AN: As usual, thank you so much to everyone who is reviewing, they make my day and keep me going! I'm sending love your way, can you feel it? Internet love should be washing over you just about now.

And (drumroll please), and extra special thanks to my brand-spankin' new beta, TouchingTrusting! She's absolutely amazing and has helped me so much. And thank you so much to everyone who offered their services, I'm so glad that there were people willing to help me with this.

Please read and review!

Onward we march!

Chapter Fourteen: The Spiral into Darkness

A black car rolled into the parking lot. Christine watched it with an almost numb detachment from where she laid; it rolled on the sideways pavement underneath the tilted summer sky and stopped not far from her. The smooth sound of a door opening and closing told her patently disinterested brain that someone had gotten out.

The police car was long gone, having squealed away so fast it left the smell of burning rubber and fear behind.

Footsteps crunched on the gravel and stopped near her head. Christine stared at the skewed sky unblinkingly, rain dripping into her eyes.

A voice sounded in her ear, so close. "Get up," the voice was a hiss, and she was almost surprised to hear that it was female.

She didn't move.

The voice moved in closer. "Get up or I will hurt you. Move. Now."

Christine's pale lips almost twitched into the mockery of a smile, but she didn't move.

The voice sighed and a face leaned over hers, nearly jerking Christine out of her stasis. The hard lined features were familiar; it was the woman from that night, the one who held the gun. This time Christine almost laughed. One of the kidnappers, here to kidnap her again. Round and round in a circle.

'Ring around the rosie, a pocket full of posies…'

Strong arms hooked bracingly under her armpits and Christine felt her body half lifted off of the ground. Her shoes scrapped the ground with a dull scuffing sound as she was dragged toward the black car.

'Ashes, ashes …'

The woman dropped her, hard, but Christine's dead muscles didn't let her catch herself and as her body fell her head connected crackingly with the pavement. The woman seemed not to notice and opened the back passenger door. "In," she said, her voice supremely unemotional.

Christine stared at the tilted underneath of the car, at the dirty wheels and snakelike pipes, and felt nothing.

'Ashes, ashes…'

"In!" The woman insisted, the toe of her boot nudging Christine jarringly in the side. "Now, damnit."

"Lina!" a familiar voice admonished, and Christine felt his presence above her, and his captivating, commanding voice whisper softly, "Get in the car, Christine. Please."

Despite herself Christine awkwardly moved her limp muscles to crane her neck toward his sound. He was leaning across the empty seat in the car and had one long, gloved hand held out to her, those irrepressibly skeletal fingers stretched beseechingly toward her dirty, wasted figure. He asked her again, and through half closed eyes she could see the dim glow of yellow behind the dark mask.

"Please Christine, do not make this harder for yourself than it already is. Get in the car." The voice wrapped around her aching head like liquid peace, promising rest and empty forgetfulness if she just gave in.

"Christine," his voice was barely a whisper. "Don't break, Christine."

Painfully, pitifully, Christine pushed her shaking muscles into a slow movement and found her way to her hands and knees, which were scraped and dirtied, her limp clothes heavily wet. Helped in part by the strange somber woman but not touching Erik in any way, she clamored unsteadily into the small dark interior of the car.

The door closed behind her.

'We all fall down.'

The car pulled out of the driveway in a smooth, unhurried motion, and curved through dirty streets made gray in the still falling rain.

Christine leaned against the window, watching as the rain streaked winding silver rivers that seemed so close to her but did not touch. Unconsciously she placed her hand against the cool glass, trying to touch those wet lace-worked patterns; she traced them with a fingertip, wondering where they ended, how long they would last before blurring or melding with other raindrops to create some new river.

She focused on the window so she would not have to focus on him.

He sat on the other side of the wide backseat, his yellow eyes fixed on her, his long gloved hands still and calm in his lap. He seemed to be waiting for her to speak.

After a long time of watching the rain, she realized that the car would not stop until they had spoken; here there was no room for her to run to, no way to get out of the conversation that he obviously needed to have. Finally Christine closed her eyes and stared blankly into the darkness of her eyelids, feeling utterly dead inside.

"Why?" she whispered through cracked lips, and he breathed in quietly, seemingly satisfied that she had spoken.

"Do you understand, now?" He questioned, and despite herself Christine opened her eyes and looked at him. He sat so still, the very angle of his body intense, his presence oddly unreal. The mask, so impassive and strangely mocking in its fake features, made him seem inhuman, like a dark creature out of a fairy tale.

His voice, so soft, the liquid beauty and melody that lingered hypnotically in the air and seemed to resound in her soul like the promise of hope, made him seem like an angel.

Christine shook her head, her previously dead emotions rising once again to the surface with the sound of that voice.

"What do you mean?" she asked achingly, her head pounding, so tired. "I don't understand…anything," her voice trailed off into a near whisper as she faced those golden eyes beseechingly. "If you care about me, why put me through this hell? Why let me escape only to snatch me up again? Why give me that hope only to prove to me that it was false? You've taken everything from me, everything…" Anger was rising in her mind as she faced him, anger that had been long suppressed by hope and fear. He sat so still, just watching her, and she was seized by the sudden impulse to grab him by the lapels of his dark suit and shake him violently. "Why? Is this all a game to you? Do you like torturing me? Do you?"

"Of course not," his voice cut through her anger, soothing it, dissipating it against her will. She sat back against the seat and stared at the dark, opaque glass paneling that separated them from the driver. "This was not torture," he spat the word as if it were repugnant to him. "I didn't do this for me. This was all for you. For your own good. Consider it a necessary evil, my dear. It had to be done, can't you see that?"

He acted like it was the most obvious thing in the world, and his golden eyes seemed surprised that she did not understand it right away. Christine stared at him blankly for a few moments.

"What the hell are you talking about?" She asked wearily.

He turned his body so that he was fully facing her; his hand drifted to the empty seat space between them, close to her knee but not touching. "As long as you dreamt of escape, as long as you believed in the possibility of escape, you would never be able to relax. You would always be looking for a way out; you would always think that you could go back to your life before if you could just get away. Aren't I right? You were consumed by the thought of escape; its hope was probably the only thing that kept you functional during those first few days."

"Why did you take it away from me?" Christine nearly screamed. "Why couldn't I keep it?"

"It was destroying you!" He insisted quietly, fervently. "As long as you focused on escape your life with me would never be peaceful, never be real! How could you concentrate on your music, on your voice, when your mind was so preoccupied? How could you ever see me as a human being and not as a means to an end? Would you ever speak to me without an agenda? Would you ever understand that what I said was true, that I am not some lunatic locked away in a strange house but someone who is real and important in the world, someone who makes decisions that affect others, someone who is alive?" He leaned toward her, his eyes fierce, and Christine leaned back unconsciously. "I did this for you Christine, for you…for us. I did it so that if you spoke to me, if you knew me, you…" he paused, as if he wanted to say something grand and far fetched yet thought better of it. Instead he leaned back into his seat and his voice grew calmer. "I told you that I would let you go. That still holds true. But I hope that now you won't think about premature escape and you can see me as a person, and that when I do release you...you will come back. Not because you are afraid, but because you know me, because you want to. Because I am more than this," he gestured bitterly at himself, and Christine felt there was some deeper meaning at that action that she did not see. "Do you understand, Christine? Can you understand?"

"I don't know," she whispered brokenly, though she felt that she did. "When can I go?"

He shook his head at her, solemn once again. "That I can not tell you, or you would think only of that date. Right now know that we have much time left together, and there are important things to be done. Your voice is very important to me; it could be breathtaking…with much work. I would like to teach you…that is why you are really here, you know. So that you can relax….and I can teach you."

Christine refrained from snorting derisively. Relax?

Stifling the insane impulse to laugh, she faced him and squared her shoulders as if to enter a fight. "And what if I don't?"

He seemed puzzled, his golden eyes staring at her quizzically. "What do you mean?"

Christine blurted out her words without thinking; her head was filled with overwhelming, conflicting emotions that had started to slowly push reason to the side. "What if I don't sing for you? What if I don't get to know you? What if I fight this? This is my life. What if I chose to not accept this…this…imprisonment, what if I fight you and all of your power and everything you stand for? What if I refuse to let you dictate my life like this?"

He was silent for a moment as he stared at his hands. "Would you?" he said softly. "I know you so well, Christine, I've watched you for so long. I don't think that you would. I don't think that you could hate so much." His eyes flickered upwards to catch hers, and they were pleading and strangely beautiful.

"Maybe," she whispered, suddenly unsure.

Slowly and with unyielding grace, Erik raised one gloved hand and brushed a stray lock of hair out of her face. "If you did," he whispered softly, gently, tracing with his eyes the curve of her jaw, her mouth and nose, her forehead with unsurpassed tenderness and emotion. "If you did I would never let you go."

His words belied the soft look in his eyes and she jerked back suddenly, her eyes wide. He continued to look at her in that slightly desperate, adoring way he had, but his voice had an edge.

"I can not lose you," he murmured, keeping his hand stretched imploringly toward her face but not touching. "I can not go back to the way my life was, alone, after knowing you. Should you reject me completely I would die inside, but I could not let you go. Even your hatred, even your indifference, is better than not having you at all. I would not prefer that ending," his voice was sad, low. "But it is your choice, my dear. You underestimate how much I need you. You are," he stared at her for a moment, apparently at a loss for words. "My air," he finished quietly.

As if on cue the car slowed to a rolling stop and he turned his eyes from her to stare out the window. "We are home," he said, and despite herself Christine turned to see the derelict apartment complex that she had run away from, what seemed like so long ago.

"Home," she traced the words with her lips but didn't make a sound, and inside she felt more hopeless than she ever had before.

Christine felt the car rock gently as he got out, and a few moments later her door swung smoothly open and he stood there before her. Tentatively he unfurled one long gloved hand, and his feral eyes pleaded with her to take it, to not initiate that ultimate rejection. She stared at his fingers, bonelike yet curiously graceful, as the man himself, and felt the utter understanding of her situation crash down on top of her.

She was never going to get away. Even if she fought, even if she screamed, even if she rejected him a thousand times it would only increase his hold on her, like a snake slowly constricting. As she fought to escape him he would fight to keep her, and he would never, ever let go.

As the young policeman with sad eyes told her, there was no escape, nowhere she could run. Even if she was good, even if she befriended him, she had no reason to know that his obsessive love wouldn't cause him to break his word and keep her locked away with him until the end of time.

And Christine knew with every fiber of her being that she could not be a prisoner. She couldn't ever accept that fate.

Slowly her eyes moved from his hand to his face, and her hand, as if of its own volition, came to meet his. His fingers tightened almost imperceptibly around hers, an unconscious gesture of ownership as he helped her out of the car and toward his – their- 'home.'

Christine knew then, as she followed his dark figure across the pavement in the still falling rain, that there was no hope, no way out.

It was at that moment she knew she had to kill him.