipped into a restless rhythm. Erik moved like a man possessed: footsteps ringing down corridors, parchment rustling, cabinets rifled through, and the hollow echo of his stride by the lake. Each time she trailed after him—hopeful, offering help—he shooed her off with a flick of those long fingers. “No, no. I have it well in hand.” Later: “You will only distract me, my dear.” And once, sharp with impatience that softened at once, “Do you think I cannot make a home ready? Let me work… please.”

     So she tried to busy herself. She tidied rooms already straight, polished cups already clean, smoothed bedclothes that did not need it—until the work itself felt hollow. Again and again she caught her breath at her own hand: the diamond flaring like a caged star. In the kitchen she paused mid-wipe, dazzled. At a threshold she stopped short, staring at her ring as if it belonged to another woman. I’m going to be married, she thought, stomach flipping. And absurdly—God help me—I’m more frightened of marrying him than I was of bedding him. The thought made her laugh, and still her pulse raced.

     Hours continued to thin, punctuated by the metronome of his frantic activity. At last the storm of motion slowed; order settled like dust after a gale. When he came to the drawing room again, he carried a rare, quiet satisfaction—chaos tamed into a plan.

     He looked at her as he stood by the hearth—hands folded, face upturned—and inclined his head toward the grand piano. “Come,” he said, low and even. “Sit with me.”

     It was not an order; it was an invitation to the place where his soul breathed. The keys lay polished and patient; the fire made them gleam.

     She sprang to her feet, nerves unraveling into sudden warmth, and crossed to him in a rush. Her arms wrapped around him in a swift, impulsive embrace. His coat carried the faint scent of candle-smoke and dust; beneath the fabric his body was cool, rigid, almost unyielding. “Oh, Erik!” she laughed, her eyes alight, breathless with joy. “What are we going to do?”

     He stiffened at first, and then set his hands—tentative, light—at her back. Her question, bright with excitement, gentled him. His gaze flicked from her face to the keyboard and back. “I want to play with you,” he said, reverent. “To sit at the keys together. To sing with you.” His voice dropped. “To be one with you in music.”

     Mischief quickened her eyes. She tipped her chin toward the far corner where a dark bank of pipes loomed like a forest swallowed by shadow. “Isn’t that—an organ?”

     A twitch at his mouth—half smile, half warning. “Yes. A pipe organ.”

     She leaned back as if struck by a spark. “How did you get a pipe organ down here?” Amazement tumbled into accusation. “Who built it? Where could it even go?”

     He cast a glance at the looming silhouette, its metal mouths gaping in the half-light like a silent congregation. His fingers flexed, recalling the remembered weight of stops and keys. “It took time,” he said at last, voice measured. “Arrangements. Skilled men. Discretion. The Opera’s under works are known to certain trades.” He hesitated, then added, quieter: “I… found those who would set the pipes, fit the chest, and bring the wind into these chambers.” The word found fell from him like a coin he would rather not have spent.

     “So you bribed? Cajoled? Charmed them with music?”

     Almost a chuckle escaped him. “A little of all was done, yes.” Then graver: “Done quietly. At night. Favors owed; favors asked. Discretion was part of the price. It belongs to this house now.”

     She looked around as though she might glimpse the ghost of that work: seams hidden in paneling, a whisper of carpentry at the blower loft. A shiver of delight ran through her. Secretive .en by lantern-light, hauling massive pipes through secret corridors, shaping something grand for one man’s need—it felt extravagant and terribly intimate.

     “Will you play?” she asked, nearly breathless. “Please. I’ve never heard one properly.”

     Caution flickered. The organ was not merely an instrument; it was thunder and confession. “I have not played it for others. It commands your soul; it can overwhelm.” He studied her eager face and then the sternness in him softened. “You would hear it.” He squeezed her fingers. “You stubborn girl. Very well. But promise me—do not be alarmed. Sit still. Its sound moves things inside a person. If I wake the pipes, let them hold you, not scare you.”

     She laughed, half bravado, half awe. “I’ll try not to faint. Play what you wish—something of yours. Something that suits our vows.”

     His mouth eased into something gentler. “Something for the night we choose.” He rose, took her hand, and guided her to the console in his crimson chamber. The room fell into hush, like tidewater stilled at its farthest reach, holding its breath before the turn.

     Candles had been gathered thick around the case, their light spilling upward in a golden pool that made the pipes glimmer like a forest of metal trunks. He seated himself at the bench, the sweep of his coat folding into the shadows, and drew her down beside him so that their shoulders brushed. She perched close, her skirts gathered nervously, eyes alight with giddy expectation as if she were about to see some secret miracle unveiled.

     A low creak followed as he reached for the rows of stops. His long fingers tested them one by one, pulling and pushing with deliberate care, each motion weighted with ritual precision. The air inside the chest stirred, a soft whisper of mechanics breathing awake after their long stillness. Then came a deeper exhale—bellows filling, finding pressure—the sound of an instrument remembering itself.

     The faint sigh swelled into a steady undercurrent, like a giant drawing its first breath. Candles shivered at the edges of the case as the whole chamber seemed to take on that pulse, the invisible tide of air pressing and waiting. His hands lingered above the keys, spread wide, every tendon sharp in the candlelight as if even this small hesitation were a prayer.

     Beside him, she leaned forward on the bench, her palms gripping the edge, trembling with anticipation. Her face glowed with excitement, eyes wide and bright, a smile tugging at her lips that she couldn’t quite contain. The hush between them deepened, fragile and holy, as he bent over the manuals at last and set his hands upon the keys.

     At first, the sound was hesitant—no more than a low clearing of the throat, a single murmur in the stillness. Then depth gathered, swelling slowly, until thick, sonorous chords rose like black water filling a cavernous chamber. The walls themselves seemed to lean outward to contain it, the ceiling lifting higher as though the sound had carved new space into the air.

     Reeds sighed with aching melancholy, their voices plaintive and human. The flues spoke with a brassy, ringing clarity that seemed to cut straight through the ribs. From deep within, a stopped diapason purred, humming warmth into the bones until she felt her body become part of the resonance itself. And above, fragile and luminous, a melody unspooled: tender, searching, a single thread of yearning woven delicately through the grandeur.

     It was a song of longing first—halting, uncertain, as though confessing a desire too long smothered. Phrases bent like supplicants before lifting again, trembling with hesitation. Each note seemed to reach forward with a lover’s hand, then recoil, ashamed, only to gather courage and reach once more. She felt it in her chest before her ears, a mounting pressure that forced a hitch into her breath. Then, without her willing it, her chest broke open into warmth, and tears surprised her—hot and unstoppable. Joy and grief were indistinguishable in the tide of sound.

     Erik leaned into the phrases, his whole body moving with them as though the currents were passing through his frame and into hers. His shoulders rose and fell with each swell, his long fingers pressing and lifting, coaxing out the hidden tides of the instrument. It was as if he were unsealing years of silence, peeling them back carefully, and laying them bare—not with cruelty, but with reverence. The music yearned, pleaded, confessed, until the melody grew steadier, as though finding an anchor at last.

     Then—like light breaking through water—hope began to bloom in the chords. Not loud, not triumphant, but quiet and steady, as if daring itself to live. Harmonies turned warmer, fuller; the aching tension gave way to consonance that settled gently, like a hand smoothing back hair from a fevered brow. The melody lingered, no longer afraid, repeating itself with more certainty each time, until it felt less like yearning and more like a vow.

     When at last he let the final chord fade, it dwindled slowly, reluctantly, as though the organ itself did not wish to release them. It hushed into silence, and the silence did not feel empty but full—shaped by what had filled it, resonant still in their bones.

     Erik’s shoulders sagged. He remained bowed over the manuals for a moment, his long hands trembling faintly above the keys. Then, slowly, he turned and sought her hand. His golden eyes shimmered, wide and unguarded, but he spoke no word. He only folded her hand into his, holding it as if it were the one steady thing in a world that might dissolve at any moment.

     There were no words grand enough to lay beside what had passed. The silence was enough—their shared breath, the warmth of her hand in his, and the echo of a song that had turned yearning into hope.

     “You did not faint,” he murmured at last, voice very soft. “You were brave.”

     She wiped her eyes, laughing a little. “It sounded like the earth itself was answering you. I could listen for hours.”

     His fingers tightened—protecting something new and fragile. “In time,” he said, “it will be part of us both.” His gaze sharpened, certain. “It knows you now.”

     Her eyes stayed on the dark forest of pipes, mouth parted, breath catching. The cavern still hummed with the sound. Slowly she turned back to him, a fierce, bright eagerness lighting her face. “Play something powerful,” she begged, breathless. “Let it roar.”

     He stilled. The organ was cathedral and grave to him. “You don’t know what you ask,” he said roughly. “It shakes stones. It will terrify you. It is…my very soul laid bare.” He searched her face for doubt.

     She leaned closer, hands tightening at his sleeve. “I want it. I want you—all of you. Please.”

     Something wild loosed inside him—something he had always kept leashed behind masks and shadows. He rose swiftly, his movements taut with purpose, and set his hands to the stops. One after another he drew them out in decisive rows, each click like the cocking of a weapon. The air thickened, expectant; even the walls seemed to brace. He gave her one last look—warning glinting like steel in his eyes—and then he set both hands, both feet, to the beast.

     Thunder.

     The floor shook beneath them. Sound did not simply emerge—it unfurled in great, searing walls, a deluge of force that drove into every corner of the chamber. The cavern seemed to stretch, vaulted wider by the assault of tone. The lake itself answered, shattering the sound into racing light-ripples that danced frantically across the black surface.

     The melody was not tender now. It was storm given voice: lightning striking through the upper registers, a relentless tide of rage surging in the bass. Chords snarled and bit, low thunder rolling under shrieking cries of reed and flue. His body moved with fierce, martial precision, a commander at war with the instrument and through it, the world. His feet pounded the pedals in furious rhythm, his hands a blur over keys and stops, every motion exact yet burning.

     The air became a living thing, dense with vibration. She clutched at the bench, knuckles white, heart hammering as the sheer volume pressed against her ribs. Her hair lifted in the pressure of the sound, her very skin alive with it. Yet it was not fear that seized her—it was exultation. It was as though each nerve had been struck alight, every hidden corner of her soul called awake. She saw him—truly saw him—in the blaze of it: a man stripped of disguise, pouring years of torment, cruelty endured, and rage unspent into a single storm of sound.

     The fury drove higher and higher, a tempest with no ceiling. The lamps themselves quivered in their sconces; the stone seemed to quake. She thought for a moment the cave might split open, that the lake would rise and swallow them whole. But still he played, until the melody, mad with rage, gathered itself into a blazing summit—raw, terrible, magnificent.

     And then—he cut it clean.

     The silence that followed was vast, rushing in like a great tide, holy in its immensity. The air rang with the ghost of what had been, every surface trembling with memory. Their own ragged breathing was the only sound, marking the fragile edges of a void that felt almost sacred.

     She sat trembling, chest heaving, the echo of him still storming through her blood. He stood above the keys, shoulders heaving, hands braced on the wood as if it alone kept him tethered to the earth. For a moment he looked not like a phantom or a monster, but like the very storm he had summoned—spent, magnificent, and entirely, terrifyingly human.

     Slowly, he turned. His eyes burned—not with the usual shadow of shame, but with something fierce and unrepentant, a raw, unmasked triumph.

     “This,” he rasped, voice roughened by exertion, “this is what it was made for. Not parlors. Not dull masses in a cathedral. This—to roar. To drown the world. To make it remember that I exist.”

     The force of his words hung in the air, vibrating like the last resonance of the organ itself.

     She could only laugh, tear-bright and breathless, her chest still shuddering from the echoes. “You’re incredible. It was like the world screamed with you.”

     He looked at her as if she were sustenance—slowly, reverently drinking in the astonishment on her face because nothing else had ever tasted like that. His mouth opened, then closed; words thinned and failed. Instead he lifted a hand, trembling, not to command but to beg—for contact, for proof that what he had laid bare in sound had not been wasted.

     She rose before thought could stop her, swept forward by the echoes of the music. His hand hung between them, fragile and needy; she took it without pause and pressed it to her chest, then threw both arms around him in a fierce, unpremeditated embrace.

     The pipes still hummed under their skin. Her body shook with it—the leftover thunder in her bones, the blood quick as if she had sprinted—and her voice spilled out in a breathless torrent, words stumbling over each other. “Erik—oh, Erik! That was beautiful, so beautiful. I’ve never heard anything like it. The whole world was roaring with you. You made it alive.” She laughed through tears, hands pressed to her ribs as if checking the truth of her own pulse. “You’re amazing—my God, Erik, my husband, the musician—my husband!”

     He felt her delight as a warm assault: the pressure of her hands at his shoulders, the quick, desperate kisses along the porcelain of his cheek. Each touch steadied him and, at the same time, undid him. Her praise struck him raw and tender; it filled spaces he had long taught himself to ignore. When she stepped back a fraction to look at him, her eyes bright and almost incredulous, he saw the full force of what he’d summoned reflected in her face.

     “You made the stones sing,” she went on, voice bright with disbelief. “You made the lake answer. The cavern bowed to you. You’re extraordinary, Erik. And you’re mine.” Her hands clutched his coat as though to pin the truth in place.

     She peppered his mask with quick, laughing kisses—temple, cheek, jaw—each one an exclamation point. The words tumbled out again, jubilant and breathless: “My husband! How could I deserve this? To hear you, to belong to you?” Her grin was wet with tears and overwhelming joy; she sounded as if she might laugh or weep, or both.

     For a long beat he simply let himself be held. Her breath warmed the porcelain at his cheek; her laughter filled the hollows that had once only known echo. The noise she made—part disbelief, part adoration—was more than any elegy he had written to himself. It was answer.

     When he finally released a sound, it was tiny and raw—a short, disbelieving inhalation that might have been a laugh, might have been a sob. It did not try to be grand; it needed no proclamation. It was the honest, stunned sound of a man who had given everything and found it returned in a hundred small, exquisite ways.

     “You are ridiculous,” he said at last, his voice roughened by the storm in him, yet gentled by the strange warmth pressing at his chest. The words fell softer than he meant, as though his own heat had blunted them. His long fingers closed around hers, folding with careful pressure, and he felt the tremor of her excitement thrumming through her bones into his own. That small, steady contact anchored him more surely than all the thunder he had just conjured from the pipes.

     “You make proclamations,” he murmured, his tone low but no longer sharp, “as though the whole world must stop and bear witness.” The faintest lift touched his mouth—rusted humor breaking through at last, awkward and untested but real—as though her joy had pulled it from some long-locked place.

     His eyes — unusually bright and clear behind the porcelain — drank her in as if memorizing the face of a goddess: her long dark lashes, the flush in her cheeks, the way her smile teetered between laughter and tears. Pride swelled in him then, absurd and fierce, because she had named him aloud. “’My husband’,” he repeated, tasting the words as if they were both forbidden and holy. The name scraped at the old scars and, impossibly, soothed them. “It is absurd… and yet it is everything.”

     He bent with careful deliberation and pressed a quick, awkward kiss to the back of her hand where the ring flashed. It was not theatrical but reverent — a small benediction, a promise folded into a motion. “You do not know what you have given me,” he murmured, low and raw. “I… I will make the lake sing for you. I will write music for you – this I vow, though I fear nothing I compose will ever match what you are.”

     At the edges of the words, the old reflex flickered: the urge to pull away, to run, to never let her touch him again. He felt it tug at his ribs and, with an effort that cost him, he stayed. “I am not good at ease,” he admitted, brittle honesty sharpening his tone. “I do not know how to live simply in joy. But I will learn. For you.”

     He drew her in then, slowly, as if reluctant to break the spell they had fashioned with sound. His arms closed around her more firmly — awkward, protective, and utterly human— and he rested his forehead against her warm temple, and let himself be small in her hold. “Do you understand,” he whispered, his voice reverential, “that when you call me that, you give me a life I never dared imagine?”

     Her laugh, bright and breathless, eased the last of his hardness. It softened lines in his face like sunlight through frost; a ghost of a grin — thin, surprised — tugged at his mouth. He lingered, eyes steady on hers, the rawness in his voice settling into something warmer and steadier. “Thank you,” he breathed, the single word enormous in its smallness. “For saying it. For staying. For making me brave.” Then, with that unguarded, almost shy smile that always surprised her, he shifted the veil and hesitantly kissed her lips — gentle this time, sealing a quiet, sacred covenant between them.

     Her lips answered him with urgent hunger, soft and fierce at once, and the world fell away until there was nothing but porcelain at her cheek, the tremor in his hands as they cupped her face, and the press of his mouth claiming hers. She lost herself in the rhythm of it—breath, taste, vow—until the air between them thinned to a single, sacred pulse.

     When he broke the kiss, it was slow and ragged; his breath shuddered hot against her skin. He stayed so close she could feel the vibration of his whisper as if it were a physical thing. “Dooset daram,” he breathed, each foreign syllable a small, private benediction that trembled with meaning and made him look, for a moment, dangerously unguarded. His golden eyes burned into hers, raw and fierce, and the longing that usually hid behind his mask lay exposed.

     She blinked, cheeks still warm, laughter bubbling up—half surprise, half delight. Her fingers tightened in the fine cloth of his coat, curious and giddy. “What is that you’re saying to me, Erik?” she asked, the question teasing, light as a bell.

     The sound of her giggle lingered in the stone like a candle-echo. He drew back just enough for mischief to soften the edges of his torment; the sharpness in his eyes smoothed into something almost playful.

     “What did you say?” she pressed, leaning in, hungry for the answer.

     He tilted his head, a small smile curving beneath the veil. “Must I explain every word I utter?” he murmured, low and coaxing. “Perhaps it was a curse. Perhaps I damned you in the tongue of a foreign land.”

     She laughed—loud, disbelieving, and entirely charmed. “A curse?” Her mock severity melted into a grin. “After a kiss like that? No. Tell me.”

     His gaze held hers, bright and warm. He leaned close until his breath ghosted her ear. “If I told you,” he whispered, “you might never let me say it again.” The tease in his voice was a dare, and the vulnerability beneath it made the words dangerous.

     Her heart gave a little leap. This playful Erik—reckless and tender—pulled at a different cord in her. She pushed at his chest, smiling, half-scolded and wholly delighted. “You wicked man,” she said, breathless. “You can’t whisper foreign spells to me in the dark and then refuse to translate.”

     He laughed then—an honest, low chuckle that surprised him as much as it did her. “Can I not?” he shot back, hands skimming hers, light and intimate. “You have already called me husband and musician… must you make me also your lexicon?” His fingers trailed down her arms, feather-light, stalling only because he enjoyed the chase too much to end it quickly.

     (Y/N) caught his wrists and held them lightly as her laughter brightened her eyes. “Yes,” she insisted, leaning so close her breath mingled with his, her nose nearly brushed the mask’s porcelain. “Yes, I demand it. Tell me—or I won’t let you go.”

     The glint in his eyes sharpened, half-play, half-fire. He leaned back a fraction, feigning the gravity of her threat, and sighed as though cornered. The act was transparent, betrayed by the twitch of pleasure around his eyes. “Very well,” he said at last, letting the words linger like smoke. “It’s something no man should say unless he means it. And I—” his voice softened, unexpected, “—meant it.”

     Her pulse leapt at that quiet fracture in his tone. Her smile tilted, coaxing, refusing to release him. “Erik.” she murmured, tugging at his wrists as though pulling the truth through his skin. “You must tell me. Every word.”

     One long finger slipped free to trace her knuckles. His voice dropped into a velvet murmur that seemed to stroke as much as speak. “Perhaps I will… but only if you kiss me again. A fair price, don’t you think?”

     The wager flickered in the air between them, a dare that left her gasping in mock outrage. She clapped a hand to her chest with a dramatic gasp. “Erik! So forward!” The words melted into laughter that shook her shoulders, dissolving the pretense of scandal into delight.

     That laugh struck him like light refracting through water. He could only stare—astonished, undone—while her eyes sparked with mischief. Then, her hands moved with sudden boldness. They slipped beneath the sheer black veil draped from his mask and lifted it free. His lips—so rarely bared—parted in the start of protest, but the protest died. Golden eyes widened; he froze, caught in her daring.

     She closed the distance before he could flee. Her kiss landed hard, hungry, not the reverent brush he had given her but a claim, a coaxing, a dare. Heat pressed through every line of her mouth; her breath came quick and unashamed. Her tongue traced the seam of his lips, gentle yet brazen, seeking more of him.

     He stiffened, all muscle and shock, his hands clamping her arms in a grip that hovered on the edge of breaking away. And yet—beneath the press of her insistence, he faltered. The tension in him trembled, loosened, shifted into the unfamiliar shiver of surrender. She kissed him deeper, her laughter fluttering against his mouth, and he shuddered as though her boldness unraveled the last armor left to him.

     Slowly, almost haltingly, he parted his lips for her. The contact was hesitant at first—awkward, uncertain—but quickly deepened as the fire of her daring pulled him in. He kissed her back, trembling with the unfamiliarity of it, the sensation both terrifying and exquisite. A low, involuntary sound escaped his throat, caught between a groan and a sigh, as if her boldness had breached some final wall.

     When she drew back, flushed and breathless, she was smiling still, triumphant. “There,” she whispered against his lips, her voice low, trembling with giddy victory. “Now, will you tell me?”

     She still held the veil in her fingers, the fragile fabric dangling between them like proof of what she had dared to claim. For a moment he was silent, not from refusal but because she had stolen breath itself. He stared at her, trembling, unmade—and for once, that undoing felt perilously close to grace.

     “You…” His voice scraped hoarse, rough as gravel, yet trembling with awe. “You wicked, shameless thing.” It should have landed as censure, but the words wavered, bent into wonder—into something perilously close to joy. His hand lifted, shaking, and cupped her cheek.

     He leaned until his forehead brushed hers, their breaths mingling, uneven. “You would drag it out of me with such fire,” he murmured, a small laugh breaking in spite of himself. The sound was low, incredulous. “Very well. What I said…” His voice fell into a whisper softer than the candles’ flame, “…was that I love you. In my tongue, in the only way I truly know how.”

     When he drew back the smallest fraction, his eyes—golden, fever-bright—burned into hers, fierce and fragile all at once. “And, now I have said it. I love you.”

     Her answering smile bloomed like warmth itself, radiant and steadying, and the weight pressing on him began to ease. Even the shadows seemed to draw back. She lifted her hand, fingertips gliding along the sharp line of his jaw, beneath the veil that still hung loose—touching the place he guarded most. The gentleness of it was so sure, so unafraid, it felt as though she were stitching him back into wholeness with nothing more than her hand.

     “Then teach me,” she whispered, her voice teasing at the edges yet underpinned by pure sincerity. “If you can say it to me in Persian, I want to say it to you too. Teach me, Erik.”

     Delight shimmered in her eyes, but beneath it lay something weightier—the solemn yearning to return his love in the secret syllables that had borne it first. The request struck him with shattering force, as though it might undo him entirely. She was not merely accepting his confession; she was reaching to echo it, to claim it in his own tongue, to bind herself into the very language of his heart.

     He stared at her, struck dumb by the enormity of it. Then slowly, reverently, he leaned closer, his gaze steady, his voice coaxing and low. “Repeat after me: dooset daram.”

     The syllables lingered, full and heavy and he watched her lips as she shaped them, mesmerized—her mouth carrying his heart’s tongue was more beautiful than any music he had ever composed.

     She leaned in eagerly, eyes lit bright, and breathed the sounds out, careful and trembling. “Dooset… daram.” The first syllable caught, clumsy, and she broke off with a laugh, covering her mouth. “Oh! That was dreadful, wasn’t it?”

     He only looked at her with soft eyes, the kind of warmth he had thought his face incapable of. His lips twitched, almost smiling. “No… not dreadful.” His voice dropped further, low, steady, coaxing. “Only—here.” His hand rose, fingers ghosting close to her chin, not quite touching, as though shaping the air itself. “Listen again. Doos-et daram. Draw out the first syllable. Let it linger, let it breathe.”

     She nodded, determination sparking through the mischief in her gaze, and tried again. “Doos…et daram.” The second word fell too fast, the rolled r stumbling, and her own laughter betrayed her, quick and exasperated. “I’ll never get it right at this rate.”

     “You will,” he murmured, low and certain, as though the very inevitability of it steadied him. “Again. Slowly.”

     She bit her lip, gathering herself, her eyes still bright with amusement as she shaped the words once more: “Dooset… daram.”

     This time the sound carried differently—truer, closer to his own tongue. She felt it the moment it left her lips, and her wide eyes lifted to him, waiting, uncertain, almost pleading for his judgment.

     He froze, chest rising sharply, undone by the fragile music she had made of his language. For a heartbeat he could not speak. Then, with a rough whisper that betrayed both awe and disbelief: “Yes. Perfect. That was perfect.”

     Her laugh came bright and unguarded, relief spilling into delight as she caught his hand and squeezed. “Dooset daram, Erik.” she said again, stronger now, her voice warm and sure.

     The cavern seemed to listen, candlelight leaning close. His name woven into those syllables struck him with a force that hollowed him out. His head bowed, overcome, while she—watching the sudden break in him—felt her own heart falter with wonder at the depth of what she had given.

     When he lifted his gaze again, his golden eyes burned with a trembling joy that looked almost like pain. The words in her voice reverberated through him like the deepest organ chord, shaking something long barred and now thrown open.

     A desperate sound tore from him before he even knew it, and then she was against him—no, he had pulled her, crushed her to him, his arms fierce with the hunger of years starved of this. Her breath caught in his shoulder, her laughter still spilling in little gasps, but she clung to him just as tightly, as if she could feel through his trembling how dearly he needed the anchor.

     “Never—never say it lightly,” he whispered into her hair, his voice ragged, torn between command and plea. “For me it is… everything.”

     She answered without hesitation, her words brushing his ear like a vow: “I didn’t say it lightly. I meant it. Every bit.”

     The certainty in her voice pierced him deeper than the phrase itself. He made a soft, broken sound, holding her tighter, unable—unwilling—to let go. And she, pressed against him, felt the absence of shame, no shadow of doubt, only the raw truth of a man undone by being loved.

     At last he drew back just enough to see her, his hands still gripping her waist, and the boyish, desperate gleam in his eyes surprised her. “Say it again,” he breathed, almost begging now, golden gaze wide with wonder. “Please… say it again.”

     Her heart nearly burst at the sight of him begging, golden eyes wide, stripped of their usual fire, made vulnerable in their yearning. The very need in his gaze melted her, and with a soft, incredulous chuckle she yielded.

     “Dooset daram, Erik,” she said, her grin tilted, playful, the lilt of her voice deliberately mischievous. It came out light and girlish, testing, a tease—but the words, even wrapped in play, still reached him like arrows.

     His body shivered, hands flexing hard at her waist, a sharp intake of breath betraying how even her playfulness pierced him deeper than she could guess.

     Her own amusement softened at once, her smile gentling as she lifted her hand to his masked cheek. She leaned nearer, whispering the phrase again, slower, steadier, against his veiled lips as if it were not a jest but a sacrament. “Dooset daram, Erik.”

     The sound undid him. He closed his eyes and trembled, pressing his forehead to hers as if he could absorb the syllables through skin and bone. A ragged sigh escaped, half relief, half hunger—the sound of a man who had been starving all his life and at last found himself fed.

     Her smile shifted again, sly now, her lashes dipping low, and her voice turning husky. She let her lips brush his ear, her breath hot against him, and breathed the words a third time, deliberate, sultry: “Dooset daram, Erik…”

     The change struck him like fire. He jolted as though branded, her voice searing straight through him. His grip on her waist clamped tighter, trembling with awe, hunger, and the darker edge of restraint fraying fast. A broken sound tore from his throat, half groan, half laugh, his lips grazing her hair.

     “Wicked, wicked girl,” he rasped, hoarse with worship and desire tangled into one. “You will undo me with those words…”

     Her pulse leapt wildly at the tremor in his voice, the shudder in his body. That rawness—unguarded, overwhelming—made her giddy, reckless. She leaned closer, her own smile curving wickedly now, mirroring the thrill that raced through her veins.

     “Dooset daram, Erik…” she whispered again, dragging out the syllables like silk over flame. His breath caught.

     She said it slower still, each sound pressed deliberately into his skin as her hands found his body, and slid down his ribs. Her fingers mapped the lines of him through the fabric of his vest, gentle and coaxing, bold because of how he trembled beneath her touch. “Dooset daram…”

     Each repetition wound tighter between them, her voice growing huskier, more intimate, until the words themselves became sensual caresses. “Dooset daram, Erik.” She pressed the phrase into his neck, lips grazing the veil, her hands drawing more purpose from every contour of his lean frame, each stroke of her voice and touch unraveling him further.

     Erik stiffened beneath her touch, every muscle strung taut between flight and surrender. His breath came ragged and uneven through clenched teeth; his long fingers twitched at her waist, caught between clutching her tighter and casting her away. When she murmured it again—Dooset daram, Erik—slow and molten, the sound pried a broken sound from his chest, half groan, half gasp, as if the syllables themselves had split the fault lines in him.

     “You…” he rasped, thick-voiced, pleading. “You cannot—you do not know what you do to me…” And yet even as the protest tumbled from him, his head tilted helplessly toward her, his mask grazing her temple. The body of the man that begged her to stop betrayed him with every tremor, every lean into her warmth, every breath that sought her out.

     Her whispered refrain—Dooset daram, Erik… dooset daram—wrapped around them both, each repetition undoing him thread by thread and filling her with a wild, trembling power she had never known. She felt him breaking open beneath the words even as they spilled from her lips, felt his restraint dissolve against her persistence until at last he gave a guttural groan and crushed her against him. He shoved the veil out of the way and his mouth found hers in a surge of need that made her pulse leap. His kiss was rough, trembling, frantic—her whispered spell having lit a fire he could no longer cage.

     Her hands slid against his back, urging him closer, daring him further, her body pressing to meet his with boldness she barely recognized in herself. His long fingers tangled in her hair, his frame pressed into hers with desperate insistence. The world blurred into heat and breath and the relentless press of his lips claiming hers again and again, and still she whispered between kisses, dooset daram, Erik, each vow a sweet, stabbing brand that left him groaning into her mouth.

     Then—sudden, ragged—he tore himself away. His chest heaved, lips glistening from the fever of their kiss, eyes burning gold and wild not just with desire but with something sharper: decision. His grip found her shoulders, trembling but steadying, and before she could protest he scooped her into his arms.

     She squealed, startled yet delighted, laughter bubbling up through her gasp. “Erik!” she cried, clinging to him as he swept her through the corridors with long, unyielding strides. “Oh, you wicked man—you’re carrying me to bed again, aren’t you?”

     The press of his body against hers, the sureness in his steps, made her certain of what awaited—until he carried her across the threshold of the Louis-Philippe room and set her lightly on her feet. His gloved hand rose, lifting one finger in sharp command. His chest still surged with uneven breaths and his eyes, fever-bright, held hers and told her to wait.

     She stood with laughter caught in her throat, her heart hammering with confusion and anticipation as he suddenly swept from the room, his coat trailing behind like a dark banner. The silence after his departure felt immense.

     Moments later, he returned. In his arms, carefully draped, lay a white gown that shimmered faintly in the lamplight, as though moonlight itself had been spun into cloth. His hands shook as he held it out, his voice ragged but resolute, each word weighted like an oath:

     “Now,” he said, breathless, fierce, unyielding, “is the time for our ceremony.”

     Her laughter slipped out before she could cage it—bright, nervous, and edged with awe. One hand pressed to her mouth as her gaze darted to the gown spilling from his arms, the fabric catching the light like water. Heat rushed into her cheeks; her body shifted restlessly, caught between running to him and collapsing under the weight of what he asked.

     “Erik…” she stammered, laughter breaking unevenly through her words, half disbelieving, half elated. “Are you—are you truly sure?” Her breath hitched, her eyes rising to meet his, wide and blazing with joy and fear in equal measure. “What made you… what made you decide this? Now?”

     For a long moment he only stared at her, chest heaving, the gown trembling faintly in his hands. Then he stepped forward, closing the distance between them, golden eyes searing with a clarity that silenced doubt.

     “You do not know,” he rasped, his voice rough with conviction, “what you do to me. Every breath, every word, every time you lay your hand on me—I am undone.” He shook his head sharply, as though the words themselves were feeble scraps against the truth burning in him. “I cannot wait another moment.”

     The final words tolled like an iron bell, simple, immovable. His tone carried no quaver of doubt, no shadow of hesitation; it was a vow as solid as the stone around them. He thrust the gown toward her, gentle but unyielding, his fingers brushing hers in a touch that lingered like a spark.

     Her fingers trembled as they closed around it. The gown poured into her arms like a river of white silk, heavier than she expected, weighted with craftsmanship and care. She lifted it higher, breath catching. The lace was fine as frostwork, the bodice dusted with tiny crystals that shimmered faintly even in the dim chamber, as though the dress itself bore its own constellation of stars.

     Her laughter faltered into silence. “It’s…” Her voice cracked, her eyes blurring with sudden tears. “It’s beautiful. More beautiful than anything I ever dreamed I would wear.” She clutched it tighter against her chest, shaking her head. “I—Erik, how? How could you possibly have gotten this so quickly?”

     Her gaze shot back to his face, wild with disbelief, as if half-expecting him to laugh, to reveal it was some trick of candlelight, some phantasm woven out of shadows.

     Erik only stood tall, his hands falling still at his sides, his eyes molten and steady. “I have my ways.” he said simply, the words measured, evasive.

     She blinked at him, thumb brushing over one of the tiny crystals that glittered like caged stars. “You have your ways?” she echoed, half-laughing through her awe. “That’s all you’re going to tell me?”

     His head inclined just slightly, no more than a shadow of a nod. “It is your wedding gown,” he said instead, voice quiet, absolute. “That is all that matters.”

     The gown grew heavier in her arms at those words. She bent her face to it, overcome, breathing in the faint scent of silk as the enormity of what was about to happen pressed against her chest.

     Erik watched her, chest rising with uneven breaths, his disbelief still shining in his eyes even as she clutched the dress like a lifeline. His voice, when it came, carried a steadiness born of decision, as though something inside him had clicked shut into certainty.

     “Ready yourself,” he said, a subtle tilt of his head toward the gown. “I will prepare as well. It is… bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the wedding. So, I will wait for you at the lake shore.” He drew in a deep breath, his shoulders taut with the weight of the words. “I have set a path for you—candles to mark the way. You will not lose yourself in the dark without me.”

     Her lips parted; delight already curling at the corners. Before he could retreat into gravity, she laughed—light, bubbling, irrepressible. “Oh, Erik,” she teased, hugging the gown close, her eyes sparkling with mischief. “You do realize you’ve already seen the bride before the wedding… all of her.”

     Color rose in her cheeks at her own daring, but she pressed on, biting her lip against another laugh. “Isn’t it a little late to worry about bad luck?”

     For a heartbeat he froze, her words loosed into him like a sudden shock. The firelight caught on the mask, sharpening its edges, while his hands twitched at his sides as though caught between outrage and surrender. Then came a sound from him—half a huff, half a laugh—an astonished noise that betrayed how her boldness had undone him yet again.

     His eyes narrowed, golden and keen, but the expected sternness never followed. Instead, the faintest, reluctant curl pulled at his mouth beneath the veil, something raw and human caught between exasperation and amusement. He stepped closer, and when he spoke, his voice had softened into that dark, velvety timbre.

     “Ah… yes,” he murmured, drawing the syllables out with deliberate weight. “I suppose I have seen the bride before the wedding—every inch of her, as you so wickedly remind me.” He leaned in, porcelain near her temple, voice silk over iron. “Bad luck, is it? Then let us be ruined a thousand times over—if ruin means you unclothed in my arms, I will gladly invite disaster.”

     Her eyes went wide at the brazenness; heat flooded her cheeks, but the sound that escaped her was laughter—breathless, scandalized, delighted. She hugged the gown to her, and then leaned closer, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Careful, my love,” she teased. “Tempt fate enough and she may take you at your word. A thousand times ruined—who knows if you’ll survive me.”

     He made a small, fond sound, the humor at the edges of it melting into something truer as his gaze drank her in—the flush on her cheeks, the tremor in her shoulders, the mischief bright in her eyes. “Do you see me trembling at such a fate?” he asked, voice dropping until it was nearly a breath against her skin. “No.” The rasp that touched the next words rendered them both irreverent and entirely sincere. “If ruin is the price of marrying you, then I am already the happiest ruined man alive.”

     Her laughter softened into something like awe. She let the gown fall a little from her arms and met his eyes, mischief braided with a tenderness that steadied him. “You are impossible,” she whispered, unable to keep the smile from her voice.

     He tipped his head, a private smile ghosting beneath the veil. “Only for you,” he said, and in that small, steady confession there was no pretense—only the fierce, ridiculous devotion that had made him bend the world so she might stand in white.

     Her eyes shimmered, wide and uncertain, the teasing spark in them dimming into something tender. She ducked her head, hugging the gown tighter, as though the silk itself might shield her from the heat rushing to her cheeks. “Erik…” she whispered, unsteady, her voice no louder than the flutter of a candle.

     He watched the flush bloom across her face, and something fierce and delicate twisted in his chest. To see her startled by joy rather than fear—to see her flustered not by his cruelty but by his confession—it made his breath come rough and uneven. His golden eyes softened, still alight with mirth but burning now with promise.

     “Did you not expect it of me?” he murmured, tilting his head as though to catch every flicker of her gaze. “Then prepare yourself, my bride. You will hear many things you did not think I would ever say.”

     Her heart leapt at the vow hidden in his words. She pressed the gown tighter to her chest, the lace whispering beneath her fingers, her lips curving in a nervous smile she could not quite restrain. The playful boldness in him—so rare, so unguarded—thrilled her, set her pulse racing as if she were standing at the brink of something vast and unknown.

     At last she nodded, teeth catching her bottom lip, her voice soft but carrying conspiratorial warmth. “Very well then,” she whispered, eyes shining. “I’ll get ready.”

     The words had left her steadier than she felt, and though she tried to hold her composure, her eyes betrayed her, flickering with the restless spark of nerves and delight. She turned toward the mirror and the wardrobe, her pulse drumming at her throat, every step weighted with the knowledge that the next time she stood before him it would not be as his captive, nor as his strange guest, but as his bride.

     Behind her, she felt his gaze linger like a touch at her back, heavy and consuming. Then came the sound of his retreating steps—soft, deliberate, dissolving into the house’s hush—until she was left alone with the gown in her arms, her racing heart, and the promise of what awaited her by the lake.

     The gown surprised her with its heft when she eased into it, white silk and lace spilling down her body in whispering folds, the beaded crystals glimmered faintly as though they had drunk the candlelight into their seams. Her fingers fumbled clumsily with the fastenings, her breath quick and shallow, until at last she stood before the mirror. What looked back was a trembling figure wrapped in finery she had never dared imagine: cheeks flushed, hair hastily put up in a cascade of curls, a littering diamond ring resting on her finger, hands refusing to rest at her sides. She forced them down, even as they wrung against the fabric in their need to release her anxious energy.

     For a moment she lingered there, heart racing, until the weight of the silence pressed too heavily on her shoulders. She turned, skirts whispering against the floor, and stepped out into the drawing room. At once her heart gave a startled leap. On the polished lid of the piano sat a single crystal glass of amber wine, glowing like caught fire. Beside it, folded neatly, lay a scrap of paper. Her skirts swished as she crossed quickly to it, gathering the gown awkwardly in both hands, pulse thrumming as she plucked the note up.

     The handwriting, jagged and wild, slanted across the page like the tracks of a bloody storm. She had to tilt her head, trace each fierce line with her fingertip before only a couple of the words managed to emerge: You may need this—for courage.

     Her throat tightened. A nervous laugh bubbled through her lips. “Oh, Erik…” she whispered, the syllables shaking. He had thought of everything—even this.

     She lifted the glass, breathing in the scent: warm, sweet, and sharp with memory. This was the same wine they had shared by the lake, the one she had called the color of his eyes. Without letting herself hesitate, she drank it down. It burned quick and sweet, searing her chest, and then spreading into warmth that loosened her limbs and brightened her head. Setting the glass aside, she exhaled hard, her hand trembling faintly against the piano’s surface.

     One deep breath. Then another. She gathered her skirts in both hands, the fabric hissing, and turned toward the waiting dark.

     The door gave way to brilliance. A trail of candles stretched out along the cavern floor, each flame a golden sentinel, leading onward. They flickered against the still black of the cavern, glowing as though a path of fallen stars had been laid just for her. She swallowed hard, her throat constricting with awe and disbelief, and placed her foot forward. Step by step, the gown whispered around her legs as she followed the trail.

     The silence pressed close—the thick, breathing silence of the underground—broken only by the tender hiss of the candle flames. With each step, the unreality of it all settled heavier. How had her life unspooled to this? Months ago, she had still been her father’s daughter, still walking streets with familiar faces, still living a life she thought was hers – poor as it was. Then her father was gone—vanished, leaving her wandering in grief. Then Erik: the traps, the fury, the terror of his world. And now—this.

     A gown. A path of light. A vow waiting in the dark.

     Love, stark and impossible, pulling her forward.

     She clutched the skirts tighter in her hands, the wine’s warmth swirling in her belly, and doubt flickered sharp as a spark. Was there something wrong with her? To have fallen so swiftly, so madly, for a man she had once feared, a man she still barely understood? Was this folly—or fate? Or, was she simply as strange and fractured as he, to want him with such fierce devotion despite everything?

     Her feet did not falter. The candles drew her onward, their flames dancing on the dark skin of the underground shore, pulling her step by step toward Erik—Erik, who had chosen her, who waited for her now. Her heart surged and twisted with every pace, tangled between terror and wonder at the impossible truth: she was about to become his bride.

     The corridor bent, the line of fire guiding her deeper, until she turned a corner—and stopped.

     There he was.

     Erik stood at the water’s edge, tall and stark in his black coat, his figure etched in the glow of a hundred flames he had kindled along the shore. His long hands writhed together, fingers clenching and knotting in restless rhythm. His head hung low, the porcelain mask catching only faint glimmers of the light. To her eyes he looked not like a groom awaiting his bride, but like a man condemned, waiting for judgment.

     Yet, in his eyes, it was she who struck the killing blow.

     When he lifted his head at the sound of her step, the sight of her hit him with the force of thunder. The gown—white silk whispering around her legs, crystals catching the candlelight—transfigured her into something at once impossible and real. For a heartbeat he thought her an apparition conjured out of his mind, some cruel vision that was sent to unmake him. But no—the rustle of her skirts, the uneven rise of her breath, the faint tremor in her hands all marked her as living, as his, as here. The impossibility of it brought tears he could not master.

     Her heart leapt at the rawness in his gaze, at the red-rimmed eyes that fixed on her as though she were both miracle and torment. His mask could not hide the tears, nor the desperate disbelief carved into every line of him.

     “Erik.” she breathed, the name catching on her lips, her face breaking into sudden light. The weight of silk, the warmth of wine, the sheer madness of the day—all of it burst into a rush of love so sharp she could hardly contain it. She gathered her skirts and hurried toward him, lace and silk swishing at her ankles.

     Even as she ran to him, he thought she might vanish. Each step closer seemed a defiance of reason, each gleam of her gown an affront to the years he had lived unloved. His breath came ragged, his fingers twitched as if to reach for her and recoil in the same instant. He had expected—always—that she would see him and turn away. But she did not. She came to him.

     She faltered at last only a pace away, the joy in her chest folding into something heavier, gentler, when she saw his tears plain. “Oh, Erik…” she whispered, her voice trembling, her hand rising toward him, her gown’s bead-work scattering candlelight into tiny stars between them.

     And he—stricken, undone—could only stand there; waiting for her hand to bridge the impossible space he had never dared believe could close.

     Wordless, she set down her skirts and reached for his hands. His long fingers were cold and restless, still knotting themselves into familiar anxieties; she closed her warm palms over them and would not let go.

     They stayed like that a long moment, the silence stretching between them like the pause before a breath. His eyes dropped, reluctant to meet hers, and she watched the way his throat worked as he swallowed tears back. He cleared it roughly; the sound was small and raw. Her hand tightened, a steadying pressure, and a slow, luminous smile eased across her face.

     “Thank you… for the wine,” she said, the words ordinary as a household blessing and weighty as a vow. She wanted him to know she had read his note, that she had taken his thought and held it dear to her.

     He let his own words scrape past the lump in his chest. “Th-thank you… for coming.” The last syllable fell almost inaudible, freighted with disbelief, as if he had braced for her absence until the instant she stood before him in white.

     Their clasped hands hung between them like a fragile bridge; his fingers trembled against her thumbs. He looked at her as if the candlelight had conjured her—a vision, impossible and raw—and the sincerity in his voice pressed down on them both like stone.

     Then she laughed—bright and sudden, a sound that split the heaviness and made the candles lean in. It was not mockery but relief, a small rebellion against the ruin he had been certain would come for him. “Erik,” she breathed, half scolding, half delighted, “you’re thanking me? With tears in your eyes?”

     Her mirth softened him; it brushed his cheek the way a hand might. “You silly man,” she murmured, thumb rubbing at his knuckles, the motion both chastening and comforting. “I would have come if it were a thousand times harder than this.”

     He repeated the phrase as if testing it, the words trembling on his lips: “A thousand times harder…” His gaze searched her face—searching for proof that she meant it or for some merciless line he could cling to and be spared hope. The candlelight made his golden eyes shine, wet and molten. “No one… no one has ever said such a thing to me.” The admission broke out of him like a wind. He bowed his head as if under a weight that was not all burden. “Always they fled. Even in my dreams, they fled. And yet you…”

     When he looked up, the mask could not hide the nakedness in his eyes: disbelief stripped to a fierce, aching devotion. “You would walk through fire to come to me,” he whispered, the words fragile as lace and as heavier than stone. “What am I to do with such a gift?” He laughed then—a cracked, unbelieving sound—and his hands rose to hold her face with reverence that trembled. “You… you make a corpse dream he is alive.”

     The image stabbed at her, and her heart clenched. She rose on tiptoe, covering his hands with hers until they stilled. “Hush,” she breathed, voice soft as a hand smoothing hair. Her thumb moved in small circles across his knuckles, a quiet insistence: breathe, be here.

     “No more corpses or fire,” she said, steady now. “Let there only be us. Only this.”

     The cavern held them—candles flaring, the lake breathing softly—while she waited, not pressing but patient, letting him find the place inside himself where words could rest. He folded his fingers around hers and, slowly, the tremor in his shoulders eased enough for him to stand in the light she’d brought him.

     At last, Erik drew in a shaky breath, his golden eyes fixed on her with something reverent and almost fearful. His hands slid slowly from her face down to her own, reclaiming her fingers and tightening on hers as if her grip were a rope thrown into a storm. The candles flickered around them; the lake hushed. Erik straightened, an odd, solemn authority settling into him, as though the cavern itself had lent him an altar.

     He swallowed once, twice, as though forcing back the violent tremor in his throat, and then his voice rose low, clear and resonant in the cavern, carrying on the hush of the water and the glow of a hundred candles.

     “(Y/N),” he began, the single name falling from him like a benediction. “I have lived in darkness—shaped by it, beaten into shadow until the world learned only to call me monster. I…I live inside that belief even still.”

     He swallowed; the sound was small in the cavern but true. “…Then you came. You saw what everyone else turns away from. You touched what others fear. You laugh where there is only silence, and you warm a place where only cold remains. You give me life I thought never meant to be mine. I do not deserve that gift, and yet you give it.”

     His voice steadied, gathering heat. “So this is what I promise: my hands, though scarred and frozen, will be yours to hold. My music—born of sorrow and memory and my love—will be yours to keep and to lean on. My body –“ Erik closed his eyes, swallowing hard, “- twisted and horrible as it is - will be your shelter; my name will wrap around you like armor. My heart, which I thought forever dead and frost-bound, will beat for you alone.”

     He faltered, his golden eyes shimmering, his words slipping into a rough whisper. “I vow to protect you from every cruelty I can, even from myself. I vow to love you—though my love is flawed, though it is clumsy, though it is more than I ever dreamed I could give.”

     He lifted his head, eyes burning with a fierce, brittle hope. “If the world names you ruined because of me, I will stand between you and that name.”

     A pause, the valley of sound between his sentences. “This is all I have left to give,” he said, the finality in his voice a cliff-edge and a confession. “My hands, my songs, my shelter, my stubborn, clumsy love. Take them if you will. Take me. Always. Until my last breath, I am yours.”

     She listened until the syllables settled into the hollow of her ribs like a stone made bright. The ring at her finger warmed in her palm; the world narrowed to his face, to the tremor in his throat, to the fierce sincerity in his eyes. When at last she answered, her voice was small and steady, every word braided to the promise he had just set down.

      She drew in a trembling breath, her fingers tightening around his as she lifted her gaze to him. The candlelight shimmered in her eyes, and when she spoke, her voice wavered with emotion but carried steady through the cavern.

     “Erik,” she said softly, his name tender as a vow in itself. “I did not come to you as most brides do. I came to you in fear, in anger…nearly in death. I swore at you, I fought you, I struck you with words and hands both. I did not know what to do with you—this strange, impossible man who held me captive and yet… who already held me in ways I could not know. And now…I cannot imagine life without you now.”

     Her lips trembled into a small smile, her chest rising with the swell of truth inside her. “You are my strange, confusing, beautiful musician. I love you. I love the way you hunger to teach me, and the way my smallest spark of understanding lights something in you, as if I have given you a precious gift. I love your music—how it roars, how it weeps, how it speaks what words cannot. I love your voice, whether it whispers, commands, sings or trembles. I love your mind—fierce, mercurial, and blazing with brilliance. I love your care for me, your devotion, sharp and unyielding as it is.”

     Her eyes glistened, her smile widening through the gathering tears. “I love the scent of you, the movement of your body, and the sound of your breath. I love you—all of you.”

     She steadied herself then, drawing closer, her voice dropping into something softer, more intimate. “But, I ask you this, my love: when you hurt, when grief consumes you, when rage and despair threaten to destroy you—do not shut me out. Do not hide. Bring it to me. Let me bear it with you. For what is the point of vows, if not to share the weight of each other’s wounds as well as our joys? If you give me your torment as freely as your music, then I will stand with you through all of it.”

     Her thumb brushed across the back of his hand, grounding them both. “Whatever lived in your past is gone now, Erik. Dead, buried. What lives is here—me, you, this love we have made together. So let the days be filled only with us, and with the life we will shape, no matter how strange, no matter how flawed, no matter how impossible. I vow myself to you in all of it—in laughter, in storms, in silence, and in song.”

     Her voice thickened, breaking into a whisper as her tears slipped free. “I love you, Erik. Only you. My husband. My love.”

     She drew a slow breath; candles flung little stars across the lace of her bodice, trembling with each inhale. Then, soft and careful as if tracing unfamiliar ink, she shaped the foreign syllables on her tongue.

     “Dooset daram.”

     The phrase stumbled — not perfect, vowels rounded with the raw edges of an accent that was not hers — and for one foolish, sharp heartbeat she felt childish and awkward, as though she’d mislaid a jewel. Then she looked up and found him.

     Something in Erik unclenched the instant the words touched the air. The iron light that usually sat behind his eyes melted away and, like a door unlatched, something ungoverned and human spilled out: astonishment, a joy so sudden it seemed to make him small. He made a sound that was at once a laugh and a sob, tiny and incredulous, and the last of his careful composure slipped.

     “You said it again.” he breathed — the words reverent, as if a miracle had been uttered. His grip closed on her hands until she felt the pulse beneath his long fingers; the tremor in him ran through her like a current and warmed the place beneath her ribs. Before embarrassment could rise in her like a tide, he leaned forward and answered with deliberate intimacy, the cadence of someone who had lived inside this language all his life.

     “Dooset daram.” He measured each syllable, slow and benedictory, and in his voice there was no uncertainty, only the weight and truth of its meaning.

     She watched the way his body released it: shoulders letting go of some ancient tension, the hard lines near his eyes softening into something fragile and almost like peace. Tears he could no longer hold back glinted in the candlelight; he wiped them away with the pads of his fingers, angrily amused at his own weakness, but the smile that followed was honest and blinding.

     “You speak it,” he murmured, astonishment still lacing the words, “and it is true.” He bowed his forehead to hers — porcelain to flesh — a reverent touch that felt like the sealing of a vow. “You have given me everything.”

     Her laugh came then, small and breathless, half disbelief, half pure delight. She cupped his masked cheek with both hands. “I’ll keep saying it,” she promised, her voice warm as embers, “until it sounds perfect.”

     He caught her fingers and held them to his chest, the motion urgent and tender all at once. “No,” he said, low and fierce, “say it until I grow used to the way you give me your voice.” The plea was almost boyish, and it undid something in her. “Promise me you’ll only say it forever.”

     They lingered, forehead to forehead, the cavern holding its breath with them. The candles watched like patient witnesses; the lake beyond reflected a second sky of trembling lights. The gown whispered against his coat; the ring on her finger caught and kept tiny suns. Time thinned until only rhythm remained: the measured beating of his heart under her palms, the soft cadence of her breath.

     Erik finally let out a small laugh that sounded like an exhale of relief. Then he lifted the mask’s veil and kissed her — fully, without the reluctance that had once fenced his mouth — a deep, claiming press of lips that sealed the syllables she had formed and the promises those syllables carried. When they parted, she tucked her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes, listening to the steadying rhythm of him, to the strange, steady hope that finally felt like home.

     “Come,” he murmured at last, his voice steadier though still hushed. “We should…figure out how to sign what we can later. For now—for now we have said it. We have spoken the most important thing.”

     She nestled closer, tucking her face into the hollow of his neck, and whispered once more—not as practice, not clumsy, but as truth laid bare against his skin. “Dooset daram.”

     They left the lake shore hand in hand, the candles behind them flickering out of sight one by one until only their glow clung faintly to the water. The house received them in silence, its shadows unchanged, and yet nothing between them was as it had been. Erik’s gaze kept slipping sideways to her, as if to assure himself she was still there, still his, the pale shimmer of her gown soft in the dim light.

     His spine was straighter, his step more certain, but his fingers trembled faintly against hers. She felt it, and without a word tightened her hold, steadying him as much as herself. He drew a breath, uneven but calmer now, and let it out slowly, his shoulder brushing hers in quiet acknowledgement.

     No more was said. There was no need. The vows hung between them still—warm, fragile, indelible—as they walked together into the hush of his world, bound by the words they had finally spoken aloud.

Chapter Text

     The great façade of the Palais Garnier loomed pale against a heavy Parisian sky. The afternoon light had thinned to a wan grey, smothered by clouds that gathered like a funeral pall over the city. Even the golden figures perched on the roof—Apollo with his lyre, Poetry and Dance stretching skyward—seemed tarnished, robbed of their brilliance. The air itself bore that charged stillness before a storm, a hush so deep it felt as though Paris was holding its breath, waiting for the first snow of winter to fall.

     Frost crept over the iron railings, climbed the marble steps, and bit into the stone beneath Nadir’s boots. He shifted his weight, drawing his coat tighter against the encroaching cold. His cane was planted firmly at his side, its tip grinding faintly against the stone each time he adjusted his stance. Every breath rose in ghostly white plumes, curling into the air like incense in a cathedral nave, only to be torn away by the restless wind.

     Beside him, Joseph Martin could not keep still. He paced back and forth, muttering broken prayers and fragments of pleas, his thin coat a pitiful shield against the cold that gnawed bone-deep. His face, raw and wind-burned, carried the hollows carved by sleepless nights and the flush of too much brandy. His dry, cracked hands twisted ceaselessly together, the manacles at his wrists jingling sharp and accusing with every motion.

     “You are certain?” Joseph rasped for what must have been the hundredth time, his voice hoarse and brittle. “No scrap of her blue dress? No sound? Not even a ribbon—or a shoe? Nothing at all?”

     Nadir’s patience thinned as surely as the daylight. His tone was flat, clipped. “Nothing, Joseph. I searched. There was no sign of her.”

     With a sharp cry and a rattle of iron cuffs, Joseph slipped on the frost-slick step. His boots scraped hard against stone before Nadir caught his arm and steadied him. The contact lasted only a heartbeat; then Nadir let him go. Grief rolled off the man in waves—muttered invocations, trembling hands, eyes wide with wild despair. Each question struck Nadir like a lash, each plea tightening the knot of frustration in his chest, until his own replies grew colder, harder, as if the frost itself were seeping into his veins.

     The policemen who had dragged them from the cemetery lingered close, their boots shifting, their muskets at ease but their hands never far from the irons on their belts. Their mutters carried just far enough for Nadir to hear: damn foreigners… vandals… ghost stories. Their glares rested on him like weight. They waited only for Jules Bernard to arrive, eager for the order to cuff him as they had cuffed Joseph. The only reason they hadn’t already was the grim discovery Nadir had made—a body lying in the cellars where none should have been.

     Nadir ignored their whispers, though the contempt stung as much as the cold. His mind was elsewhere, haunted by the image of Charles Delarue dangling in the lantern light, the Punjab lasso knotted tight around his neck. Even in memory, it sickened him—the body slack, the eyes wide, death drawn out in suffocation rather than given swiftly. He forced his gaze forward, fixing on the police cart that waited at the curb. Its dark maw yawned open like a coffin, lanterns swaying in the cutting wind while the horses stamped, their breath clouding the air in ghostly plumes.

     The sky pressed lower, dark and bruised with snow. Nadir’s jaw clenched. Once, in a fit of naïve hope, he had convinced himself that Erik’s madness had ended when Christine had gone, that the house on the lake had gone dark, that the traps ended after the third cellar. But Erik had nearly destroyed the Opera before—his own creation—when grief and rage drove him past all reason. Nadir had never thought him capable of such folly, and yet he had been wrong. Wrong to believe Erik’s boundaries were fixed, wrong to trust the man’s word. Charles’s death had proven the truth again: Erik had no boundaries.

     Joseph’s pacing turned jagged, his boots striking sharp against the stone until he stopped abruptly. He whirled on Nadir, bloodshot eyes narrowing, lips twisted in bitterness.

     “Of course you saw nothing!” he spat. “She is not a Delarue. I am a poor man, and you know I cannot pay you. You care to drag their son from the pit, to play the hero for the ones with money in their pockets. But my daughter?” His throat worked as the words ground out, rough as stones. “For her, you have no answers.”

     The commissaries shifted uneasily, their hands brushing pistols and irons, their eyes darting warily between the two men as though grief might ignite into violence.

     Joseph stepped closer, his face flushed with cold and drink, with anger that shook his words. “Do not pretend it is goodness that drives you, Nadir. You walk about as if righteous, selfless—but you are as much a liar as the rest. You wear compassion on your sleeve, yet you follow francs like any other devil in this city. That is the truth, isn’t it? Admit it!”

     Nadir’s cane ground against the frozen step. His jaw locked, though he gave no answer at first. The accusations cut deeper than Joseph could know. He told himself he searched for justice, for the lost, for debts to shadows he could never repay. But to be named mercenary, coin-driven like a scavenger? It struck like a cold blade.

     The silence stretched. A horse stamped restlessly, harness bells jingling against the wind. The snow-laden clouds above seemed to press lower, their weight mirroring the heaviness settling between the two men.

     At last Nadir lifted his head, eyes dark and unyielding. His voice cut low and sharp, each word like drawn steel. “You think me false? Greedy? Know this—if I cared only for money, I would not be standing here with you now. I would be long gone. But I am here, Joseph. That should be answer enough.”

     Joseph stiffened. His mouth opened to retort, but no words came. Only a harsh breath clouded white between them. The only sound was the growl of wheels, the clatter of hooves drawing nearer.

      The rumble grew, echoing down the frozen boulevard until it filled the square before the Opera. Lanterns swayed on the sides of the police cart, their glow smudged against the thickening sky. Behind it rolled a heavy, dark coach, gilt trim gleaming faintly through the gloom—the Delarues had come to collect their poor son.

     The air shifted with their arrival. A sharp wind swept down the avenue, carrying the metallic tang of snow. It whipped Joseph’s coat about his thin frame, sent the horses tossing their heads. The first flakes fell, small and dry, spinning through the half-light before melting on the marble steps and the pale cheeks of those assembled.

     Detective Jules Bernard descended from the cart with his men, his boots striking hard against the cobbles. His jaw was iron-set, his greatcoat clutched close, but his eyes blazed with fury. He barked a command, and his men straightened at once, hands easing from their irons though their eagerness lingered. The storm seemed to walk in him, fury charging every step.

     “Not an hour, Nadir!” His voice cracked across the steps, carrying above the wind. “Not an hour after you promised me and my men you would stay clear of the cemetery—and I find they’ve dragged you and Martin out of it again!”

     Joseph flinched at the words, though it had been his wrists chained first. He began to protest, but Jules was already striding forward, scattering flakes with each heavy step, breath steaming white into the storm. Snow clung to the shock of his red hair, the storm thickening as though summoned by his anger.

     “You think me a fool?” Jules hissed, his voice sharp as a whip. “You and your drunken companion play undertakers in the catacombs while the city stirs with rumor! Do you know how close you came to making a spectacle of this? A scandal at the Opera, in the streets? You were warned.” His gaze slid briefly to Joseph, then snapped back to Nadir, hot and unrelenting. “And you—of all men—should know better.”

     From the dark coach, Henri Delarue and his wife emerged. Her mourning skirts brushed the snow-dusted stones, black against the whitened steps. Henri guided her forward with a steadying hand, but they halted just short of the quarrel. The lantern light caught the gilt buttons of his coat and the veil that shadowed her pale face, where the first flakes clung like tears. Their silence was heavy, a wordless demand that all answers would now be measured against their grief.

     Jules advanced, his voice lowering to something more venomous. “You undermine my orders, compromise my men, and think you may dictate where you go and when. You are no officer here, Nadir. You are nothing.”

     Nadir did not flinch. The words lashed like sleet, cold and cutting, but he let them wash over him. His breath came steady, measured against the storm. He thought of Charles’s broken body, the traps Erik had hidden, the lies he had swallowed. He thought of the empty cart waiting behind Jules, the coffin yawning open to swallow another life.

     Joseph’s irons jingled faintly as he shifted, muttering prayers under his breath. The sound mingled with the whistle of the wind and the sigh of snow sweeping across the steps, drifting now thick and insistent. Jules’s men stood behind him like shadows, eyes sharp, waiting only for the order to bind Nadir.

     Meanwhile, the storm in Nadir’s chest, in Joseph’s grief, in Jules’s rage—threatened to break as surely as the clouds above.

     The house lay wrapped in a hush so complete it felt like a held breath. The lake beyond the shuttered windows was an ink-black plane, swallowing the thin light, and even the soft clink of a spoon on porcelain seemed an intrusion into that great, patient stillness. Candle flames trembled low in their brass sconces; smoke curled up and vanished into the rafters. In the kitchen Erik moved with the terrible, exacting care of a man performing a rite he did not trust himself to botch.

     He arranged the tray as if laying out an offering. Each slice of bread was scored and placed with measured intent; butter was smoothed until it shone, the knife leaving no ridge. Jam glinted like garnet; the silver spoon lay exactly parallel to the cup’s handle. Even the coffee—strong, bitter, the way she liked it—was poured with a steadiness that belied the tremor in his fingers. It should, in any reasonable accounting, have pleased him. It should have felt like victory: the small, domestic mastery of a husband tending to his bride.

     Was he not entitled, for once, to enjoy such a role? She had stood with him only yesterday, her hand in his, before the black-draped stage of the chapel he had conjured from his shadows and his will. She had spoken vows meant for him alone. And he, who had never believed himself capable of such a gift, had trembled beneath the weight of words he had dreamt of all his life but never dared imagine spoken aloud. For one brief span of hours, he had permitted himself the heresy of believing he was a man, not merely a phantom.

     Yet as he set the last spoon into place, the memory of returning with her to this house—the place that had sheltered his solitude like a tomb—rose in him like a sudden fever. Terror had gripped him the moment the door closed upon them. It had not been her laughter or her trust that unsettled him, but what might follow. Surely she would expect him to reach for her in the night, as husbands did. Surely she would come to him in warmth and longing. The thought had coiled through him like a serpent—half dread, half aching desire—until he had nearly broken beneath its weight.

     Mercifully, she had not pressed. The wine, the day’s excitement, had claimed her swiftly. She had leaned against him on the sofa, her voice slowing as she rambled happily about nothing at all, until she slid into silence against his shoulder. The memory of that moment returned to him now with the suddenness of a blade between his ribs. He remembered rousing her gently, guiding her to the Louis-Philippe chamber, and fumbling like a boy at the fastenings of her gown. Each button, each tie, had been an ordeal of trembling hands. He had forced himself not to linger on the warmth of her skin, not to let his eyes stray too boldly, not to breathe too sharply. She had trusted him, and he had felt both unworthy and unbearably alive beneath that trust.

    He had clothed her in something soft, settled her into the bed, where she had clung to his arm and whispered his name with such sweetness it nearly undid him. “Stay,” she had murmured, half-dreaming, her breath warm on his sleeve. So he had obeyed, lying beside her like a corpse laid out for burial, every nerve awake, every muscle taut, while her fingers strayed idly across his chest. He had focused on the rhythm of her breathing, waiting for it to deepen, to slow, until at last her hand slackened and she sank into sleep.

     Only then had he freed himself, as though from chains, and stolen away to the drawing room. The piano sat waiting, its black curves gleaming in the candlelight like a confessor’s robes. He had laid his hands on the keys, striking chords that refused to resolve, echoes of his own turmoil. He had searched the dissonance for clarity, for any way to understand the storm that raged in him. Relief had surged through him that she had not turned to him with expectation, that she had not tried to translate vows into flesh. Yet the relief was tangled with shame, with longing, with a terrible hunger that left him shaken. To be wanted in that way beckoned to him like a forbidden promise; to touch her in that way horrified him with equal force. He could not reconcile the two.

     Now, in the kitchen once more, setting the tray just so, he felt the same contradictions binding his chest. He craved her joy, her laughter, her luminous gaze—and yet the thought of enduring such nearness again made him feel as though his bones might splinter apart. He knew himself too well. He had destroyed everything he had ever desired. What could be more fragile than this sudden, impossible happiness he held with trembling hands?

     He looked toward the corridor, toward the door at its far end. Soon he would wake her. Soon he would see her smile, unguarded and bright, the light of her trust shining on him. Soon he would have to face the unbearable miracle of her calling herself his. His bride. His undoing.

     The porcelain rattled faintly as he lifted the tray. He steadied the tremor in his hands with a harsh breath, pinning the coffee cup with a glare as though his sheer will might keep it from spilling. The corridor stretched before him, silent but for the muted tread of his feet and the loud, steady drum of his own pulse in his ears.

     At her door, he hesitated. The wood loomed like a threshold to some unknown trial. Shifting the tray, he nudged it open with the edge of his knee, slipping inside as carefully as if he were a thief in his own house.

     The chamber was hushed, half in shadow, the fire in the hearth whispering low breaths of light that painted the Persian rug and the carved edges of the furniture in muted gold. The air was warm, tinged with the faint scent of smoldering wood mingled with something purely her—soft, intimate, familiar. That scent, more than anything, nearly unraveled him.

     He crossed the room stiffly, each step betraying the tightness in his shoulders, and lowered the tray to the bedside table. The porcelain gleamed pale in the flickering light, delicate, spectral. For a long moment he stood, frozen, watching the rise and fall of her chest beneath the blankets. Her hair lay spilled in dark waves over the pillow, her hand curled against her cheek. The sight of her—unfaltering, open—made him feel at once ashamed and unbearably glad.

     At last he reached forward, gloved hand trembling as it brushed her shoulder. “Wake… wake, darling,” he murmured. The words wavered, half-command, half-prayer. She stirred, lashes fluttering against her cheeks, and he felt a terrible twist inside him at the sight of her so near, so unguarded.

     “I… have brought… you breakfast. My… bride.” The words fell unevenly, awkward, as if he were speaking in an unfamiliar tongue. He wanted to say more—that he had made it for her because she was his wife, because the act itself was worship, because serving her was the only way he knew how to express the enormity of what he felt. But the syllables tangled, treacherous, and he felt the familiar urge to retreat into distance, to fracture himself into the old habit of speaking in the third person. Erik has brought his bride her breakfast. Safer. More bearable. A way to avoid the rawness of I.

     But he did not. He forced himself to stand there, trembling, his voice and body betraying him, as her eyes opened at last and found him. Her smile bloomed instantly, bright and warm, and it pierced him to the core. For an instant he hovered at the threshold of two selves—husband and ghost—unable to claim either fully, terrified of both, and certain that whichever he chose would break him.

     Her lashes fluttered like pale moth-wings as she came awake; for a breath she was still between the worlds of sleep and waking, the last threads of dream clinging to the corners of her mouth. The hearth painted the room in slow, amber pulses, and for an instant she lay there, dazed and luminously content. Then her eyes found him — tall, dark, utterly still by the bedside — and the sight of him made her smile bloom as if sunlight had opened inside her chest.

     “Erik!” she breathed, voice soft and hoarse with sleep. She pushed herself upright, blankets falling away from her knees, and her delight sharpened when she saw the tray: bread, fruit, a steaming cup sending small spirals of steam into the cool air. “Oh, my darling — you brought me breakfast? In bed?” The childish wonder on her face was real and whole, and it tore straight through Erik’s chest.

     She opened her arms to him, reaching as though it were the most natural thing in the world to fold him against her breast. For one terrible, exquisite beat he did not move. Every muscle in him poised on the edge of either yielding or recoil; the pull of her touch agonizing. He veered away, masking his hesitation by gesturing toward the waiting tray instead. “Eat,” he said quietly, the words clipped and plain. “I…I thought you would want to eat.”

     Undeterred, she reached for the coffee, lifting the cup delicately in her hands. She inhaled the steam with an indulgent sigh, savoring the way the mug warmed her hands. “Oh, Erik.” she said with a playful fondness. “Dark and strong! Just how I like it.” She took a sip, humming in satisfaction, and as she lowered the cup, she noticed the way his weight shifted back, as though he were preparing to vanish into the shadows of the house.

      In an instant, she reached out, catching him by the bony waist with an arm. The suddenness of it startled him – his breath caught audibly; his body made a small, involuntary recoil - but she only stubbornly tugged him closer, her smile bright and insistent.

      “Don’t go,” she said sweetly. “Please…stay with me.” Her embrace was more plea than command, soft but inexorable, pulling him back to her side.

      For a long moment, he hovered there, wavering between the familiar instinct to flee, and the desperate need that had already undone him too many times. At last, with a shudder of surrender, he lowered himself to the edge of the bed, the rigid line of his back easing only slightly as he let himself be near her. She brightened and immediately tucked herself closer, as if she had never doubted he would come to her.

      Her joy spilled over at once, unguarded and effusive. “Yesterday was the most beautiful day of my life!” she gushed, her words tumbling one after another. “Oh Erik, the lake with the candles, the vows, the way you looked at me – it was all so perfect! You were perfect.” She turned and sat down her cup so she could catch his hands, squeezing them gently, her smile radiant. “And now this! Breakfast in bed, made by my own husband. How could this be any more wonderful?”

       Her gaze softened, her voice dropping into something unbearably intimate. “My love, you are so romantic. How could I not fall in love with you?”

     The words landed on him like a thrown stone. He inhaled sharply; some private mechanism in him clicked and receded. His posture went rigid; his gaze lowered. The mask made his features a pale, implacable plane, but the gold of his eyes flashed like something wild within. She felt the tension ripple though him. He remained utterly silent, breath rasping shallow beneath the mask; its veil billowing softly. Then, he whispered, broken and halting:

       “Romantic…” he breathed, the word tasting foreign. For a moment he teetered on the brink of speech and then, as if flinching from owning himself, he slipped into the old refuge of distance. “Perhaps…perhaps Erik is,” he said, voice halting, the name tumbling from his lips as if it were a thing removed from him. “Erik the—” He stopped, the syllables fracturing. A tiny, violent shake ran through his hand; his fingers flexed as though it sought to claw free of her embrace. “No. Don’t ask me to take that word. It’s not mine.”

        The fracture chilled her. She knew that pattern – the way he retreated into the third person, dividing himself, splintering into speaking about a separate thing rather than himself. He did it when his torment was too great to bear, when the self he had shown her felt too exposed. But why now? Why after a wedding and vows, after submitting herself into his love, and he into hers, and after she had woken to his gift of breakfast in bed, would he dissolve like this?

     “Erik….” Her voice was hesitant, the brightness fading from her smile. She shifted on the bed, leaning closer to him. “Why do you talk like that? It’s only us here. There’s no one else to see, no one else to hear. You don’t have to hind behind speaking about yourself that way.”

      He jerked faintly away at her approach so that her shoulder did not touch his, but his hand remained in hers, pinned between desire and terror. His golden eyes flicked to hers, wide, restless, like an animal cornered.

      “He…cannot ruin what he does not own. But I –“

       Her heart tightened at the sight of him unwilling to stand in the light of her affection. She pressed her body against him, squeezing his hands more firmly to anchor him. “You are not only a corpse. Or a monster.” She whispered, her voice insistent but gentle. “You are my husband. Mine. Do not give that away to something else when it belongs to you.” She was silent for a long moment, searching the mask for some crack she could reach into.

     At last, her hand left his, gently coming to rest against the frantic rise and fall of his warped chest. “I don’t understand everything,” she admitted softly, “but I know this: I did not marry some monster. I married you. My Erik. My romantic Erik. If you cannot believe yet that you are worthy, then let me believe it for you. Let me carry it until you can.”

     Something in him tightened; a visible recoil as if her touch had been hotter than she’d meant. He drew in a breath so fast she heard it catch. For an instant he seemed to be held between two wills — one that wanted to flee back into shadow and one that bent, impossibly, toward the small mercy of her presence. His eyes closed for a moment, his head lowering as her words pressed too heavy on him. His hand – trembling and uncertain – drifted from the bed to cover hers against his chest, a gesture that was not full surrender.

     After a moment, she lifted her hand slowly, and reached for the pale plane of his mask. Her fingers hovered an inch from the cold porcelain; she wanted simply to press her lips against his masked face, to bring him back to her with her love.

     Before she could touch him, he flew away so violently the air seemed to snap. He leapt from the bed, and stumbled toward the table and couch in the middle of the room and for a second he stood with his back to her, hands clasped at his chest, the mask tilted away so she could not see the quick work of his jaw, the day his shoulders bucked with a quiet, animal cry.

     She sat very still in the bed, startled into silence by the suddenness of it. As the shock faded, concern and the start of impatience braided together in her expression. He brows drew together.

     “Erik.” She said softly, but edged. “What in the world is wrong? Please – help me understand. Why are you doing this? It’s the morning after our wedding. Tell me.”

     He remained frozen where he was, his silhouette rigid against the orange glow of the hearth. Finally, his hands found the edge of the table and tightened around it as though he might crush the carved wood. His breath was a rapid, frightened thing.

     “I –“ his voice was small, swallowed by the tense silence between them. He licked his lips as if to find his voice, and then looked at his hands as though they belonged to someone else. “It is…nothing. Nothing to concern yourself with.” The words came too quickly, too light; flung away to hide the storm beneath.

     She let the silence stretch only a heartbeat longer, then pushed the coverlet aside and rose from the bed. The cool of the rug met her bare feet as she crossed the short distance between them. He did not turn – his head remained bowed, his hands remained gripping the table. His shoulders were set as taught as iron bars, but she reached for him all the same, her hand light against his solid back.

     “Erik. Nothing?” she repeated, her voice low, incredulous, threaded with both tenderness and reproach. “You stand there shaking as if the world were about to fall, and you try to tell me there is nothing?” She moved carefully to his side, pressing with gentle insistence until at last the mask tilted slightly towards her.

     The firelight gilded the hard edges of the mask, gleaming pale and spectral, but it was the flicker of his golden eyes she sought. She raised her hand, reaching gently to touch his face, to turn his head towards her, reaching for where the porcelain met his skin.

     “It’s me Erik. Your wife. You have nothing to fear from me. Dooset daram.”

      Nadir stood his ground, one hand steady on the head of his cane. The snow clung to his dark hair, the folds of his coat, the iron tip of his cane buried in frost. His eyes, black and sharp, never left the detective. When he spoke, his voice was low, even, yet edged like drawn steel.

     “You rage at me, Bernard, as though it were I who failed this family. But let us speak plainly—had your police done their duty, had they searched the places they swore they had, I would not be here. The Delarues would not have needed to beg me for aid. Charles would not have hung in darkness for days while your men prowled the boulevards above. If you feel shame, it is rightly earned.”

     The words hit harder than any shout could. The policemen exchanged uneasy glances, their boots scraping faintly against the stone. Even Joseph fell still, his muttering silenced, his wide eyes fixed on the two men as though expecting one to strike the other.

     Jules’ face flushed crimson, whether from cold or rage it was impossible to tell. His jaw tightened until the cords in his neck strained. “You dare lecture me?” he spat, advancing another step. His breath curled white between them, hot against the frigid air. “You trespass, you undermine, you endanger my men, and now you would smear my name before the whole city? Be careful, Khan.” His hand twitched at his side, as though it longed to summon the irons.

     But before he could speak another word, a voice cut through the storm.

     “Enough.”

     Jules stiffened. He had not heard them approach.

     Henri Delarue had mounted the steps with his wife at his arm, her black veil quivering in the wind, her pale face hidden but for the tears shining through its mesh. Henri’s presence carried weight enough to still the air between them. The snow gathered on his broad shoulders and the gilt buttons of his coat, but his gaze was steady, cold as the marble beneath their feet.

     “Nadir speaks the truth,” Henri said, his tone firm, measured, unyielding. “Were it not for him, my son would still be lost in those cellars, left to rot while your men busied themselves with whispers and excuses. I owe him the bitter comfort of truth, Jules Bernard—and that is more than I have ever been given by you or your police.”

     Jules turned, stunned into silence. He had not seen them arrive, had not expected their witness. His anger faltered beneath the weight of Henri’s grief and the quiet reproach that carried in every syllable.

     Henri looked at him no longer, as though dismissing him with the indifference one might give to a servant. Instead, he turned to Nadir. His voice softened, though it carried all the dignity of a man speaking not for himself, but for the family broken at his side.

     “You have given us back our son, Monsieur Khan,” he said, the formal title spoken like benediction. “For that, you have my gratitude.” He drew his wife closer to him, her trembling hand resting against his arm as though her strength lived only in his stead. “Though it is grief you have returned, it is better than ignorance. And for that service, we thank you.”

     The snow fell thicker, shrouding the steps of the Opera House in white. Henri’s words hung in the air a moment longer, like smoke in stillness, before Nadir inclined his head. His voice, when it came, was quiet, almost subdued beneath the hush of the storm.

     “Your thanks humbles me, Monsieur Delarue. I only wish it were not grief I had returned to you. No man would choose to deliver such tidings.”

     Henri gave no reply, save for the tightening of his jaw as he drew his wife closer, steadying her trembling frame against his arm. Her weeping was low but ragged, the sound cutting through the silence with more power than any tirade.

     Jules shifted uneasily, his face still flushed with the heat of their exchange. His mouth worked as if to summon some retort, but nothing came. After an uneasy pause, he turned brusquely to his men. “Go. Bring him up. Carefully.”

     The officers obeyed, their boots clattering against the marble steps before fading into the dark maw of the Opera’s lower passages. Silence closed over the square again, broken only by the keening of the wind and Madame Delarue’s grief. Henri stood like stone beside her, his arm anchoring her, though his own face betrayed the strain. Nadir remained at their side, a solitary figure of stillness, his gaze fixed forward.

     The minutes stretched long, as though the storm itself conspired to delay what they all knew must come. Snow gathered along the shoulders of coats, in the seams of boots, even in the grooves of Nadir’s cane. The city beyond blurred into whiteness, muffled beneath the falling veil, until it seemed only the three of them remained—husband, wife, and stranger—bound together by the cruel waiting.

     He had not wanted to think of Erik. Not here, not now. But grief was a contagion—it clung to the air, burrowed under skin, and brought old wounds to the surface. And so Erik came to him again, as he always did.

     There had been times when he had loved him like a brother. The strange boy from Persia, hidden in shadow, mocked and reviled, yet brilliant in ways that defied belief. Nadir had felt a strange guardianship then, a fierce need to protect him from a world that never hesitated to bruise and exploit him. He had known the cruelty that forged Erik’s jagged edges; he had seen how scorn and neglect could warp even the gentlest heart. And in his better moments, he reminded himself of this, tried to temper judgment with compassion.

     Love and pity could not erase what Erik had done. Charles’s corpse was proof of that, as had been so many others before him. The traps, the lies, the arrogance—it was always the same pattern. Erik built wonders, and then those wonders turned to weapons. He drew others near, craving love as desperately as air, and then destroyed them with his own hands. It was in his nature, as unavoidable as the storms that leveled villages or the floods that drowned fields. Genius and ruin—bound in the same body, inseparable.

     Nadir’s jaw tightened. He hated him for it. Hated him for lying about the boundaries of his traps, for the secrets hoarded until they spilled out in catastrophe. He hated him for nearly blowing up the Opera, for the terror he had inflicted upon Christine, for the shadow he still cast over Paris long after his supposed departure. But most of all, he hated him for making pity and love feel like shackles, chains binding Nadir to a man who brought only sorrow.

     He stood there, beside the weeping Madame Delarue and the stone-faced Henri, and felt the old duality tear at him once more. Resentment burned in him like frostbite, bitter and merciless. And yet—God help him—love remained, a stubborn ember that refused to die. For all Erik’s ruin, some part of Nadir still longed for the boy he had once tried to save, the boy the world had never given a chance to be anything else.

     The snow thickened, cloaking them all in silence. The remaining police shifted uneasily, their breath puffing white in the air, but Nadir barely noticed. His gaze lingered not on Charles’s shrouded form, but on the storm itself—the way it descended without malice, covering rich and poor, guilty and innocent alike. Erik was like that. Not evil by choice, not wholly. He was unstoppable. A force of nature. One could only endure him as one endured a tempest: by weathering the destruction and counting the cost in what remained.

     Nadir exhaled slowly, watching his breath fade into the storm. He stood with the Delarues in silence, his presence a fragile anchor amid grief, and thought, not for the first time, that love for Erik was its own kind of ruin.

     The stretcher lurched up the steps, boots scraping as the policemen finally emerged, carrying their grim burden beneath the storm. The sheet covering the stretcher sagged faintly, outlining the crumpled form beneath, and though snow clung to its folds, it could not hide the dark, staining truth of death.

     At the sight, Madame Delarue let out a sound that tore through the hush like breaking glass. She surged forward, skirts dragging in the snow, her veiled face tilted toward the stretcher as though she might tear away the sheet with her own hands. “Charles—mon fils—!”

     Henri’s hand shot out, gripping her arm hard enough that she faltered. His knuckles whitened against her black sleeve, his jaw tight with pain and restraint. “No,” he said, his voice strained but steady. “Not like this.”

     She writhed against his hold, her grief shattering into sobs that seemed to wrack her whole frame. “I must see him! Let me go—let me see my boy—”

     It was then that Nadir stepped forward, the crunch of his boots in the snow slow and deliberate. He bowed his head slightly, his hand tightening on the head of his cane as though to anchor himself, and his voice came low, soft against the storm.

     “Madame, I beg you… do not.” He raised his eyes to hers, though her veil blurred the anguish written across her face. “This is not how you must remember him. Keep him as he was—warm, bright, full of life. With laughter in his voice, not silence. With joy in his step, not stillness. Hold fast to your boy as he was when the world was still kind to him. Do not take this last image into your heart. It will devour all the others.”

     She trembled, caught between her husband’s iron grip and the quiet pleading in Nadir’s words. Snow clung to her veil like salt, melted tears streaking the fine lace. Her voice broke on a sob as she turned her gaze back to the stretcher. “Then—then at least tell me what happened. What fate befell him down there, in those terrible cellars?”

     Nadir’s lips parted, but no answer came. His silence deepened the storm around them. Even the policemen seemed to falter, glancing sidelong, shifting the weight of the stretcher as though to avoid listening.

     Madame Delarue’s sobbing breath misted white into the air. Her voice, cracked and desperate, carried again: “Tell me at least this—did he suffer?”

     Nadir froze, his breath catching. The question pierced him with merciless precision. Behind his eyes, he saw it too clearly: Charles’s face gone purple with strain, his legs kicking wildly in the dark, his hands clawing uselessly at the thin garrote biting into his throat. He heard the muffled gasps, the rattling choke, the scraping boots on stone as the life drained minute by minute in awful slowness. The Punjab lasso killed without mercy, but never swiftly. It prolonged death until the body surrendered in despair.

     He knew the truth. He knew the horror.

     And yet, when he looked at her—this mother, bent beneath her grief, clinging to the last fragile hope that her son had not died in pain—he could not speak it. He could not lay that image upon her. His voice, when it came, was steady, though it felt like a blade twisting in his chest.

     “It was sudden,” he said, lowering his gaze to the whitened stone at his feet. “He did not know what happened to him. There was no suffering.”

     She broke then, collapsing into Henri’s arms with a wail that tore itself from her soul. Henri caught her, holding her firmly against him, his own face contorted with silent grief. Snow swirled around them, white veils against black mourning, a tableau carved in sorrow upon the steps of the Opera House.

     Nadir stood apart, stoic and silent, though his heart felt hollowed by the lie. His hand clenched on the head of his cane until the wood bit into his palm. He had spared her the truth, yes—but in doing so, he had taken it into himself. The image of Charles’s death would remain his burden alone. Nadir remained silent, despair gnawing through him like frost, his thoughts drifting back to Erik, the architect of so much ruin—of traps that ensnared not only bodies but hearts, lives, families. Always, always destruction in his wake.

    (Y/N)’s fingers barely grazed the mask’s edge before he lurched back as if seared. The violence of it shook the table, wood creaking. His chest heaved, his breath tore ragged in the silence. Then the words ripped from him, hoarse and wild.

     “You made a mistake!” Erik’s voice cracked, echoing sharp in the chamber. “A terrible mistake marrying me!” He flung a hand toward himself, toward the mask, his body a knot of fury and despair. “I cannot love—I have never been loved!. How could I have any hope of learning it now? I am a corpse, a beast, a monster!”

     She froze where she sat, her hand still outstretched, the sting of rejection biting sharper than the fire’s heat. Her lips parted but no words came; her heart thudded, aching with disbelief.

     He pressed forward, relentless, spitting venom at himself but striking her all the same. “If you knew the truth of me, you would not whisper endearments—you would run! You would beg for death rather than endure my touch. Do you not see? You were foolish to marry me, to love me, to—” his voice broke into a hiss “—to let me touch you as you did. And now—now you are trapped in the nightmare you built with your own hands.”

     Her breath caught, tears pricking her eyes though she refused to let them fall. Shock warred with hurt across her face, the flush of betrayal rising in her cheeks. “Erik…” Her voice faltered, scarcely audible. She pulled the blanket tighter about her, as though warding off a chill, her brows knitting in wounded confusion. “Why would you say that? To me?”

     “You were stupid!” he thundered, advancing half a step before stopping himself, trembling. “Too stupid to see what you’ve done. You chained yourself to ruin. To me.”

     (Y/N) recoiled then, her hand falling to her side. Shock glazed her expression, but beneath it bloomed something sharper—a wounded disbelief that cut deeper than anger. “Stupid?” she echoed softly, her voice trembling. “To love you? To believe you when you held me and swore yourself to me?” Her chest rose and fell in quick breaths, her eyes shining not with tears yet but with something perilously near them.

     Her hurt hung heavy in the air, raw and silent, while he stood trembling in the firelight—mask gleaming, eyes frantic—every word he had hurled ringing back at him like an accusation.

     Her chest rose and fell sharply, the first sting of tears drying into something hotter, tighter. She took a step towards Erik, fixing him with a level gaze, her brows drawn in a storm of her own.

     “Enough,” she said, her voice shaking but firm. “You will stop calling me stupid, Erik. Stop calling me foolish. The only one acting foolish here is you. Look at yourself—shouting at me, the morning after our wedding, as if love itself were a crime. Calm down. Talk to me. Tell me what this is truly about, instead of lashing out like a madman.”

     Her words cut through the charged air, sharp and clear, and for a moment there was silence—only the crackle of the fire, only the tremor of their breathing. But then Erik’s golden eyes flared, wild and wounded, and his whole body seemed to recoil as though she had struck him.

     “Calm?” he spat, his voice rising, cracking like thunder against stone. “You dare tell me to calm when you cannot see the precipice you have stepped upon? When you cannot see that you have shackled yourself to a corpse?!” His hands, clenched at his sides, shook with the violence of his own fury, his voice climbing louder with each word. “You speak of vows and weddings and mornings in bed as if they could transform me into something I am not. But you are blind—blind and willfully so!”

     He pressed closer, looming, the firelight painting every hard angle of the mask until he seemed something carved from ruin. “Do you not understand? I am warning you! I scream because you will not hear it otherwise. You think me foolish?” His laugh cracked, dry and bitter. “No. I am the only one who sees clearly! The only fool in this house is the girl who believes a monster can be made into a man by speaking a few tender words.”

     “Erik, stop it!” she shouted back at him.

     He shook his head, trembling, words spilling from him like a torrent he could no longer control. “I tell you this for your own sake. You think me cruel? It is kindness! Better you learn now than later—better you see it in rage than discover it in ruin. If you will not call yourself a fool for loving me, then I will call you one, because it is truth. Truth!”

     His final word cracked into silence, jagged and raw, the echo of it swallowed by the fire’s hiss. He stood before her, panting, trembling, eyes gleaming fever-bright above the mask, his body a taut bowstring drawn to breaking.

     She stood her ground - bare feet on the rug, the nightgown wrinkled and clinging where he had so tenderly helped her the night before. Her chest rose and fell hard; hurt had knotted into something hotter, something edged with fire. She planted her palms on her hips as if to anchor herself against the storm he’d become.

     “Calm down,” she said, voice rising despite herself, firm and sharp. “Go and collect yourself before you say anything else. Do not—do not dare speak to me like this again until you can be civil. I will not stand here and take your self-loathing as an excuse to shred me.” Her words snapped through the room. “If you’re acting foolish, Erik, then go be foolish somewhere else.”

     His face—masked, but for the restless gold of his eyes—shifted. The light from the hearth cut the porcelain into hard planes; his pupils narrowed until they were molten coin. Something like a smile, bitter and too quick, ghosted the corner of his mouth.

     “You tell me to go?” he breathed, voice low and dangerous. He closed the small distance between them until she could feel the cold of the mask almost graze her cheek. The air between them hummed with the force of it. He towered there, breath hot and shallow, all taut wire and barely contained animal energy. “You dare tell me to collect myself? After—after you tethered yourself to me like some bright fool?”

     She did not step back. If anything she leaned forward, heat and indignation matching his. “Do not get in my face, Erik,” she said, softer but harder for it. “You make it—” she searched for the words—“you make it so difficult to love you when someone actually tries. You push and you pull and you tear yourself open and fling the pieces at me. How is anyone supposed to love a man who refuses to be loved?”

     At that, his restraint shattered like glass under a boot. His hand went up—not to strike her, but to pinch the air, to puncture the space between them—and his voice broke into Persian, a jagged, searing torrent she had not heard from him before.

     The words roared from him raw, every consonant a struck bell. He spat another sentence in his native tongue—short, feral—and his eyes flared so bright she felt they might cut. The firelight turned them into honed blades.

     For a terrible second the room hung on that phrase and on the animal music of his native anger. Then he moved as if a storm had taken him—sweeping, irrepressible. His shoulder rammed into the carved chair; it toppled with a lurch and a crash. A lamp rocked, went askew; a small side table collided with the tray, sending porcelain leaping and one cup slumping to the floor with the brittle sound of ice breaking. Coffee fanned in a dark arc across the rug, the steam smelling suddenly of ruin. It was like watching a tidal wave pass through a parlor: everything in its path upended, scattering the ordered quiet of the house.

     She watched, stunned, as he became a force that obeyed no leash, fingers splayed, chest heaving. He rounded on her with the speed of someone who’d been drowning and had found the shore only to realize the shore was cliffs. “Do you hear me?” he barked, half Persian, half English, each syllable an accusation. “I cannot be what you want! You will regret this—” His voice warped into a snarl. “You will wish you had never—”

     “Stop!” she screamed back, the sound cracking with hurt and fury. “I love you, Erik! I do! That will not change because you decide you are unlovable!” The words ripped out of her like a plea and a command all at once. “Maybe—maybe you’re chained to me, too, in whatever way that means. Maybe you have stuck yourself here as surely as I have bound myself to you. So do not pretend I am the only fool.”

      He tore the next words from his throat as if wrenching out a live thing. “Damn you!” he screamed, voice raw and savage, then the Persian bled through him in a thrilled, furious cascade: “Lant bah to, zan!” Damn you, woman! “Lant bah eshght, lant bah lajbazit!” Damn your love, damn your stubbornness! “Ant bah badnat, lant bah boseteyat, lant bah garmaye vojudat keh mono misozoneh!” Damn your body, damn your kisses, damn the heat of you that scalds me!

     The words were not tidy curses but jagged stones thrown with both hatred and despair. As he spoke he became something elemental — wind turned to wrecking force. He shouldered into the little round table beside the bed; it snapped from its feet and slammed to the carpet, sending silverware skittering and a dish clattering like a bell. Coffee sprayed like dark confetti, seeping into the weave of the rug, staining the ordered quiet with the smell of burned beans and sudden ruin. He planted a foot into the settee; it tore, springs whining, cushions flying. A lamp toppled and shattered, scattering hot glass across the rug.

     She staggered half a pace, breath snatched by the violence. The shock flared into fury and she answered him in the only language that could reach him in the moment — plain, fierce, no romance left at the edges. “Stop this!” she spat, each word a blow. “Stop using me as a furnace for your fear! Stop acting as if the only way you can be safe is by tearing the world down around us! You are cruel!”

     He whirled on her, fingers splayed like skeletal claws, the mask a pale blank that made his face more monstrous by denying it. “Cruelty?” he shrieked. “You call what I am cruelty? I tell you the truth and you call it cruelty! I am saving you from a lie by speaking plain. I free you!” His voice hit the stone above them and echoed back hollow.

     “You don’t free me by hurling insults and upending my home!” she shot back as she lunged forward, bare feet slapping on the floor, hair loose and wild about her face. “You make it impossible to love you when you punish anyone who tries!” She hurled a curse of her own — sharp, unpolished — a spit of words aimed to wound and to wake him. “You are acting like a coward! If you are so dead, then stop pretending you are alive enough to wound me with this self-hatred!” Her voice rose, hot and raw, each syllable battering him as he had just battered the room.

     For a sliver of a second his eyes went wider as if her words had struck bone. Then the old thing inside him—rage braided with humiliation—reanimated. He began to speak again, half Persian, half French, a cascade that made the walls shiver. Then, the Persian came quicker, sharper, a staccato of invective she could not fully parse though its fury translated clear enough in his tone: accusations of stupidity, of mercy turned to mockery, of the world’s cruelty to a man like him.

     He stormed from the room as from a ship in storm, throwing down a path of ruin. He stormed into the drawing room like a force of nature, the door ricocheting against the wall as he crossed the threshold. He made straight for the piano, his cloak whipping about his shoulders, and with both fists he struck the lid. The instrument shuddered, a discordant groan reverberating in its strings, the sound more scream than note.

     His curses came like fire in a storm, words torn from his chest in a torrent of Persian, one crashing over the next.

     “Lant bah to! Lant bah shabi keh mara sakht! Lant bah khodayani keh mara taneya gozashtand!” Damn you! Damn the night that made me! Damn the gods that left me alone! He roared, slamming his fists once more on the polished wood, the echo ringing through the chamber like blows struck on a coffin lid.

     (Y/N) came tearing after him, hair wild about her shoulders, nightdress tangled at her ankles, chest heaving as she fought to catch him with her words. “Enough, Erik!” she shouted over the cacophony. “Enough! You will not smash your way out of this. You will not run from me again!”

     He spun, his eyes molten in the firelight, madness and despair bright as sharpened blades. Before she could draw another breath, he lunged. His hands clamped around her arms—strong, desperate, shaking—and he spun her with brutal precision, slamming her back against the piano. The instrument groaned at the impact, a cluster of sour notes shivering into the air.

     Her cry caught in her throat, more fury and sharp pain against her spine than fear. She glared up at him, his mask inches from her face, his breath ragged and hot as it ghosted against her skin. He held her there, pinned against the black lacquer, his grip fierce, as though he needed the anchor as much as he needed to restrain her.

     For a moment the world narrowed to two pairs of eyes locked in unbroken battle—hers blazing with hurt and defiance, his seething with rage and self-loathing. Neither flinched, neither yielded. They stood suspended, their bodies taut with fury, their breath colliding in the scant space between them.

     The firelight caught them both: his mask gleaming like death’s own pale head, her lips parted in a furious glare. Rage boiled between them, as if daring the other to make the first move—to lash out, to relent, to confess, to break. The room was utterly still but for the hiss of the hearth and the faint quiver of the piano beneath them, caught in the wake of their storm.

     The stretcher, draped in its thin white sheet, was borne down the steps with a dreadful, deliberate slowness. Each footfall of the commissaires reverberated against the steps as they bore their grim burden. Snow fell thicker now, dusting the cloth until the shape beneath seemed sculpted from frost. They bore it across the square toward the waiting cart, its lanterns swaying in the wind, casting uneasy halos that rocked with every shift. The hinges groaned as the doors yawned open, and the body slid inside on rails of wood and iron with a dull, final scrape—a sound that seemed to echo against every listening stone of the square. The horses stamped, tossing their heads, plumes of breath bursting white from their nostrils. Harness bells chimed nervously, a brittle music that clashed against the muffled sobs Madame Delarue tried and failed to smother behind her veil.

     Jules Bernard, his shoulders mantled with snow, stepped forward then. His expression had hardened into official calm, though the storm streaked his lashes and the lamplight caught the taut line of his jaw. With practiced gentleness, he guided the grieving couple aside—one gloved hand steadying Henri’s arm as the man bore his wife upright. She trembled beside him like a reed battered by wind, clutching his sleeve with desperate strength. Jules murmured instructions low, his tone measured, almost priestly, and an officer appeared with papers already dampening in the snow. Henri accepted them with a hand that quivered despite his stony composure, his mouth set in a rigid line as the ink scratched haltingly across the page. Madame Delarue clung to him, whispering broken words that could find no answer. The shuffle of quills, the dry cadence of questions, the hollow civility of signatures—all of it weighed like iron upon a grief too raw for such formality.

     Apart from them stood Joseph Martin. The irons at his wrists rattled softly with his tremors, a faint metallic counterpoint to the wind. His hollow gaze fixed on nothing, eyes gone glassy with despair. His face, pale and blotched from cold and wine, sagged into a silence more terrible than any wail. He swayed faintly in place, as if the storm itself might topple him, consumed not by spectacle but by his own private abyss.

     Nadir stood fixed upon the steps, his cane braced firm against the stone, his coat drawn tightly around him as the snow thickened in its fall. His gaze did not stray from the cart, from the grim certainty of what it bore away into the storm. The tableau below—the parents bent beneath their grief yet forced into signatures and seals, the officers fussing with ledgers, Joseph sagging hollow-eyed in his irons—pressed on him with a weight that threatened to splinter his composure. It was a burden of silence, of futility, heavier than any chain.

     Boots cut sharply across the stone. Jules Bernard reemerged from the gloom, his breath steaming in short, clipped bursts, the set of his jaw colder now than the air itself. He halted before Nadir, shoulders squared, his greatcoat fluttering faintly with snow. The solemnity he had worn with the Delarues was gone; what remained was something entirely unforgiving.

     “There remains the matter of your arrest,” he said, voice pitched low but honed to a cutting edge. “Do not think yourself free of consequence. You trespassed again, Nadir. You defied the law. You defied me. And you will answer for it.”

     Nadir’s dark eyes turned on him at last—steady, unblinking, unreadable. The snow had gathered along the furrow of his brow, clung to the dark strands of his hair, melted into rivulets that traced down his cheek. He said nothing. His silence weighed more than words, thick as the storm pressing down around them.

     Jules’s lips tightened, and he pressed on, tone sharpening, each phrase delivered like a blow. “This time, there will be no leniency. No overlooked offense. You will not slip free with a warning and a token fine. You will be imprisoned until trial, and the penalty laid against you will make your last trespass seem paltry. Perhaps then you will learn the limits of your reach in this city—and of mine.”

     The words were meant to intimidate, to rattle—but Nadir did not so much as blink. His cane remained rooted at his side, his breath slow, controlled, curling into the storm in steady white plumes. He regarded Jules in silence for a long, taut moment, the falling snow whispering between them like the hush of an audience waiting for the first strike of a duel.

     Then, at last, he lifted his head. His gaze was dark, sharp as tempered steel, and it locked Jules in place. There was no apology in it, no hint of concession—only the unyielding resolve of a man who had endured storms fiercer than the one now gathering around them.

     When he spoke, his voice was low, each word honed, cutting through the wind like the draw of a blade from its scabbard.

     “If your men had done their duty, there would be no need for me at all. If your men searched where they should, the Delarues would have been spared this grief. You speak of law, Bernard, but what has law given them? Their son lay strangled in the dark while your officers stood here muttering about ghosts and foreigners.”

     Jules’s face flushed crimson, his jaw tightening, his mouth half-open to strike back—but Nadir did not yield him the chance. His voice rose a fraction, carrying easily through the snow-muted air, each word deliberate as a hammer blow.

     “You brand me criminal for trespass—yet what are you, if not negligent? You threaten me with irons while you polish your reports. I have walked where your men fear to tread. I have seen what they pretend does not exist. If you would call me guilty, Bernard, then first look to yourself. To your failures. For if not for me, the Delarues would have no son to mourn at all. He would still be rotting in the shadows.”

     The snow thickened between them, flakes clinging to their coats, the silence after Nadir’s words as sharp as any drawn sword.

     Jules’s men shifted where they stood, unease rippling through their ranks as though each expected their commander to lash out. Their gloved hands hovered at belts and irons, but no order came. Joseph Martin, hollow-eyed and swaying at the edge of the square, blinked himself from his fog of grief long enough to stare. His lips parted at the edge in something between disbelief and grim satisfaction at the sharpness of Nadir’s tone.

     For a moment, the world itself seemed to hold its breath. Jules’s jaw clenched, his nostrils flared, and the fury etched into his face made him look almost inhuman, a figure of iron stiffened by the storm. The white of falling snow settled across his flame-red hair, dusted his lashes, and rimed the shoulders of his coat until he seemed sculpted from fire and frost alike. Yet it was his silence that betrayed him. For all the heat of his wrath, the sting of truth in Nadir’s words had struck deep, and every heartbeat of delay laid that fact bare.

     They stood facing one another as though carved from opposing stone—Jules with his simmering fury, Nadir with his cold, immovable defiance. Between them, the tension stretched taut, a bowstring drawn to breaking. Even the storm seemed to hush; the wind swirling in restless eddies as though waiting for one of them to loose the arrow.

     It was Henri Delarue who broke it.

     He stepped forward with the unshaken certainty of a man long accustomed to command—be it boardrooms, salons, or the floor of the Exchange. His boots crunched steadily through the snow, his shoulders squared, his grief masked behind a controlled fury of his own. The gilt buttons of his greatcoat caught what little light remained, glimmering faintly through the veil of white. Beside him, his wife clung to his arm, trembling under her mourning black, her veil already stippled with melting snow. Yet Henri’s face was a chiseled mask, every line set with cold resolve.

     When he spoke, his voice cut easily through the storm, sharp and steady.

     “That will be enough, Bernard.”

     Jules turned, caught off guard, his anger faltering as his eyes fell on the Delarues. He had not realized they were so near— or that they had heard every word. Henri’s gaze narrowed, his voice cold, deliberate, each syllable weighted like judgment.

     “You waste your breath threatening this man, when it is your failures that brought us here. My son lay rotting beneath this Opera for weeks while your commissaires offered me nothing—no search, no answers, and no truth. And now you dare speak of arresting the only man who gave us what your office would not?” He paused, his jaw tightening as the snow drifted across his shoulders. “You shame yourself, Bernard.”

     Jules stiffened, his lips twitching as if to summon protest, but Henri did not yield him the chance. His tone dropped lower, resonant, heavy with warning.

     “Do not think your position protects you. By tomorrow I could have your name delivered to the Prefecture under the charge of incompetence. And before the week is done, I could see you replaced—bought out and swept aside—for a man who would honor his post and do the job properly. Do not test me, Bernard. My influence and my purse are not idle things.”

     The silence that followed struck harder than any blow. Jules’s jaw tightened, but the weight of Henri’s words, his wife’s trembling form at his arm, and the watchful eyes of his own men made protest impossible. His pride balked against the leash, but the storm—and the moment—had already bound him.

     At last, Jules bowed his head slightly, his tone stripped of venom, polished into something deferential.

     “Monsieur Delarue… forgive me. My words ran ahead of me. You have my deepest condolences. I am here to serve you, and your wife, in whatever you require. When you are ready, say the word and we will depart for the morgue together.”

     He stepped back with a stiff flourish of his gloved hand, presenting himself in hollow humility. Yet his eyes, in their brief flick toward Nadir, betrayed him—a shard of cold fury flashing before the mask of civility shuttered it away. He snapped his fingers toward his men, his command crisp, clipped.

     “Back to the wagons. Release Martin.”

     “-And allow Monsieur Khan free passage into the Opera’s cellars,” Henri interjected, his voice calm but edged with iron. He did not raise it, but the words cut through the snow-thickened air like the crack of a whip. “As many times as he requires. Without interference.”

     Jules froze, the order catching in his ears. His jaw locked, teeth grinding as the humiliation curdled behind his composure. The pause stretched long enough to be noticed. But the weight of Madame Delarue’s silence, the stares of his own officers, and the looming façade of the Opera itself—all seemed to press him down into obedience.

     With a stiff nod, Jules relented.

     “Very well,” Jules said at last, the words flat, bitten off like gristle between his teeth. He turned sharply to his officers and jerked his chin. “You heard him. See to it.”

     The men obeyed, their movements brisk but strained; as though they, too, felt the balance of power shift on the snow-slick steps. One bent to Joseph, the key rasping in the lock before the irons fell away with a sharp metallic snap. Red grooves ringed Joseph’s wrists, the skin rubbed raw; he rubbed at them absently, as if he barely noticed the pain. His hollow gaze lingered on nothing, heavy and vacant, while the police—silent now—trudged back toward their cart. Lanterns swung in their grasp, the glow shrinking into the white veil of snow, until the square seemed to belong only to grief and storm.

     Nadir and Henri turned toward one another. For a long moment, neither spoke. The silence between them was its own language, binding them as fathers who had both lost children—Henri, in the body just borne away under a white sheet; Nadir, in the graves of Persia, in shadows and memories he seldom allowed himself to touch. Their gazes met, and within it was recognition: sorrow weathered, weariness endured, a shared truth that hollowed men from the inside out.

     At last, Nadir inclined his head, his voice low, muted by the wind. “Forgive the spectacle, Monsieur Delarue. I would not have had your grief compounded by quarrels such as these. I assure you, I am well enough. I have endured worse storms than this.” His tone was even, but his cane pressed harder into the snow at his side, the iron tip anchoring him as though against some invisible current.

     Henri’s features softened, though grief still etched its lines deep, immutable as stone. He inclined his head gravely in return. “You need not apologize. You gave us back our son. For that, no insult, no indignity, can outweigh what is owed.” His gaze shifted toward the cart holding the body of their only son. “You have done what the commissaires would not—what they could not. For that, you will always have my gratitude.”

     Nadir started to bow again, but Henri lifted his hand, forestalling the gesture with a quiet authority. His voice deepened, steady and deliberate, carrying the weight of both grief and promise.

     “Hear me, Monsieur Khan. You have my patronage, and my resources. Men, money, equipment—whatever you require. Continue your work. Find the missing that others have abandoned. The families who wait in silence, who are given nothing by those sworn to protect them—let them turn to you. And know this: you will not stand alone. So long as I draw breath, you will not lack for what you need.”

     The words struck Nadir like a blow to the chest. He had faced kings and shahs, generals and ministers, men whose promises were sharpened by politics—but rarely had he been spoken to with such raw conviction, stripped of pretense, from a grieving father. His mouth went dry. His usual composure cracked, and for a moment, he stood motionless, stunned by the enormity of the gift—and by the burden it laid upon him.

     When he finally found his voice, it was hoarse, fervent. “Monsieur Delarue… you honor me beyond measure. I will not squander what you entrust to me. God himself bear witness, I will do all I can—for your family, and for all the others who still wait in darkness.”

     He pressed his hand briefly to his chest, a gesture half-born of old Persian courtesies, his head bowed low against the falling snow. “You have my profound gratitude.”

     Henri studied him for a long moment, his gaze weighing the sincerity in Nadir’s face. At last he gave a single, curt nod, grave and final. With a steadying hand, he drew his wife’s trembling arm closer through his own. She sagged against him, her body hollowed by sobs.

     “We have a funeral to arrange then, I suppose.” he murmured, the words nearly lost to the storm.

     Together, they descended the snow-slick steps toward their waiting coach. The lanterns of the cart jostled faintly as the horses stamped, and then the door shut with a hollow thud that seemed to echo through the square.

     Nadir stood watching until they were gone, his breath rising white into the night, his thoughts leaden with the weight of what Henri had pledged—and what it demanded of him. Slowly, his gaze turned.

     There stood Joseph Martin, alone, broken, his figure stooped beneath the storm. Their eyes met across the hush of snow. No words passed between them. None were needed. The snow whispered down around them both, binding them in silence.

     The police cart jolted forward, its iron-rimmed wheels grinding through the snow as it bore Charles Delarue’s body into the white haze of the boulevard. The Delarue’s coach followed closely behind. The jangle of harness bells, the creak of leather, and the muffled snap of reins—all of it dwindled, swallowed by the storm until only the sigh of falling flakes remained. Nadir stood motionless on the marble steps, his cane braced beside him, his gaze fixed on the retreating lanterns until their glow thinned, flickered, and vanished into the storm.

     It was then he felt the weight of Joseph’s stare. Hollow-eyed, insistent, the man looked carved entirely from grief. His raw, reddened hands shook against the sleeves of his threadbare coat, the iron marks still livid on his wrists. When his voice came, it rasped low but sharp, cutting through the hush like a blade.

     “Well? What about my daughter? She could still be down there.”

     The words reached Nadir distantly, muffled, as though from beneath water. His mind still lingered on the white sheet sagging over Charles’s still form, the finality of it. Slowly, he exhaled; the plume of his breath curling away in the wind. Half to himself, half aloud, he muttered, “I never went as deep as Cellar Five.”

     Joseph’s eyes flared wide. He lurched forward, voice breaking with disbelief. “You—what? You told me you searched everywhere!”

     Nadir turned at last, his expression hardened to stone. “Everywhere that could be reached,” he said, his tone clipped, precise. “Everywhere it was possible she could have gone.”

     “You don’t know that!” Joseph’s voice rose, harsh and trembling, ricocheting off the stone façade of the Opera. Joseph pressed on, his words ragged, shaking with fury and fear alike. “You don’t know! She could be down there even now—waiting, dying—and you’ve written her off because you’re too much a coward to go deeper!”

     Nadir’s eyes flashed. In a single, sudden motion, he whirled on Joseph, his voice slicing through the storm like a whip. “Enough! If she is in the cellars at all—and I doubt it—there is no possible way she could have reached Cellar Five. You think your daughter stumbled into that place by chance? That she wandered where even trained men falter? No. It is folly.”

     Joseph recoiled as if struck, but grief drove him forward still, his voice breaking into a shout that tore at the air. “Folly? You speak of folly while you stand idle! You condemn her without proof, you decide her fate before you have even dared to see with your own eyes! You call yourself a man of honor, but you shirk the depths because you fear what you might find. You tell yourself lies so you can sleep, while she lies in darkness!”

     The snow hissed down between them, the tension mounting with every word. Nadir’s patience snapped. He stepped forward, his cane biting into the ice, his voice ringing cold and merciless in the frozen air.

     “Very well, then! “I will go down—now. Tonight, if you demand it. I will descend into Cellar Five myself and scour it for any trace of her.” He jabbed the cane once toward Joseph; the motion punctured the gale. “But you—” his dark eyes narrowed until they were hard as flint, “—you have work to do above. Hospitals, workhouses, poorhouses, the places men like you and I prefer not to look. Brothels, if need be. Speak to the people who live at the edges of this city. Ask them the questions the comfortable never will. Do not leave it all to me while you drown in drink and despair. If you want her found, act like a man who wishes to find her.”

     The single word—“brothels”—was a shard. Joseph’s face crumpled, indignation snapping into the brokenness beneath it. “How dare you,” he spat, voice ragged, “how dare you say such a thing about my daughter!” His fists twitched as if to strike.

     Nadir did not soften. He leaned in, voice sterner still, each syllable a clean, hard thing. “Do you think I relish saying it? That I take pleasure dragging such filth into daylight? No. The truth is cruel. It will sting you if you want it to save her. Pride blinds; it buries the living in the same silence that took them. You will search everywhere. Everywhere. Or you will lose her twice—once to whatever darkness claimed her, and once to your refusal to lay down your pride!”

     For a long, stuttering instant, Joseph’s breath came in ragged clouds. Cold and rage and shame stained his face. The hard edge of his protest gave way to something rawer—the thin, brittle thread of hope refusing to be cut.

     “Very well,” Joseph managed at last, each word torn out of him in short, ragged bursts that betrayed the tremor beneath. “I’ll do it. Hospitals, workhouses, brothels—whatever it takes. I’ll do it.” The anger still clung to his voice, jagged as broken glass.

     Nadir inclined his head, grave and steady, his expression stripped of triumph. He neither softened the truth nor pressed harder—it was enough that Joseph had yielded. “Good,” he said quietly, each syllable precise, final. “Then we will both do what we can. If you need respite, return to my apartment. There is a spare key hidden within the frame of the door. You will find it easily enough.” His voice carried no warmth, no trace of comfort—only the cadence of one soldier assigning a task to another in a war that neither of them could truly win.

     Joseph gave no reply. He only turned away, shoulders bowed, his posture broken as grief itself bent his frame. He trudged into the storm, his figure dissolving step by step into the white veil. His footprints filled quickly behind him, erased by the falling snow, as if the city itself sought to swallow him and his despair whole.

     Nadir stood rooted in silence, his cane pressed into the frost as the cold gnawed at his bones. He exhaled a long breath, white and ghostly, before lifting his gaze to the façade of the Palais Garnier. The great house loomed pale and spectral; its gilded statues blurred into wraiths by the storm, the weight of its shadow pulling at him like a tide.

     The wind roared down the avenue, clawing at his cloak, driving the snow against his face in stinging sheets. It felt less like weather than a summons—an inexorable force dragging him toward the Opera, demanding his return to the depths below.

     He drew his coat tighter with one hand and shifted his cane into the other, its polished wood striking sharp against the marble as he mounted the first step, and then the next. His pace quickened, his stride firming with grim resolve until he was climbing at a near trot, shoulders squared as though bracing against the storm itself.

     At the top he paused only briefly, sweeping the clinging snow from his boots then pressed both hands against the great doors. They gave way with a groan, and the storm was cut off at once. The hush of velvet and gilt enveloped him. The grand foyer breathed around him like another world—warm, echoing, and alive with shadows.

     Snow still clung to Nadir’s shoulders as he crossed the threshold into the Palais Garnier. The storm’s roar muffled at once, sealed behind the great doors, leaving a hush so deep the cavernous foyer felt less like a palace of music than a mausoleum.

     Above, the chandeliers loomed in darkness, their crystals catching only the faintest gleam from a handful of burning lamps. Their tired flames flickered against gilt cornices and tarnished mirrors, painting the room in weary gold. The velvet runners climbing the grand staircase lay pristine, undisturbed by any step. No murmur of conversation drifted from the salons, no laughter from the foyers, no music from the stage. A house that usually would have been alive with voices and finery stood hollow and vast, its silence pressing on Nadir like a weight.

     He paused; the click of his cane against the marble struck sharp in the stillness, and let his gaze sweep the hall. Shadows gathered thick in the corners, and within them he felt an almost living absence—the echo of Erik’s shadow stalking through the silken crowd.

     Drawing his cloak tighter, he advanced, his boots ringing softly on stone before the sound was swallowed by the hush. He passed beneath marble colonnades, the busts of composers and gods gazing down with solemn, immutable faces—silent witnesses to Nadir’s journey.

     At the far end, grandeur narrowed into a shadowed corridor. The air grew cold and damp, each step carrying him farther from velvet and gilt into the realm of stone and dust. The sconces thinned, their weak light powerless against the dark that thickened ahead.

     At last he reached the plain, iron-banded door that marked the threshold of Cellar One. Its heavy handle caught a glint of lamplight—and to his unease, the door hung ajar. Darkness spilled through the gap like breath, damp and chill, carrying with it the smell of stone and hidden water. The storm outside felt distant now, muffled into memory by the silence that poured upward from the depths below.

     Nadir paused, his cane shifting in his grip, and stared into that open maw of shadow. He let his gaze fall to the floor beside the door. There, just where he had left it when guiding the police hours ago, lay his lantern; cold, unlit, and waiting. He bent, lifted it carefully, and with a practiced flick of a match from his coat, he coaxed a small flame to life. The wick caught, flared, and settled into a steady glow, spilling trembling light across the threshold. Shadows leapt and curled along the stone, revealing the iron bands of the door like scars.

     He exhaled slowly, the draft from below tugging at the flame as if to smother it. His jaw tightened. Raising the lantern in one hand, cane in the other, he pushed the door wide and stared into that open maw of shadow. The breath that rolled out smelled of water, dust, and secrets too long buried.

     The darkness swallowed him as he stepped through, the echo of his cane striking stone ringing sharp as he began the descent.

     The silence shattered. With a guttural sound—half snarl, half sob—Erik ripped the black veil from his mask, tearing it down as though nothing in the world should stand between them. In the same breath he seized her face in both hands, rough and trembling, and crushed his mouth against hers.

     It was no kiss of tenderness but of fury: brutal, consuming, bruising. Their teeth clashed with a crack that sent pain darting through her jaw. His breath scorched into her mouth, ragged and fevered, his whole body pressed into her until she felt the prison of his desperation close like iron. Behind her, the piano groaned beneath the sudden jolt, strings humming a discordant dirge.

     She gasped into him—not yielding, but raging. Her fists curled and hammered against his chest, knuckles thudding against bone and muscle in a frantic litany of defiance. “No—damn you, Erik—stop!” The words broke apart in his mouth, muffled against the violence of his kiss. Blow after blow rained down, each strike an echo of her fury—at his contradictions, his cruelty, his unbearable need to devour what he seemed determined to destroy.

     Still he did not relent. His mouth only deepened, angrier, more desperate—an act that was both war and worship. His fingers bit into her scalp, trembling with the strain of holding her as much as of holding himself together. Her strikes did not deter him; they seemed to only drive him further, each fist against his chest answered by another brutal press of his lips, as though he could smother her rebellion with sheer need.

     The fire rumbled in the grate, gilding the room in bronze and blood, shadows grappling wildly across the walls. For that moment they were two storms colliding: her fury hammering into him, his despair consuming her. Neither yielded. Both burned.

     Her fists struck once more, harder, a cry ripping from her throat. “Enough, Erik! You can’t—”

     Before her words could land, his hands shot up and seized her wrists. With a violence born not only of desire but of sheer, blind panic, he slammed them flat against the black lacquer of the piano. The instrument wailed at the impact, strings rattling, the lid shuddering beneath her back as he crushed closer, his weight now fully against her.

     His mouth fell on hers again—wilder, more frantic, as though salvation itself could only be beaten into her lips. The kiss was punishment and plea, drowning and demand. His teeth caught her lip until she tasted the slight sting of blood, his breath searing her skin in ragged bursts. Every protest she tried to shape was swallowed, devoured, until she could not tell if she fought him or the storm of him. This was no flare of passion but a relentless blaze.

     The piano groaned again in protest, its strings humming sourly beneath their struggle. She writhed under him, wrists aching in his unyielding grip, her heel lashing against his shin in furious defiance. But he held fast—eyes fever-bright, body trembling, as though this collision of lips and rage was the last thread holding him from splintering apart.

     It was not tenderness but chaos, not love but the ruinous echo of it. He kissed her to punish her for loving him, to prove with each brutal press of his mouth that he was unworthy, unfit, monstrous. Yet beneath the violence trembled something rawer, more fragile—the terror of her slipping from him, of her defiance unmaking him, of his own ruin consuming them both.

     The firelight painted them in molten hues, her back shoved hard against the lacquered wood, his mask a pale, deathly gleam above her. His mouth pressed to hers with ferocity that dared her to resist, dared her to stop him, and dared her— against reason— to love him still, here in the wreckage of his madness.

     For a heartbeat she continued to fight him, wrists straining against his iron grip, teeth grinding against his in the bruising collision. Her chest heaved, her legs braced, her fury sparking against his despair—until something inside her snapped, anger unraveling into the same desperate fire consuming him.

     Instead of shoving him back, she caught his mouth with her own. It was no yielding, no forgiveness, but a kiss forged of storm—matching him bruise for bruise, fury for fury. The sudden shift jolted him; she felt it in the falter of his grip, in the sharp, ragged inhale through the nose of the mask. His hands trembled at her wrists now, not only gaolers but anchors, as though letting go would mean losing her to the dark.

     The kiss sharpened, hotter, ragged. Their breaths tangled in uneven bursts, the air between them thick with fire. The piano beneath them shivered with each frantic shift, coughing up discordant chords that seemed to score their violence, until sound, breath, and fury became one.

     Her fingers slipped beneath his hold, clutching fistfuls of his shirt as though she might either drag him into herself or tear him apart. Something inside him snapped taut at her defiance, and with a ragged growl he drove forward, crushing her so violently into the lacquer that the piano shrieked beneath them, its strings jangling like a choir of discord. It was as if even the instrument recoiled, unable to bear the storm that had claimed its surface.

     His mouth ripped from hers for a single gasp of air, only to seize the curve of her throat, biting at her pulse, and then returning hungrily to her lips as though he could not decide where to consume her first. Her head struck the piano lid with a hollow crack, yet still she kissed him back, her gasps colliding with his guttural growls—sparks leaping off steel, feeding the furnace of their fury.

     Her nightdress twisted high beneath his grasp, linen wrinkling and gathering as his hands tore at it in frantic hunger. She yielded only to fight back, pressing against him with equal violence, her fingers clawing across the hard lines of his shoulders, the corded sinew of his arms, the porcelain mask that scraped her skin like a blade. Every kiss, every bruising clash of lips and teeth was both wound and balm, punishment and offering, as if desire itself were the weapon with which they cut each other.

     At last, Erik tore from her mouth with a ragged cry, breath ripping from his chest. His hands moved in a frenzy, desperate and wild. With a savage wrench he pulled the shift up and over her, linen skimming her fevered skin, and flung it away like a discarded veil. She stood naked in the firelight—sudden, startling, caught between defiance and vulnerability. The glow painted her flesh in bronze and shadow, a vision that seared him to the marrow.

     A hiss of fury broke from her, and she struck back at once, her fingers seizing the front of his shirt. Fabric popped away beneath her fists as she tore it open, baring the pale cage of his ribs, the long stretch of his abdomen down to the sharp lines of his hips, all exposed to the feverish heat between them.

     His reply came without words—only a brutal grip at her hips, fingers biting deep into her flesh as if to anchor himself to the world. In a single, savage motion he spun her, pressing her forward with his hips until she struck the piano with a resounding thud. Her breasts and stomach flattened against the lacquer, the instrument groaning beneath the violence. She twisted, defiant, trying to break free, but his hand—thin, trembling, and merciless—closed on the back of her head and forced her down. The firelight caught in the porcelain mask above her, pale and spectral, as he held her there beneath him, bound not by chains but by his need and his ruin.

     The firelight quivered across their bodies: hers arched and straining against the glossy wood, his looming above her, mask gleaming like pale bone. The piano gave a long, discordant moan, strings rattling as though it too felt the storm of their collision.

      “Erik! Damn you, you can’t—” Her protest fractured on a gasp as his erection, hard and unrelenting, pressed at her folds, silencing her words with the blunt threat of intrusion. She hissed, furious, a sound half-snarl, half-shriek, and reached back blindly, fingers searching for his flesh. Her hand caught at his thigh; her intent was to claw him, to mark him, whether in wrath or desire she could not tell. But her nails found only the coarse weave of a pant leg, fabric instead of skin. She raked at it in frustration, tearing at cloth when she yearned to wound him deeper.

     Behind her, he thrust again—sharper, more insistent. The heavy head of him caught her entrance, jolting her with the suddenness of it. A cry burst from her throat, shock laced with something far more dangerous. He did not relent. Each jab was both demand and defiance, the raw force of his body answering her anger with a hunger that blurred into violence, his breath hot and ragged above her as though the act itself was an argument he meant to win.

     It was no gentle press, no hesitant claim. Gone was the clumsy, trembling tenderness of the day before. He struck against her with the blunt force of desperation, meeting resistance inside of her that should have checked him, yet only sharpened his hunger. Again and again he shoved, each failed entry stoking his rage and need, until he was half-mad for the silken heat that barred him.

     The piano groaned beneath them, wood shuddering with every violent push, its strings singing out in discordant cries that filled the room with their chaos. Her gasp tore through the air, tangled with his own, as her fingers clawed at his trousers—dragging him forward even as he pinned her down, his body a weight of hunger she could not escape, could not resist.

     Then, with a searing thrust, he broke through. She cried out, her body yielding at last, and he stilled only for a heartbeat; only long enough to take her in: the soft swell of her hips rising to meet him, the arch of her back taut with strain, her profile caught in the firelight, twisted in a rapture made of both pain and pleasure. His scarred fingers tangled firmer into her hair, yanking her head back, holding her pinned to the piano’s glossy black surface as though she were the only anchor left to him in a world that reeled.

     The sight unmade him. A groan burst from his chest, raw and guttural, as he gave in to the ruin of it. His hips began to drive, jagged and relentless, each thrust a confession and a curse, a vow pounded into her body rather than spoken with his tongue.

     Erik set a brutal rhythm from the first thrust, each stroke driving into her with such force that her gasps broke into ragged cries. His movements were rough, chaotic, consuming—the cadence of a man coming apart. The piano shuddered beneath them, strings rattling into savage, discordant notes, as though the instrument itself had become their unwilling accompaniment.

     His masked face dove down and pressed hard into the curve of her back, his breath hot and frantic against her skin. One hand remained knotted in her hair, holding her bowed, while the other gripped her hip with bruising strength, fingers biting deep into soft flesh. She cried out again, breathless, overwhelmed, her back straining helplessly into his relentless assault as he drove her harder and harder into the unyielding wood.

     Half-formed words spilled from him—curses, prayers, fragments of Persian and French tangled together, trembling with the violence of his need and his rage. His mouth hung open as he panted against her, teeth flashing in the firelight, grimacing as though each thrust was both torment and release.

     Her own breathless grunts spilled onto the lacquered surface of the piano, the black sheen catching her breath like smoke. Her body jolted with each brutal stroke, every impact reverberating through her bones. Once, with desperate strength, she tried to lift her head—to see him, to glimpse the man who was ruining her on his own altar—but his hand shove her down again, pinning her with a force that left no room for defiance.

     He did not relent. Tears slid hot from his eyes as he buried himself in the scent of her sweat-slicked skin and tangled hair, drinking in the sharp cries torn from her throat as if they were communion. The air shook with the obscenity of it—the slap of skin against skin, his ragged whines tangled with her gasps.

      Oh, heaven above—no aria, no anthem could rival this chaos made flesh, this terrible, exquisite music of their ruin.

     Then, suddenly, he stilled. Sweat and tears dripped from the edge of his mask to fall upon her back, salt and fire mingling. She panted and tried to swallow, but her throat had gone dry as dust. His mouth descended to her spine, laying frantic kisses down the length of her bowed body—her shoulders, her nape, her back—until he reached the soft swell of her hips. There his lips turned brutal, pressing heated, bruising marks into the flesh of her rump as though to brand her.

     Without warning, Erik tore himself from her body. She cried out, a choking sound—grief and shock intermingled—bereft of his hard length, her legs trembling with the sudden void. For one wild moment she prayed it meant his deluge had ended, even as every nerve in her ached for his return.

     Erik seized her waist, spun her, and with sudden, desperate violence swept her onto the broad lid of the piano. The wood shuddered beneath the force. His mouth crushed hers again with ravenous hunger. Neither yielded. He gasped raggedly against her lips, every breath a tearing of his chest, only to plunge back again, drowning himself in her taste.

     His hands wandered in frantic devotion, trembling as though they could not choose where to anchor: her breasts, her waist, the delicate rise of her throat. He clutched her blindly, as if she alone were his map back to the living world. Between their kisses poured fragments of Persian, half curse, half prayer, words unraveling into sound alone—pure desperation given voice.

     She met him stroke for stroke, ferocity for ferocity. Her nails pushed crescents into his shoulders, fists knotting in the folds of his open shirt to drag him nearer, holding him like a storm she refused to release. When the hard edge of his mask scraped her cheek she did not recoil—she arched into it. The gesture broke him; he shuddered, undone by her willingness to embrace what he could not bear to reveal.

     Her voice rose into his mouth, trembling with fury and splintered with desire. She moaned his name, syllables frayed and molten, lips stinging with bruises, the faint copper tang of blood sealing their mouths in communion.

     Again Erik found his purchase in her body. His pace resumed without mercy, his hips driving her into the piano with every ounce of force he possessed. He wanted her carved into him, seared into the wood, etched into his mind so deeply that no power on earth could tear her free. For a heartbeat he pressed his forehead to hers, eyes shut tight, breath breaking raggedly—as if he could force her existence further into himself before it slipped away. A raw sound broke from him, half sob, half animal growl, when her legs locked around his hips—not yielding, but defiant, daring him to cast her off when she would not let go.

     Her back arched against the black lacquer, pain and pleasure entwined until she could not tell them apart, every nerve sparking fire. The piano groaned beneath their weight, strings trembling in wild protest, its voice as fractured and fevered as their own. They moved together

     The firelight crowned them in copper and shadow, the room itself transfigured into a chapel consecrated by violence and desire. Each kiss landed like a wound; each gasp resounded like a vow. Love and fury blurred, indistinguishable, until they were consumed entirely—no longer phantom and bride, no longer even man and woman, but two storms colliding, frightful and furious, inseparable in their ruin.

     Erik’s grip shifted—one trembling hand cupping her jaw with something perilously close to reverence, while the other clamped her breast in a bruising hold, dragging her against him with desperation that veered toward violence. His kisses struck in a furious rhythm, too hard, too many, as if he could hammer his love further into her being with every bruise he left on her skin. Each time she gasped for air, he stole it back, drinking her in as a man already condemned.

     Her palms struck his chest again—not to drive him off, but to feel the frantic thunder of his heart, the undeniable proof of him alive and burning above her.. Her body arched and pressed to his, answering brutality with her own fierce insistence, as though she could fuse herself into the broken places of him, binding him forever against splintering apart.

     The piano beneath them groaned, strings quivering into discordant cries, until each shift of their bodies made the instrument sing their ruinous litany. She clung to its edge with white-knuckled hands, then abandoned it, seizing him instead—his arms, his hair, the hard edge of porcelain scraping her cheek. She welcomed the sting, welcomed the proof that he was no dream, no phantom, but her own—violent, impossible, real.

     Words tumbled from him against her mouth, fractured and breathless: curses in Persian, pleas in French, her name torn raw and reshaped by need. “Dooset daram… I cannot—” Each fragment broke upon another kiss, another bite, another frantic press of lips and teeth.

     Her head struck the lacquered lid with a hollow bang, and she cried his name again—raw, unguarded, a sound that tore from her chest like prayer and curse entwined. His answer was no word but a ragged moan, wrenched from the bottom of his soul, trembling between anguish and ecstasy. The firelight painted them in fevered bronze, their shadows flung wild and broken across the walls, as if the house itself strained to hold the violence of their joining.

     There was no boundary, no end—only the dizzying spiral of fury and love: kisses that bruised, gasps that pleaded, bodies colliding in chaos as if the world beyond them had fallen away.

     The storm broke over them in full. Erik wrenched her tighter, frantic strength quaking through him as if he feared she might vanish if he loosened his hold. She clung to him, gasping, furious tears streaking her cheeks as his mouth bruised her lips again and again. Her fingers tangled in his hair, dragging him back down each time he tried to breathe, as if she would not permit him even air unless it came through her.

     The piano beneath them sang its protest with every frantic movement, strings jangling in discord that echoed their ruinous rhythm. The lacquer was slick beneath her, her spine driven mercilessly into its surface with each violent thrust. His breath tore against her lips in ragged sobs, words shattering into gasps—“dooset daram”,” mon amour”—as though even two tongues could not name the immensity of his undoing.

     The mask scraped her cheek as he buried his face against her, and he shuddered, undone by her continued refusal to recoil. The heat of her seared him, yet still he plunged as deep as he possibly could as though he would burn himself to ash within her arms. A guttural cry wrenched from his chest, half curse, half prayer, torn from a place where agony and rapture met.

     The peak came not as sweetness but as breaking—a violent, consuming rapture that seized Erik in its teeth.

     “Oh my God—Erik!” she cried, his name flung into the cavern air as her hands clung desperately to his back. He answered with a hoarse, wordless roar, clutching her as though release itself might rip her away. For one blinding instant, there was nothing but the shatter of their fury and their need, mingled into a single unbearable bliss.

     Then silence—marked only by ragged breath, trembling limbs, the stunned stillness of bodies spent. They clung where they had fallen against the battered piano, the air thick with smoke and sweat, heavy with the ghost of their cries. Firelight guttered across them; gilding flesh, linen, and porcelain alike, as though even ruin might be rendered holy.

     Erik remained braced above her, trembling, his mask pressed into the hollow of her throat. His chest heaved against hers, each desperate gasp tugging at the fragile veil of silence. His hands still clung to her—breast and jaw—fingers splayed in a grip that should have loosened but refused to, as if by sheer will he could prevent her from vanishing.

     Her arms, which had locked around his neck in the last throes of their storm, now draped there loosely, her fingers tangled in the damp strands of his hair. She felt his heartbeat pounding through his ribs against her chest, wild and uneven.

     The air was rich with the scent of sweat, sex, and spilled coffee—a heady incense lingering like in some desecrated chapel. Her throat ached as she swallowed, her lips red from his bruising kisses, and in the fragile hush she became sharply aware of her body against his: the heat of every place his hands had branded her, the trembling of her muscles, the way her breath still faltered, helplessly, in rhythm with his.

     Neither spoke. The silence between them was not peace, not yet—it was stunned, reverent, precarious. The storm had broken, but its wreckage lingered all around: chair and tables remained overturned from his rage and lie like fallen soldiers. The piano still groaned beneath their weight as though it too bore the bruise of what had passed. Even the air felt brittle, a fragile hush straining to hold itself intact, waiting for the smallest sound to fracture it all over again.

     Her fingers stirred faintly in his grey-streaked hair, a small, instinctive motion, almost tender—too natural to be stopped, too intimate to be dismissed. That feather-light touch sent a ripple through him, a tremor that betrayed the panic already coiling beneath the silence. Yet she did not let him go. Slowly, inexorably, she guided his head lower until the cold porcelain of his mask brushed her cheek. She sought his mouth with hers—not with fury now, but with aching, deliberate tenderness.

     The kiss was deep, slow, unhurried—the deliberate inversion of the fury that had consumed them. And for a moment, impossibly, he yielded. His body sagged into hers, the taut strain of his muscles easing as if her warmth were the only refuge left to him in the world. He pressed into her with indulgence, drinking her in; a man too long denied water. The taste of her—faint coffee still clinging to her lips, mingled with something unbearably sweet—dizzied him like wine too potent to endure. Her mouth opened to him, soft, welcoming, her breath mingling with his, and his heart convulsed at the sheer, unthinkable miracle of it.

     His hand splayed across her waist, trembling against the tremors still echoing through her, the shuddering aftermath of their joining. She was alive, she was warm, pliant under his touch, and the reality of it threatened to undo him to the marrow. For those few breaths, he held her as a starving man feasts—savoring each taste, each brush of her lips, each quiver of her body—reverence pouring through him so fiercely it was agony. It felt eternal and impossibly fragile all at once, as though if he dared to open his eyes, she would vanish like smoke, leaving only silence and ruin in her place.

     Sweetness curdled into terror. The generosity of her lips, the ease of her love, became unbearable—too radiant, too forgiving. Every bruise he had left on her, every contradiction and cruelty, seemed to flare beneath her kiss, branding him with proof of what he had done, of what he was. Her closeness smothered; her tenderness pressed too hard against the monstrous truth inside him. His pulse spiked, panic rising like fire in his throat.

     With a sudden, ragged breath he tore his mouth from hers. His body lurched back as though ripped away by invisible hands, the porcelain of his mask flaring in the firelight. The kiss broke—and with it, the fragile hush that had held them. His chest heaved as if he had surfaced from drowning, gasping against an ocean that still threatened to drag him under. Already his eyes darted, fever-bright, wild as a hunted creature’s, searching the shadows for escape.

     Her hand followed him, sliding up the tense line of his back, steady, coaxing, and refusing to let him vanish. Her voice softened to a hush, low and careful, as though soothing a wounded animal too dangerous to corner. “Shhh… Erik, please. Rest. Just stay here with me. You don’t have to move, don’t have to think. Just… be with me.”

     Her lips brushed his temple, a whisper of warmth against the damp, tangled strands of his hair. Her chest ached with the sheer, unbearable tide of love surging through her—love for his brokenness, his brilliance, his violence, his fragility. Love for the storm that had ravaged them and for the man left trembling in its wake. She wanted nothing more than to hold him fast in that instant, to suspend time itself, to keep the splintering at bay a little longer.

     He only stiffened in her embrace. The tremor coursing through his body was no longer born of passion but of panic. She felt it in the stutter of his breath—quick, shallow gasps against her collarbone—her embrace transforming from refuge into suffocation. His golden eyes fluttered closed for an instant, heavy beneath the weight of her tenderness, then snapped open again, fever-bright, darting wildly around the room as if searching for an unseen predator closing in.

     “Erik…” she whispered, her thumb brushing the base of his skull, desperate to anchor him. “Please—you’re safe. With me, you’re safe.”

     Her words only shattered against the tide of his terror, brittle fragments lost before they could reach him. With a sudden, wrenching motion, he tore himself free. The absence struck her like a physical blow—the warmth ripped away, leaving only the cold lacquer of the piano beneath her spine. He reeled backward, bare feet dragging across the chaos-strewn floor, his chest heaving, his hands fumbling helplessly as though he no longer knew how to inhabit his own body.

     He turned sharply, seizing at his trousers with frantic, clumsy fingers, tugging them into place, tucking himself in with a violence that felt less like dressing and more like erasure. The intimacy of moments ago seared him like a brand, and he clawed at his disheveled clothing as though armor might shield him from the unbearable nearness he had allowed.

     She pushed herself upright on the piano, her hair a dark tangle, her skin flushed and slick with the sweat of their storm. “Erik,” she said, her voice steadier now, though lined with grief and rising fear. “Don’t run from me. Don’t—don’t do this.” She reached toward him, palm open, her hand trembling but resolute, her heart hammering like a drum against her ribs.

     He would not look at her hand—would not look at her at all. His gaze slid past her to the door, to the dark cavern gaping beyond, as though only flight could offer him life. His shoulders hunched, drawn taut, his whole frame quivering with the effort of holding himself intact. It was as though the love she offered were not salvation but the most merciless trap he had ever devised for himself.

     He snatched his cloak from the chaise by the door; the fabric cracking through the air like a sail caught in storm, and flung it around his shoulders. His movements were frantic, jagged, desperate—barely movements of a man but of something fleeing its own skin. The cloak hung half-fastened, shifting wildly as he lunged for the door. His trousers were dragged into order, but his shirt still gaped open to the waist, baring the pale cage of ribs, the hollow stretch of his stomach, and the stark line of his hips. In the flickering firelight he looked less like a person than a specter tearing free of its mortal frame.

     Then he was gone. The door groaned on its hinges, slamming back against the wall with a thunderclap as he burst through into the waiting dark. He ran as though hunted by demons, cloak streaming behind him, shirt whipping loose in the air. His feet barely seemed to strike the ground; he was nothing but forward momentum, not running toward freedom but fleeing the unbearable prison of himself. Within moments the cavern swallowed him whole, shadows rising like a living tide, greedy and merciless, until he was gone.

     “Erik!” Her cry ripped after him, raw and desperate, but it only splintered against the cavern’s vast hush. She stumbled forward, bare feet catching on the rug, and reached the threshold. The cavern’s breath struck her naked body like a blade—cold, merciless, endless. She stood there trembling, silhouetted by firelight against the void, her heart hammering, her throat thick with grief.

     The dark beyond thickened, a void made flesh. No outline moved, no footfall stirred, no breath lingered. It was as if the dark itself had reached out with greedy hands and seized him back, folding him into its depths until nothing remained but silence.

     Her own breath came too loud, ragged against that immense stillness. “Erik…” she whispered one last time—softer now, her plea unraveling at the edges. Tears welled, hot and blinding and she pressed a trembling hand to the door frame to hold herself upright. No answer came. No shape returned from the dark. Only the vast, indifferent black mocked her with its silence.

     At last, shivering, she stepped back. The heavy door shut with a groan of iron hinges, sealing the emptiness outside—but sealing him away as well. The house seemed cavernous without him. Around her the wreckage of his storm lay like mute witnesses: the overturned chair and the crashed tables. The piano still hummed faintly; a wounded beast.

     Her nightgown lay crumpled by the instrument’s legs, half-lost in shadow. She bent, fumbling with shaking hands, dragging the cloth over her raw, trembling skin. From the couch she pulled a blanket, wrapping it tight about her shoulders as though it could guard her from the cold hollow inside her. The thick, damp weight between her thighs tugged at her awareness, a reminder of heat still smoldering, but she forced it down, willed it silent, as though to acknowledge it would deepen her humiliation.

     She drifted to the piano bench in a daze. Its lid still quivered faintly from their violence, a single string humming low and mournful—a dirge in the silence. Lowering herself onto the bench, she pressed her hands to her face, and at last the tears broke loose. They slid hot through her fingers as she bent forward, shoulders shaking, her breath catching in broken sobs.

     The house was quiet again, but no longer sanctuary. It was a ruin, haunted by his absence and by the searing memory of him—the weight of his body, the heat of his kiss, the echo of his curses, the shock of his flight. She sat bowed over the keys, her tears falling where music should have been, mourning not only the loss of him in that moment but the greater terror it foretold: that their fragile joy had already shattered at its beginning, too frail to endure even a single day.

     Nadir descended quickly, though every nerve in his body bristled, sharpened to a knife’s edge. His cane tapped steadily against the stone, not merely a walking stick but a probing blade, kept at eye level, ready to sweep aside whatever death lay invisible in the dark. The air thickened as he sank lower—colder, heavier—damp with the musk of mold and the brackish tang of unseen water pressing close around the walls. Shadows narrowed the passage until they seemed to lean in upon him, each echo of his boots flattening into whispers that clung and followed like ghosts.

     Cellar One unfolded before him, cavernous and sprawling, its wide arches crowded with the Opera stage’s treasures. Towering flats painted with faded skies leaned in ranks against the walls, their edges worn where numerous hands had dragged them up and down the stage. Gilded balustrades, grand staircases dismantled into sections, and plaster statues half-swaddled in canvas loomed in the gloom, their blind faces catching faint glimmers of his lantern. Painted columns and false doorways stood clustered together, their grandeur reduced to idle scenery awaiting resurrection. Dust dulled their colors, but they waited, all of it stored neatly, patiently, until the next season or the next grand production summoned them back into the light.

     Nadir moved carefully between them, the cluttered silhouettes strange and theatrical in the lantern’s glow. Here, the Opera’s illusions were stripped bare of context: a Grecian temple pressed against a Gothic arch, a Versailles salon half-toppled beside a broken statue of Apollo. They loomed like fragments of a dream, incongruous and jarring, the impossible magic of the stage reduced to the reality of lumber and plaster in the dark.

     At the far end of the chamber, the clutter thinned, and the weight of silence gathered in its place. Beyond these mute relics of opera, the dark grew heavier, older, waiting for him in the depths.

     Cellar One gave way to Cellar Two with a jarring shift as if he had stepped through a seam in the earth into something colder, more absolute. The change was not merely in sound but in presence: the silence here was not the ordinary stillness of storage and dust, but a hollow carved by memory and death.

     He halted on the threshold, raising his lantern. Its glow swept the length of the familiar space. Here was where Charles had been found—where the boy had dangled in the cruel knot of the lasso, his body made into a grotesque marionette swaying in the lantern glow. The image clawed at Nadir’s mind even as the reality denied it. The rope was gone. The snare dismantled. The floor scoured clean of stain. Even the walls seemed to have been scoured of witness, as though the stone itself had been purged, unwilling to hold the memory.

     And yet, he did not walk freely.

     Each step forward was measured, his cane brushing the air in tight, deliberate arcs, probing for the unseen. His breath rose in white plumes that curled and vanished in the chill. He strained for the faintest betrayals—the sigh of a spring, the creak of a hidden hinge—but only the hollow hush answered him.

     The place had been scoured. The police must have done a thorough job of stripping the scene bare, sweeping away every trace of the snare, every stain that might offend a curious gaze. But whether they had collected evidence, or simply buried it in some bureaucratic report destined never to be read, he could not tell. He imagined Jules summoning him later, expecting a statement, an account, another weary interrogation—as though he longed to waste another hour in the detective’s company.

     By the time he entered Cellar Three, the darkness had thickened into something almost tangible, oppressive as a weight on his chest. The silence here was not clean but corrupted, full of echoes that seemed to cling rather than fade. The air carried a faint rasp, a whisper like metal dragged across stone, and it set his nerves alight.

     Nadir raised his lantern higher—and his breath caught.

     Some of the traps he knew too well, those monstrous devices once described to him with Erik’s smug delight, had been reset. There, a false flagstone lay flush again with the floor, its pressure plate dusted with gravel to conceal the seam. A stretch of wire, taut and gleaming in the lantern-light, spanned the corridor where once it had sagged slack.

     He pressed forward with care, circling each one with the precision of a surgeon. The memory of how they worked, of how they killed, prickled at his nerves until even his breathing felt perilous. Each inhalation seemed a trespass; each exhalation a risk of tripping some invisible snare.

     Deeper still, his progress slowed until it ceased altogether. Nadir froze mid-step, his cane suspended in the air. The lantern’s glow trembled over a sight that chilled him more than any functioning trap.

     The mechanisms had been tampered with. A spring sat coiled loosely beside its casing, dust disturbed in fresh patterns around it. Hinges and counterweights had been drawn from their sockets and set in tidy piles. Iron teeth, trigger plates, hooks—all arranged with meticulous order, as though laid out on a craftsman’s bench.

     This was not dismantling. Not abandonment.

     It was repair.

     The work was half-finished, paused mid-process, awaiting a hand to return and complete it.

     Nadir’s grip tightened on the cane until his knuckles burned. The knowledge pressed on him like a vise: someone had been here. Not the police, not scavengers—no clumsy meddler could manage such precision. This was the touch of practiced hands, of someone who understood every hidden vein of the device.

     Of Erik.

     The silence pressed close, suffocating, so dense it seemed the very stones leaned in to listen to his thoughts. Nadir’s pulse quickened in his throat, heavy as a drumbeat, and only then did he realize how fiercely his jaw was clenched, each muscle aching from the strain. His cane quivered faintly in his grip, the tremor of a hand that wanted to betray him.

     If Erik had returned to this place—this Opera—then the danger was not a memory buried in the cellars. It lived again. And it was only beginning.

     Nadir forced his breath into a steady rhythm and drove himself onward. His descent became a ritual of control: each step deliberate, precise, the measured strike of his cane against stone like the beat of a metronome conducting the silence itself. Every tap was a vow, every sweep of its arc a barrier he placed between himself and panic.

     The thought of Erik, the suspicion gnawing at the edges of reason, burrowed deep into his marrow, but he locked it there. Fear was indulgence. Fear was weakness. Fear distracted, and distraction meant death. He would not permit it.

     When he stepped into Cellar Four, the discipline he clung to began to splinter. The lantern’s glow skimmed across the chamber, and what it revealed made his stomach knot. The shadows here held not only echoes of old snares but something worse—something alive, unfinished, in motion.

     Reset traps gleamed in readiness here as well; their menace renewed. Pressure plates lay flush with the stone, their surfaces brushed with grit to hide the seams. Wire stretched taut across the corridor, invisible until the flame kissed it into a brief glimmer. It was not merely the resetting that sickened him—it was the incompleteness. There was the sense of work half-done, as though he had stepped uninvited into a craftsman’s workshop.

     All around him, new devices lay in partial assembly. A counterweight dangled from its rigging but had never been tied off, swaying faintly whenever the cavern breathed. A spring mechanism sat gutted, its iron coils and gears arranged with surgical neatness on the floor beside it, waiting for a hand to slot them back into place. A spiked panel leaned casually against the wall, its intended spot marked out in chalk, the jagged teeth casting long, crooked shadows across the stones.

     Farther along the chamber walls, evidence of that same hand lingered in dark, frantic scrawls—measurements and crude diagrams etched with chalk; quick notes in a language of geometry and death. They were not plans abandoned but plans alive, paused mid-thought, waiting to be realized. Half-finished sketches of murder that would one day be made flesh in iron and rope.

     The cellar reeked of industry, as though its very stones remembered the shaping of a thousand horrors. It was again a workshop of ruin, and its master had begun his labor anew.

     He had been wrong. Wrong to believe Erik would ever abandon this place. Wrong to think him capable of severing himself from the Opera’s depths, from the house that had already consumed him once. Wrong to hope.

     The rage of it scorched his throat, bitter as bile. Erik, with all his brilliance, with all his cursed genius, could not let go. He was shackled here, bound to his own obsession like a penitent damned, circling his torment forever. Again and again he returned—like a dog to its own vomit, helpless before the filth that was killing him.

     Nadir’s grip on his cane whitened, his knuckles aching. The urge to smash it against the wall, to shatter these grotesque half-made devices, nearly overtook him. Instead he stood rigid, seething, his breath ragged in the lantern’s light as it skimmed over the meticulous order of Erik’s hands.

     Beneath the fury, grief pressed close—sharp, suffocating. He knew why Erik was like this. He knew the boy had been raised in cruelty, shaped in neglect, taught only to hide and to kill. He knew the loneliness that had been thrust upon him, the abuse that had carved his brilliance into a weapon. Erik was a monster—but not one born whole. Others had sharpened him into what he had become.

     Nadir still loved him. That was the bitterest truth of all. Love for a dear friend, once shared in stolen confidences and laughter half-believed, survived beneath the anger like an ember buried in ash.

     Oh, but love could not excuse this. Not Charles strangled on a wire. Not the silence of these cellars now seeded with death anew.

     If Erik was here—if he had truly come back—then Charles’s death had never been the accident of some forgotten trap. It was a deliberate setting of new traps beyond the promised boundary. Murder. Erik had returned to his cycle of violence, his kingdom of ruin, and broken what fragile, fragile hope for peace Nadir had clung to in his heart.

     Nadir’s fury burned hot enough to drive him onward, carrying him down the final stretch of passage. His boots struck hard against the stone, each impact ringing in the cavern air like a challenge. The cold deepened with every step, heavy with the musk of stagnant water and the sour tang of rot that clung to the back of his throat. He knew, before the darkness began to thin and the echoes of his stride widened, that he had reached the boundary of Cellar Five.

     The chamber opened around him in sudden vastness, a cavernous maw of shadow and water. The underground lake sprawled endlessly, its black expanse swallowing the lantern’s glow until it seemed he carried no light at all. The surface mirrored nothing but its own void, a stillness so absolute it was more menacing than the roar of flood or storm. The silence here was not emptiness—it was waiting.

     He edged closer, and a sharp crunch beneath his boot stopped him cold. Slowly, he lowered the lantern. The glow spread across the stone at his feet, illuminating shards of glass scattered like bones. A lantern—shattered. Its oil long since bled out, leaving a dark smear of soot across the rock, its residue hardened like old blood.

     Nadir crouched, his joints stiff from the chill, and reached for the fragments. His gloved fingers brushed the edges; they bit back, jagged and cruel. The pieces still caught the lantern-light faintly, as though they remembered fire, as though they demanded witness to what had broken them.

     His stomach twisted. This was not an old ruin, not the casual debris of time. This had been recent. Close. The shards glistened with accusation, whispering of hands that had fumbled or discarded them not long ago.

     He straightened slowly, raising his eyes to the cavern wall—and his breath caught at the added layer of confirmation.

     Lanterns.

     A multitude of them; fixed to the jagged rock that framed the black expanse of the lake. Not extinguished. Not abandoned. Burning. Their flames swayed in the draft, each one a restless tongue of light licking at the shadows. The glow shimmered across the water in fractured ribbons, reflections rippling out until the cavern itself seemed to writhe. Darkness no longer cloaked the lake—it pulsed now with a false, unnatural life.

     The even spacing, the deliberate order, the way their light conspired together to paint the cavern walls in shifting amber—this was Erik’s hand, his pattern, his signature.

     The lantern Nadir carried trembled faintly in his grip, its light scattering in jagged bursts across the stone. Rage smoldered in him, hot enough to smother the damp cold pressing from the walls. Erik had indeed returned. Returned to the lair he had once destroyed with his own madness, to the depths that should have been his grave.

     Returned like carrion to its rotting den.

     He saw Erik as he once had—proud and secretive, guiding him through these same caverns with a torch in hand and a mocking glint in his yellow eyes. He remembered the boasts, every trap described with cruel delight, the laughter that always carried the edge of madness, and the rare confidences whispered in the dark, when Erik had almost seemed human. For a moment the echoes of that past pressed close around him. And now—now all he felt was old wounds ripped raw, the cycle of genius and ruin repeating itself with merciless precision.

      “Damn you, Erik.” he breathed. The words misted white in the frigid air, snatched away and drowned in the lake’s unbroken silence.

     Then, jaw set and eyes hard, he began his search for the hidden passage. The rise of stones along the cavern wall emerged in the wavering glow of his lantern—jagged outcroppings, uneven but familiar. This was the path he remembered, the narrow ascent Erik had once revealed in a moment of pride, a secret way around the lake.

     Nadir pressed himself to the rock and began to climb. His fingers dug into cracks slick with damp, boots scraping for purchase on the cold stone. Each motion became a careful negotiation—slow, deliberate, his body taut with strain while his breath stayed tight in his chest, as though even exhalation might betray him. The lantern in his free hand swung with each pull upward, spilling faint light across the jagged face, flashing against moss-slick patches and the wet gleam of mineral seams. Below, the lake whispered against the cavern wall, the sound swallowed in its black, depthless silence.

     He paused midway, chest heaving, and held still. The hush of water lapped faintly against the stone far below, joined only by the soft drip of condensation threading down the cavern walls. No footsteps. No voices. No music drifting faint from the house across the lake. He was undetected so far.

     Drawing a breath, he resumed his ascent. His muscles burned with the effort, each pull dragging him higher until the stones at last gave way to a broad shelf jutting out above the black expanse. He crouched low as he pulled himself onto it, cloak dragging across the grit, his body flattened against the rock as though the very shadows might be looking for him.

     Nadir lifted his lantern, its glow trembling across jagged stone. There—at the far end of the shelf—yawned the black mouth of a tunnel, just as he remembered. His stomach tightened as the light flickered over the faintest glint. Silver. Almost invisible but for the tremor of lantern-light. A wire stretched taut across the entrance.

     A tripwire. Waiting in silence. Waiting for prey.

     Erik.

     The name hissed through his mind like a curse.

     His grip whitened on the cane, the lantern trembling faintly until he stilled it with a steadying hand. The wire gleamed like a strand of spider silk, delicate and almost invisible, yet more lethal than any blade. One misstep would be enough to end him.

     He lowered himself fully to the ground, cupping the lantern so its flame dimmed beneath his hand. The silver thread of the tripwire glimmered faintly, stretched taut across the cave mouth. He followed it with his eyes, tracing it to a notch half-hidden in the stone where the mechanism lurked. He could almost hear Erik’s voice whispering in memory, silken and cruel: They hang themselves, Daroga, with no hand but mine upon them…

     Grinding his teeth, Nadir slid a narrow knife from his coat, steel dulled by years of necessity. Slowly, steadily, he extended his cane toward the wire, wedging it beneath to hold the tension. His hands worked with the precision of habit, fingers sure even as his pulse thundered. The blade slipped between stone and coil. A single turn, a muted scrape—then the wire slackened, its deadly tension undone. The spring sighed into silence, impotent.

     Nadir exhaled slowly, as though releasing the held breath of the cellar itself. He gathered his lantern, rose, and slipped past the opening into the tunnel beyond.

     The air grew closer, colder, thick with centuries of seepage. Water dripped from the ceiling in hollow echoes, each drop falling like a distant clock tick. The lantern flame seemed to labor in the dark, its light choked by the weight of the damp. The floor climbed and fell in uneven pitches, forcing his boots to clamber over jagged rises and sudden dips. His cane swept constantly, a blind man’s sentinel probing not only the ground but the air before him.

     And soon, it found the silver line of death again.

     A wire strung low, just above the ankle, stretched invisible in the dark. He crouched, tracing its line to its anchor, severing it with a swift, clean stroke. Farther in, a plate of stone disguised with gravel gave the faintest shudder under the tap of his cane. He circled it warily, hearing the quiet rattle of the trigger buried beneath. Twice more, his probing found wires set at the height of a man’s chest—set deliberately for someone like him, lantern held before his face. Each one he neutralized with infinite care, sweat slicking his palms despite the freezing air, until his breathing itself seemed too loud, too risky, as though the darkness might tighten into a noose around his throat at any moment.

     Each trap was its own invention, yet every cruel device bore the same unmistakable hand—the same obsessive precision, the same hunger for control. Erik had not merely returned. He had been hard at work. He was here. Alive. Rebuilding his kingdom, relighting its arteries with fire, filling it with teeth.

     The tunnel curved and coiled, narrowing until Nadir had to turn his shoulders to slip through, and then yawned wide again into hollowed chambers where the air sank colder and heavier. The floor sloped downward at last, his boots scraping across damp rock as the black water of the lake spread before him in sudden vastness.

     He halted at the edge. His lantern spilled its glow over the surface, gilding ripples that caught and shimmered with reflections already waiting. For across the water—it stood.

     The house.

     Its square silhouette rose out of the dark, familiar and dreadful, no ruin, no tomb. Windows glimmered with lamplight, pale gold against the cavern’s endless shadow. Fireplaces burned within, hearth-smoke vanishing high into the unseen dome above. And the shore—dressed in fire. Lanterns planted in even rows, flames steady despite the cavern’s draft, their light mirrored in restless streaks across the black water. The whole place breathed with life, obscene in its normalcy.

     Nadir froze where he stood. His chest locked tight, his breath ragged in his throat. To see this house alive again—this house that should have been abandoned, silenced, left to rot in darkness—was an abomination. It stood as though nothing had ever happened. It was as though the screams and the blood, the fire and the ruin and the threats were illusions simply erased.

     Nadir’s grip on his cane whitened, tendons straining in his hand. His jaw clamped until pain radiated through his skull. Every flame along the shore mocked him, every glow a taunt, every reflection in the lake a reminder of his own failures to believe this would end.

     He had been right to press deeper.

     Erik was here.

     And now, at last—so was Nadir.

     Nadir descended the final jut of stone and stepped onto the narrow strip of shore. Behind him, the black water lapped faintly at the rock, each ripple disturbed by the lanterns burning in rows along the cavern wall. Their reflections shivered on the lake’s surface, tangled veins of light glowing like the arteries of some monstrous heart still beating in the dark.

     Every muscle in his body was drawn taut, strung between vigilance and fury. His cane swept in steady arcs before each step, probing the air as though it might split open and strike him at any moment. The crunch of gravel beneath his boots seemed indecently loud, too sharp against the vast hush of the cavern, as though every sound might betray him. The house loomed nearer, the glow of its windows resolving into clear view, each one lit by steady candles burning against the cavern’s breath. Their flames did not flicker—they burned stubbornly, defiantly, proclaiming that this place lived.

     Then—his cane struck resistance.

     He froze. Lowering the lantern, the light revealed a wire strung low across the path, a silver thread glinting faintly in the firelight. Another trap—cunningly placed at the weary man’s step, just where hope and haste might blind him. He crouched, teeth grinding as his eyes traced its length to the anchoring points buried in the stone.

     Nadir’s hands moved with the same cold precision he had once used in Persia, in deserts where one false movement meant death. He slid the cane beneath the wire, taking its tension. His blade flashed in the dim glow, slipping between steel and stone. A single twist—quiet, exact—and the line slackened. The spring sighed faintly, but nothing fired. Another of Erik’s shadows undone.

     For a moment, he did not rise. He crouched there, the lantern flame guttering in the draft, his breath clouding white in the bitter air. His heart pounded a hot, uneven rhythm against his ribs, a drumbeat that matched the mocking shimmer of the flames around him.

     Nadir rose slowly in the halo of lantern light, the black lake at his back and the house looming before him. The back door rose dark and familiar, its wood swollen faintly from damp, its iron fittings dulled with age—and yet the knob gleamed, polished by a hand that had turned it only recently.

     He reached out, fingers trembling as they brushed the cold iron. His breath came harsh and hot in the freezing air, his lantern shaking just enough to send shadows shivering up the walls.

     This was no ruin. No husk. The faint glow of firelight pressed against the door’s seams, seeping into the night air like blood through a bandage. The scent of wax, of smoke, of habitation spilled faintly into the cavern draft. Every sense screamed that the place lived again, that someone was within.

     His hand closed around the knob, knuckles whitening as though he might crush the iron itself. For a long, suspended moment he could not move. The cold metal bit into his palm, but the vise that held him was memory.

     He heard again the echo of Erik’s laughter—low, mocking, terrible in its delight—as it reverberated through these very stones. He saw the gleam of wire and steel, heard the smug cadence of boasts whispered like poison in the dark. The weight of secrecy pressed down on him, as suffocating as the stone ceilings overhead.

     Christine’s face rose before him, pale with terror, framed in the half-light of those infernal chambers. Erik’s hands, once so precise in their artistry, trembling with desperation. The acrid bite of gunpowder still seemed to sting his throat, the air thick and choking as the Opera itself nearly collapsed in fire and ruin. He saw Raoul’s ashen face beside him in that torture chamber, both of them caught like insects in the web Erik had spun.

     All of it pressed into this moment, into the cold knob beneath his hand. Behind this door lay no stagecraft, no illusion. There would only be the truth of Erik’s ruin—and surely another descent into catastrophe.

     (Y/N)’s sobs dwindled into ragged breaths, but her thoughts only sharpened, rushing over one another like waves breaking against stone. She pressed her palms harder to her face, as though she could dam them back, but the questions tore through all the same.

     Where had he gone? Into the tunnels, perhaps—into the endless dark where even he might be swallowed. Was he safe, or had he already flung himself down some path bent on ruin? The fear of losing him burned sharp in her chest, hot and immediate: fear that the man who had clutched her with such brutal need could vanish now into shadow, leaving her grasping at emptiness.

     Then arose another fear; colder, more insidious. Could she stand in the storm that was Erik? Could she keep her footing against the violent tides of his despair, his contradictions, his rages that cut as deeply as his tenderness soothed? The memory of his eyes—wild, fever-bright, anguished even in the heat of his kiss—seared her. She wanted to believe her love might anchor him, soothe him, and teach him he was not alone. But would he ever let her? Would he ever believe it?

     Her heart twisted around the echo of his warning: You will regret this. You will wish you had never… The words burrowed under her skin like a curse. Was he right? Had she been reckless—foolish—to bind herself so wholly to a man who could tear himself open and tear at her in the same breath? She told herself she loved him, that she could not imagine a life without him, that every part of her reached for him still. But love alone might not keep her upright if he fought it, if he fought her, every step of the way.

     Her tears fell swiftly and renewed, dripping through her fingers onto the keys. No music answered—only dull, muffled thuds, as though even the piano had been muted by grief. She bent forward, pressing her brow to her folded arms, her shoulders quaking as she tried to draw breath into a body that no longer seemed willing to hold steady.

     What if their vows had been doomed the moment they were spoken? What if she had bound herself to a man who could never believe he was worthy of her love, a man who would spend the rest of his life fleeing it, fleeing her? And what then would become of her—left always reaching into the dark, begging him to return, begging him to stay?

     Her chest constricted until each breath scraped, sharp and thin, and yet beneath the storm of doubt one truth refused to break. She loved him. She loved him in all his brilliance and ruin, in his cruelty and his aching need. Even now—alone on the bench, abandoned in the wreck of their house—her heart clung to him as if it had no other choice. And that love, whether it was to be her salvation or her undoing, was the very thing that left her trembling now.

     Slowly, painfully, she lifted her head. Firelight wavered across her tear-streaked face, and she forced her lungs to draw breath through the raw knot in her throat. Her pulse still hammered, her body still burned with the memory of his desperate touch, but beneath all of it a fragile truth took shape: she could not shatter as easily as he had. If she did, there would be nothing left to save either of them.

     She saw him then in her mind’s eye, fleeing like a hunted thing into the tunnels—half-clothed, undone, eyes wild with terror at the very intimacy he had begged for. He was brilliant, yes, but broken so deeply that love itself felt like poison to him. And if she had dared to bind herself to such a man—dared to love him through his curses and contradictions—then she could not falter now. Not at the first breaking. She would have to stand stronger than the storm he carried inside him, steady enough to keep her footing when he lost his own.

      Her fingers slipped from her face to the piano keys, cool and unyielding beneath her touch. The ivory seemed to absorb her trembling and return it steadied, humming faintly in the silence as though the instrument itself remembered both fury and music. She straightened, dragging the discarded shift tighter across her shoulders, the fabric damp against her skin. Her tears still clung hot at the corners of her eyes, but her gaze grew clearer, her jaw firmed into resolve.

     Whatever storms he carried, whatever shadows he summoned down upon them both, she would not surrender him to them. If she had to weather every outburst, every flight, every breaking, then she would endure—for him, for the love that burned too fiercely to doubt, no matter how violently he raged against it.

     For now she bowed beneath the quiet, the wreckage of their storm scattered around her. Yet inside, something fragile and defiant had rooted itself: a vow trembling but unshaken. She would not let him destroy them. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not ever.

     A shuddering breath escaped her, rough but deliberate, and she scrubbed her palms over her damp cheeks. The silence pressed close, thick as water, broken only by the faint tick of the clock and the echo of her heartbeat. She forced her shoulders straighter, spine stiff against the weight of despair. She would not crumble here—not when there was still a chance he might return, not when he might yet need her strong.

     And then—the creak of the back door split the hush like a match struck in the dark. She jolted upright from the piano bench so fast her knees cracked painfully against the wood. Erik. Surely it was Erik. He had come back. She should run to him, fling herself into his arms before he vanished again.

     Her heart surged at the thought—Erik returned, contrite, ready at last to speak. She hurried across the wreck of the parlor, through the dim corridor, her bare feet whispering soundless over the rugs, hope pressing her forward.

     A voice tore through the house.

     “ERIK!”

     It was a man’s shout; raw and commanding and angry. The name rattled against the walls like a summons, and she froze. Her blood iced over. That was not Erik.

     (Y/N)’s breath snagged in her throat, chest cinching tight. Who could have come so deep into these labyrinthine halls? Who had crossed the black lake, breached the hidden house—dear God, who had found him here, and what would they do to her Erik if they laid hands on him?

     The blanket slipped from her shoulders as she spun, instincts hauling her toward the kitchen. She darted across the dining room, the overturned chairs gaping like corpses in the firelight, and pressed herself through the narrow archway into the shadows beyond.

     Her gaze skittered wildly across the dim until it caught on iron: a skillet hanging by the stove. She seized it down, its weight biting into her trembling hands. Her pulse thudded against her ribs, louder even than the echo of the intruder’s call.

     She crouched behind the counter, curling the skillet to her chest, her other hand clamped over her mouth to quiet her breath. Every muscle screamed to flee, to burrow into the dark, but she forced herself still, straining to hear.

     For a long moment there was only silence—then footsteps, heavy and deliberate, moving through the rooms. Not Erik’s silent tread.

     Unfamiliar. Searching.

     Her heart quaked, dread filling every vein. If he stumbled home into this, what would he find? His sanctuary breached—his new wife cornered—or blood on the stones? Her grip tightened, the skillet’s rough rim cutting into her palms. Be brave. For him. The words burned in her mind, steadying her when her heart threatened to give. She thought of Erik—his hands trembling in hers, his vows whispered like miracles—and her fear bent itself into something fierce.

     The shadow of the intruder’s step hit the stone floor, closer, and closer still. She tightened her grip, every muscle coiled, her whole being straining toward the moment to come. Whatever waited in the dark, she swore it would not take him from her. Not Erik. Not today.

Chapter Text

     Nadir extinguished his lantern with a swift pinch of the wick. The flame sputtered once, and then collapsed into darkness, leaving only a thin curl of smoke that twisted upward and vanished into the cold abyss. He crouched to set the lantern carefully on the stones by Erik’s back door. His hand lingered on the door knob longer than it should have, fingers tight, as though bracing himself against what lay beyond. At last, with deliberate patience, he turned it until the latch yielded with a muffled click.

     The door creaked inward. The breath of the house met him at once—warm, fresh, unmistakably lived-in. The air itself felt wrong after the silence of the tunnels. It carried traces of smoke and spice, of fresh wood and candle wax, and with it came the unshakable certainty that Erik was near.

     Nadir slipped inside, every sense straining. His cane rose to the level of his eyes, its polished length held like a shield to sweep aside whatever snare Erik’s hand might have set across the threshold. His body was coiled tight, each muscle alive with tension, each breath forced into quiet, measured pulls—as though even the rhythm of his lungs might betray him.

     The silence pressed closer, heavier, as he advanced into the hall. The house enveloped him with the uneasy hush of a place that had just erupted in violence. Rugs were skewed, papers scattered. Nadir felt it in his bones: a storm had broken here, and Erik was its eye.

     His voice cracked through the silence before he could restrain it, anger laced with dread.

     “Erik!”

     The name rang down the corridor, striking the walls like a challenge. No answer came. Only the lapping of the distant lake shore and the distant pulse of fire in a hearth replied.

     Nadir advanced, silent-footed, his cane whispering through the air in careful arcs, the polished wood tracing invisible wards against whatever unseen snare might lie ahead. To his right, a door gaped open: the Louis-Philippe room. He stilled, shoulders tightening, and let the silence close around him. The house breathed faintly—the distant crackle of hearths, the sigh of air slipping through the house’s rooms—but no footsteps, no voice.

     He slid closer and leaned into the threshold.

     Disorder met his gaze. An overturned chair slumped at an awkward angle near the hearth, like a body abandoned mid-collapse. A porcelain cup had burst across the carpet, its pale shards glimmering in the firelight, dark stains of cold coffee bleeding outward in a bloom on the carpet. A side table leaned askew against the wall. The bedclothes were tangled, sheets half-dragged to the floor, as though someone had thrashed there not in sleep but in torment. Only the fire remained steady, its embers pulsing weakly, like the fading beat of a heart too exhausted to keep rhythm.

     Nadir’s mouth set hard. Indeed, this kind of ruin was all too familiar. He had seen it in the alabaster chambers of Persian palaces, in secret rooms beneath Paris, in every place Erik’s torment had broken their walls. The violence did not leave when the man was gone—it lingered, seared into the air, into the silence, into the memory of the furniture itself. Rage lives here—Erik’s rage. Nadir could almost hear the echoes of it now: the thunder of furniture breaking, the guttural roar of a man at war with himself, the ruinous sound of something too dangerous to be contained.

     Every nerve alert, he pushed deeper into the corridor, each step measured, each breath controlled. His cane stayed high and ready, fingers clamped so tightly around the wood that his knuckles ached. To his left, another door stood open—darker than the rest, the air beyond it colder, heavier. He halted on the threshold, jaw tightening.

     Erik’s bedroom.

     The sight inside struck him. The coffin-bed—Erik’s morbid bed, lacquered black and lined in blood-red satin—lay overturned, its lid wrenched off its hinges and propped at a crooked angle. Blankets—normally folded with obsessive neatness—were thrown in every direction, a tangle of fabric sprawled across the crimson carpet. A pillow had been ripped open, its pale feathers scattered as if from a bird freshly gutted. Candelabras lay toppled, their spines bent, wax smeared, candles snapped into crumbling stumps. Even the sheet music—those pages Erik treated like relics—had been crushed underfoot, their corners torn, ink smudged, grit and soot ground into the paper.

     Nadir’s stomach turned. Erik hadn’t merely returned to his home. He had come to unravel in it.

     Nadir’s breaths came heavier now, though he forced each one into even measure. He tightened his grip on the cane again, and stepped past the door, leaving the wreckage behind and pressing into the dining room.

     More devastation awaited him here as well. The long table had been jolted half-sideways, its cloth dragged with it, bunched and twisted and half-collapsed in a heap. Chairs lay scattered in disordered array, some lay on their sides; struck aside as Erik stormed through. Nadir moved in silence, every instinct braced, walking through the wake of a storm he could not yet see. He forgot about the kitchen.

     The drawing room opened up. A table lay overturned, music pages strewn in great arcs across the carpet, some fluttering faintly in the draft from the fire. A few pages bore shoe prints, others had been ripped clean down the middle. The piano had been shoved out of its place, its gleaming surface smeared and dull. The fire continued on, flames leaping high, shadows writhing across the walls in restless agitation.

     Nadir stopped at the edge of the room, cane lifted, his gaze sweeping the corners. He listened—the hungry crackle of the fire consuming wood, the faint hiss of singed parchment. Beyond that, nothing. A silence too absolute, too intentional. The house felt as though it were holding its breath.

     Erik had returned… only to tear apart the sanctuary he’d built, then. The damage was not random. It was the pattern of a mind splitting under its own weight, too violent to contain. It clung to every surface, to the walls, to the very air—rage made manifest.

     Erik in such a state was perilous—to others and to himself. This was not the dwelling of a man in control. This was the wreckage of someone stripped raw of every restraint, his demons unchained and loosed through the rooms like hunting dogs. Nadir had seen Erik’s tempests before—but after Christine… after Erik’s delusions collapsed and madness took their place… this was darker.

     His jaw set. He braced his cane hard against the floor to steady himself.

     This was no refuge anymore.

     It was a battlefield.

     And Nadir did not yet know where its General was hiding.

     In the kitchen beyond the ruined rooms, beyond the overturned furniture and the smoldering hearths, there whispered a cautious step.

     (Y/N) crouched in the cloak of shadow by the cold kitchen stove, the iron pan a cool, unrelenting weight in her hands. The handle dug into her palm where her grip had locked tight; the pain steadied her rather than deterring her. Every sense strained outward, clinging to sound and shadow.

     The fire in the other room cracked softly. A draft curled along the floor and slipped over her ankles. She focused on the sounds beyond the kitchen: a boot scraping against the carpet in the corridor, slow and deliberate. Another step. Then stillness.

     She held her breath.

     This was no intruder stumbling in ignorance. Whoever walked that hallway moved like someone who knew something – someone – might be hiding in ambush. That was worse than any random stranger; a man like that would not blunder. He would seek.

     If he could read silence, he could find Erik as a hound finds blood.

     Her heart pounded, hard enough to steal the air from her chest. She pressed herself lower, angling her body into the deeper shadow beside the hearth, lifting the pan in a raised, ready arc. The iron caught no light as she felt every ounce of its balance. She needed to use it to her advantage. That was all she knew.

     Courage did not come quickly, but it did come—only when the thought of Erik; fragile in his rages and monstrous in his love. He hardened her fear into something sharp-edged and usable. She swallowed dryly, rising into a more ready crouch. Her hands did not shake.

     Somewhere down the corridor, steps fell gently against the carpet.

     She braced herself.

     A boot heel whispered over the dining room threshold—slow, deliberate—and slid farther into the drawing room. For one breath, relief fluttered through her chest. They hadn’t come straight to the kitchen as they could have.

     The moment passed. Every muscle in her body drew tight.

     She moved—not with panic, not with sound, but with the grim precision of someone who had already practiced terror into readiness. She took one measured step out of the shadows, just far enough to strike when he crossed the door. The pan rose in her hands, iron sweeping upward in a silent arc, her elbow locking to brace the weight. Firelight from the room caught her fingers, turning her bloodless knuckles a stark white against the dark iron.

     She exhaled slowly, a breath shaped into steadiness.

     She did not think of fear. Not of missing her mark. Not of whether he was faster. Not of dying on the dining room floor. Her thoughts fixed on one thing only—Erik.

     Let someone else reach him first? She would sooner kill.

     If she had to bury iron in a skull to keep him safe, she would do it.

     The intruder halted just beyond the arch of the drawing room—a shape cut from shadow, outlined by the flicker of the hearth. For the space of a heartbeat, the world narrowed to that silhouette. The fire, the wreckage, the cold pulse of the tunnels—all of it vanished.

     No more waiting.

     She didn’t blink.

     She struck.

     The iron struck flesh and bone with a hollow, ringing clang that shivered up her arms and cracked through the silence like a bell. The force of it slammed through Nadir’s back before his mind caught up—white-hot pain flaring across his shoulders, knocking the air from his lungs. His knees nearly buckled.

     He lurched forward with a strangled grunt, the room pitching with him. Instinct—not thought—snapped his body around. His cane rose in a sharp defensive arc, vision narrowing to motion and threat.

     Only impressions surfaced at first—a flash of white nightgown, iron lifting for another strike, the coiled posture of someone ready to kill. Smaller than Erik, yes, but the force behind the blow had been anything but. His shoulder throbbed with proof.

     The attacker’s breath came fast and sharp, and didn’t retreat. The pan was already falling again, their footing braced, terror sharpened into intent.

     Nadir reacted. The cane cracked against a temple with a sound he knew too well—the dull thud of wood on bone. They reeled sideways, the pan clattering against their knee as they fought to stay upright.

     His vision steadied.

     Not Erik. Not the silhouette of a skeletal killer in black.

     A woman.

     She stood trembling before him, clothed only in a nightgown, bare legs and arms and throat catching the firelight. Her hair fell loose around her face, wild and unbound. The frying pan dangled from her hands like a knight’s sword suddenly too heavy to lift—but the grip she kept on it was desperate, unyielding. Her eyes—wide, wet, fevered—blazed with equal parts terror and fury.

     Nadir froze. His cane remained half-raised, his breath caught in his chest. A red welt had already bloomed along her temple where his strike had landed. Guilt lanced through him, sharp as any blow.

     He raised one hand slowly, palm outward. “Mademoiselle—”

     Her scream tore loose before he could finish. It was not the scream of a frightened woman, but something dragged raw from the gut—untrained, animal, meant to strike first and think later. She swung again without hesitation. The pan hissed past his sleeve in a wide, clumsy arc, powered by panic and will rather than aim.

     Before he could intercept the pan from her, she bolted—skirt flaring, bare feet slapping against the floor as she sprinted for the hall.

     He lurched after her, voice rough. “Wait! I am not—”

     His words broke against the dark and vanished. She was gone before the sentence had even left his tongue.

     He followed.

     The hallway stretched ahead in dim, breathless silence. There was no pan-wielding woman in sight. Doors stood ajar like gaping mouths, shadows pooling in their frames.. His pulse hammered in his ears as he advanced, cane raised before him like a shield.

     Somewhere ahead—just out of sight—he could almost hear her breathing: shallow, ragged, fast as a hunted animal’s.

     “I am sorry,” he tried, softer now, voice pitched to soothe. “Forgive me. I startled you. I do not mean you harm. Do you need help?” He paused. “I can help you, girl.”

     Silence answered him. She was close. She had to be close. And, she was terrified.

     He moved on, each step measured, the hush pressing at his back like a held breath.

     At last he reached the threshold of Erik’s chamber. He hesitated there, fingers tightening around the cane. A flicker of motion to his right—

     The frying pan flashed out of the shadows of Erik's room.

     He twisted just in time. Cane met iron with a metallic crack, the force jarring up his arm. He felt sparks leap beneath his skin. She came at him again immediately; face contorted with fury—teeth bared, eyes wild, hair stuck to her damp cheek. The pan rose and fell in frantic succession, slamming against his cane, his knuckles, the bone of his forearm. There was no technique in it, only raw, desperate survival. Every strike spoke what her voice could not: she believed she was fighting for her life.

     “Stop!” he shouted, voice fraying under the effort. “Stop—please! You will—enough!”

     She did not stop. She did not hear. Fury had drowned out everything else.

     With a hoarse cry she threw herself forward, using her entire weight. The impact drove him back a step—just enough. She slipped past his guard and tore free, vanishing down the corridor in a blur of white, the hem of her nightgown trailing like smoke around the corner back into the dining room.

     Nadir braced a hand against the wall, breath coming hard, the cane trembling in his grip. His knuckles stung where iron had met bone; the ache in his shoulder throbbed from the first blow she’d landed. None of that struck as deeply as the memory seared into him: her face, twisted in terror—looking at him not as a man, but as a monster come out of darkness.

     Beneath the pain, one thought cut colder than the rest:

     Erik... what have you done to this poor woman?

     She fled through the dining room with wild speed , skirts snapping against chair legs, bare feet slapping against the stone floors. The frying pan still hung from her hand; a weapon she refused to surrender. At the threshold of the drawing room she whirled, seized a chair with both hands, and with a raw, wordless cry hurled it behind her; meant to stumble her pursuer. It crashed to the floor, legs snagging in the carpet, the sound echoing like a blow.

     Nadir did not slow. Each stride sent pain knifing through his shoulder, his breath coming harsh and uneven, but he pushed forward. He hooked the fallen chair aside with his cane and forced his way through, eyes fixed on the wild flicker of white vanishing ahead.

     She reached the front door and wrenched it open so hard it struck the wall with a crack. Cold cavern air rushed into the house in a sharp gust.

     She had only one foot across the threshold when Nadir lunged. His arm locking around her waist, dragging her back.

     She screamed—high, ragged, instinctive. Her body bucked against his hold, every muscle convulsing with terror.

     “Erik!” she cried into the cellar's darkness, her voice splintering on the name. “ERIK!”

     The frying pan came down in a blur as she writhed against him. Iron slammed into his arm and his shoulder—each strike a jolt of pain that rattled bone. She swung without rhythm, without breath, only terror. Nadir held on, teeth clenched, his grip locking around her waist.

     “Please!” he shouted, voice cracking. “Stop this—listen to me!”

     She didn’t. She fought like something cornered in the wild—nails clawing, pan battering him again and again. Her hair lashed across her face, eyes wide and gleaming, mouth open around a scream meant to split stone. The sheer volume of it sent panic through Nadir—not from her blows, but from the knowledge of who must have already heard.

     With a harsh, guttural effort, he heaved her off her feet and forced her down onto the gravel outside the front door. She kicked and clawed, crying Erik’s name with every ragged breath. Nadir seized  her wrists, tore the pan from her grasp, and flung it into the dark, where it landed with a clatter.

     Her back struck the gravel with a bruising thud, the cold earth biting through the thin cotton of her nightgown. Air burst from her lungs; the world shrank to cavern ceiling and fear and the crushing weight above her. She tried to scream again, but the sound died against the thick hand that suddenly clamped over her mouth—hot, calloused, and shaking.

     His breath broke across her face, harsh and uneven. “Quiet! Quiet, woman—God’s sake, be still!”

     She bucked beneath him, nails raking the fabric of his sleeves, seeking flesh. He pinned her harder, heart hammering, dread rising like a tide. Her cries had surely echoed through the cellars; reaching the man whose wrath needed no invitation. It was only a matter of time before he appeared from the shadows.

     He pressed his palm tighter over her mouth. Beneath his hand, he felt everything: the panicked flutter of her breath, the salt of tears streaking over her cheeks, the frantic hammer of her pulse against his grip.

     “I am not him!” he hissed, forcing the words through clenched teeth. “I am not Erik! I am not here to hurt you. Do you understand? Listen!”

     Her mind split in every direction at once. Lie still. Bite him. Scream. Wait. Trust. Don’t trust. The weight of him across her ribs, the iron clamp of his hand, told her one thing clearly—she would lose if she kept struggling. Her body trembled while terror kept her thoughts racing, clawing for any exit.

     “Stop panicking,” he huffed, his voice fraying with effort. “Think. Use your head, child! I am a friend. I can help you—but only if you stay silent. Do you hear me?”

Something in her stilled—not in surrender, but in calculation. Her breath hitched under his palm. Her eyes locked onto his, and in his face she saw not triumph, but strain: sweat along his brow, fear riding his pulse as sharply as hers.

     “If you promise not to scream for him,” he said, voice low and urgent, “I will let you rise.”

     She nodded at once—too fast, too eagerly, her hair falling wild across her face. Her desperation made his suspicion flare. He didn’t trust the gesture. His palm stayed clamped over her mouth even as he shifted his weight off her ribs and pulled her upright.

     Only once she knelt before him, trembling but no longer thrashing, did he lift his hand. Air tore into her lungs in a ragged gasp.

     “What is your name?” he asked.

     Her lips parted—but her mind fractured around the choice. Speak truth. Tell a lie. Call for Erik now, while she still had air. Throw herself at him again and pray she could make him bleed. His question hovered like a sprung trap and she couldn’t see which answer would free her—or doom her.

     Her breath came in shallow bursts. Words tangled behind her teeth. And then instinct overran thought.

     She inhaled—and screamed, hoarse and breaking:

     “ERI—”

     The sound died in her throat as his hand clamped down again, fierce and unyielding across her mouth. In the same motion he hauled her upright, dragging her against him as his cane remained clenched in his other fist. They staggered together, unsteady on the stone, her bare heels scraping painfully as she was lifted. His grip tightened; she would surely dissolve into the dark if he dared loosen it.

     “Enough!” The word cracked like a whip, low and furious in her ear. “Do you want him upon us? Do you want to bring certain death down on both our heads?”

     Her eyes burned, fury and terror warring in them. She glared at him over the cage of his hand, defiance flaring even as her body trembled. He could feel it in her—the outrage like fire in her blood, the refusal to submit. He felt his own anger answer it, raw and ragged at the edges, and for an instant they were bound together in a stalemate, neither yielding, her breath searing hot into his palm while his cane trembled faintly at his side.

     Then her gaze shifted. Not at him—through him. Her wide eyes fixed beyond his shoulder, sharp and unblinking, the fury bleeding into something strangely soft. He felt the change ripple through her frame, a shudder that ran like ice down his own spine. Instinct seized him. He tore her aside, and in the same breath swung his cane up before his eyes—just as the air split with the shriek of a flying wire.

     The hiss of cord cut the air—sharp, predatory. A blur of motion, the glint of wire sliced across Nadir’s vision like lightning. In the space of a heartbeat the Punjab lasso cinched tight; looping head, neck, and arm with merciless precision. Cold steel kissed Nadir’s skin, constricting with deadly promise.

     Reflex was older than thought. His shoulder wrenched, his wrist snapped, and with a violent twist of body and will he tore free before the noose could bite deep. The cord went slack as he flung it aside.

     Nadir planted his boots in the ground, stance wide, every nerve alive. The cane rose before him as a shield, and a line drawn against death. He barred the way, his own body the wall between the trembling woman he kept pulled against his side and the shadow slithering out of the cavern’s black.

     Erik.

     The cellar chilled, as if the grave itself had exhaled. His shirt hung open across a chest twisted by nature’s cruelty; pale flesh stretched too thin over warped muscle and stark ribs. A black cloak clung to one shoulder, its folds hanging loose like a shroud ripped from the dead. His feet, naked and pale, curled against the earth, toes clawing the lake shore like talons gripping soil.

     The mask was worse. White, pitiless, and stark as a skull. The veil that once hid the mouth was torn away; ragged strips fluttering with his heaving breath. From the black sockets blazed his eyes—yellow, molten, inhuman. Behind him the black waters of his lake caught his reflection only in broken shards, as though even the water could not hold his shape whole.

     (Y/N) felt Nadir’s arm tighten like a shackle around her ribs, the hard wall of his body pressed close. Every instinct screamed to break free, to run away—no, to run to Erik. Her breath tore sharp in her chest at the sight of him: savage and wrathful; his bare feet rooted in the gravel, his ribs rising like a jolting cage beneath his open shirt, his yellow eyes blazing through the skull-white mask. Terror knifed through her, but so did a wild, trembling exhilaration. He had come. He would save her.

     Nadir felt her tremor pulse through his sleeve. Dread clamped in his gut, heavier than iron. Erik had come not as a phantom, nor as the broken genius who once sought his company, but as wrath incarnate. Nadir knew with cold certainty that now Erik would kill him. For touching this girl. For standing between them. The cane in his grip suddenly felt laughably frail, a strip of wood against the furnace of a hell bound monster.

     And Erik—Erik saw nothing but betrayal.

     The Daroga’s arm was around her, holding her as though she were his to shield. Her eyes were wide, wet, and terrified—and she had screamed Erik’s name. His name. That was all the proof his rage required: she was afraid, and she was not in Erik's arms.

     His ravaged chest heaved, each breath a ragged drag that sent the torn veil fluttering against his mouth. In his skeletal hands the lasso quivered—not inert steel wire, but something half-alive, coiled with intent. The lamplight skated along the wire, turning it sinuous, serpentine.

     With a motion as invisible as breath, he recalled it. The cord slithered up from the ground, obedient as a summoned viper, winding itself back into his grip. It tightened between his fingers with the surety of a beast returning to its master, awaiting only the order to strike.

     “SHE’S MINE!” Erik roared.

     The cellar recoiled with the sound, stone and shadow bristling as the three of them held there: the woman trying to wriggle away, the guardian braced for death, and the phantom, wrath-bound, wielding his weapon as though the devil himself had placed it in his grasp.

     Nadir did not move.

     His boots ground into the gravel, spine locked. His heart thundered in his ribs, but his will held. The man advancing was no phantom from whispered opera tales, no haunted friend from their shared past. He was death given form—and Nadir would meet him as such.

     Erik’s chest swelled, cloak flaring. Then he moved—no warning, no cry—just a blur of pale limbs and black fabric slinging death at Nadir.

     Nadir moved.

     He seized (Y/N) and heaved her sideways with a brutal shove, sending her stumbling back through the threshold into the shadows of the house. “Run!” he barked, the word ripping from his throat.

     Then Erik was upon them.

     The lasso sang through the air, the loop flashing toward Nadir’s throat. He dropped, ancient instincts snapped into place. The cane came up in a vicious arc. Wood met bone with a crack, and Erik’s wrist jerked, the wire clipping the stone step with a spark instead of closing around Nadir’s throat.

     A sound tore from Erik—not quite human. A hiss, wet and sharp, born of pain, outrage, and something more primal. Through the shredded veil, teeth glinted in a snarl. He came on again, relentless, cloak and limbs sweeping around Nadir like the wings of some great vulture descending to feed.

     The cane struck again, the ferrule slamming into Erik’s ribs. On any other man, it would have driven breath from lungs and driven him into retreat. Erik only lurched a fraction; his momentum fueled by inhuman rage. His bony hand shot out, tendons standing like cables beneath bloodless skin, claws closing around the cane in a snarl of fingers.

     Nadir twisted away before the grip could anchor. His body moved with remembered precision—pivot, pull, redirect. The cane came free, spinning with him in a clean defensive arc. He did not hesitate. He struck.

     The blow landed against the temple—sharp, controlled, deliberate. Porcelain rang under the impact, the sound brittle as ice cracking on stone.

     Erik reeled—but only for the space of a breath.

     Nadir pressed the brief opening. He stepped in, shoulders fluid, and brought the cane across again, this time with the iron ferrule aimed with precision. The strike connected across the eyes of the mask with brutal finality.

     The sound was unmistakable—shattering porcelain echoing like breaking bone. White fragments sprayed across the gravel, skittering like teeth. The mask split and fell away in ruined pieces, exposing the face beneath.

     Where a nose should have been was nothing—only a cavernous pit of bone and shadow, obscene in its exposure. The cleft of his upper lip split his snarl in two, carving upward from his twisted mouth into that hollow void. His teeth were divided by it, the upper row broken by that same fissure, leaving a black gap in the white.

     The skin of his face clung too tightly, as though stretched over the wrong skull. Thin, scarred, and mottled, it looked stolen rather than born of him, pulled taut in the wrong places, shrunken in others. In the shifting firelight it appeared patchwork: pallid here, darkened there, shining where fresh blood and sweat slicked the surface; the grotesque tapestry of a man fashioned by pain.

     His eyes were the only things unmistakably alive. They blazed from deep sockets sunken into the skull, so recessed they seemed lanterns set in the stale dark of a tomb. Yellow, feral, alight with a predator’s promise—they held a vitality that the rest of him rejected.

     Above them, heavy brows—once black, now threaded with silver—knotted into a single line of wrath. His hair, usually tamed into severe order, hung wild now. Graying strands, damp with sweat, clung to his forehead and temples like tarnished threads. They framed the hollow cheeks, the cleft-torn mouth, and the skeletal void where his nose should have stood.

     He did not look like a man. He looked like something the grave spat back out—half-rotted, animated by fury, refused even by death; the world had tried to bury him. It had failed.

     The moment shattered in the span of a breath.

     Erik was movement and violence in the same breath.

     The lasso snapped like lightning reborn. Before Nadir could reclaim his stance, the wire slashed through the air and coiled around the cane mid-swing. The loop constricted with a hiss, biting deep into the polished wood. A savage yank—too fast, too strong—and the cane wrenched free. Pain tore up Nadir’s arm as the shock of it jolted through tendon and bone. The weapon spun out of reach, clattering against stone.

     He had no time to retrieve it.

     Erik was already on him.

     Bare feet struck the ground, his breath a ragged snarl. The wire danced in his skeletal hands, alive, flashing like a striking serpent. Whatever restraint existed before the mask broke was gone—there was only the demon.

     Nadir met him with fists—not courage, but reflex. He braced, feet digging into gravel, shoulders set, his heart a drum of dread and stubborn resolve. Instinct roared for a weapon, but there was none. He’d faced assassins in palaces and jungles, but never like this—never a man who no longer cared if he died in the act of killing.

     The lasso flicked, not to strangle this time but to blind, to maim. Nadir twisted clear, barely, feeling the sting of metal whisper past his cheek. Erik followed with his whole body, crashing into him like a storm given bone. Their shoulders collided. Nadir’s heel skidded in the gravel, and Erik’s hands found fabric and tender flesh with terrifying surety.

     Erik drove Nadir backward, the two men locked chest to chest, limbs tangling, fists and elbows striking wherever they could land. Nadir smashed his forearm up beneath Erik’s jaw; Erik answered with a knee aimed at the gut. Teeth flashed - the stench of sweat and iron and blood hit Nadir’s nose, and his mind screamed that this was surely the end. Suddenly, Erik tore Nadir's balance from him.

     They went down hard.

     Gravel tore at Nadir’s back as Erik bore him to the ground, fingers clawing for his throat. Nadir slammed an elbow into Erik’s exposed ribs, felt the jolt of bone, heard a roar that didn’t sound human. The wire, still coiled around Erik’s arm, snapped and whined with each violent motion.

     Through the blood-heat of it, Erik’s screams erupted:

     “He touched her—he dared put hands on her—he will not leave with breath—he will not take her—she called my name—SHE IS MINE—“

     He hammered a fist toward Nadir’s skull. Nadir caught his wrist with both hands, tendons straining hard with the effort. The strength behind Erik’s arm was impossible.

     (Y/N) hovered one breath inside the doorway, torn between running to retrieve a weapon and freezing where she stood. Her heart begged to cry out to Erik, to call him back from the edge—but terror held her silent.

     Erik yanked his wrist from Nadir’s hold and lunged again, trying to drive his full weight down and crush the wind from him. Nadir twisted, slamming a fist into Erik’s jaw—but Erik barely flinched. His hands locked on Nadir’s coat, dragging him up half off the ground only to slam him down again in a spray of gravel.

     The world narrowed to breath, blood, wire, and striking bone.

     And neither man, in that moment, cared if he died—so long as he ended the other first.

     (Y/N)’s pulse screamed at her to flee—to hide, to cry out, to do anything but move nearer—but she forced herself forward, barefoot on the cold stone. The fight was a tangle of limbs and breath and gravel, too fast and brutal to follow cleanly. Erik and Nadir were locked in a grapple that looked less and less like combat and more like a death struggle.

     Her eyes darted for a weapon.

     The pan was too far—lost somewhere in the dark near the steps. But there—the cane. It lay on the shore where it had fallen, only a few feet from the thrashing bodies.

     She dashed to it and snatched it up.

     The polished wood was warm where Nadir’s hands had gripped it, slick with dirt and bright blood. She held it awkwardly, not like a staff but like a cudgel, the weighted ferrule angled down. She hovered at the edge of the brawl, breath ragged, eyes flicking between them—waiting, watching. Ready to strike Nadir if he gained the upper hand, ready to defend Erik if he faltered.

     And then Nadir landed a savage blow.

     A brutal, upward strike—more instinct than form—drove his knuckles into the exposed ruin of Erik’s face. The impact cracked against bone with a wet crunch.

     Erik reeled.

     A snarl tore from him—not human: wounded, enraged and startled all at once. Blood streamed from the ragged cavity where his nose should have been, streaking his upper lip and teeth, spattering Nadir’s sleeve.

     For the first time, Erik hesitated.

     It was only a flicker—barely longer than a heartbeat—but Nadir took it. He twisted, using the moment of slack in Erik’s weight to roll free and heave him sideways, breaking their lock.

     (Y/N) surged forward.

     Nadir moved faster.

     He saw her in the same instant he tore himself from Erik’s grasp. Her nightgown, her wild eyes, the cane clutched in her hands—too close, too loyal to the thing trying to kill him. He lunged for her, not with cruelty, but with the cold precision of a man cornered.

     Before she could swing, his arms closed around her and wrenched her off balance. The cane flew from her grasp, clattering across the gravel. He dragged her down with him as he fell back, using the weight of his body to pin her between himself and the ground.

     Her gasp was choked fury and shock. She thrashed under him, nails digging into his coat, trying to twist free—but his grip was iron. He didn’t bother to restrain her gently. He hauled her upright just enough to bring her fully between them.

     A shield. A hostage. A final barrier.

     Erik froze.

     Blood dripped from his face in slow, vivid lines, his chest heaving. His yellow eyes burned through the firelight, fixed on the sight of her caught in Nadir’s arms—on Nadir’s hand braced against her neck, holding her firm.

     Everything in him shuddered like an animal forced to a halt mid-charge.

     Nadir’s breath came in harsh gasps, his voice low and jagged with warning. “Enough, Erik! Come at me again, and you will strike her first!”

     Her pulse hammered against Nadir’s grip.

     She made a sound—small, broken, barely more than breath—but it cracked through the air like a fault line giving way.

     Erik jolted.

     The noise hit him harder than any blow Nadir had landed. His whole body flinched as though the sound itself had entered his flesh. He took a step forward without meaning to—drawn, driven—but stopped just as suddenly, his breath tearing at his chest.

     The lasso quivered in his grasp.

     His hands shook so violently the wire chimed against itself. His eyes flicked from her face—white, wet, trembling—to Nadir’s hand clamped around her neck, then to his own palms, slick and red and useless.

     Nadir didn’t loosen his hold. His voice came low, steady, unrelenting.

     “If you love her, control yourself. End this. Or you will lose her here and now.”

     The words sank into Erik like hooks.

     Something in him recoiled. His spine shuddered; his shoulders pulled inward, as if his own skin had turned against him. His breath came ragged, wet, almost wheezing. For a moment neither man moved—only the wire did, trembling like a live thing caught in the grip of a dying one.

     Then Erik let go.

     The lasso slipped from his fingers and fell, metal kissing stone with a sharp, final clatter. His hands curled back to his chest—claw-like, bloodied, desperate. The ruin of his mouth twitched, twisting around a sound that couldn’t decide whether it was rage or grief.

     It might have been a snarl.

     It might have been a sob.

     Either way, the fight bled out of him—not surrendered, but strangled by something older and deeper than fury.

     For the first time since the mask shattered, he looked less like a furious revenant and more like a man dragged back into his own skin against his will. Erik swayed where he stood, shoulders heaving; his hair had fallen loose and hung in damp strands across his brow. Blood darkened his mouth and the edge of his shirt, and each breath came as if it hurt. His yellow eyes, fierce and molten a moment before, were fixed now not on Nadir but on (Y/N).

     Nadir eased her behind him with a careful, practiced motion, turning so that his body made a literal barrier between her and the phantom. He kept his voice low — not pleading, not cruel, but iron beneath silk. “Choose, Erik,” he said, every syllable measured. “You can answer with violence, and you will destroy her. Or you can choose peace, and perhaps keep her.”

     (Y/N) twisted against Nadir’s hold before she even realized she was doing it.

     His hand was locked across her collarbone; braced at her shoulder and the side of her neck—not choking, but firm, immovable. It didn’t matter. Panic, need, and something far more primal surged up and over reason.

     She had to reach him.

     Her fingers clawed at Nadir’s sleeve, nails scraping wool, her breath coming in fast, uneven bursts. Erik stood just beyond —bleeding, shaking, unmasked—and every heartbeat that separated her from him felt wrong, felt dangerous, felt like abandonment.

     “Let me go!” she rasped, her voice cracking around the words. She strained again, trying to slip out from under his grip, but Nadir only tightened his hold, guiding her another half-step behind him as if she were delirious or about to fling herself into fire.

     Erik’s gaze never left her.

     She could feel it in him even at this distance: the tremor in his hands, the way his shoulders bunched as if ready to spring or crumble, the way every muscle seemed to wait for her voice—her touch—to decide what came next.

     “Stupid man—” she hissed, voice shaking, “let me go to him—please—”

     Nadir didn’t release her. His stance remained iron, his body a barrier between them.

     In the space of that refusal, something in Erik’s expression cracked—just slightly, just enough to show how thin the line was between surrender and renewed fury.

     Perhaps he needed to reconsider.

     “You don’t know what you’re asking.” Nadir said quietly, the words strained but controlled. His arm tightened around her without thought—habit, caution, survival. He had seen how her screams and terror had stoked Erik’s madness; to release her now might be the spark that lit it again.

     Yet she pressed on, her grip tightening with unexpected force, not to only fight him but to plead. He glanced down at her face and for a moment he saw not a victim but someone already tethered by her own will.

     He let her go.

     His hand fell away from her, leaving his palm cold and useless in the air. She stumbled forward first, barely steady, and then gathered speed—drawn to Erik with a determination that bordered on desperation.

     Erik flinched. For a heartbeat he recoiled as though expecting another strike, another blow, another betrayal. When her hands reached him—trembling, reverent, sure—he went utterly still. His chest hitched once, like breath had turned to glass inside him.

     Nadir remained where he was, eyes tracking every movement with the grim awareness of a man who had witnessed such moments crumble before.

     She reached Erik fully and folded her arms around him tenderly. Her cheek pressed to the sharp rise of his ribs; her tears vanished into the blood and dirt on his shirt. For a heartbeat he stood inhumanly rigid, fingers lifted behind her back like talons uncertain where to strike.

     His body shook—not with rage now, but with the violent effort of containing something larger, something older. The fight bled out of him in stuttering waves, and he collapsed into her hold as though his bones could no longer remember their shape. His arms clamped around her without warning, crushing her against him with a desperate strength, his bloodied face burrowing into her hair.

     Nadir watched in silence.

     His throat tightened around a memory he had not summoned, but which came anyway: Christine’s slender hands trying not to shake as she soothed the same monster, whispering comfort she did not believe, wearing devotion like armor and praying it bought her time. Erik had mistaken that fear for love too.

     The cycle had not broken. It had only found a new stage and a new name.

     Nadir, once again, stood witness to a storm that love could not tame—only delay.

     Erik trembled inside her embrace as the rawness of being unmasked gnawed at him—his skin crawling under the knowledge that every flaw, every horror of his face was etched into her sight forever. Rage still boiled, hot and choking, but it had lost its target. In its place pressed something heavier, more suffocating: fear. Fear that she would now recoil. Fear that the ruin beneath the mask would now be indelible in her memory, an image she could never unsee, and image she would hold against him.

     And yet—

     Her arms held him. They reached for him - they held him.

     It was unbearable and intoxicating at once. Shame roared too; that she touched him only from pity, she was forced into this, she could never love a corpse. He wanted to wrench free, to snarl at her to look away, to scream his fury into the dark. But her cheek pressed tighter against his breast, and the tremor of her sob vibrated through his skin—and his rage faltered. Something cracked open, raw and wet, leaving him unguarded.

     He clutched her as though drowning, skeletal fingers knotting into her nightgown until the fabric strained. His breath broke in shuddering gasps, half-growl, half-sob, spilling hot into her hair. Words clawed at his throat—begging her not to leave, to never look away, to promise she was his—but nothing emerged but hoarse, wordless sounds.

     Inside him, thought shattered like glass underfoot, jagged fragments cutting from every side:

     She has seen me—seen all of me. She will run. She must run.
     Her arms still cling to me. She is still here. She is still holding me.
     The Daroga. He has poisoned her against me. He will steal her away from me.
     Dooset daram. She said it. She pressed it into my horrid skin. She must love me. She must.

     Her sobs shook against his shoulder.

     She is crying. She weeps because of me. Because I am what I am.

     He didn’t speak at first—he couldn’t. He only clutched her tighter, arms trembling, as though sheer force might fuse her to him, make her a shield against the world—and against himself. His breath hitched against her hair before he finally raised his head. His yellow eyes, wet and blazing in the firelight, fixed on Nadir with murderous clarity. His ruined mouth twisted into a snarl that couldn’t decide if it was rage or despair.

     “This is your doing,” he rasped, voice raw and serrated. “You put your hands on her—you set her against me! You think to stand between us, Daroga—to take her away as you will take everything—!”

     The words shredded themselves into a guttural sound, half-growl, half-broken sob. His cleft lip curled back, teeth bared. He held her as if daring Nadir to try and pry her away.

     Nadir didn’t so much as blink. He let the accusation crash against him without yielding an inch, his cane still easy in one hand, his gaze level and unreadable.

     “You’ve done enough for one night,” he said, his tone cold but controlled. “She is still standing here despite it. If you want her to remain at your side, you’ll stop raving and get inside. I haven’t taken anything from you.”

     Erik’s eyes darkened, fury bristling anew—but Nadir’s next words dropped like iron between them.

     “Inside, Erik. Now. You’re bleeding, and you stink of it. If you don’t want her fear of you to worsen, put your house and yourself in order.”

     Erik was the first to look away.

     His breath tore in and out of him, ragged and uneven. He drew her against his chest again— the contact alone kept him from falling. Then, with a jerking motion, he turned toward the house. Each step dragged, bare feet scraping against stone, his cloak hanging in ripples down his back.

     Nadir came after them, silent and grim. The fight wasn’t finished—he could feel it still coiled in the air—but for now, Erik was subdued.

     Inside the doorway, Erik’s stride faltered. The house seemed to press against him, as though its walls remembered his rage and leaned in to reclaim it. Nadir’s eye caught the fresh streak of red glistening at the corner of Erik’s mouth. Erik wiped it with the back of his hand, but the smear only stood out brighter against his ashen skin.

     “Get him cleaned up,” Nadir said quietly to (Y/N). His voice held no softness, but neither was it cruel. It simply allowed no room for refusal. “He’s bleeding again.”

     Her gaze snapped to Erik’s face. When she saw the blood trailing down his chin, worry knit itself across her features. She moved closer to his side, her hands gentle but firm as she steered him toward the armchair by the fire.

     “Erik—sit, please—” Her voice trembled, breath catching on his name. He obeyed only because she guided him, sinking into the chair with a stiffness that spoke of exhaustion and pain. Firelight flickered over the ruined planes of his face, casting shadows that deepened the hollows and scars there. He did not – could not – meet her gaze.

     She rose at once and turned, nightgown brushing her knees, her footsteps swift as she disappeared down the hall in search of water and cloth.

     The silence she left behind was heavy as stone. Erik sagged into the chair, one shaking hand dragging across his face as though he could hide in his own grasp. His breath rattled, uneven, the posture of a man deeply defeated, and unwilling to admit it.

     Nadir crossed the room and lowered himself carefully onto the sofa opposite, his cane balanced across his knee. The motion was measured, deliberate, not deference but necessity—his bruised back protesting every inch. He forced the ache from his features and settled into stillness, unwilling to give Erik the satisfaction of seeing how much Nadir had really hurt. Across the gulf of the fire-lit room, the two men regarded one another, bound by years of memory, by fresh resentment, and by the unspoken weight of everything left between them.

     “You’ve chosen well,” Nadir said at last, his voice even, though steel glinted faintly beneath the calm. “The girl you found has a strong arm. My shoulder will remind me of it for days.” He gave a disarming chuckle. “Where on earth did you find her?”

     Erik’s scowl deepened, yellow eyes narrowing. His ruined mouth twisted, lips pulling to expose teeth in a grim flash. He said nothing; only let the fire paint his form in shadow.

     Nadir let it stretch, taut as wire. The silence itself became a weapon, a mirror forcing Erik to sit with the ruin of his rage. Then, with a faint hum, as though dismissing the tension outright, Nadir reached into his coat. From within he drew a small pipe, holding it with a calmness so precise it became its own act of defiance. He packed the bowl with practiced motions, thumb pressing the tobacco neat, each step measured, deliberate.

     The ritual steadied his breath—and forced Erik to sit opposite it, wordless and seething, while Nadir’s composure turned the room’s silence against him.

     He struck a match, the flare biting through the low light, and bent it to the bowl until the tobacco caught. The faint red glow pulsed once, then steadied. A plume of smoke lifted upward in a lazy curl, fragrant and sweet, drifting between them.

     Nadir leaned back into the sofa; spine angled but not slouched, and let the smoke slip slowly through his nose. Each motion was deliberate, almost ceremonial, as if patience itself were his weapon. His gaze never shifted from Erik.

     At last he extended the pipe across the gulf of air, his hand poised, steady. The gesture bore two faces: a civility that might have passed as kindness, and a provocation cloaked in courtesy.

     “Smoke?” His voice was dry, sharpened on the edge of challenge.

     Erik’s hands tightened on the chair arms, bruised knuckles pale and splotched in the fire’s glow. He sat rigid, shoulders coiled, his bloody fingers braced against carved wood. His yellow gaze burned darkly back at Nadir, unblinking, hard. The flames snapped in the grate, scattering restless shadows across the walls as the loathing in him thickened the room; a storm front pressing close.

     Nadir held the pipe a heartbeat longer, letting the silence stretch taut, before he shrugged faintly and drew it back. He inhaled again, filling the space with another sweet coil of smoke, and then exhaled with careful slowness, his eyes hooded, steady, cutting.

     “So be it,” he murmured. “I will smoke for both of us.”

     The words sank into the silence, absorbed by the crackle of the fire. The only sound that followed was Erik’s jagged breathing, low and uneven—caught between the leash of restraint and the growl of violence still prowling in his chest.

     Nadir let the pipe rest between his fingers, the ember pulsing with each unhurried draw. The sweet, earthy scent of tobacco drifted into the air, curling upward toward the beams, softening the room even as the silence hardened between them. Erik’s gaze did not waver—a steady, searing flame of yellow fixed on him, unblinking. Nadir met it with calm indifference, letting the storm gather and break against his stillness.

     At length, he spoke. His tone was smooth, conversational almost, but beneath it ran an edge of tempered steel.

     “Where did you find her?”

     The words landed between them like a stone dropped into still water, rippling through the silence.

     Erik’s jaw worked, but no sound emerged. His skeletal hands tightened on the chair’s arms until the tendons ridged stark beneath his waxen skin. The valleys of his throat shifted with a swallowed breath. His eyes glittered with warning, but the silence was louder than any denial.

     Nadir exhaled another slow plume of smoke, eyes narrowed as he watched the vapor twist and vanish in the firelight. “A girl like that does not wander willingly into your house,” he said, voice quieter now, more dangerous for its restraint. “She is not Christine. She is not some trembling soprano lured by a magic voice behind the walls.” His head tilted, the faintest mockery in the gesture. “So tell me—did you drag her here? I hope for your sake she was not armed with a frying pan.”

     Erik flinched as if stabbed, his ruined mouth twisting into a contortion of rage. His chest rose sharply, breath scraping raw in his throat, and his lips peeled back to bare his teeth. A guttural sound built at the back of his mouth—snarl or sob, it was hard to tell—but still no words came.

     Nadir did not relent. He leaned forward, pipe poised in his hand, his voice low and insistent, each word aimed like a blow to strip away Erik’s silence.

     “Her name, Erik? You must know it. You call her yours, you clutch her love to you as if it were armor against the world—but do you even know who she is, beyond what you need her to be?”

     That stung. Erik surged out of the chair; trembling hands gripping the arms so hard the wood creaked. His voice tore free at last, ragged and venomous: “She is mine! That is all that matters. Mine to keep. Mine to protect. Mine to love as no one else will ever dare!”

     The outburst cracked through the room, reverberating off stone and wood. The fire leapt in the grate as though struck by the force of his fury. Nadir did not so much as blink. He leaned forward, pipe balanced delicately between two fingers, his gaze fixed and cutting.

     “Yours to break, you mean,” he replied evenly, his voice like a blade sheathed in calm. “As you have already broken her, I am sure.”

     Erik recoiled as though struck across the face, his ruined mouth parting in a soundless snarl. His chest heaved, fury trembling on the cusp of collapse into something darker—shame, or despair. His eyes flicked suddenly toward the doorway, wide and wild at the faint sound of footsteps approaching.

     Nadir leaned back, smoke wreathing about his face in slow, deliberate coils, his expression grim and unyielding. The door creaked softly, and (Y/N)’s steps carried across the threshold. The basin in her arms sloshed, droplets striking the stone with faint, rhythmic pats. She halted just within the firelight, gaze shifting between them—the languid silhouette of Nadir, pipe glowing faintly in his hand, and Erik’s trembling, blood-streaked figure hunched low in his chair.

     The silence thickened, made heavier by the reek of tobacco and the iron tang of Erik’s sweat and blood. Erik sat bristling, breath ragged, yellow eyes still blazing with animal fury, but beneath it all his posture sagged with exhaustion. Nadir remained composed, smoke curling from his lips, the calm precision of his stillness a provocation in itself.

     (Y/N) lingered at the threshold, the basin heavy in her arms, her heart thudding with the echoes of the words she had only half-heard. Her eyes found Nadir first.

     “What just happened?” she asked; her voice sharp with suspicion.

     Nadir met her gaze with a cool, unreadable calm. The smoke curled upward from his pipe, veiling his expression, but the ghost of bitter knowledge lingered in his eyes. He offered no quick answer, no excuse. His silence carried weight, as if what had passed between them could not be spoken before her.

     Her lips pressed into a hard line.

     Then she turned away, firmly, decisively. Her whole focus narrowed to Erik.

     He looked so raw in the firelight, so undone: blood smeared at his chin, hair wild and falling across the ruin of his face, yellow eyes still fever-bright from the storm. The sight twisted something deep in her chest. She crossed the room swiftly, setting the basin down with a muted clatter, water lapping against its rim.

     “Erik,” she murmured, crouching beside him, her hands already reaching as if touch alone could knit him back together.

     Her hand reached for his cheek, gentle, deliberate. Erik flinched as if her touch were fire. He jerked his head aside, shoulder rising defensively, his skeletal hands curling into fists on the chair’s arms. His breath rasped through his teeth, and the look he shot her—wild, anguished—was half warning, half plea.

     “Don’t,” he hissed, voice hoarse. “Don’t look at me. Don’t touch—” His words broke on a ragged exhale, teeth bared in self-disgust.

     She recoiled only a fraction, her hand falling, but her gaze remained steady, torn between hurt and compassion. The basin’s water rippled faintly, disturbed by her sudden movements.

     From across the fire, Nadir’s voice cut in, iron beneath its calm.

      "Enough.”

     Erik’s head snapped toward him, eyes blazing.

     “You sit there, soaked in blood and sweat, driving away the only hand that bothers to reach for you,” Nadir said, his tone low and sharp, like a blade drawn under cloth. “You whine of betrayal, of the world’s cruelty, but when she comes back—when she comes back despite every reason to flee—you recoil.” He leaned forward slightly, pipe smoke curling in the firelight. “Is that how you mean to keep her? By snarling her away until she is too weary to try again?”

     Erik’s trembling grew worse, fury and shame warring behind his eyes. Erik’s lips peeled back, and the words burst from him in Persian, jagged and venomous, each syllable spat like a curse. His voice rasped and cracked, but the intent cut sharp: a string of accusations, of hatred and contempt, words that filled the fiery air with violence older than the moment itself.

     (Y/N) startled at the sudden torrent, the unfamiliar syllables dark and furious in his mouth. But her eyes darted immediately to Nadir, catching the faint twitch at the corners of his expression, the subtle tightening of his jaw.

     “Enough!” she said sharply, her voice firm, French cutting through the Persian storm. Her stare fixed on Nadir, a warning clear in its heat: Do not push him further.

     Nadir’s mouth twitched faintly around the stem of the pipe—amusement, perhaps, or weary acknowledgment. He inclined his head by a fraction, letting the smoke drift upward in slow surrender.

     She turned back to him, her face softened but her tone firm; steady as stone.

     “Give me your hands.”

     For a moment, Erik only stared at her, yellow eyes wary, the cords of his neck pulled tight. His ruined mouth twitched, caught between refusal and desperation. But when she extended her palms in quiet insistence, he yielded. Tentatively, almost like a child, he let his hands fall into hers.

     The basin sloshed as she guided them into the warm water. The surface rippled around the bony shapes of his fingers, pale and torn, red-streaked from blood both dried and fresh. She soaked them slowly, letting the heat seep into the bruised skin, the cuts and sores that lined them. His hands were trembling—partly from pain, partly from the storm still caged inside him—but she held them steady in her grasp.

     With a cloth, she began to wash them, her movements deliberate. The water clouded faintly pink as she worked, rinsing away dirt and blood. He flinched at the first touch, a sharp hiss pulled through his teeth, but he did not pull away.

     Her thumb smoothed carefully across the back of one hand, pausing at a ridge of bone where the skin had split.

      “There,” she murmured, more to herself than to him. Her voice was quiet, grounding, but there was an edge beneath it too—a warning that his violence could go no further tonight.

     He bowed his head, watching the water ripple around their joined hands. The torn veil of his breath brushed against her hair, shallow and uneven, caught between shame and the strange, unbearable relief of being tended to. Behind her, Nadir’s pipe ember pulsed once in the dim.

     In her mind, one truth beat steady as a drum: Erik would protect her if he had to. He would stand against anyone, even this man who smoked so calmly across the room. And if Nadir tested the limits of Erik’s patience again tonight, she knew which side she would stand on.

     When at last she lifted the damp cloth to his face, her heart lurched at how close she must come. She dabbed gently at the smear of blood along his chin, then traced upward, hesitant, toward his cheek. Firelight carved every harsh contour: skin stretched thin as parchment over bone, the cruel hollow of the cleft that split his mouth. When she dared edge nearer to the void where his nose should have been, Erik gave a guttural, strangled sound and snapped forward. His hands closed around her wrists in a bruising grip.

     Her breath caught sharp. For an instant she thought he meant to strike—but then she saw it, blazing clear: not anger, but raw terror. The blind, instinctive recoil of a man defending the one place no hand could ever be allowed to touch.

     She hummed softly—an understanding sound, though her pulse thrashed against her throat. “Ah… I see,” she murmured, her voice gentling as if speaking to a wounded animal. Slowly, deliberately, she uncurled her fingers until they brushed his. Her hands folded over his wrists, not resisting, not pushing—only steadying.

     His gaze flicked from her face to Nadir’s silhouette through the veil of pipe smoke, suspicion and shame sparking equal fire in his eyes. His lips twisted, his chest heaved—but her touch did not waver. She held steady, patient as stone, until the tremor in his grip faltered. At last, with a shudder like a cord snapping, he let her wrists slip free.

     She did not press closer. Instead, she reached for a clean rag, folded it with care, and set it in his hand. “Here,” she said softly, without judgment. “For you. Do it yourself.”

     For a long moment he stared, unblinking, as if testing her resolve. Then, turning his ruined face aside, he pressed the cloth to his cheek with trembling fingers. His pride would not permit her to cross that line again—but he accepted the compromise.

     She rose, smoothing her skirts with measured composure. “I’ll fetch medicine… and more cloths. And,” she added with dry practicality, “I’ll put on a robe. I’ve been indecent long enough.”

     It was excuse enough. She needed air, distance, the chance to steady her heart away from the suffocating weight of the room—the smoke curling lazily from Nadir’s pipe, and Erik’s molten glare fixed on every movement of the Daroga’s hands.

     She turned toward the door, her face calm though her chest still ached with the echo of his grip. For now, the pretense of care was her escape. She slipped from the drawing room, leaving them in silence broken only by the restless crackle of the fire and the faint drip of water into the waiting basin.

     The fire cracked and shifted, a small flare of sparks spiraling up the chimney before fading into ash. Smoke from Nadir’s pipe drifted lazily into the rafters, the ember at its heart dimming with each unhurried draw. Across from him, Erik sat hunched low in the chair, the cloth pressed hard against the hollow ruin of his face. The fabric darkened slowly where it met the raw, skeletal pit of his nose, seeping red in uneven threads. His yellow eyes, sunk deep in shadow, never wavered from Nadir—burning, watchful, a predator’s glare even as weariness pulled his narrow shoulders into a bow.

     Nadir let the silence settle between them, heavy as an unsheathed blade balanced on the edge of his palm. His instincts itched to break it—to drive words like wedges into Erik’s defenses, to prod at the cracks while the mask lay shattered and his pride lay bleeding. But the sight before him was not merely broken pride. Erik had been stripped to something rawer, something skeletal, with nothing left to hide behind. To strike at him now would be to corner a wounded beast. The girl was gone—the only tether holding him to the ground. Pressing further, here and now, will send him howling back into the storm.

     So Nadir held his tongue. He reset the stem of the pipe between his teeth and drew in deeply, his chest expanding with deliberate calm. Smoke trickled out through his nose in a languid stream, curling into the fiery air. Its sweet, earthy tang mingled with the copper scent of Erik’s blood and the musk of sweat, and the room smelled of conflict itself—bitter, human, inevitable.

     At length, he rose stiffly from the sofa, cane clinking softly against the rug as he steadied himself. His body ached from the fight—bruises along his ribs, muscles still quivering from the struggle—and yet he masked it as best he could.

     His voice, when it came, was even—almost casual, the tone of a host inquiring after a guest.

     “Shall I bring you anything from the kitchen?” A faint brush of his fingers cleared a fleck of tobacco from his sleeve, his eyes never straying from Erik. “Water? A glass of alcohol? You look as though you could use it. I’ll be making coffee for myself regardless.”

     Erik gave no reply. His gaze, yellow and unblinking, fixed on Nadir with the intensity of a predator holding its ground. The only movement was in his hands: the bloodied rag clenched tighter, knuckles paling until the bones showed stark. His ruined lips pressed into a rigid line, silence barbed with loathing.

     Nadir lingered for a moment, the pipe balanced loosely between his fingers. Then he gave a small, sardonic hum, a sound as inevitable as it was dismissive—exactly the reaction he had expected. He turned toward the door, shoulders calm, steps deliberate, leaving Erik hunched in the chair by the fire, the cloth darkening steadily in his grip.

     The firelight threw long shadows that cut Erik into sharp planes and hollows, a broken gargoyle crouched in a storm of his own making. The flames picked out the sweat on his temple, the tremor in his jaw, the streak of blood that had escaped the rag to trail down his chin.

     The doorway stirred. (Y/N) slipped softly inside, bottles cradled to her chest, the swish of her robe whispering across the floorboards. Her tread was quiet, cautious—not stealth but reverence. The air shifted with her presence; even the fire seemed to hush, waiting. She set the bottles gently on the side table. The clink of glass against wood rang sharp in the silence, and Erik’s head jerked faintly toward the sound, eyes glinting in the half-light.

     Without hesitation she sank to her knees at his side. The fall of her robe spread around her like a pool of pale fabric, her movements deliberate, steadying, though her heart thudded in her chest. She did not speak at first. Instead, her nearness was its own answer, her quiet resolve setting itself against the jagged edges of the room.

     “How badly are you hurt?” she asked gently, her voice no louder than the soft crackle of the flames. “I brought laudanum… ointment for cuts. I didn’t know what else you would need.”

     Erik did not look at her. His hand tightened on the rag, wringing it against his palm until blood seeped weakly between his fingers. The cloth pressed hard to the hollow ruin of his nose, but the only reply was the rasp of his breath—uneven, fierce, like the bellows of a furnace straining to keep from collapsing.

     She leaned closer, tilting to catch his face in the firelight, searching for how far the bleeding had spread. “Please,” she whispered, reaching with hesitant fingers toward the cloth. “Let me see—”

     His skeletal hand jerked, sharp and impatient, flicking her away. Not a blow, but final. A tremor ran through his ruined lips, as if words fought to rise and failed. At last his eyes turned toward her, yellow and burning, a warning glare that sent her breath tight in her chest.

     She froze, hands suspended mid-air. For a long heartbeat she stayed that way, and then folded her hands slowly into her lap. The tense silence swelled between them, heavier than words, the kind that pressed into bone.

     From the kitchen came the muted clink of crockery, the scrape of a chair—Nadir’s steady, unhurried movements. The ordinary sound felt like a lifeline. She hesitated, waiting—half-dreading, half-expecting—the skeletal hand to shoot out, his ruined voice to rasp her name and forbid her to leave. But no sound came.

     Erik stayed slumped by the fire, head bowed, cloth pressed against his face, every line of him bristling with fury and despair. His silence was more terrible than any shout.

     She rose carefully, smoothing her robe with trembling fingers, and stepped backward toward the dining room. Her heart pounded with each pace, waiting for the storm to break. Yet still he did not move. He let her go.

     The fire cracked sharply as she slipped into the hall. The glow dimmed behind her, replaced by the hushed, steady sounds of the kitchen—Nadir’s world of clinking cups, tobacco smoke, and the faint, grounding scent of coffee grounds. She followed it like a thread, leaving Erik alone in the drawing room, a broken figure hunched against the firelight, blood seeping through his hands into the cloth, and silence devouring the rest.

      The kitchen was dim but close with warmth, lit only by the glow of a single oil lamp and the low fire beneath the newly lit stove. Shadows crowded in the corners, softened by the amber light. The bitter, grounding scent of coffee grounds hung thick in the air, curling together with the faint, sweet haze of tobacco that clung to Nadir’s coat. He stood by the stove as though carved from the stone cellars themselves, steady and deliberate, pouring water from the kettle into the waiting copper pot. The hiss of steam filled the hush—low, constant, oddly soothing after the chaos that had consumed the house.

     (Y/N) entered with a briskness that made the lamp flame shiver. Her bare feet whispered against the tiled floor, her nightgown trailing pale in the half-light. Her face still bore the blotched traces of tears, but her eyes were hard now, her jaw set, and her shoulders squared as though she had armored herself against him.

     She stopped just inside the doorway, the lamplight catching the steel in her gaze. For a breath the silence between them was filled only by the hiss of water striking the copper, the quiet thud of the stove’s firewood settling in its bed of coals. Then her voice cut through—sharp, restrained, each word bitten back from spilling over into fury.

     “Why did you come here?” she demanded, her tone taut as drawn wire. “Who are you to intrude on us like this? How dare you—after everything—disturb what little peace we’ve managed to find?”

     The kettle hissed and spat as steam curled upward, clouding the space between them. Nadir set it aside with unhurried precision, his hands steady as he stirred the grounds into the water. The dark liquid foamed, hissed, and settled. Only then did he lift his gaze. His face was composed, but his eyes—dark, unblinking—were heavy with judgment.

     When he spoke, his voice carried low across the room, silk drawn taut over iron. “I came because there is no peace here,” he said. “Not for you. Not for him. Whatever you believe you’ve built—it is not sanctuary. It is a prison.”

     The words cut the air cleanly, as sharp and final as a blade. He did not thunder as Erik did; he had no need. The certainty in his tone was more than enough.

     Nadir poured the coffee slowly into two cups, the steam curling between them like a veil, the bitter scent filling the close air. He slid one cup across the counter toward her, his movements deliberate.

     “You ask who I am,” he continued, his gaze never once wavering from hers. “I have walked beside Erik farther and longer than you could fathom. I know what he is—and what he becomes when left unchecked. And I tell you this: no matter how tightly you cling, he will drag himself—and you—with him into the dark.”

     The words held no tremor, no plea. They were spoken like judgment already passed. Iron beneath silk.

     Her reply came quick, sharp, with no room for hesitation.

     “You’re cruel,” she snapped, her voice trembling but fierce. “He is already fragile enough—and you; you come here only to torment him further. You call it the truth, but it is nothing but cruelty. You stand in his house, after breaking him in the dark like some jailer, and dare to tell me there can be no peace? Who are you to pass judgment?”

     Her words lashed like a whip, ringing in the small kitchen. Though even as she burned, her body betrayed her. Almost without thought, her hand closed around the cup he had slid across the table. She pulled it close, steam rising to brush her face, the bitter scent of coffee wrapping her like a strange, steadying balm. The instinct was plain: take comfort, even if it came from the very hand she condemned.

     Nadir’s eyes followed the movement, steady and unreadable—until the lamplight caught on her hand. A thin gleam of gold circled her finger. A glint, small yet blinding. His gaze fixed there, and his expression shifted as though the air itself had thickened.

     A wedding ring.

     The world seemed to fall silent. The hiss of the kettle, the faint pop of the stove—all faded to nothing. His breath caught, stilled in his chest. He stared at her hand, the delicate band gleaming where it should never have been, and for a moment all the composure drained from him.

     He had not expected this. He had expected fear, or pity, or even the desperate sort of devotion born from captivity. But this—this seal, this false sanctity carved into Erik’s madness—was worse. Far worse.

     His lips parted but no sound came. Memory rushed in instead: Christine’s pale face, her frightened eyes, her trembling voice whispering promises she did not mean to keep. Erik’s delusion binding her like iron chains. And now here again—this girl, this stranger, marked as his wife.

     Nadir dragged his gaze up to her face at last. Her eyes met his, wet but blazing, defiance burning even through the shimmer of tears. She clutched the coffee close, shielding herself with it, as if daring him to snatch away even that small comfort.

     When he spoke at last, his voice was low, roughened by the gravity of what he had seen.

     “He… thinks he married you.”

     It was not a question. Not quite disbelief, either. It fell heavier than both—a verdict, final and damning.

     The silence that followed pressed down like a stone. Only the faint crackle of the stove filled the air, its small fire mocking the enormity of what had just been said. For the first time that night, Nadir’s composure faltered—the iron beneath his silken calm bending under the weight of horror.

     (Y/N) drew a trembling breath, clutching the coffee cup as though its heat could anchor her. The ring gleamed again in the lamplight, defying the shadow between them. She ignored his words, brushed them aside as though they were smoke.

     “It doesn’t matter what you think you see,” she said, clipped, defiant. “I asked you a question. Who are you, to come here and torture him like this?”

     Nadir set his own cup down with deliberate care, porcelain tapping softly against the wooden counter. He straightened, dark eyes never leaving hers. When he spoke, his voice was calm—but the weight inside it could not be mistaken.

     “My name is Nadir Khan,” he said. “I am the man who tended him when no one else would—in Persia, in the desert, in the shadows where he hid. I walked beside him when others spat at the sight of his face. I brought him out of darkness there and then followed him here to France, because I knew if I did not… no one else ever would.”

     His words landed with quiet force, and (Y/N) blinked, faltering for the first time. Persia. Erik had spoken of it, but only in fragments, shards too sharp to touch. Her grip tightened on the coffee cup, knuckles paling.

     After a pause, her voice came quieter, almost reluctant. “Erik… he spoke of a man. Called him Daroga. Was that you?”

     Nadir inclined his head once, precise, deliberate. “Yes. That was me.”

     Silence hung between them. Recognition shifted in her eyes, weighing him, testing him. He held her gaze unflinching, the calm of a man who had lived with shadows long enough to wear them easily.

     Then, with a gentleness sharpened by command, he pressed, “And you? What is your name?”

     The words came soft, but beneath them ran iron. His gaze was steady, insistent, as though he could strip the truth from her by the sheer weight of looking.

     Her face hardened. She slammed the cup down with a sharp clink, a scowl twisting her features. “Why?” she demanded, voice shaking but fierce. “Why did you attack him like that? He was already hurt—already—” Her voice cracked, breath catching on the edge of a sob she swallowed down. “You had no right.”

     Nadir’s expression did not shift, though his eyes darkened. “If I had not struck,” he said, low but edged with steel, “he would have killed me. Without hesitation.”

     Her eyes flared, outrage sparking. “No,” she shot back, shaking her head violently. “You don’t understand. He wouldn’t—he wouldn’t kill you.”

     The faintest shadow crossed Nadir’s face, the subtle tightening of his jaw. His reply cut through her denial like a blade. “You do not know him as you think you do. You have not seen what I have seen. The man you cling to is not tame, not safe. He is a storm—and storms do not love the roofs they tear away.”

     Her breath caught, but she did not look away. The defiance in her eyes burned through the cracks of doubt his words had pried open.

     For the first time today, Nadir felt the faint stir of something other than frustration. He had expected denial, fear, perhaps naïve devotion—but not this refusal to bow, not this quiet strength in the face of truth she did not want to hear. It was reckless. Dangerous. And yet—he could not help but respect it.

     His voice softened, but it did not release her. “Your name,” he said again, the command still there, but touched now with a reluctant acknowledgment. “Tell me who you are.”

     The silence that followed was taut; the only sound the faint crackling of the fire in the stove. Nadir’s gaze held her fast, steady as stone.

     Her lips pressed into a thin line as she weighed him, jaw tight. At last, she exhaled through her nose and spoke out, firm: “(Y/N).”

     Nadir’s brows lifted sharply, genuine surprise flashing across his face. He leaned forward a fraction, his voice quick, urgent. “(Y/N)… Martin? That is your name?”

     The change in her was immediate. Her fingers clenched hard around the coffee cup, body rigid as if struck. Suspicion flared hot in her eyes. “How do you know that?” she demanded, her voice sharp, defensive. “How do you know my name?”

      Nadir’s lips pressed thin, the truth clawing at the edge of his tongue. His mind raced—should he tell her now, when the night already stank of blood and terror, or hold it until there was a moment when it would not crush her completely? In the heartbeat of indecision, he shifted course.

     His eyes flicked to her ring—the slim band of gold that still caught the lamplight—and his voice hardened. “Answer me plainly. Does Erik believe you are his wife?”

     She stiffened, throat working as though the words had lodged there. Nadir pressed on, tone sharpened with iron. “You wear the ring. You defend him as a wife might. Has he bound you to him with that lie? Has he told you the two of you are wed?”He leaned closer, softer now, but with a weight that would not be denied. “Tell me the truth, (Y/N).”

     Confusion flickered first across her face, then wariness. She gripped the cup tighter, its steam curling about her, but she lifted her chin and forced the words out.

      “Yes. We are married.”

     Nadir’s breath stilled. His brows drew tight, his jaw locking. He shook his head slowly, as though he could deny the sound of her voice itself. “No. No, child. That is not marriage—that is Erik’s delusion.” His tone hardened; the iron in it unmistakable. “He has spun a web around you, and you… you cannot be blamed for stumbling into it, not when you are trapped here, cut off from the world.”

     Her cheeks flushed hot with color, her eyes sparking with fury. “Delusion?” she snapped. “We are married, monsieur. Do you hear me? We had a ceremony for ourselves, we exchanged vows—”

     “Vows whispered to walls,” Nadir cut across, his hand rising sharply to still her words. “A ring pressed onto your finger in the dark by a man half-mad with longing—that is not a marriage. That is fantasy.” His eyes blazed, his voice like iron ground against stone. “You must not feed it more than you already have.”

     Her lips trembled, not with weakness but with indignation. She leaned forward, her voice burning, plain and unflinching.

     “You are wrong. The marriage is real. It is consummated.”

     The world seemed to freeze.

     Nadir’s face drained of color. For a long, stricken heartbeat, he stared at her, as though her words had cleaved the ground from beneath him. His pipe slid forgotten onto the table, his hands clenching white against his knees. When his voice came, it was hoarse, ragged with disbelief.

     “What did you say?”

     She did not falter. “I said the marriage is consummated.” Her tone was cold, almost defiant—but her eyes shone, thinly veiled with desperate fire.

     Nadir’s jaw slackened, his breath gone. His face twisted as though struck. Abruptly he pushed to his feet, looming over her, his expression a storm of grief and horror.

      “Explain,” he demanded, voice rough, unsteady. “You must explain.”

     She gave a short, bitter laugh that rang hollow, her hand lifting the cup again. Steam curled against her cheek as she murmured flatly, “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Her tone cut sharp, dismissive.

     She met his gaze a moment longer, drinking in the horror that had overtaken him—his eyes blazing with disbelief, his mouth a thin, stricken line. Unease prickled at her skin. She lowered her eyes at last, setting the cup down more carefully this time, the porcelain’s clink echoing like a judgment.

     Her voice wavered, though she fought to steady it. “Why? Why do you want me to explain it?”

     Nadir leaned in, his dark eyes fixed unblinking on her face. His hand clenched on the head of his cane, knuckles taut. His voice, though level, carried the weight of command.

     “I need to…I need to hear it plain.”

     The silence stretched, taut as wire. Heat crept up her neck until her cheeks burned, shame searing her skin. At last, she broke; her gaze skittering to the kitchen’s shadowed corners as if the dark itself might recoil at her words.

     “Erik and I…” She swallowed hard, every syllable dragging like glass across her tongue. “Together… we consummated the marriage.”

     Nadir’s breath stilled. She pressed on, cheeks aflame. “We… we…made love? More than once. A few times.”

     The words seemed to reverberate off the walls, heavy and obscene in their naked honesty. Even the small hiss of the lamp seemed to recoil.

     Horror deepened across Nadir’s face with every syllable. His lips parted, but no sound came. His brows knotted, his features collapsing under disbelief, grief, and fury bound so tightly they could not be told apart. His hand rose almost of its own accord to cover his mouth, as though he could physically dam the flood of words threatening to burst out. His eyes shut against her, his shoulders tense, the line of his jaw rigid as he fought to keep control.

     The bitter smell of coffee clung to the air, sharp and acrid now. For long, aching seconds, their breathing was the only sound—hers tight, uneven, cracking at the edges; his dragged in slow, as though each deep breath might steady him against breaking.

     When at last his hand fell, his face was hollowed, gaunt with what she had forced him to hear. His voice, when it came, was carved with anguish. Low. Final.

     “This…” He faltered, breath catching. “This is far worse than Christine.”

     Her head snapped up, her eyes flashing, outrage flooding her features. “What does that mean?!” Her voice trembled, rising sharp and fierce. “Why do you keep saying that? Christine—Christine—always Christine! Why does her name matter here? Why should she matter to me?”

     Her voice cracked, but she pressed on, words tumbling hot and jagged. “Why is it so terrible that I am married to him? Why must you look at me as though I’m lost? As though I am doomed just for loving him? Speak plainly, Monsieur—because I will not sit here and be judged by riddles!”

     She leaned across the counter, closing the space between them until her face hovered only inches from his. Her eyes blazed; defiant and unbroken.

     “I love him,” she said, her voice raw, trembling but fierce. “I love him, and he loves me. Why should that be so terrible?”

     Nadir’s gaze did not waver, but his chest clenched as if a fist had closed around his heart. Christine’s name had escaped him unbidden, dredged from a well of memory that refused to die. For a heartbeat she stood before him again—Christine’s pale face, her trembling hands, that terrified smile she had tried to offer as balm to Erik’s wounds. He remembered the desperation in her eyes as she whispered promises she could never keep, how her compassion curdled first into fear, then into resignation. He remembered Erik’s hunger, bottomless and ravenous, mistaking every kindness for devotion, every tremor for desire. He remembered how it ended: a heart broken, a girl nearly destroyed, Erik raging at a world that would never mirror back the dream he demanded.

     And now—this.

     This girl, fiery where Christine had faltered, furious where Christine had bent. He had expected fear in her, perhaps pity, the fragile façade of love worn thin by terror. Yet here she sat—cheeks flushed, eyes blazing, defiance etched into every line of her body. She had just confessed the very thing Christine had dreaded, the thing she would never bring herself to yield—and (Y/N) did not flinch. She defended it. She claimed it as if daring him to strip it from her.

     It unsettled him more than the admission itself.

     Beneath the defiance he saw not the brittle mask Christine had worn, not the trembling concession of a girl cornered by a monster, but conviction—dangerous, unyielding will. Though it horrified him, though it made his stomach clench with dread, some reluctant corner of his heart stirred with respect.

     She stood across from him, gold band glinting on her finger, her voice shaking but sure, claiming Erik as her husband in the face of Nadir’s horror.

     He shut his eyes for a moment, drawing in a slow breath. Respect was dangerous here. Respect blurred lines he could not afford to blur. If she was strong enough to stand against him, strong enough to take Erik’s storms upon herself willingly, then she might also be strong enough to last.

     And if she lasted—if she endured—then what?

     Would the nightmare finally end? Or spiral darker still? He could not tell.

     When he opened his eyes again, his voice was steadier, but it carried the weight of everything he had seen.

     “You think love will save you,” he said quietly, almost sorrowfully. “Perhaps you are stronger than Christine ever was. Perhaps. But strength alone cannot master the storm you have bound yourself to.”

     His gaze softened—only slightly—but his jaw remained taut with unspoken warning.

     “If you mean what you say—if you truly love him—then know what you risk. And be prepared to pay that price.”

     “Then tell me,” she snapped, her voice sharp as glass. “Enough of riddles and warnings. You sit here, in our house, judging me as though I don’t already know Erik is…difficult. You tell me I must be prepared to pay the price. What price, Monsieur? What exactly do you mean?”

     She leaned forward, gaze blazing, daring him to answer. “Do not hide behind sorrow. Do not hide behind Christine’s name, as though her ghost speaks for me. I am not her. I chose him—freely, with eyes open. Tell me, then—why do you look at me as though I am blind, or some naïve little fool?”

     The air seemed to tighten around her words. She braced her fists against the counter, shoulders squared, chin lifted with a resolve that trembled but held.

     Nadir studied her, his dark eyes unreadable, the weight of years pressing behind them. He said nothing at first, letting the silence hang. Inside, her challenge struck deep: this was certainly not Christine trembling in a corridor, begging to be saved. This was a woman demanding truth, even if it cut her open.

     At last, his lips parted, his voice low and grave.

     “The price,” he said, “is the same it has always been for those who come too close to him. Binding yourself to a storm does not only ruin your life—it corrodes your soul. That is what I mean.”

     His eyes darkened, memory rising like smoke from a fire never extinguished.

     “I have seen what Erik is capable of. In Persia he was no man but a weapon, the shah’s executioner and assassin. They used him to design palaces of death, to strangle enemies with his cursed lasso until the desert drank its fill of blood. I saw men by the dozen hanging from the sun, their bodies rotting, and Erik’s hand never trembled. Mercy is not in him. When his fury rules him, nothing can stop him.”

     He leaned closer, his voice dropping to a rasp, each word deliberate, unflinching.

     “You speak of vows whispered in shadows, of marriage and devotion. But do you even know what you have bound yourself to? You see a man clinging to you like a drowning soul to driftwood. I have seen the monster beneath that man; the monster that does not forgive. That does not relent. And when he turns his wrath upon those who claim to love him—there is no escape.”

     He let her see the sorrow that underpinned his severity. “Christine. You know of her. She was once at the heart of his obsession, just as you are now. A singer—bright, beautiful, and foolish enough to pity him. He ensnared her with music, with genius, until she could no longer breathe. He kidnapped her, dragged her beneath the opera, and threatened to murder all who stood in his way. He nearly destroyed her, body and soul. And when she resisted—when she dared to love another—his rage nearly buried us all.”

     He sat back slightly, eyes burning into hers.

     “That is what I mean when I say this is worse than Christine. She never gave herself to him, never crossed that final threshold. You have. You’ve stepped fully into the grave he dug for her—and I fear it will bury you alive. He will clutch you to him, yes. He will adore you in ways you cannot yet imagine. But his adoration is a prison, and his love is a noose.”

     The words lingered between them, heavy as stone. Nadir’s chest heaved once, as though the memories themselves threatened to choke him. His gaze softened, but the warning in his voice did not waver.

     “You think you can weather his storms, hold him steady where the world has failed him. Perhaps you can—for a time. But make no mistake: Erik is not a man easily held.”

     Her fingers tightened on the cup beside her. When she spoke, the edge in her voice had softened, tempered with something more careful. She drew a breath and asked, almost bitterly, but with weary caution:

     “Then what would you have me do, Monsieur? Leave him? Abandon him to his torment and break him worse than he already is? Or fight him until he destroys us both? Tell me plainly. You speak of prisons and storms, but you give me no road to walk.”

     Nadir regarded her a long moment, weighing the steel in her words against the tremor beneath them. He leaned back, pipe and coffee both forgotten, features carved with strain.

     “I expect nothing,” he said at last, his voice rough, each word dragged out as though it cost him. “I have no right to order you. I know Erik: if you defied him, if you fled, he would chase you to the ends of the earth. If you stayed, he would bind himself tighter around you until neither of you could breathe. There is no path free of danger.”

     His eyes darkened.

     “But there is a difference between staying out of love and staying out of fear. One may give you a chance—just a chance—to keep your soul intact. The other…” His mouth twisted grimly. “The other will hollow you until nothing remains of who you are.”

     He leaned forward again, his tone sharpened with urgency.

     “So I ask you this instead: when the storm comes—and it will come again and again—will you still say you love him? Will you still claim him when his love feels more like a noose than a vow? You want me to tell you what to do? Then hear this: be certain. Whatever path you walk with him, walk it with your whole commitment. Do not let him blind you to what he is. Erik will never change. Only you can decide if you can endure what that means.”

     The words fell between them, heavy as iron. And for the first time, Nadir’s gaze held not only pity, not only warning, but a glimmer of deepening respect. She had not broken under the weight of his revelations. She stood before him, ring gleaming on her finger, defiant and unbowed, even if her defiance trembled. That, he thought grimly, was more courage than most had ever shown Erik.

     Nadir’s eyes softened, the steel in them dimming to something quieter. He leaned back against the counter, and when he spoke his voice carried a weight both weary and resolute.

     “I am your friend, Madame,” he said, each word deliberate, as though carved into the silence itself. “Yours—and Erik’s. Whatever you need, you may rely upon me.”

     Even as the promise left his lips, he felt the sting of it. He had not come here to bind himself once more to Erik’s madness. The very thought of being dragged again into that man’s orbit twisted in his chest like a knife. He had longed to be free—free of the shadows, free of the darkness that clung to Erik like a second skin.

     But now—now he could not. Not when Joseph Martin’s daughter sat before him, wearing Erik’s ring. That knowledge shackled him as firmly as Erik’s delusions shackled her. Neither of them were free.

     He drew a slow breath through his nose, steadying himself, his gaze never leaving her face.

     “I will watch over you both,” he said at last, his voice low, edged with quiet iron. “If the day comes when you cannot bear it—when his storms threaten to drown you—I will stand between you and his fury. I do not say this lightly.”

     His hand tightened on the cane at his knee, the small gesture carrying the full weight of his vow.

     “If you remain, I will help keep him from destroying himself—and from destroying you with him. But if you flee, I will protect you against him, even if it sets me against Erik for the rest of my days.”

     The admission cost him dearly. The words tasted of old chains, a sentence he had sworn never to speak again. It was a return to Erik’s labyrinth, the old bonds twisting tighter. He did not want this. But, he could not abandon her to face that man alone.

     His gaze held hers, dark and unflinching, though his heart bore what he would never confess aloud—that either path before her, staying or fleeing, would carve her to pieces. And if Nadir was not careful, it would carve him as well.

     Her chin wavered despite herself. That steady promise—unexpected—struck something in her chest. She had bristled against him from the moment he entered, defied his every word, but now the walls she had built thinned. Gratitude flickered, swift and sharp, before she could smother it.

     It broke over her in an instant. Tears welled and spilled, hot against her cheeks. She bit them back, shaking her head, but her body betrayed her exhaustion—the night’s terrors pressing down at once. Erik’s rage, Nadir’s blows, the unmasking, the ring heavy on her finger, the endless battle of love and dread clawing inside her—each wound colliding until she could contain them no longer.

     Her hands locked around the coffee cup, knuckles white, porcelain rattling faintly against the counter. Her breath shuddered, uneven. She tried to choke it down, tried to keep her spine stiff as she stared at him through the blur. But the tears kept coming, silent, unstoppable, bright in the lamplight.

     Nadir did not move. His eyes softened, iron dulled to weary pity. He let her weep, gave her silence, though every line of his face bore the truth: that it was his words that had driven her here—that the weight he had placed upon her outweighed any kindness he might now offer.

     She stood stiff-backed in the kitchen, tears running unchecked, fingers still wrapped stubbornly around the cup. Exhausted. Frayed. Strung between two men, two futures, neither promising peace.

     Nadir’s hand twitched faintly on the table, an unconscious impulse. The sight of her trembling there—shoulders drawn tight, tears streaking her face—stirred something older in him, something paternal. He longed to steady her as he might once have steadied his own child, had fate not stolen that chance: a hand on the shoulder, the simple reassurance of human warmth in a night made unbearable.

     He shifted slightly, leaning forward, hand half-raised. She recoiled—not in anger, not even in fear, but with the weary stiffness of one who had borne too much. She turned her face aside, drew her sleeve across her cheeks, and straightened against the collapse pressing in on her. Quiet, but decisive: no comfort. Not from you.

     His hand stilled. His breath steadied. He leaned back once more, letting the silence close between them. Respect where resistance demanded it. He did not press.

     Her steps were slow but deliberate as she turned away, gathering the cup in both hands as if it were an anchor. Without a word she left the kitchen for the dining room. The table there still bore the scars of chaos—cloth skewed, chairs askew—but she righted one with a tired motion and lowered herself into it. She set her cup down with careful precision, folding her hands around it, staring into the dark surface of the coffee as though seeking stillness in its black mirror.

     She wanted only quiet. Only a corner of space to breathe, to cry in peace without straying too far from Erik. The drawing room door yawned just beyond; she could still hear the faint rasp of his breath from the chair by the fire. Close enough. Near enough.

     Nadir lingered in the kitchen doorway, watching her a moment longer. The lamp cast her in a fragile halo of gold, her night-robe pale against the dark. The resolve in her posture struck him—so young, already worn raw, refusing comfort yet refusing surrender. Respect flickered, reluctant and heavy with pity.

     At last, he inclined his head, his voice low and even as he addressed her back.

     “Then I will leave you to your quiet, Madame. May this night end better than it began.”

     No answer came. Only the faint clink of porcelain against wood as she lifted her cup.

     Nadir turned away, cane steady in hand, and stepped into the drawing room. The air thickened at once—warmer, heavy with smoke and the copper tang of blood, Erik’s presence coiling through every shadow. The steady tap of his step carried him toward the fire, leaving her alone at the table with her tears, her coffee, and her ring.

     Erik had not moved at all. He sat hunched in the chair, gaunt form gilded by the restless glow of the flames. The cloth pressed to his ruined face was stained dark, his long fingers trembling faintly against it. His yellow eyes—shadowed, unreadable—lifted the instant Nadir entered.

     The silence between them stretched a beat too long, taut as wire, before Erik drew a ragged breath and lowered the bloodstained cloth from his face. His voice came out low and rasping, a hiss more than speech.

     “Erik does not need you here.”

     The words struck like a lash. He leaned forward in the chair, the restless glow of the fire carving his ruined profile into stark shadow and gold. The veins in his temple stood out, pulsing, his long fingers flexing against the armrest as though to strangle it.

     “Erik and his wife do not need your pity… nor your poison. Do you think Erik did not hear you?” His hand twitched, a tremor running through his frame. “Every word you spat into her ear—every warning, every doubt—you meant to turn her against him. To make her fear him.”

     His gaze flicked toward the adjoining room where she sat, then snapped back to Nadir, eyes burning with a feverish light.

     “And yet she did not bend. She did not run. She defied you. She chose Erik.” His voice cracked sharp, half-snarl, half-triumph. “You see? She is his. She belongs here. Your lies cannot touch her.”

     He rose unsteadily, a long shadow thrown up the wall, towering though he swayed under his own weight. Every line of him was drawn tight with the need to strike but held in check by exhaustion and pain. The cloth slipped from his hand to the floor, forgotten, smearing a dark stain where it fell.

     “You will not come here to fill her head with your ghosts,” he hissed. “You will not stand between them.” His whisper sharpened, fierce and shaking, his voice flicking like a blade. “Go. Leave them. Erik does not need you.”

     Nadir stood unmoving beneath Erik’s rebuke, the cane steady beneath his hand as though it rooted him to the floor. The firelight glinted off its polished handle, casting thin bars of light across his hand. His stance remained calm, shoulders squared, boots planted.

     For a moment he said nothing. His eyes—dark, unreadable—locked with Erik’s wild glare and did not flinch. In that stillness there was the weight of years: deserts and palaces, catacombs and executions, all of it pressing against his ribs like a second heartbeat.

     When he spoke, his voice was level and deliberate, each word placed like a stone across a rushing current.

     “Then learn to master yourself, Erik. If you will not listen to me, at least hear this: if you cannot govern yourself, you will ruin her. Not with my words, not with any ‘poison,’ but with your own hands.”

     The fire cracked between them, throwing sparks into the silence. Erik’s shadow trembled up the wall; Nadir’s remained still. He let the words settle like dust in a crypt, then drew a breath through his nose, tempering his tone.
“You are bleeding, and she is exhausted. If you wish me gone, I will go. But before I leave—tell me plainly. Is there anything you need of me tonight?”

     His gaze softened only a fraction, enough to carry weight without surrender. The fine tremor of his thumb against the cane betrayed what his face did not.

     “Speak now, Erik. If you would have me do nothing, then I will do nothing. But if there is some way I may ease this night, say so.”

     Erik did not relent. Though his body sagged with weariness and his breath rasped ragged in his throat, the fire in his eyes did not dim. He pushed himself to stand tall, gaunt frame trembling under the effort, and bared his teeth in something caught between a snarl and a grimace of pain.

     “Erik does not need your counsel,” he hissed, voice cracking with the strain but still cutting sharp. “Do you hear? Not your warnings, not your pity. Erik has chosen, and she has chosen him. You will not stand here and dress your poison as wisdom, you will not put shadows between Erik and his wife. She is his—his—she has said so with her own lips. Do you think Erik does not know what you wish? You hope she will flee him. You hope she will look to you for salvation, as though you could deliver her from him. But she has not. She will not! She stood before you and defied you, and you could not break her. Your words are nothing.”

     His voice faltered, harsh breath pulling at his warped chest, but his gaze never broke. The firelight caught his ruined face, cruelly gilding its furrows, his yellow eyes gleaming fever-bright.

     Nadir absorbed the fury in silence. His hand remained steady on the cane, his face unreadable save for the faint tightening of his jaw. When he answered, it was with no anger, no edge, only a measured calm that seemed to fill the room with stillness.

     “Then I will not argue with you, Erik. I will offer only this.” He inclined his head slightly, the gesture both solemn and deliberate. “You have taken a wife. For that, you have my congratulations. Whatever storms you may face, I pray your union holds fast. May it bring you strength where you are weak and light where the shadows gather.”

     The words came low and formal, touched with the weight of his heritage. He let them linger, then spoke in the tongue of his own country, his voice deepening with cadence and reverence:

     “Khodavand shma ra dar khir ve salamet nageh dard. Bashod keh ruzemaytan par az nor khorshid ve shabiacpeheitan par az aramesh bashod.”

     God keep you in goodness and safety. May your days be filled with sunlight and your nights with peace.

     Erik’s glare did not soften, though the blessing hung in the air like smoke over kindling. His chest heaved, each breath a painful rasp, but he offered no reply.

     Nadir did not press. With quiet dignity he inclined his head once more, and then turned from the firelight toward the back of the house. His boots clicked softly against the floor, the cane tapping in rhythm as he passed through the dining room. The air grew cooler there, the lamplight weaker, the silence broken only by the faint rattle of porcelain where (Y/N) sat, watching him leave. He did not look back.

     Reaching the rear door, he set his hand against the frame, pushed it open to the cavern, and stepped into the chill darkness beyond. The fog of the underground seemed to cling to the threshold, damp and heavy. There, sitting on the stones where he had left it, waited his lantern. He gathered it up, fingers brushing over the cold brass, and opened its small door. With practiced care he struck a match, coaxing a thin flame until it caught on the wick.

     The lantern glowed, warm against the shadows, casting long beams across the damp stone. Nadir lifted it, steady in his grip, and breathed in once to center himself. He had offered his blows, words, his warning, and his blessing. Nothing more could be done tonight. With the lantern’s light cutting the dark, he prepared to walk once more into the labyrinth, leaving behind the house, the woman, and the man who still raged like fire at its heart.

     His thoughts were a snarl, a storm no steady breath could quiet. Should he have told her? Should he have spoken the truth of her father now, when she was already bruised with fear, confusion, and a love that bound her tighter than chains? What would it do to her—to learn that Joseph Martin searched with the desperation of a drowning man?

     Joseph—what truth could Nadir carry back to him? That his daughter lived, yes, but lived in Erik’s grasp—bound to him by vows spoken in madness, sealed by consummation . Joseph’s girl was not merely stolen, but had given herself—willingly or unwillingly—to the monster of the Opera?

     His stomach turned, bile rising. He could not imagine how the father would bear it. He could not imagine how he himself would bear the words, forced to speak them aloud, to give them shape and permanence in the air.

     The lantern swayed in his hand, light stretching long and thin across the damp stones. Each footfall echoed too loudly, as though the tunnels themselves mocked him with their emptiness.

     Erik—what would Erik do now, once the dust of the night’s fury settled? Nadir had stirred the waters. He had forced truths into the open, forced Erik’s mind to reckon with intrusion, with witness, with doubt. How long before that fury, denied an outlet, turned inward—onto the girl who clung to him? How long before love curdled into punishment, devotion into destruction?

     Christine had fled before she was broken. She had never surrendered herself wholly, never crossed that final threshold. But (Y/N)… (Y/N) had crossed it. She had stepped into the abyss and forged a bond deeper, darker, and more perilous than Christine had ever endured. This was uncharted ground, and its weight pressed on Nadir’s chest with every step he took.

     How was he to help her now? How was he to help Erik? Was there any path left to walk? Or had he only set flame to kindling that must burn, no matter what he did?

     He reached the mouth of the stairs sloping upward toward the fourth cellar, the lantern’s flame trembling against stone. He paused, the vast silence of the catacombs pressing in, heavy with questions that yielded no answers.

     What was he to do now?

     With a weary sigh he lifted the lantern higher and began the slow climb upward, his shadow stretching long behind him, devoured by the dark.

Chapter Text

     The fire didn’t merely burn—it raged. It hurled light and heat into the room as though trying to claw its way free of the hearth. Flames snapped and writhed like the breath of some caged dragon, casting shadows that leapt and shrank across the stone walls. The roar of it seemed to pulse with every thud of his heart.

     Erik sat unmoving in the armchair before it, as though carved from the same black iron as the grate. One elbow was braced on the armrest, his fingers pressed to the side of his face, digging into skin as though trying to hold himself together by force.

     He hadn’t even realized he was touching it at first. His fingertips drifted over the uneven terrain of strange flesh along his sharp cheekbone, down the crooked hole that passed for a nose, then lower—over the split cleft seam of his lip. The nerves there were treacherous things—half-dead, half-aflame, every touch a reminder of what should never have lived. No porcelain intervened. No barrier spared him the feel of his own skin.

     The mask was gone.

     Shattered.

     Scattered in pieces along the rocks outside where Nadir’s cane had struck—cracking porcelain, cracking silence, cracking him. The sound had been thunder trapped in bone. But…it was the quiet that followed—the stillness, the exposedness—that had gutted him clean through.

     She saw.

     (Y/N) had seen him.

     Now she knew what lay beneath the last pretense of humanity he owned.

     The fire spat a burst of sparks that flared and died. He watched them burn out midair and imagined himself among them.

     The longer he sat before that inferno, the tighter his thoughts curled around his throat—hot, thin cords of panic, like wire drawn through flesh, garroting breath before it could reach his lungs.

     She is in the dining room. She is taking off the ring. She is rehearsing what to say. She is deciding how to run.

     He could see her without turning—rigid in one of the high-backed chairs, the dark swallowing her features but not her intentions. Her fingers would be turning the wedding band over and over, as though trying to decide if she dared drop it, or if she had to place it carefully into his palm to keep from provoking him. She would be steadying her breath, planning her softness. She would come in quietly—like Christine had before she left him to the dark.

     She would not shout. Not cry. She would offer him some gentle, merciful phrase meant to lessen the blow, and in doing so drive it in deeper. Kindness was worse than cruelty, especially it when it came before abandonment.

     And he—like the fool he had always been—would reach for her. He would lunge. He would beg. He would grasp at whatever scrap of illusion remained before it was snatched away.

     She would scream. Or flinch. Or hurl herself backward and slap his hand aside, as Christine had, as every soul had who had ever glimpsed the truth.

     She…had not screamed when the mask split.

     That was worse.

     Far worse.

     Silence was not mercy. Silence meant she had seen the full horror and could not even summon breath to name it.

     His fingers dug harder into the twisted ridge of his cheek, as though he could grind the bone into dust and be done with it. The firelight flickered and caught the sheen of tears on his face—running in uneven tracks he hadn’t bothered to wipe away; evidence of weakness. Of hope.

     She should have run the instant she saw him.

     That was the order of the world—beauty recoiled from deformity, the living flinched from the grotesque. Creatures like him were meant to be fled, not faced.

     But, she had stayed. Remained in the house after Nadir left, rather than beg to be taken from this place—taken from him.

     Why?

     The question rattled through him like a knife in a tin cup. There was only one answer, and it arrived with the sting of acid:

     She is afraid of you.

     She hadn’t yet gathered the courage to flee, but she would.

     And when she did—

     He swallowed against the dryness clawing his throat. His heart thudded too sharply, too fast, rattling in his ribs. Each breath scraped at him as though drawn through broken glass. Rage stirred beneath his skin—coiling, gathering heat, waiting for the first target it could scorch.

     She would leave. Of course she would.

     They always did.

     It had never been if. Only when.

     Christine had fled from him. His own mother had flung him from her breast in horror the day he was born.

     Now she—his wife, his impossible, undeserved miracle—had seen what lay beneath the porcelain. She had seen the grave-flesh, the corpse’s leer, the skull half-swaddled in ruined skin. She had seen the monster.

     Of course he would lose her. He had always known he would, after all. But foreknowledge did not dull the blow—it only prolonged it, made the waiting into a blade slowly turning under the ribs.

     The silence from the dining room dragged on, and dread thickened with every breath. His lungs burned, drawing air that seemed to cut on the way in. Something sharp twisted behind his heart.

     She should come now. She should end it. End it and leave—leave and be done with it—before I… before I—

     His hand slid from his cheek to his mouth, covering it to keep some horrid sob from escaping. His other hand clamped around the armrest.

     The firelight writhed across the room.

     Still—she had not come to him.

     He didn’t know if that absence fed hope or madness.

     Either way, the waiting would kill him quicker than a knife.

     His fingers would not be still. They dragged and clawed their way over every hated contour of his face in the same ritualistic path: across the jut of bone at his brow, down the sunken ridge that passed for a nose, along the split seam of his cleft lip where a line of dried moisture clung like salt. He rubbed at it savagely, as though he could scrape the flesh away, erase the proof of his existence. The movement was restless, compulsive—a ritual of self-torment he could neither name nor stop.

     He could still feel the ghost of her on him. Her lips pressed to his horrid mouth. Her fingers tangled in his hair. Her hands splayed over the hollow of his thundering chest. The memories came like brands—searing and sickening all at once.

     For one blasphemous flicker of time, she had brought warmth into the tomb of his existence—and he had been fool enough to bask in it.

     Her laughter came back to him first. Not the brittle titter people used when humoring a lunatic, but something bright, unguarded, alive. It had burst from her at some small, stupid thing—he couldn’t remember what—and he’d looked at her as though he’d witnessed a miracle he hadn't earned.

     Her curiosity had been worse. She had asked about his music, his books, and the house he had carved out of darkness with his own hands. She had listened when he answered—listened—as if he were not a monster hidden in the depths of hell, but a man with thoughts worth hearing.

     And her gentleness—God, that had been the deepest cruelty of all.

     The way she touched his hands as though they were not weapons, the way she leaned against his shoulder when she was tired, as if the bones beneath her cheek were not carved from a corpse, the way she filled silence with laughter so he would not drown in it, the way she reached for him in the dark without flinching.

     It burned. Every memory was a coal pressed into open flesh.

     He had warned her. He had begged her not to give him hope. He had told her not to pretend, not to soothe him, not to lay soft lies across wounds he could not afford to reopen. Hope had always been a blade to him—thin, gleaming, and meant to spill what little life he had left.

     And what had she done?

     She had gone to his bed. Let him touch her, taste her, speak her name against her skin like sacrilege. She had married him—willingly—put her hand in his and sworn herself to him with eyes unclouded. She had said love aloud, and he—starved, famished to the bone—had devoured the word like bread.

     She had loved him.

     …For a time.

     That was the poison. That was the rot beneath every breath. For a time, he had been permitted to imagine he was not despised. To believe—if only for a moment—that a thing like him could be chosen. Wanted.

     Kept.

     Now she had seen his face.

     And the truth would reclaim her, as it always did.

     She had seen what lay beneath the porcelain, seen the corpse’s ruin masquerading as a face, the death-mask of a wretched creature that should never have drawn breath. She had seen the nightmare in full.

     So, now she would leave. That was not fear—it was fact. The law of the world, just like gravity, or decay. Abandonment.

     Because she had made him hope—because she had touched him, and laughed with him, and lain in his bed, and spoken vows meant for men and not abominations—her leaving would not be a clean wound.

     It would be annihilation.

     She was kind. That was the vilest thing about her. Placating kindness before departure was always the sharpest cruelty. He slammed his fist against the arm of the chair with a sharp thud.

     She was cruel. Cruel! CRUEL!

     —A sound.

     The faint creak of a chair.

     His head didn’t turn, but his whole body locked as though a wire had drawn tight through his spine. He heard the scrape of the dining room chair legs against stone, the whisper of fabric as she stood, the slow, deliberate steps toward the room.

     She was coming.

     The air constricted, crushing his lungs from the inside. His fingers froze mid-motion where they had been dragging over the ruined plane of his face, then curled hard—digging into flesh as if he could tear the deformity off before she reached him.

     A tear escaped before he could command his body to swallow it. It carved a hot, humiliating path down his cheek. He didn’t wipe it. Let it stain him. Let her see it. Let it be part of the pity.

     This was it.

     She would stand before him with that look—pity, the herald of departure. She would speak softly, in that careful, suffocating way people used when stepping around broken things. She would not place the ring in his palm—oh no, she would set it down somewhere near him, like an offering to a shrine best not touched. She would tell him it wasn’t his fault. She would pretend regret. She would lie.

     Then she would turn.

     And he didn’t know if the sound that tore out of him after would be the scream of an animal gutted alive—or the quieter, deadlier crack of something inside him finally breaking beyond repair.

     Breathing became an ordeal. His heart didn’t race; it thrashed. Blood thundered behind his eyes, hot and choking. The dread swelled so violently it made his stomach pitch and his vision tighten at the edges.

     She’s leaving. She’s leaving. She’s leaving.

     He wasn’t sure if he thought the words or if they bled through every nerve in his body by sheer instinct.

     His mind tried to run in two directions at once—bar the door, trap her, beg, bargain, threaten—no, no, sit still, accept the sentence, bow your head to the blade.

     He could not move.

     He could not speak.

     His fingers clamped around the armrest, the carvings biting into his palms. The fire popped—just a shift of a log—and he flinched like a beaten cur.

     Every step she took through that room tolled like a countdown. Every breath she drew was another inch of rope tightening around his neck.

     He had survived whips, stones, mobs, fever, solitude, graves, furnaces, starvation—he had survived being feared, scorned, and hunted.

     But this—

     This, he did not know if he could survive.

     Better she would scream. Better she would run. Better she would recoil in horror, spit in his face. Better anything than the softness of mercy.

     Another tear gathered, heavy and traitorous, and slipped free.

     He did not bother to blink it away. Pride was no defense against an execution.

     Let it be quick, he thought. If she must go, let her go now and quickly. I cannot endure the dying by inches.

     “Erik?”

     She stepped closer.

     He heard the whisper of her skirts, the shift in the air, the faintest tremor of hesitation as she crossed the space between them.

     “How badly are you—?”

     Her hands came to rest on his shoulders.

     He detonated.

     A sound ripped out of him—an animal scream. His arm flew back before thought could catch it, palm striking her hand away with a hard, ringing crack. The chair crashed behind him as he lurched to his feet, breath tearing in and out of him, eyes blazing in the firelight.

     (Y/N) staggered back a step but did not fall. She stood where his blow had driven her, hands half-raised in shock. Color drained from her face, her lips parted without sound, eyes fixed on his—not with terror yet, but with a stunned, stricken disbelief, like someone watching a trusted creature bare its teeth.

     Something in him had broken cleanly. Violently.

     No more waiting. No more fear. Rage surged up to fill the space where terror had lived. It was better to kill before he himself was killed.

     He flung his arms wide in a grotesque, mocking flourish—an obscene welcome played out in the flicker of the hearth.

     “Well?” he snarled, the words shredding into a cackle that scraped his throat raw. “What do you think of your husband now?”

     He twisted his head toward her, turning so the firelight struck every ruined plane, every ridge and hollow and jagged seam—the sunken eyes, the collapsed cheeks, the missing nose, the cleft and broken lips still darkened with drying blood.

     She saw all of it.

     And he saw her seeing it.

     “Look at him!” he hissed, voice tearing itself raw. “Go on—have a proper view. Isn’t he—ah!” His uneven teeth bared in something between a grin and a snarl. “Isn’t he handsome?”

     He advanced a step, head twisting, tilting so the firelight could rake across every ruin, every hollow, and every grotesque seam of him. The flames licked his profile as though crowning him in a mockery of a halo.

     “How could you resist a man like this?” His words came fast, jagged. “How could any bride deny such beauty when he came calling? You – lucky woman! You married him!”

     Her eyes widened, glassy now, her lips parting just enough to drag in a shallow breath. One hand hovered near her breast, and then dropped to brush against her ring finger as though she had to remind herself what sat there. She stayed rooted to the spot, pale, stricken, unable to look away from him.

     His laughter cracked apart, warped and hoarse, curdling into something ugly. He circled her like prey, shoulders hunched, hands flexing at his sides, uncertain whether they wanted to strike her or tear his own flesh open.

     “Love,” he spat, a curse in his mouth. “That was the game, wasn’t it? You said the word—you sang it in my ears like a lullaby and thought I would thank you for the poison.”

     Her chest rose and fell quickly, her throat working, but no sound came. She stared at him as though he was about to attack.

     “You let this touch you!” His snarl split into a ragged laugh. “You opened your body to this—” his hand slashed across his face, digging his fingers deep into ruined flesh—“and called it good. Do you know what that makes you? Do you know what kind of woman lets a walking nightmare crawl over her in the dark?”

     Her hand trembled where it clutched her ring. Shock, hurt, and the first hairline crack of fear showed in her eyes.

     His voice fell, shaking with disbelief and fury. “You let me put my mouth on your throat, your breasts—your thighs. You let a corpse rut inside you and you moaned for it. Was it pity? Charity? Or were you so desperate for purpose you thought you’d martyr yourself on something damned?”

     He laughed again, shrill and broken, a sound that didn’t belong in a human throat.

     “You married me!” he screamed. “You—my angel, my salvation, tell me—did you shut your eyes and imagine another man every time Erik fucked you?!”

     He snapped his face fully into the firelight, baring every ravaged inch of it, forcing her to see.

     She still hadn’t moved. Her hands trembled faintly at her sides, but her gaze held steady—stricken, yes, but fixed on him, unyielding. It was the look of a woman staring at the ruin of a man she loved, refusing to flinch even as the wreckage shifted toward her. Her breath was shallow, uneven, but she did not look away.

     “Erik…”

     It came soft, the syllables trembling but clear. Not a plea, not a curse, just his name, spoken as though it still belonged to him—as though he were a man after all.

     He froze. The sound struck between them like the toll of a bell, reverberating through the charged air. His hands, half-raised to claw more at his face hovered and shook instead. His mouth opened, no venom spilling, only silence. For an instant, the fury warped into something rawer—confusion, grief, a glimmer of panic under the blaze of rage.

     She drew a breath that quivered in her chest. Her eyes shone wetly, but her voice held.

     “Erik…” she said again, softer now, sadder—yet firmer too, as if anchoring him with nothing more than the sound.

     The word undid him more than a scream would have; more than rejection. Her voice, calling to him like that—stricken, trembling, but his—landed on him like a lash. His head tilted as the blow struck, shoulders curling forward, lips parting to reveal his jagged teeth. The firelight played on his face, turning sweat and tears into jeweled rivulets.

     His breath stuttered—then sharpened, vicious, frantic, as though he could smother the falter beneath fresh fury.

     “Don’t—” The word split his throat as he spat it. “Don’t you say my name like that!”

     He staggered back, and then lunged forward again; a beast torn between bolting and tearing at the snare. His hands clawed at the air, then curled into fists against his temples, knuckles blanching.

     “Do you think it makes you kind?” His voice shook with heat, his eyes glittering, fever-bright and wet. “To whisper my name as though it belongs to a man, and not—to this?”

     His hands slashed upward, raking again over the ruins of his face, nails dragging against scar and seam, the flesh red under his nails.

     “Say it with horror! Say it with disgust! Scream it, spit it—hate me, as you should!” He trembled, chest heaving. “But don’t you dare pity me with sorrow in your voice and tears in your eyes. Don’t you dare!”

     The last word splintered into something too thin and sharp, caught between a cackle and a sob. His lips peeled back, baring uneven teeth—mockery twisted out of agony.

     “If you were merciful, you would scream and run,” he rasped. “Or spit in my face and leave me to rot. But no—you stand there and ache, don’t you? Ache at the sight of what you let fuck you. Ache at the monster you called husband.”

     He took a step forward—not in menace, but in torment, the stagger of a man who leans willingly into a blade just to feel its truth.

     “Do not look at me as though I am something to be pitied,” he whispered, trembling. “I would rather you hated me outright than—than weep for me.”

     The firelight caught in his eyes, glassy and fever-bright. Another tear broke loose and tracked down his cheek, and his mouth twisted in fury.

     “Do not—” his voice faltered, then rose again ragged—“do not speak my name as though you love me.”

     “Erik.”

     This time it was steady. Not a plea. Not hysteria. There was no revulsion in it, no tremor, no flight. Only resolve.

     And then—God help her—she reached for him.

     Her hand came up slowly, deliberately, to rest against his arm.

     He recoiled as though she had seared him with a brand.

     “Don’t touch me!” he snarled, his voice cracking like a whip. He wrenched his arm back so violently he nearly stumbled, hair falling wild across his brow. “Don’t you dare touch me as though I am still yours to soothe!”

     His breathing came fast and ragged, fury rising to strangle the returning terror underneath.

     “You think saying my name like a prayer makes you holy?” he spat, voice pitching high with disbelief and despair. “You think putting your hand on me erases what you saw? You should be gagging. You should be retching. You should be clawing your way out of here—not reaching for me like some saint come to bless the carcass!”

     Her lips parted, but she didn’t retreat. Instead, she took a small step closer, quiet, steady, unflinching.

     That broke him all over again.

     “STOP!” he shouted, the word breaking in half as it left him. “Stop pretending you can bear the sight of me. Stop saying my name like it still belongs to a man and not—” he jabbed a finger at his own face, lips peeling, “this—this abomination you let between your legs!”

     The tears in his eyes didn’t soften him—they stoked something wilder. His voice shook with fury sharpened by despair.

     “Do not look at me like I can be forgiven,” he rasped. “Do not touch me like I am worth touching. And do not—” the last words dropped to a jagged whisper, “—do not reach for me as though you still want what you saw.”

     Before she could speak, he lunged.

     His hands clamped around her wrists, vise-tight, bruising. “You want to touch me? Then touch me!” he snarled. “Go on—touch what you married. Touch what you let into your bed!”

     He hauled her hands upward, forcing her palms against the ruin of his face. His nails bit into the backs of her hands as he forced her fingers into claws.

     “Feel it,” he spat. “Feel what you’ve been lying with! Here—here—” he ground her hands harder into the collapsed cheeks, the bared bone ridge, the puckered seams. “This is what you chose! This is what you claimed to have loved! This is what you let crawl over you!”

     She drew a breath, sharp—but she didn’t fight. Instead of raking him with her nails, she let her fingers go soft. Her thumbs flattened; her fingertips smoothed across mangled skin with aching care. A caress, not a wounding scratch.

     He recoiled as though she’d pressed a hot iron to his flesh.

     “No!” The word tore out of him, high and uneven. “No! Not like that! Don’t you dare—” His grip trembled violently, caught between hurling her off and crushing her to him. “Hurt me! HATE ME! Don’t—don’t touch me like that—”

     “Erik.”

     Just his name—firm this time—was enough to break the last restraint inside him.

     A raw shriek ripped from his throat, bouncing off the walls, too wild to be wholly human. His fingers constricted so hard around her wrists the bones ground together; she gasped at the pressure.

     “Run!” he roared, spittle flying. “Run now—while you still can! Before he—before this—” he struck his fist against his chest, as though he could crack his ribs open and tear out the curse beneath them, “—drags you down to hell with it!”

     He shoved her arms against her chest and drove her bodily toward the door. The force of it wasn’t calculated cruelty—it was panic weaponized, terror made violent. His whole frame shook, breath coming in short, ragged bursts, as though he were fighting something inside himself harder than he could fight her.

     And still she did not leave.

     That—more than anything—drove him closer to the edge of madness.

     “Get out! Be free! Be done with it!” The last word broke apart in his throat, half-scream, half-sob. “Do you hear me? You’re free of it now. Free of me! Take off the damned ring and throw it in the lake, throw me in after it—go, go!”

     The words curdled into curses, slurred with fury and self-hatred. He spat filth at himself, at her, at everything that dared to breathe in the same air. “Get out—get OUT, you stupid, cruel—leave me before I make you—”

     She forced back against him, heels sliding on the floorboards, wrists straining in his grip.

     “Erik!” she gasped, fighting to break his hold. “Erik, let—”

     His eyes were wild, fixed on something further away than her face. He didn’t seem to see her at all. “Leave!” he roared over her. “Leave! Leave me! GET OUT!”

     She twisted and shoved and braced, the heel of one hand driving into his chest. “Erik, stop!”

     He didn’t hear her. His voice had gone hoarse, the words collapsing into raw expletives, flung at the world, at his own skin. “Run! Run! Get out—go—go—”

     So she did the only thing left—

     She screamed his name.

     “ERIK!”

     It cracked the air like a whip.

     The sound hit him like impact. His whole body went rigid, breath caught mid-roar. His fingers remained locked around her wrists, but the force in them faltered, trembled. Rage, grief, confusion—all of it flickered at once across his ruined face, then halted as though she had physically struck him.

     For a heartbeat, neither moved.

     Only his ragged breathing, the slow hiss of the fire, and the echo of her shout seemed to exist.

     They stood frozen where the storm had broken—her back nearly to the front door, his hands shaking around her wrists, both chests rising and falling like they’d fled a burning room. The silence that followed wasn’t peace—it was the shuddering space where the next blow should have come, and didn’t.

     His chest heaved like a bellows; each breath sharpened by rage and panic both. Hers rose and fell more quietly, controlled only by force of will. The fire behind him snapped and spat, lighting his face in violent flashes—gold on horror, shadow in every hollow. His eyes, fever-bright and rimmed red, clung to her with desperate, feral intensity, as though waiting—needing—her to flinch, to run, to prove him right.

     She didn’t.

     Her pulse hammered in her throat, but her voice—when she finally found it—came out low and steady.

     “Why are you acting like this?”

     A twitch cut through his features, sharp as a muscle spasm. His grip tightened around her wrists, not in answer but in reflex, like an animal bracing for a blow.

     She didn’t retreat.

     “What are you afraid of?”

     The question struck him like glass to the skin—silent but slicing. Something flickered across his face in the firelight—panic, denial, fury, a spark of grief—all of it too tangled to separate.

     His mouth opened. Nothing came out. The breath caught in his throat made a strangled, nearly voiceless sound, as if the truth were too jagged to name.

     She held his gaze. Not pleading. Not soft. Unyielding.

     “What are you so afraid of, Erik?”

     That name—said without trembling, without revulsion—sent a tremor through his arms. His fingers bore down on her wrists until pain bloomed beneath her skin, but she did not look away.

     “Afraid?” he spat, the word twisting into a snarl. “Afraid of you? Of what—your tears? Your pity? Your sainted little hands on my face?”

     The rage came back like a shield slammed into place—but the fracture beneath it had already shown.

     Spittle caught the firelight at the corner of his mouth as he leaned in, voice rising to a ragged pitch.

     “You want to know what I’m afraid of? I’ll tell you—I'm afraid you’ll keep looking at me like that right up until the moment you finally see what’s in front of you!” His breath came hot and sharp. “I’m afraid you’ll play at love for another day, another hour, another kiss—then run screaming once it truly reaches you that you let this—” he jerked her wrists upward, forcing her knuckles against the twisted planes of his cheek, “—touch you, claim you, defile you!”

     His breathing fractured, fury shredding itself as it left his mouth.

     “I’m afraid you’ll leave.” The admission tore out of him like something pulled forcefully through bone. “Happy now? There—it’s said. I’m afraid you’ll leave like you should. Only worse—worse—because you made me believe you wouldn’t.”

     The next words dropped to a hoarse, serrated whisper, no softer for the lowering of his voice.

     “I am afraid you’ll wake tomorrow and grasp the miracle you wasted on a corpse—and I’ll have to watch you walk away.”

     His teeth flashed in something too pained to be only rage.

     “I am afraid you will live—and I will go on rotting.”

     Her wrists were still bound in his shaking grip when she drew a breath, lifted her chin, and met his wild stare without flinching.

     “Why?” she demanded—not gently, not timidly. “Why in God’s name would I leave you?”

     It didn’t soothe him. It struck him.

     For an instant, the question stunned him into silence—his mouth parted, eyes blazing with disbelief that she’d even dared.

     Then the fury came thrashing back, tangled with grief and something terrified and unhinged.

     “Why?” he rasped, the word ground through his teeth. “You ask why? Look at me!”

     Still clutching her wrists, he dragged her hands back to his face, pressing her palms hard against the ravaged skin as though he meant to carve the truth into her by force.

     “Do you need a mirror?” he snarled, breath hot and ragged. “Shall I bring you a lantern so you can catalogue it properly? Every fissure, every seam, every place God stitched me wrong? Shall I stand closer so you can trace where the rot begins and the man ends—if there was ever a man at all?!”

     His voice pitched higher, starting to splinter under its own weight. Each word hit the air like something bloodied.

     “You would leave! Everyone runs the moment they truly see! My own mother. Christine -  any wretch I ever loved, every fool I ever begged to stay!”

     His breathing went wild—short, sharp bursts that barely counted as air.

     “You would leave because no woman with eyes and breath and sanity would stay with this. Because now you know what you let into your bed—what you kissed, what you vowed yourself to! Whatever fantasy you draped over me has cracked to dust, and you’ll run before the shards cut you to the bone!”

     He surged in closer, crowding her backward until her shoulders met the door frame. His chest heaved with the force of each breath.

     “You would leave because you are not blind. Because you are not mad. Because ‘love’ rots and promises collapse once the flesh beneath starts to show.” His voice dropped to a broken rasp, edges wet and serrated. “Because you—because you were never meant to stay.”

     His grip on her wrists trembled with the strain of holding her there, as though if he released her, reality would swallow him whole.

     “You ask why?” His mouth twisted. “You should ask how you stomached a single day of it without screaming.”

     He still held her pinned, his fingers digging deep enough now to bruise. She inhaled slowly. Despite the choke-hold of his grip, she shifted one hand—first a curl of her thumb, then the slide of her fingers against his. Bit by bit, she freed just enough movement to reach his face.

     She touched him.

     Her thumb brushed his cheekbone—slow, sure, unflinching.

     He jerked as though she’d plunged a blade through his chest. His eyes flew wide. His breath hitched into silence. The trembling in his hands turned to a full, shuddering quake, rattling her own frame.

     She didn’t retreat.

     She met his stare—not gentle and not frightened—steady, with a softness that refused to break and a fierceness that refused to yield.

     “Erik,” she breathed, barely above a whisper. “I love you.”

     The words didn’t fall so much as strike—quiet, but with the force of something that shouldn’t exist.

     The sound he made in response was small and awful—part gasp, part laugh, part wound. His fingers clenched around her wrists as if to crush the words out of existence—then faltered. The pressure slackened, not by choice but by something buckling inside him. His mouth worked uselessly, lips trembling, no sound formed.

     “Don’t—” he tried, and the word scraped out of him like something dragged over stone. It wasn’t a command. It was nearly a begging. His eyes—wild, red-rimmed, fevered—searched her face with frantic desperation, hunting for the cruelty he was sure must be there. Pity. Revulsion. The lie.

     It was not there.

     Her thumb moved over his cheek again—slow, sure, unbearably gentle. Warmth against deadened nerves. Not recoiling. Not flinching. Not masking her touch in obligation. Her other hand rose to mirror the first, framing his face as though it weren’t a battlefield of scars and bone.

     “I love you,” she said again, and this time her voice did not waver. She gently shook his head in her hands as if to knock some sense into him. “Do you hear me?”

     His breath caught—shallow, sharp, almost painful. Fresh tears gathered in the corners of his eyes, catching the firelight like molten glass. He looked as though she had pressed him to the edge of a precipice with nothing but words—and he had no hands left to hold the ledge.

     “You—” he managed, voice splintering, “you don’t know what you’re saying…”

     Her touch did not relent. Both thumbs traced the ridges of his ruined cheeks with a slowness that bordered on reverence. Her palms cradled him like something breakable. Every pass of her fingers anchored him to the present—away from the ghosts, the mirrors, the memory of every door ever slammed in his face.

     His breath came shuddering against her face, hot and uneven. His eyes—still fierce, still frantic—raked over her expression, waiting again for the lie to surface.

     It didn’t.

     “Stop,” she said quietly—but there was iron in it. “Stop telling me what I know and what I don’t.”

     His brows drew together, a protest rising, but she didn’t give him the space to voice it.

     “I love you,” she said, each syllable steady as a nail driven into stone. “You are my husband. Do you hear me? My husband. That hasn’t changed.”

     The words held him more tightly than his hands held her.

     He tried to turn his face away—but she followed the motion without hesitation, palms firm and steady, guiding him back to her as though she had the right.

     “Your face doesn’t matter to me,” she whispered. “Not now. Not ever. I love you. All of you. Do you understand?”

     His breath caught abruptly, as though she’d slid a knife beneath his ribs. His hands were still locked around her wrists, but the pressure shifted—not pushing her away, not pulling her closer, only shaking.

     She held his gaze, unwavering.

     “I. Love. You.”

     For one terrible, suspended moment, he only stared. Her hands framed every ravaged plane he had spent a lifetime hiding; her thumbs moved over the broken skin as though it were worthy of touch. And she had said the word love like it belonged there.

     His throat convulsed. Silence stretched—tight, splintering.

     Then, with a violent shudder, his voice tore free:

     “Liar.”

     It wasn’t screamed. It was worse. The word came ragged and low, shredded at the edges—hoarse, breathless, reverent in its despair. His fingers spasmed around her wrists, the old instinct to shove her away flickering to life—but the strength bled out before it could become motion.

     He didn’t push her.

     He only breathed—brokenly.

     “You don’t love this,” he rasped. “You can’t. You have no idea what you’re saying. You don’t know!”

     She drew breath to speak, but he shook his head—sharp, frantic, as if the very act of her answering would undo him.

     “Don’t—” His voice buckled hard. “Don’t lie to me. Don’t…” His jaw clenched, then trembled. “Don’t say things like that!”

     His eyes, fever-bright and furious a moment ago, were coming apart at the seams—rage collapsing into something far more dangerous: despair.

     “You wed a voice,” he choked, “a mask—an echo in the dark. A trick of candlelight and shadows.” His lip curled, but not in scorn—in pain so old it had forgotten where it began. “But this—” he tipped his chin toward the places her hands dared to rest “—this was never meant for love.”

     Her fingers did not leave his skin.

     His throat worked around a breath that shook on the way out. When he spoke again, it was quieter—not gentler, only emptied of the strength to snarl.

     “You should run,” he whispered. “You should scream, or strike me, or hate me for what I’ve done to you. Not—” his voice splintered—“not stand there telling me - .”

     His hold on her wrists slackened. Not from kindness—only collapse. His shoulders sagged, the tautness in his arms unspooling as though something inside him had finally given way.

     “You don’t understand….” he said, but it came out almost dazed, as if he no longer believed the words even as he spoke them.

     Her thumbs swept across the wetness beneath his eyes—wiping away fresh tears, not denying them. Then she smoothed back the wild silver of his hair, pushing it from his brow with quiet, unhurried care.

     He didn’t move.

     Didn’t flinch.

     Didn’t breathe, for a moment.

     He stood there in her hands as though she held a blade to his throat—not of steel, but of mercy—and he had no defense against it.

     Her thumb traced the split line of his cleft lip—slow, deliberate, unafraid. He jerked at the touch, a sharp full-body flinch, as though she’d pressed hot iron to exposed nerve. But she did not pull back. Her hands stayed firm on his face, her eyes locked to his, and when he tried to turn away, she followed the movement and held him there—pinned, not by force, but by something far more lethal.

     She swallowed, breath unsteady but voice unwavering when she spoke.

     “Dooset daram, Erik.”

     The words struck clean through him.

     His eyes went wide—horrified. For a suspended heartbeat he stopped breathing entirely. The Persian—his language, the only tongue in which he had ever briefly been seen as a man — fell from her lips like confession and curse in one.

     His mouth parted without sound. A tremor seized his jaw, then his shoulders, then the breath that would not fully come. He did not speak. Couldn’t. Every emotion he’d spent years caging—terror, longing, disbelief, grief—writhed through his gaze in open war.

     For the first time since the mask had shattered, his hands rose—not to strike, not to shove, not to seize and destroy—but to hover, trembling, unsure, just at the curve of her waist, asking without words if he was allowed to exist there.

     Her palms stayed on his face. Her thumbs kept moving in small, certain circles along the torn and twisted flesh no other soul had dared to touch. His eyes flicked between hers, unmoored, searching for the moment she would wake from her madness and recoil.

     “Enough,” she murmured, and though her voice was soft, fatigue had worn it thin and honest. “Stop this foolishness.”

     He blinked rapidly, lips parting as if to protest—but no sound followed. Only breath, ragged and uneven.

     “You’re bruised,” she continued, her tone shifting—gentle, scolding, familiar. “You’re bloodied. You’re exhausted. And so am I.” Her thumbs swept the dampness from under his eyes, then brushed away the dried smear of blood left at his lip as though she were cleaning the face of someone beloved, not cursed.

     The tremor that passed through him then was near-violent, rippling down his narrow frame. She pushed his tangled hair back from his brow again, slower now, careful as one might soothe a creature always braced for a blow.

     “Come,” she whispered, the word soft but edged with quiet command. “We’re cleaning up. You need something for the pain. And then we’re going to rest.”

     Her hands remained on him—unyielding, tender, real.

     “No more shouting,” she said, voice lowering to something steady, something that could be followed in the dark. “No more panic. Just… stop.”

     His hands still hovered at her waist—shaking, uncertain—but they no longer tried to control or force. The fury that had sustained him was ebbing now, leaving him hollow. His eyes searched hers—wild still, but stripped raw; confusion and terror lay bare where rage had been.

     Her hands slid from his face to his shoulders, fingers firm but gentle, and she drew him toward her with quiet finality.

     He stiffened at the first pull—breath stuttering, muscles tensing—but the resistance wasn’t refusal. It was disbelief. And it lasted only a moment.

     The instant his brow touched her shoulder, something fractured inside him. The anger, the spite, the raw dread—it all buckled. What remained was stripped-down instinct.

     A sound escaped him—small, broken, and involuntary. Not fully a sob, not a gasp, but the helpless noise of something tortured finally collapsing into the only refuge left.

     Then he clutched her.

     Not delicately; with violent, desperate need. One hand fisted in the fabric at her back, twisting it until the seams strained. The other clamped at her waist, fingers digging in as though anchoring himself to existence.

     She didn’t waver. One arm braced across his back, the other slid into his hair, combing through the coarse tangles with slow, steady passes. His breath hit her collarbone in ragged bursts—hot, damp, frantic. She could feel the stark edges of his ribs even through the layers of fabric, his whole body shuddering with the aftershock of his own undoing.

     She lowered her cheek to the crown of his head, her breath moving through his hair. She whispered nonsense and his name in the same tone—soft, steady, unhurried—as though she were soothing a child or a wounded animal.

     Gradually—agonizingly slow—the rigidity began to bleed out of him. His grip didn’t slacken; if anything, he clung more tightly, fingers trembling where they knotted in her gown and at her waist. But the feral violence in him—the flaring, defensive wildness—dulled, hollowed, and flickered out. What rose in its place was far more fragile: not peace, not fully trust, but the first helpless slackening of a man too spent to keep fighting.

     She didn’t rush him. She held him until the shudders in his breath ebbed to something less jagged, and the frantic pounding of his heart slowed enough that she could feel it steady against her chest

     Only then did she move.

     Her hands shifted—one sliding from his hair to his jaw, the other easing from his back to his arm. She drew back just enough to look at him, not separating fully, only creating space to breathe between them.

     “Come.” she murmured, the word neither question nor command, but something in between.

     He didn’t answer. He didn’t nod. He simply let her turn him, let her pry his fingers loose from her dress, and followed when she began to walk. His steps were unsteady, but he didn’t resist. His hand brushed hers once, then hovered near her side like a man afraid of being left behind.

     (Y/N) gathered his hand in hers and led him down the corridor with the kind of quiet certainty that tolerated no argument, even unspoken. At the bathroom door, he hesitated—only for a breath—as though unsure if he was meant to enter. Then he stepped in after her, silent and shaking.

     She went to the sink without a word.

     She let the warm water rise in the porcelain basin, steam unfurling in slow ribbons as she stirred it once with her fingers. Then she took a fresh cloth and lowered it into the heat. When she lifted it out, she twisted it carefully over the bowl, the runoff falling in soft, steady drops.

     When she turned to him, he stiffened at once.

     With the same patience she always used to hold him upright, she raised the cloth to his face.

     The warm press against the skin beneath his nose made him freeze. His breath caught, but he didn’t recoil. She wiped slowly, tracing the dried line of remaining blood and snot from lip to chin, methodical and gentle. Then she lifted the cloth higher, running it along the uneven ridge where a nose should have been, then up to his brow—over the thin, cracked seam of dried blood left by the blow of Nadir’s ferrule.

     Every touch was quiet. Intentional. Merciful.

     He stood there, trembling and bare of armor, letting her do it.

     His eyelids fluttered shut in spite of himself.

     “There,” she murmured. “Better.”

     She left him only long enough to cross to the tub and turn the taps. Water rushed into the basin in a muted roar, steam curling upward in thin tendrils. The quiet sound filled the silence between them, gentler than words but just as present.

     When she returned to him, she reached—not abruptly, but with calm deliberation—for the first button of his shirt.

     He recoiled as if from a brand. A hoarse, raw sound tore from him—half snarl, half plea—and his hands flew to his collar, clutching the fabric tight against his throat.

     “No,” he rasped. “No—don’t—”

     She laid her hand over his, warm and steady, unshaken by the panic in his grip. “You need to be cleaned,” she said softly, but without yielding. “And I need to see how badly you’re hurt.”

     He shook his head—sharp, frantic, like an animal trying to chew through a snare. “It’s nothing. Leave it.”

     “It’s not nothing.” Her tone gentled, but the edge of resolve remained. “If you’re bleeding, if something’s cut, I won’t know unless you let me look.”

     He didn’t release his grip, but he didn’t retreat again either. His chest rose and fell too fast; his eyes glinted with the shine of fresh tears he refused to shed.

     She lowered her voice further, soft as breath. “Erik. Let me.”

     Not a plea. Not a command. An anchor.

     After a long, brittle pause, his fingers slackened. She unfastened the buttons one at a time, careful, slow—making every movement visible before she made it, giving him time to stop her if he chose. The blood-streaked collar peeled back beneath her touch, and she eased the shirt off his shoulders.

     He stood unnaturally still as she slid the fabric down his arms. Lamplight caught the gaunt lines of his torso—the pallor of stretched skin over bone, the tension of muscle held too tightly for too long. Dark bruising had already begun to spread along one side of his ribs, another angry welt rose across his back.

     She ghosted her fingers near one of the contusions. “Does this hurt?”

     He didn’t speak. His jaw locked, a tremor traveling briefly down his ribs.

     She didn’t press him for words.

     Her eyes traveled lower, searching for further damage. When she reached for the waist of his trousers, panic flashed white-hot across his face. He stepped back—but only a pace—his hands rising to fumble at the fastenings himself.

     He turned his head aside as he stripped them off, shame and fury twisting together suddenly beneath the fractured calm. The rest of his clothing followed with unsteady, reluctant movements—shirt forgotten on the floor, undergarments dropped with shaking hands.

     Then there was nothing left to hide behind.

     He stood naked before her, his frame drawn tight, his body angled as though still expecting scorn—or recoil—or flight. His breath came in shallow pulls. The tendons in  his neck stood out like cords. Every line of him braced for judgment.

     She didn’t deliver one.

     She knelt beside the tub first, testing the water with the inside of her wrist. The steam curled up in soft ribbons, fogging the edge of her breath. Then she rose and stepped back to him—not reaching too quickly, not touching more than she must. She simply took his hand.

     He went rigid at the contact, every tendon pulled taut—but he didn’t yank away. His palm was clammy in hers.

     “Come.” she whispered.

     He followed, though each step was hesitant. At the edge of the tub, she steadied him with a hand at his wrist and guided one leg, then the other, over the rim. He lowered himself with halting care until the water came up to his ribs, sucking in a sharp breath when the water touched the bruising there. Only then did he fold inward, hunched against the heat, arms wrapping around himself—not only with shame this time, but for lack of any idea what else to do with them. His shoulders trembled.

     She knelt beside the bath again and plunged the cloth into the water, letting it soak before drawing it up and wringing it once. Then she pressed it gently to his throat, wiping away the last streaks of blood and sweat. The cloth traced the sharp ridge of his collarbone, and then swept lower.

     He didn’t look at her. His eyes fixed on the far wall, as though if he stared hard enough, he could climb into it and disappear. His knuckles were bloodless where his hands gripped his bony elbows.

     She moved to his shoulders next, and then his chest and tense stomach, washing away the dirt and flecks of dried blood. When the cloth passed over one of the bruises along his ribs, his breath hitched—a soft, involuntary sound—but he said nothing.

     When the front of him was clean, she rose quietly and stepped behind the tub. He tensed again, his spine going stiff with memory, with instinct—but there was no snarl this time. No flinch backward. He sat very still.

     She dipped the cloth into the bath, wrung it out, and set it gently to the back of his neck, then down across his shoulders. The lamplight glossed the wet skin beneath her hand, turning each slick line of sinew and bone into something fragile.

     And that was when she saw.

     Just as she had felt before, his back was a map of old suffering. Scars laced across the pale skin in jagged strokes and brutal angles—some raised and roped, others sunken and silvery; time had tried and failed to erase them. Long, diagonal lashes crossed his spine and shoulder blades in overlapping lines. One scar in particular carved a path from the base of his neck down the length of his back, brutal and deliberate, like a mark left by something that hadn’t meant for him to live through it.

     He went very still beneath her hands—as though some part of him already knew she was looking.

     These were not the marks of mishap.

     Not illness.

     Punishment.

     A weapon. A lash. Again—and again, and again.

     Her hand faltered over one of the darkest scars, the damp cloth stilled against his skin. Words fled her, but silence spoke loudly enough. One heartbeat passed. Then another—too long.

     He felt the change in the air like a strike.

     His back went rigid, spine drawn tight as wire beneath her touch. He did not turn his head—but his voice rose from his chest low and cutting, honed thin by something older than the rage he’d shown her before.

     “What are you staring at?”

     Not a question. An accusation.

     She didn’t jerk away, though he clearly expected it. Instead, she kept the cloth where it lay, fingers barely shifting to brush the edge of another scar—light enough to touch, gentle enough not to flinch.

     Her breath slipped out softly, bracing and sorrowing at once.

     “I didn’t know,” she whispered. There was no horror in it—only a stunned, aching quiet. “You never told me.”

     He went even stiller. His shoulders knotted beneath her gaze, every muscle pulled taut, as though preparing for the inevitable: revulsion, pity, or questions he could not bear to answer. His silence wasn’t calm—it was the held breath before a blow.

     She did not recoil.

     He still didn't turn—but the betrayal came in his breathing. A tremor, barely audible,      slipped through before he could swallow it down.

     Her hand moved again—more gently this time, the cloth hanging useless from her fingers. She ghosted her touch along the raised ridge of one scar, so lightly it was more recognition than contact. The water around him shifted in muted ripples as she spoke.

     “I’ve felt them before,” she murmured. “When I held you. When you slept against me. When we—” her breath caught once, but she didn’t avert her eyes “—when we made love. But I… I’d never really seen them. Not until now.”

     Her voice wasn’t laced with fear or revulsion. But something in it had changed—softened, yes, but weighted with a kind of quiet grief that unnerved more than disgust ever could.

     She let the backs of her fingers brush a second welt near his shoulder—barely a touch, but deliberate. “These weren’t accidents.” A heartbeat’s pause. “Darling, who hurt you?”

     Silence answered first—immediate and thick, like a door slamming.

     His breath stopped.

     The tension that overtook him was absolute—his shoulders tightened, spine rigid, forearms knotting beneath the water where his fingers dug into his own skin. For a moment, it seemed he might surge to his feet and bolt—naked, wounded, and seething—rather than sit here exposed beneath the weight of her question.

     When he spoke, the words came low and strangled through clenched teeth.

     “I don’t know.”

     Too quick. Too clean. A lie born not from deception, but instinct.

     She didn’t withdraw her hand.

     Her voice didn’t tilt toward pity or skepticism. She only repeated, softer but surer:

     “Who hurt you, Erik?”

     His jaw flexed, a tremor skittering across the muscles of his back. He didn’t turn—but his breath came uneven, ragged, trapped halfway between a swallow and a cry.

     He held the silence like a shield until it cut him to keep it.

     Then—harsh, bitter, dredged up from somewhere old and festering—he forced the words through:

      “Everyone.”

     A low hum slipped from her—no words, no apology, no plea. Just sound. A soft current of breath and tone meant neither to soothe nor to demand—only to say: I heard you. You do not have to go further.

     She dipped the cloth into the bath again, wrung it out with slow hands, and returned to the tattered canvas of his back. Her touch was deliberate, unhurried. She followed the slope of his shoulders, the ridge of his spine, the jagged terrain of old injury with strokes as careful as if she were handling a newborn.

     He stayed rigid under her soft hands, breath too sharp, too shallow. Shame had woken in him like an old master—curling tight across his muscles, coiling in his gut with the familiarity of something learned through pain. He fixed his gaze on the tiled wall ahead, jaw locked, golden eyes gone distant, as if he were watching something far older than the room around him.

     She could feel him slipping—backward, inward—retreating beneath the surface of himself, away from the heat of the water, away from her hands, away from the present moment entirely.

     When she finished with his back, she didn’t break the silence. She moved to his arm instead. She took his wrist with care—not prying, not forcing—and drew it from where it had clutched his opposite elbow in a self-bound vise. His hand emerged pale and waterlogged, knuckles protruding sharply, the tendons straining like cords.

     Erik didn’t fight her—but he didn’t aid her either. His arm hung in her grasp like carved stone, breath moving through him only because his body hadn’t remembered how to stop.

     (Y/N) drew the cloth down the length of his forearm, slow, respectful, tracing the lines of bone and the scattered bruises already forming there. The lamplight skimmed the water and caught on every harsh angle, every old mark half-hidden beneath the skin.

     Still he said nothing. Still his mind was not here. His silence had weight—the kind that signaled not peace, but slipping.

     She needed to pull him back.

     She let the cloth fall from her fingers into the bath; it landed with a soft, muted ripple. Then she reached for him. One hand rose and settled gently at the side of his neck, her palm warm against the hollow just below his crumpled ear, her thumb resting in the space where breath and pulse met.

     She didn’t speak.

     She made him feel her touch—and presence—before the darkness could take him further.

     “Erik.”

     Not whispered. Not demanding. Just present—spoken like a hand catching someone at the edge of a fall.

     She didn’t rush him. She didn’t repeat herself. She simply waited—for breath, for a flicker of the eye, for any sign that she wasn’t speaking to a memory wearing his skin.

     It came in a tremor.

     A breath drew too sharply into his lungs, as though he’d been hauled—unwilling and bewildered—from some frozen place inside himself. His eyes, fixed on the tiled wall, shifted—slowly, like the turning of something long rusted. He didn’t meet her gaze, but the vacancy in his stare receded by some fragile margin.

     He was back enough to hear her.

     His voice, when it finally emerged, sounded scraped from the bottom of a well.

     “What do you want?” he muttered.

     Her hand remained at his neck, thumb resting just beneath the hinge of his jaw, her touch a quiet, steady warmth. She was gazing gently at him.

     He shut his eyes—briefly, tightly—lashes dark and damp against his skin. His jaw clenched once, twice. He swallowed, and the sound was small and dry and human.

     “I told you not to look at me like that,” he said hoarsely. “Don’t… don’t touch me like I’m something you can love.”

     There was no bite left in it. The edge had broken off somewhere between the firelight and the bathwater. It came out as warning—but underneath, it shook like a plea he didn’t know how to name.

     Still, he didn’t pull away. His arm, limp in her grasp, remained suspended where she’d left it. The trembling under her palm had eased, if only barely. The water lapped around him in soft, rhythmic sounds, as though the room itself were breathing with them.

     She reached for the bar of lavender soap in the chipped dish at her side. The scent lifted faintly when her fingers touched it—an alien gentleness in a space that had known nothing but damp and iron and pain.

     She worked the soap into the cloth, slow and practiced. Lather gathered beneath her hands, pale and soft, clinging to the weave of the fabric. Then she returned to him.

     “Lean forward a little for me?” she murmured.

     He hesitated—only the span of a breath—but then he bent forward. His shoulders curved over his jutting ribs, his spine arcing like a drawn bow. She laid the cloth across his back and began to work the soap into his skin.

     The water shifted around him in muted ripples.

     She draped the soaped cloth across his back and began to work it over his skin.

     Slow. Even. Certain.

     Her hand didn’t skim the surface—she touched him like he was real flesh, not something to be avoided. The cloth glided over scar and sinew alike, following the curves and ridges life had carved into him without recoil. The lavender rose with the steam—warm, faint, almost incongruous—and the scent threaded into the air between them.

     When she rinsed the cloth, the water pattered softly back into the bath before she rinsed the soap from him in quiet arcs. She moved to his shoulders next, running the lathered fabric from the sharp rise of bone down the slope of each arm. His breathing changed there—not calm, not steady, but less frantic. Each inhale began to reach deeper, no longer caught in the throat. She smiled to herself at that – a small victory.

     She followed the length of one arm, then the other, from shoulder to wrist. When she reached his hands, she paused only long enough to take his left one gently in hers. His fingers twitched—not pulling away, only reacting. She washed the back first, tracing each knuckle, and then turned it to clean his palm. Her thumb rested there briefly—pressing into the hollow with quiet warmth before moving on. She did the same with his right.

     When she reached his chest, the tension returned like a breath held too long. His ribs raised sharply, his muscles drawing tight beneath the skin—but he let her. She circled the cloth lightly over his collarbones, then down the narrow ridge of his sternum, careful where bruising mottled the flesh near his side. She rinsed the cloth, and then used her free hand to smooth the soap away with cupped water, her palm passing over him in steady strokes.

     She moved lower.

     His stomach tensed hard at the first press of the cloth, a sharp inhale betraying more than any word. She didn’t quicken or retreat—her motions stayed deliberate, patient, wiping away the grit, the sweat, the dried blood clinging to the ridges of him.

     When the last of it was gone, she dipped the cloth again. Fresh lather bloomed beneath her fingers. She wrung it out, then lifted her hand toward his hair.

     That was where he flinched hardest—his spine snapping rigid, one hand seizing the rim of the tub as though to vault free. Wet strands of hair clung to his temples, veiling some of the worst scars, but not enough to spare him. The deep furrows between his brows carved sharper in the lamplight.

     Her voice came at once, softer than steam but steady as stone.

     “I’m only washing your hair.”

     He didn’t meet her eyes. His knuckles stayed white against the porcelain. But after a long, taut moment, his grip loosened by a fraction. He stayed.

     She set aside the cloth and worked the soap into his hair with her hands instead. Her fingers threaded carefully through the damp tangles of silver and dark, massaging the lather into his scalp. His breath caught—once, then again—when her nails brushed lightly against the tender place near the nape of his neck. His eyes slid shut in a flicker of unguarded surrender, opening again only when he seemed to remember himself. They shone glassy, hollow, but no longer empty.

     She cupped warm water over his head to rinse the suds away, shielding his brow with her palm so nothing stung his eyes. The lavender clung faintly to the rising steam, threading the silence between them.

     When it was done, she set the soap aside. The room was quiet save the drip of water from his hair, the pulse of his breath. His shoulders had sunk lower. His hands no longer clenched the rim. The trembling in him was different now—not wild, not furious, but weary, emptied out.

     She lifted a towel and opened it with quiet certainty.

     “Come out,” she murmured. “You’re clean.”

     His head jerked, his shoulders stiffened, and his mouth twisted as the old defenses scrambled to return.

     “Erik doesn’t need—” His voice was low, hoarse, brittle with shame. “Erik doesn’t need you to… to coddle him like a child. He can tend himself.”

     She did not flinch. She didn’t retreat. She held the towel steady, eyes fixed on him, calm and unwavering.

      “I’m not,” she said—softly, but with a steadiness that allowed no argument. “I’m caring for my husband. That is all.”

     The word hit him. Husband. His scorn—so carefully worn—faltered. He blinked, once, as though the floor had tilted beneath him.

     “You fought for me,” she continued, her voice dropping as she reached out to sweep a damp lock of hair from his temple. “You fought and hurt yourself to keep me safe. After that…please let me take care of you.”

     Her tone gentled further, quieter than steam and twice as dangerous. “I’m not humoring you, Erik. I’m loving you. There is a difference.”

     She raised the towel again, open in her hands. She didn’t press it to him—she offered it, patient and still. Steam curled between them, and the lavender clung to the humid air.

     He stared at her, as though he could out-wait meaning itself. Shame and disbelief and some unnameable ache warred in his expression. His jaw clenched around a protest he could not shape.

     Then—unsteady, trembling despite himself—he stood.

     She stepped close. Without hesitation, she pressed her lips to his cheek—right at the thin, ruined flesh. The kiss was light. It was sure. It was final.

     “I’ll fetch your clothes, darling.” she said quietly.

     Before he could summon any reply—plea, denial, fury, anything—she slipped from the room. The door remained ajar, neither invitation nor dismissal, only fact.

     He was alone with the steam and the lavender and the air she’d left behind.

     Water beaded along his shoulders and slid down the knots of his spine. The towel hung low at his hips, the fabric clinging as though it, too, feared to fall away. The scent on his skin felt alien—too gentle for flesh once flayed and stitched and starved of touch.

     He dried himself by rote, movements disjointed, every gesture jagged with swimming thoughts. She had seen everything—every scar, every bruise, every line of old pain—and now, with nothing left for her hands to tend, silence crept back in to take her place.

     The towel drooped against his thin frame as he left the washroom, his bare feet soundless on the floorboards. He didn’t think of where to go.

     His body took him to the Louis-Philippe room.

     The Louis-Philippe room lay dim and hushed, the fire long since guttered to ash.

     He crossed to the bed and sat on its edge, then slowly lowered himself beneath the coverlet. He pulled the quilt high to his collarbones, the damp towel slipping soundlessly from his body to the floor. He curled inward, facing the wall, every line of him folded tight.

     Her footsteps sounded faintly in the hall.

     “Erik?”

     Her voice—searching, careful—preceded her figure in the doorway. She carried a neat stack of folded garments in her arms. At the sight of the empty washroom and the thinning ribbon of steam along the corridor, she followed the silence until she found him here.

     “Oh, there you are!” she brightened, relief soft in her tone.

     He did not turn. His shoulders only stiffened beneath the quilt.

     She came to the bedside, setting the clothes carefully on the mattress within his reach—shirt, trousers, robe—each piece laid out with quiet precision.

     “These are for you.” she said.

     He glanced once at the bundle. Then, wordless, he pushed them from the bed with the back of his hand. They fell in a muted heap to the floor.

     He rolled tighter into the covers, pulling them closer around himself as if they might shield him from something unseen. His back curved hard, his whole body shrinking smaller, smaller, until there was nothing left of him but the ache of someone trying to vanish.

     No words came.

     He simply hid.

     She stood a moment, her breath catching in her chest. Then—quietly, achingly—she exhaled:

     “Oh, Erik…”

     She bent to retrieve the clothing. One by one she folded them again, smoothing each piece as though it mattered. Then she set them neatly on the side table, waiting for him still, but out of his immediate reach.

     Then she rounded the bed to the other side.

     She slipped her robe from her shoulders, then her shift, and draped them neatly over the chair by the hearth. The air was cool against her bare skin, but she did not shiver.

     Lifting the coverlet, she eased herself into the bed behind him, careful as though even the sound of the mattress dipping might break the fragile stillness he’d drawn around himself. The blankets settled over them both, warm and close.

     He remained curled on his side, his back to her, ribs rising and falling in shallow, constricted breaths—each one too small, too tight, as though he braced against touch, against memory, against the risk of being reached.

     She watched the stiff lines of his shoulders in the dim light, the way the shadows caught the ridges of his spine, the scars ghosting beneath the fabric. His damp dark hair clung in fine strands at the nape of his neck.

     The instinct to reach for him was overwhelming. To smooth her hand along his back, to draw him against her chest, to remind his body what shelter felt like. But she kept her hand still, fingers curling into the sheet instead.

     He would reach for her when he was ready.

     So she lay there, naked as he was naked; her breathing attuned to his until the space between them steadied.

     “I love you.” she whispered into the quiet—a truth laid gently at his back.

     He didn’t answer. But his shoulders—just slightly—stilled.