"Erik?" Emily said softly so that no one else would overhear her.

"Yes, Madame?" Erik said, his voice equally as soft as he stepped over to her. Behind him he heard Nina and Victor deeply enraptured in conversation, the two of them at the end of the hall near the door.

"Please, call me Emily. But it is vital that I warn you about something important."

Giving a glance over to where Nina and Victor stood talking, he stepped closer to her, feeling that Nina mustn't overhear them at all costs.

"Nina is a very unusual woman, you must understand. She can behave normally for one moment and then strangely the next. I am afraid that somebody is going to get hurt."

"I'll admit she's a fragile woman, but I promise you I would never hurt her."

"It's not Nina I'm worried about." She said with a small laugh. Suddenly, a deep graveness washed over her and a frown covered her pretty young face. "It's always been obvious to me that Nina is different from most people. I never knew how different until once a man provoked her and she became. . . violent. She broke that man's arm. And then, not only does she have violent outbursts at times, but she will stop at nothing to get what she wants if she wants it bad enough. Something in her has changed now, I know, and I do not think it is a change for the better."

"And you are worried about me, why?"

"Because, Erik, I sincerely believe that Nina wants you." Before he could say anything, Emily continued. "You have not known her long enough to see it, but she is two people. There is the lovely, happy, smiling Nina that is present most of the time, and then there is the version of her where she becomes sly, dangerous. She has little self preservation and even less preservation for others. She is normally such a God fearing girl, but simply stops caring. She becomes cruel, strange, sadistic, contemptuous. She finds genuine pleasure in other people's pains. She hurts people, Erik. It's how she controls people to get what she wants. She'll hurt you if you're not careful."

Looking back onto the first conversation he had had with the girl he had met in the woods, Erik remembered the grin she had given him, the same coy smile that had invoked fear in him. Slowly, he nodded. With his intense eyes he could see through Nina's outer layer to look clearly at the dangerous inner part of her, the same part that had let him touch her and the same part that demanded he sleep in the same bed with her. A coquettish smile here, a sly twinkle in her eyes there, every small attribute he had not cared to piece together added up to a strange sum. She was not just a Spanish rose, but a devious vixen. She was an angel and a demon in one body.

"Everything will be fine, I assure you." He said to her, sliding his arms into the sleeves of his black frock coat and stepping over to where Nina and Victor stood talking.

"How do you know? How do you know everything will be fine?" She asked, holding Erik's arm in her hand to prevent him from getting any closer to her husband and friend.

"Because I am exactly the same way."

"Nina?"

"Hmm?"

"Come here, won't you?" Erik said, gesturing her over to the piano in his parlor where he had been sitting silently the past hour, occasionally moving his fingers over the ivory keys but never pressing a single note. Something had been obstructing his power today. He thought that, at first, it was merely the absence of Christine, but now he was not so sure.

Remembering how he first likened himself to Nina, Erik felt agitated. They were magnificently similar. Give her a deformity and the talent of Apollo and she would be his perfect female counterpart. Remembering a saying that opposites attract, something he had always applied to himself and Christine, he doubted if it really had much meaning. It had taken Erik years to convince Christine of his benevolence, and it had taken her even longer to begin to show affection in return. Now he wondered if he had ever even gained an ounce of her love. No, he spat to himself, there had only ever been pity. But here Nina was, professing her love to him when she had known him for just a short two weeks. And, he reminded himself, she was lonely just like him. Two souls had been plunged into the dark, each of them groping for some form of companionship. Both of them had latched onto the first thing they had come across, for Erik that had been Christine, for Nina it had been a sadist name Armand de Rousseau. Neither one of them had gotten what they had wanted but now they had each other. Something has truly driven us together, he sighed silently.

"Perhaps there is a God." Erik muttered, his eyes fixed on his fingers stretched out over the keys of the piano.

"Excuse me?" Nina said, stepping next to where he was seated at the black painted bench to stand behind him.

"Nothing." He said, quickly. "Nina, I have treated you wrongly. I must apologize."

"Anyone compared to that bastard is a saint." She snorted, running her hand through Erik's soft hair. In a flash, he had stopped her hand by gripping her by the wrist.

"No. Not me."

"You needn't apologize, Erik. You may have the voice of a god but you are still just a man. But. . . ."

"But?" He asked, his throat slightly gravelly with irritation.

"But," Nina's voice dropped to a whisper and she wrapped her arms around his neck. "I know a way you can make it up for me."

One hand snuck itself through the tie and collar of his shirt to graze its fingers over the flesh of his chest. Though she felt the mass number of scars that laced themselves across his breast, Nina did not let her hand stray and he gasped softly. Erik could not remember the last time somebody had touched him there; perhaps no one had. Only the whip of various captors had ever found its way to his chest. The skin there seemed almost virginal, its only mars the criss-crossing of deep, white lines embedding themselves into his flesh like a fisherman's net.

Without a word, Erik stood and, after shoving all stacks of sheet music and pens to the floor with one broad sweep of his arm over the top of the piano, Nina found herself on the black, reflective surface of the instrument. Placing his hands on either one of her thighs, he parted her legs slightly and she held him fast to her neck. His lips met with the dark curve of her neck and a soft moan escaped her lips as he kissed her there deeply. One black trousered knee met with the piano keys with a sharp, loud clang and Erik registered vaguely that it was bad for the piano chords. However, he did not much care at the moment.

Grasping her rustling skirts angrily, he swore loudly before letting her go and striding to the other side of the window where he crossed his arms and glared at the transparent panes.

"I'm sorry." Erik said, his voice nothing but bitter. "You just can't imagine what I want to do to you and I know that would not be right."

Silently, she sat on the edge of the piano bench and lightly set her fingers on the highest G flat, pressing it lightly to create an ominous sound that reverberated around the room.

"You're right. I can't imagine." Nina said. "So, why don't you tell me?" Her hand slipped to the F sharp, creating a fortissimo pang, and Erik jumped slightly. At the same time, each of them turned to face one other and Nina's eyes glittered haughtily in a silent challenge. "Or would that be too intimate for such an isolated man?"

Her mind had worked remarkably fast. Nina had not wanted to discontinue her and Erik's charade on the piano and her thoughts sped around dizzyingly while searching for a solution. Her saucy wit had concluded that the only way she would be able to coax him into their heated interaction again would be by making him angry. Her smart plans failed.

"I would pick you up like a bride and I would carry you upstairs. Not to the room you slept in last night, but to mine."

"Go on." She murmured breathlessly. His voice had slipped into the same silky, seductive manner he had used on the night he had gotten her into his bed. Nina was left hypnotized at the sheer beauty, her eyes nothing but glazed over crystal orbs in her head.

"I would set you on my bed. If you were wearing a dress that tied in the back, I would let you unlace it yourself. If it was tied or buttoned in the front, I would take it off for you."

"And then?"

"I would take off everything else. Slowly to be gentle, but not as slow as to make the anticipation painful." As Erik spoke, Nina was silent and her blue eyes straed at him, furiously focusing on his face. Her black hair hair, blue gown, and almost violet eyes combined together to make an eerily dark statement. She sat patiently, her hands clutching her skirt, waiting to see the rest of his painting. Full lips parted softly, he could see the trace of white teeth. Calmly, he walked nearer to where she was still seated at the piano bench.

"You're warm. So very warm." Erik whispered. "And beautiful. You are so beautiful, Nina. And I am so ugly. Not just my face and my body, but my soul is hideous, as well."

"Yes, Erik." She said, muttering her agreement coldly. "You are revolting, I'm sure. Truly horrifying. The prospect of your ugliness invokes nothing but disgust in my soul."

"I apologize." He said.

"Make it up to me." Nina exclaimed sharply, and Erik was silent, waiting for her command. "Kiss me, Erik!"

"I can't." He said with a small shake of his head.

"Why not!" She shouted, though she already knew the answer:

"Christine." Erik answered her solemnly.

"Always Christine." The misery in her voice outmatched his sorrow and Erik felt a twinge of guilt for the second time. He was not the only person who had been hurt and was lonely, but he could not stop his blindness, even when it hurt possibly the only person who ever felt enough generosity to bestow love and kindness upon him.

Faintly, a dark tune scratched itself in the empty air, long, cold, and undampened by her foot placed on the pedal of the piano. The simple, one handed melody was, at one time, quiet and angry, almost as if the rhapsody floating in the air had the means to be passive aggressive. Despite the lingering traces of hostility in it, the continuous flats produced from her slim fingers caressing the ivory keys also suggested deep anguish and despair. There was tragedy there along with anger, and it almost felt as if the wind had been knocked out of him. Erik gasped softly when her hand slipped onto a wrong note and she stopped, though her hand still rested against the carefully arranged pieces of ebony and ivory.

"I didn't know you played."

"I don't." She said, abandoning the instrument and standing up to face him. "Christine hurt you, but I have not. Did she love you, Erik, because I love you. She saw you, she feared you, she ran into the arms of another man. But I adore you and you refuse me."

"My God you infuriate me!" Erik answered her, scowling and crossing his arms over his chest angrily. "Do you think I want to be in love? It is worse than the most unimaginable hell! I am constantly in the throes of a fire that I cannot control!"

"Then let me douse your flames! Or at least let me start my own!"

"Then do it! I cannot kiss you, so why don't you kiss me?"

Without another word, Nina pulled Erik by the lapels of his coat to her and met his mouth with hers. Several sharp sounds arose in the air as her back met with the sensitive piano keys and he reeled into her kiss, almost like a vampire in a swoon. Silently, she pushed him to the ground, fury ablaze in her eyes.

"You are an imbecile." She told him, tearing off his cravat and forcibly removing his jacket. "Now take your damn pants off."

Erik stared at her like a deer about to be shot and Nina gave a frustrated groan before pulling off his waistcoat and opening his shirt to expose his scarred chest, watching with a satisfied grin as the buttons on both garments popped off to litter the floor, not bothering with the tedious task of undoing them. His shirt hung off his shoulders as she glared at every blemish that carved itself into his flesh and she held him to the floor fast.

"I took a vow of celibacy and now you've ruined it. I saw how miserable my mother was over my father and I told myself I would never become like that. She died being away from him and that was the day I swore off men. But now what have you done, you insufferable man?! You've ruined me. I'm just as miserable as my dear dead mother. You ache for Christine, you despair for her, you yearn and whine and mope all for her. And I do the same for you. I want you, I need you, don't you understand that, you idiot?! You've ruined everything!"

Nina did not cy, simply because she would not cry. But she sobbed slightly and buried her face into Erik's chest, pressing the smooth skin of her face to the multitude of lines weaving their way across his pale form. In an effort to comfort her, he ran his hand through her long raven hair and wrapped his arm around her back, holding her close to him.

"My mother and father truly loved each other, you know. But they could not be together." She told him somberly. "They were both married, and then they were of completely different ranks, so they had to keep their relationship a secret. When I was born my mother told her husband that I was his child, and he believed her, the stupid man. He was Spanish like her but neither of them had blue eyes. I have a brother, too. A half brother, the son of my father and his wife. We would secretly play when we were children because his mother didn't like me. She was suspicious, I think. What really tipped her off is when my mother's husband died and she barely mourned him, but she didn't do anything. Everyone was a little miserable in that house back then, her because she knew her husband was unfaithful, my mother and father because they could not truly be together, me because, well, I am always miserable."

She paused to laugh a little and Erik continued to run his hand through her hair comfortingly, silently listening to the rest of her story, "When my brother turned fourteen he started behaving differently to me. I was just ten and two years then so I was at a complete loss as to what he was doing when we were in his room one day. We were such good friends, I had never expected something like that from him. He kept pacing around his room rearranging things until he thought they were perfect for whatever was going to happen. Well, he sat me on the little carpet where we always used to play games and he tried to kiss me. I almost kissed my brother, can you believe it? But our father walked into the room and he just started shouting and shouting. Not at me but at my brother. I had never seen him so angry. I was terrified. I remember sitting in the outside hallway with Leonardo, that's my brother, and, and there was so much shouting going on behind my father's office door. My mother, my father, my father's wife, they were all so loud."

Nina's voice dropped to a low whisper and she slowly slid off of Erik's chest to lay on the carpet beside him.

"The next day my mother and I left. We lived in some stupid little shack in the country that had been my mother's parents when they were still alive. She started changing without my father, almost immediately. She was tired, sick, miserable. She cried, she cried so much, Erik. And then she died and I went to live at an orphanage in London. I met Emily, she watched after me, we were best friends. There was some patron to the orphanage, I can't remember his name but sometimes he brought his son with him on his visits. That's how Emily and I met Victor. I was ten and four years by the time he first talked to me. It seems so long ago but it was only just a little over two years. He was so pretty and clean and warm and kind, I thought I loved him. I know that I didn't now, though. You are the only man I have ever loved. But I was crushed all the same when he and Emily took a liking to each other. They got married so quick and I lived with them for a while, but then I met Rousseau. He was so handsome and dark and suave and polite and he invited me to his summer home in Paris. But then you know what happened next. I began to feel like I was a prisoner in those little damask rooms, and I was right. He wouldn't let me go, Erik. He was mad."

Nina inhaled sharply to herself and Erik, still with one arm wrapped around her, held her to him tighter. Quietly, he wondered if this was how Christine felt when thinking about him. Was he just another Rousseau to his angel and her precious little viscount? Had he hurt her so much that she had to cling to her husband like Nina was clinging to him now just to bear with the thoughts?

"Do you think he loved you?" He asked her quietly.

"No." She answered simply. "It may have seemed that way but he was only ever obsessed with me. He worshiped me, but he wanted to possess me as well. That was his mistake, I think. If he hadn't been so forward, if he hadn't been so sudden and violent and imposing maybe I could have learned to love him back."

Could it have been the same with Christine, Erik asked himself, would she have loved me if I had been different? A little voice in the back of his head said yes.

"Would you ever hurt me, Erik?" She asked him.

For a moment, he did not know what to say. To say no would be a lie. Hadn't he wrapped his own hand around Christine's throat in his lair on the night Don Juan premiered? If he had hurt Christine it would certainly be a possibility that he could hurt Nina. But to say yes might frighten her. Erik could only imagine her seeing him as just another Rousseau, a familiar kind of distrust and hatred in her eyes, completely reminiscent of the Swedish soprano he had been so fond of.

"I've already hurt you." He decided suddenly, placing a gloved hand over her chest directly above her heart beat. "Here. I've hurt you here."

Lovingly, Erik cupped her cheek in his other hand and turned her face towards his. His lips brushed against hers softly before he kissed her for only the second time. Her warm breath collided against his and Nina made soft, happy noises in his mouth, almost like she was purring.

"I'll never do it again, though. Or at least I'll try." He whispered hastily, moving his mouth away from hers in just enough time to give her his message before claiming her lips again.

"I know you know where he is, Madame Giry." The beautiful young woman said, her long brown hair falling over her slender shoulders. "Raoul has told me what you know of him, and now I want you to tell me where he is."

The aging widow stopped in her racks and turned slowly. She had tried her hardest to ignore Christine de Chagny as she passed the silver throated soprano on the street, but it had been to no avail and the girl would not stop heckling her about the man they both knew as the Phantom of the Opera.

"I know nothing." Madame Giry spat, tapping her walking stick against the ground and continuing her journey across the streets of Paris. "Believe what the police say, girl. That one is dead."

"That's a lie!" Christine hissed kitten-like, wrapping one small, porcelain hand on the older woman's arm and striding with her briskly. "You must tell me where he is!"

"Why should I tell you? You have caused him nothing but trouble since the moment he laid eyes on you!"

"Because I must tell him something, something vitally important!"

Giving a furtive sigh, Madame Giry paused in her speedy walk and looked into Christine's eyes. In the magnificent brown, teary orbs she saw a number of things. Desperation, hope, fear, and, above all else, madness. It was no secret to the wise woman that the girl in front of her has slightly insane. She likened the silver throated beauty to Ophelia, her former maestro having contaminated her like Hamlet with his diabolical demeanor. She could only hope that her fate would not end similarly to the Shakespearean tragedy's. The strict, skeptical old woman could only imagine the grave headline in the newspaper, 'Acclaimed Performer and Viscountess Found In River Seine".

"London. He should be in London if he's still alive."