"Pretty Christine."
Her husband's murmur barely reached her ears, though he stood directly behind her as she fussed with her hair. She should have had a maid; they certainly had the means for one, but circumstances being what they were, it was not practical.
"Will you back up, please? I don't want to elbow you," she said, trying to keep the annoyance she felt at his presence from insinuating itself into her voice.
He obliged, and she bit back a sigh. How terribly unkind she felt. He had delivered on every one of his promises as best he could, and still she could a hardly muster the patience to deal with him. They lived above ground in a normal house. After throwing all of his formidable intellect into the project, he had finally been able to create a mask that allowed him to appear as a normal man. When he was wearing it, which was most of the time, she could almost forget the horror underneath it. As far as she knew, he had not done anything truly wicked since their marriage. He was trying.
When he inevitably lost his temper (Christine found it difficult to obey her husband without question), he mostly managed to control himself. He had shoved her against the wall once, an inexpensive little vase had once flown past her head to shatter against the doorframe behind her, and all manner of curses would stream from his lips, turning his angelic voice into something hideous and frightening, but he did not strike her. After each incident, he would present her with some sort of gift, usually jewelry. She was amassing quite the collection of things she did not want. She knew it should have been those incidents that caused her grief, but mostly it was the way he dogged her steps that drove her to distraction. She could not even visit Mamma Valerius without him being right there, hanging on her every word.
Why had she ever agreed to marry Erik? Ever since she had learned he was a man, she had known he would only make her miserable. A beginning built on deception could not lead to a good ending. Had she really been naive enough to think that marrying him was better than marrying no one? As a single girl, her time had been her own. And she was still so young, there might have been someone else, someone who didn't make her feel as if she were suffocating merely by being in the same room.
She finished pinning her hair, and Erik's slightly trembling hands rested on her shoulders. She looked at his false face in the mirror, at his bizarre yellow eyes. She wished they were blue, like Raoul's. She had not thought of her childhood friend in years. She caught herself smiling, thinking of the last time they had met, not children anymore, but not grown either. Her father had still been alive.
"I love to see my wife smile." Erik's voice quivered with his affection, and Christine's face slipped back into its usual stoic expression. She would not tell him that her smile had not been, and would never be for him. Instead she patted one of the hands resting on her shoulder with all of the affection she could muster, knowing she would never be able to shake off the guilt which gnawed at her constantly.