A/N: Thank you for the reviews! :) Over 800?! I am stunned and very happy that most of you are still enjoying my bizarre little tale! ... Now, how about a nice chocolate walnut brownie, with a thin layer of revelation for icing? ;-)


LIV

.

Love Erik?! How can any woman in her right mind love someone like him! He's cruel and insensitive and cold

Cruel …

Cold…

He's brooding and dark and at times he frightens me…A woman would have to be mad to entrust her heart to Erik or consider him for a husband…

Mad…mad…

Sometimes I wish he'd never come to The Heights, that he'd just go away and leave me in peace!

Away…

Go away

- I kept my word to stay in those horrid dark dungeons with you …and I would have stayed…Do you hear…?

The Phantom clutched the coarse wig on both sides of his head, cursing her words that echoed and spun with ruthless abandon inside his mind.

Those voices. Past. Present. To "hear" was all he could do - her voice that would not stop, would not leave, tormenting him with its swarm of contradictions.

What was the lie? What was the truth?

Did she even know how to speak it?

The Phantom blinked away the accursed moisture that had gathered in his eyes and struggled to control his erratic breathing, his body winded from his latest tempest.

He could still recall the night he first saw her. Oddly, A storm of epic proportions had marked the beginning of his trust, and ten years later, another cloudburst had pealed to the end of it. Rain giving life and taking life away…

He had been a skeleton of a boy, abused and rejected, who met a petite fairy princess extending to him her hand in friendship, even after she'd seen his accursed face. Never had he experienced such a phenomenon and had been stunned to receive her acceptance. In all the years they grew up together, he did not once presume to be more than a friend, thinking such hopes to gain her love in vain. He had not allowed himself to believe that such a sweet maiden could grow into the beauty who would truly care for the ogre, as on occasion she had done in their make-believe play as children – arguing that she did not like some endings in her Gothic tales they imitated, pitying the beasts and claiming the tales should be changed ...

Just as she did not like the ending of his opera and wished it to change, upset with the way Aminta was written. Of course, she'd been correct – he had based the character of the avaricious gypsy on Christine and his last memories of her. Leading the hapless Don Juan into her web of sweet seduction and lies, while falling in love with the handsome wealthy merchant's son, both of them plotting Don Juan's ultimate destruction. He had intended her involvement as part of her punishment, to make her play the role of her own treachery again and again.

She had exhibited emotion but not as expected – instead angry that Aminta showed no love toward Don Juan at any time during the play.

He had argued that Aminta did not know how to love, greed her true soul mate, and stipulated that all romantic love was shallow and the moral of his story.

She had staunchly defended the emotion while he had just as resolutely scorned any individual who allowed himself to surrender to such an idealistic concept.

Not only was he a liar and a beast, he was also a fraud and a fool. What he felt ran deep in his marrow, hardly superficial, and threatened to shatter his heart indefinitely.

The Phantom stared hard at the organ pipes without truly seeing them. His fingers instinctively sought the keys so familiar, and he played a haunting melody, trying to drown out Christine's divergent words from four years past and the present of six nights ago. Becoming his adversary, the music instead gave vision to thought. It raked twisted furrows of confusion in his mind, while dim images, once battled with to be forgotten, arose once more to play upon the harsh landscape of cruel recollection.

Her fierce admission in England to her old nursemaid – the last he had heard Christine speak of him until bringing her down to these dark dungeons – had branded through his heart into the walls of his soul. Those words alone mirrored the malevolent ones spat at him from his executioner as a mode of torture, in the black moment before his world vanished. The fierce disillusionment in his fallen little angel and the loss of dreams that literally became nightmares filled the pain-wracked weeks of his bleak recovery. He had forced himself to recall each hateful word of spite and rejection again and again in order to gird himself in stony indifference using hatred for his tonic. It had been a necessary and excruciating lesson. Later, the torture he self-inflicted became a means of survival – equipping his soul with the cold, unfeeling armor necessary to become the monster commanded of him in Persia.

The Phantom shook his head free of that hellish past and concentrated on the present conundrum, his dark chords turning sorrowful, bitter, weeping into the lake chamber.

At least her revelation of years ago had made sense with all of what happened before: her decision to remain at The Grange and distance herself from him the strongest evidence of her altered feelings, if indeed such feelings ever existed. If she had felt anything more than friendship for him, it had been weak and easily manipulated.

He had accepted it, he had understood it.

So what in the bloody hell had she meant that she would have stayed in these dark dungeons with him? Was she trying to earn back his trust with the proclamation that she would have kept her vow had he not sent her above?

Held up to those final days in England, her beseeching words in the icy garden of shadows made no sense, and he struggled to find a rational answer from the insanity of the past eleven weeks …

He never once believed she had grown to love him. Hell, for the majority of their time together she did not even like him. Nor could he blame her. He had been a beast, causing her endless suffering and heartache in his twisted plot. Yes, she had whispered his forgotten name in the moment of their greatest passion, but throughout her stay in his labyrinth of caverns she had often confused the Erik of old with the Phantom of the present. The final evening he had been with her, as Erik, they had shared a fiery embrace on the moors. Perhaps in the darkest part of her mind she had recognized his touch while he made love to her in her bed and confused the two personas yet again. It had been nothing more than a haze of the familiar surfacing into the misguided identity of his masquerade.

She, as others before her, had been drawn to the mysterious guise of the Phantom he created, a quixotic and illusory façade that veiled the horrible truth of his secret. She had given her body to the Phantom, intrigued with his sordid reputation as a lover despite her disgust and desire not to be fascinated with the scandal – that must be what compelled her to seek out his expertise of bedroom affairs, just as those fool little dancers did, a few still occasionally creeping through the corridors in the dead of night with the futile hope he would come to them.

Coupled with his music, Christine had been powerless. His expression of his soul through his music had cast a spell on Christine as long as he had known her, even without his selfish manipulations to entice her emotions. Before she begged for his touch, they had engaged in a different duet of fiery ardor, his aria of the Point of No Return. Her mind and body thus seduced, she had sought fully to know the experience of physical passion. Unfortunately for her the myth fragmented into a kaleidoscope of horror, and she found beneath his mask not the alluring Don Juan of Opera House legend but the twisted face of the unwanted beast she long ago had spurned.

Her feelings were made even more clear when not even a day into her return to the world above she again shared company with her insufferable Vicomte of the perfect face. The Phantom had expected no less, but that did not make his sacrifice for her peace of mind any easier to bear.

He had waited for their emergence from her dressing room and pursued them through the city, not to kill the bloody Vicomte or his prying cousin as Christine so greatly feared in pleading for their lives – though the desire to rid himself of the pompous noble who always sniffed around her skirts never strayed far from conscious thought. Instead, he had followed on his stallion, to ensure the fool did not spirit Christine away from the opera house in the hope of extending her absence from it, perhaps to plant ideas into her mind not to sing the Phantom's opera by making her believe it was for the best.

The idiot had clearly discouraged her from sharing her exquisite voice before this, and if he would have attempted something so foolish as to hide her away, the Phantom would know where and secretly intercede before Christine could be heavily persuaded again.

He was sure it was not the first time she had been coerced to the Vicomte's will.

A manipulator of emotions, the Phantom knew how to force obedience – but never had done so with Christine. With her, he had always extended a choice. Perhaps not fair, and cruel to her way of thinking, but a choice even so. The one time he used his hypnotic skills to coax her senses had been solely for her comfort, when he sang her the lullaby to relieve her terrible distress.

An arrogant nobleman accustomed to having his every whim met by all that came into his vicinity, the Vicomte would not be so lenient as to allow Christine to follow her dreams. He would shape them into what he chose for her.

She had changed – and he had changed her. And from the day of her return to The Heights, he had made the Phantom into his worst enemy.

Five weeks in the de Chagny's foul home had transformed his Little Angel from the wild, sweet girl he knew into a coquette of a stranger he did not understand. Henri's whipping of four years ago, on the night before her homecoming, had been accompanied by heated warnings to steer clear of Christine and not interfere with Henri's plans for her – the point driven home with each lash that tore into his flesh while two of Henri's cronies held him bound – that she had found someone else, a Vicomte worthy of her time and affections, "a highly respected gentleman who could give her true riches, not a scarred, vagabond gypsy who could give her nothing but shame."

Yet even Henri's embittered threats and severe punishments had not swayed Erik from his objective to be with her; only Christine had done that with her capricious tongue.

The following day when she approached Erik at The Summit, Christine had driven him to madness with her flattering talk of the damned Vicomte followed by her demands on his own bleeding heart – making unjust comparisons – and he reacted in fury– unleashing his passion for her that had burned for months. She had responded to his awkward and obsessive overture of seduction, whether from mutual desire or curiosity, he never had known, never could ask. He had been unable to look at her afterward, angry with the Fates that separated them those eternal weeks, angry with Christine that she had changed enough that he felt uncertain of her feelings. And he left as soon as Berta tended to the newly opened stripes on his back, later returning for his shirt, only to eavesdrop and hear Christine's confession to Berta that demolished any shred of remaining hope: her repugnant assessment of Erik that followed on the heels of her praiseworthy analysis of the Vicomte.

For once, Henri had not lied: Christine wanted nothing to do with Erik as a lover and everything to do with gaining wealth and status. Later he learned her changed interest in him had been a pretense, a lie and malicious game. Christine had been all that once kept Erik at The Heights. His emotions in turmoil, his every dream destroyed, he left and later almost perished when he reconsidered his haste in not confronting her. Upon his return to England a year later he overheard gossip of her involvement with the wretched boy – (clearly not as intimate as he'd been led to believe) – but that did not change their current status. Christine herself alluded to it during her stay in his dark caverns. And that morning, he had heard from Madame Giry that Christine was again seeing the damned Vicomte, the boy having visited her dressing room last night. This time, without the company of his interfering cousin.

The Phantom clenched his throbbing fingers into tight fists over the keyboard stained with crimson. Hours, days, of relentless playing had not purged her and this searing jealousy from his system. He had orchestrated the events and returned her to her world above, knowing full well what would happen – and by God, somehow he must rid himself of this weakness that seized his mind!

But no…

He could not stop thinking of her, could not stop wanting her. Despite her old deceit and this new betrayal. She had forgotten her sacred vows, while he could not expunge them from his heart.

I kept my word to stay in those horrid dark dungeons with you …and I would have stayed

But what did that mean? Did she presume she could have both lives to satisfy her fickle nature? A dalliance with the despicable Vicomte while secretly married to his nemesis, the Phantom of the Opera? Had she actually believed they could revisit mere friendship? They had crossed the line for that, far beyond any point of return. He could never be content with anything more than all of her, could never go back to platonic companionship … and she wanted nothing more, not with the monster she once knew. Her harsh diatribe at the unveiling made that clear.

So that left ... nothing.

The remembrance of her satin skin and the creamy heat of her supple body drawing him closer, her husky voice begging him to take her, brought new fire to his loins and threatened to unhinge his crumbling resolve.

His mind took him to the night-shrouded garden, where he had turned from her, afraid that another glimpse of his fragile songbird pleading with him for a response would have caused him to swoop on her and carry her away, to ride off with her and blend into the night, never to look back. She had been unable to see him, a piece of good fortune, though his keen nighttime vision had not afforded him the same kindness. The hope in her eyes shimmering with tears, the plea in her soft, anxious voice had haunted him before he fled the torment –

- but in these eight days and nights absent from her company he had almost succumbed twice and taken the path to the mirror door. Was sorely tempted to do so now...

With a roar that shook the stillness of the cavern, the Phantom shot up from the bench and grabbed his unfinished score, hurling it to the stones, then pivoted on his heel and struck one of the remaining candelabras still standing to the ground. The flames from the candles extinguished from the wind of their fall but not before catching fire to the paper. With an impatient growl, he kicked at the lit pages of his deplorable start to his new opus, shoving them over the rock cliff to fall into the lake as they disintegrated into a shower of burning ash, so much like his dreams.

No, damn it, NO! He would not yield to these feelings! Would not again let her destroy him! He was immune to her, damn it – IMMUNE! Somehow, he must rediscover that blessed plane of indifference, the icy control he had once taught himself to attain.

Her soft words persisted, gently battering against the shuttered windows of his heart, and he sank to the bench again, clutching his bowed head in his hands...

She had said she needed him. She needed her teacher.

He recalled the apprehension in her tone, the lack of self confidence in her voice that she exhibited these past months. She had never been on stage with a full house as a live audience. Never had lived amid the dizzying glamour of the opera, with its many temptations of wicked decadence prevalent among the theatre troupe. He had sent her back, an innocent dove among wolves who would gladly tear her to shreds, those who resented her angelic voice along with those who lusted after her haunting beauty – and woe to any man who acted upon such foul urges! He would not hesitate to kill the odious cur.

He had been remiss to withhold his guidance, he could see that now. He had hoped to entrap these wretched feelings and harden his heart once more before they again met above. Had hoped he could resurrect the barrier that enabled him to share her company without acting on his own damnable urges to throw himself at her feet in penance – or throw her against the wall with his body in passion.

Distance was a brutal necessity.

And yet… perhaps there was another way…

He again exploded off the bench to pace the dais, his heart ripped asunder, the steely half calling him a pathetic fool for considering the prospect of any form of reunion, however brief or formal. The vulnerable side persuading such actions, eager to see her and hear his name again on her lips. Logic assured him he had done the proper thing in sending her back while his soul decried such petty assertions – when had he ever done what was proper?

He was the ogre of this tale, not the damnable prince!

And yet she did care about the unwanted, the ogres, the beasts and the outcasts. She had not shunned them, had not shunned Jacques, or the Phantom as a boy - as Erik. Her heart had been pure, perhaps in that sense, still was …

It was her weakness for a life of plenty that ultimately destroyed her soul.

And she was his weakness, no matter how violently he tried to purge himself of the addiction. His heart was slowly dying in her absence. She was his muse, the music within having grown hollow and harsh. He felt dead without her presence to sustain him. His body ached for her soft warmth and cursed the harsh and rare act of his mercy night after cold, endless night.

How easy it would be to slip through the mirror, to bring her back into his world, as he once intended she never should leave it. Daily to rehearse and sing above, yes - never to abandon it completely. Yet he had brutally seized her innocence, unaware, and must now atone for the transgression. But oh, how he longed to teach her the many joys of the flesh. One day, she might even learn to love him as a man and no longer pity him as a monster …

"DAMN IT – NO!"

He whirled on his heel, his black velvet wrapper flying about his trousers, and picked up the closest object - his bench - hurling it to crash and splinter at the foot of the stone steps.

She did not belong in this damp darkness that she abhorred and had no reason to hide.

He could not risk being seen above ground…

She belonged to the fresh air and daylight.

He had become a creature of shadows…

She did not deserve to suffer any longer.

He deserved no less…

"M-m-maestro?"

The fear in Jolene's voice broke through the cloud of rage again building to a peak and he spun around to look at where she stood trembling at the bottom of the opposite staircase. Her horrified eyes took in the destruction he had wrought within his chamber of music in the last hour.

Tables and candles overturned, furniture splintered, glass broken, papers scattered upon the stones. Then her gaze lowered and she brought her fingers up to her mouth.

"You're hurt!"

She rushed forward.

He took a wary step back, straightening to his full height in warning. Any injury of the flesh paled to the emotional anguish that ripped into his heart.

"What do you want, Jolene?"

The icy chill in his voice froze her ascent and she blinked, unable to pull her attention from his slender hands hanging motionless at his sides, their fingertips stained and dripping with blood.

"I-I- The-the exit. To the ou-outside…" she stammered.

The previous night she had expressed her need to go to market, unable to replenish their supplies in the past week due to her fear of leaving her brother's side, the boy having suffered from a fleeting illness.

"Yes? Did you not find the lever that opens the wall?"

He had crafted the barricade of brick and mortar in the week of the little maid's treachery. It doubled as a secret entrance and stood on a wheeled platform that slid open to reveal a gap leading to the outside, not apparent to those with no awareness of it and who would only see it as a barrier of stone.

She jerked her head in a nod. "The wall opened to gain access to the door, but…" She hesitated and bit the inside of her lip, knowing he would be displeased and uncertain her news was wise in his present state of mind. What had happened to cause such a terrible change in her Maestro? His clothes were disheveled, his jaw unshaven, and his eyes looked bleary as if he hadn't slept in days. She knew he had not, having heard the mournful organ music throughout the nights. And his hands, his beautiful hands ... Surely he could not be upset about Christine? He had chosen to take the singer back above, stating the time had come, much to Jolene's relief, and she had hoped that life could finally go back to being what it had been. With one difference.

He narrowed his eyes. They flickered like fire.

"Go on."

"The key, the one kept hidden beneath the rock ..."

Still she hesitated until he gave an impatient nod.

"It's missing."

"Missing."

"I – I suppose the lady did not put it back. Though I told her to and said I would need it."

The Phantom turned his back to the girl in curious speculation. A skeleton key, like so many of its kind, it could open any door and was not the sole one in his possession. Other keys of the same ilk existed within the opera house, so its absence brought no real fear of a mob entering his home, his certainty amplified with his addition of the secret brick entrance that doubled as a wall.

But why should the de Chagny noblewoman have kept such a key?

.

xXx

.

Christine fingered the iron key on the ribbon of black velvet. Her ever-shifting emotions had spun in a whirlwind since the night of his treachery. They twisted from shock and hurt into fear and worry then into desperation and anger – around and around – until finally settling into a composed plane of icy acceptance.

Five nights ago, she had resealed the Phantom's envelope with heated candle wax, patching the original seal and hoping Madame would be none the wiser to Christine's tampering, then replaced his missive within the pillar's secret door, this time taking the journey alone to Box Five.

His instructions for the rest of the cast she had skimmed over, but his words about Christine had been scorched into her mind.

With regard to Miss Grendahl, it has come to my recent attention that she is in need of further guidance. I shall see to the arrangements and inform you of your instructions ...

That had been the extent of his mention of her – and not even by her true name! Cold, remote, very much the Phantom, his impersonal and inappropriate form of address a snub to the acknowledgement of her as his wife. But his choice of words had told Christine what she wished to know: He had been in the dark garden and heard her words to him. She had not imagined it. She had finally reached him and said what needed to be said since their last confrontation when she unmasked him, not all of it, but she had expressed her fervent desire to speak with him, in the hope of demanding answers and explaining old mistakes – and still he chose to preserve this gulf of silence between them. The years had hardened and changed him. He no longer cared or wanted her. Their last night together, that wondrous night when he taught her the meaning of passion, had clearly meant nothing to him other than a brief distraction, like those he experienced with his sordid following of ballerina whores –

And she would be damned if she would follow in their footsteps and plead with him to take her back!

It had taken Christine eight days to reach this new plateau of chill indifference, a match to his own. Her heart still felt freshly torn, and in the nights she wept bitter tears of silence on her pillow for all she had lost – she would never cease to love him, forever destined to be his and now doubly so, since he was both her lost love, Erik, and her love so newly discovered in the Phantom – but she was no longer willing to play his wretched games that ripped into her soul and made a mockery of the heart. Perhaps he even attained a cruel sort of enjoyment in witnessing her distress from afar, a windfall in his plot of vengeance for whatever pathetic reason he chose to harbor ill will against her –

She was determined no longer to give him the satisfaction.

With that grim resolve, she slammed the key into the shallow top drawer of her dressing table and rose from her bench, in lieu of dining with Meg and other members of the cast.

Many of the thespians still regarded her with suspicious uncertainty. And no wonder – after all, she was the infamous Opera Ghost's protégé. Others of the cast were kinder, though she wouldn't call them friendly. In Carlotta's absence, Christine's lead, Ubaldo Piangi, often spoke to her, trying to make her feel welcome, the only member of the company besides Meg to do so. It felt odd to be in the Italian tenor's vicinity, and to her chagrin, Christine still responded with edginess to any of his sudden movements to approach her on or off stage, though as corpulent as he was, there were not many incidents of that. But when she did react with unwanted nerves, her equilibrium faltered, making her appear graceless and often eliciting muffled giggles from one or more of the dancers.

Her cousin had not only stolen her trust in most men with his vile act, he had stolen her grace, but she was determined to surmount this newest obstacle before the opera opened to the public.

"Cara mia…" Piangi's accented voice reached her once she stepped outside her door. "Buona sera. Might I escort you to dinner?"

She blinked in surprise at his warm greeting, noting he stood in the nearby corridor. He carefully approached, as if a witness to her earlier thoughts, and she felt bad for her agitated behavior with him on stage, realizing he probably thought himself solely to blame. His hair had been slicked back with water, his dark eyes sparkling and his plump cheeks ruddy above his thick, cropped beard. Had he been waiting for her to emerge from her dressing room?

Confused by his attention, she decided he must have only been walking past and saw no reason to refuse his company. She did not find the little man a threat, actually feeling a bit sorry for him that with his short stature, he had needed to stand on the stair above her to deposit the required kiss on her lips after their aria. The choreographer for the male dancers, Madame's counterpart, had worked with them both to try to make it look natural, but Piangi was the obvious brunt of a joke, judging from several stagehands who snickered. The passionate duet had left Christine's blood tepid, neither hot nor cold and certainly nothing like the blaze of heat she experienced with the Phantom for her partner. She had been relieved that the moment she long dreaded of accepting her lead's kiss in the play had been so inconsequential and brief she scarcely noticed it. Indeed, she found the whole thing rather peculiar that Señor Piangi had been cast in the role as a romantic Don Juan. The whole spectacle came across as something of a parody, surely nothing like the Phantom intended for his tragic opera. And she recalled Meg telling her that in his notes to the managers, he initially ordered that they cast another singer for the role, recalled also the curt instructions in his recent missive that she found and read, his advice with regard to Piangi- "…the aging tenor must cease to overindulge, so as to fit into his costume on opening night."

To her knowledge, there was only one man who could fill the part of Don Juan to perfection, firing her blood in passion…

Aggrieved that her thoughts always led back to him, she offered a bright smile to her escort.

"How is La Carlotta faring? I understand that you went to visit her today."

His eyes dimmed slightly. "Her ankle is recovering. Her tongue is as sharp as ever."

Christine's smile grew curious. What an odd thing to say about his beloved; Meg had informed her of his close association with the diva that had gone on for five years.

"She hopes to return soon and take over in the role of Aminta."

Christine nodded vaguely, well aware of the erstwhile diva's intentions. For the woman's sake, in remembering the Phantom's threats, she hoped that she stayed far away from the theatre.

"It is my hope that she does not return," Piangi surprised her by saying. "You have the voice of a goddess and the beauty of one. You alone should play the part, signorina."

She stopped walking and looked at him. "But surely, you don't mean that."

"Carlotta is a woman of advanced years. She should not play a gypsy girl in the bloom of her youth."

Surprised that he should state the fact, no matter how true, she refrained from speaking her mind that he did not fit the role he'd been given either.

"Señor Piangi…"

"Please, call me Ubaldo."

Uncomfortable with the prospect, Christine shook her head. "No, I cannot do that. And you should not be speaking to me like this."

His expression broke into one of sincere regret. "I have offended you?"

"No, no. It's nothing like that. I just, I don't feel comfortable having this discussion."

He shook his head in admiration. "In my twenty-six years on the stage, you are unlike anyone of the theatre I have met," he speculated in wonder.

"I'm not sure that's a good thing," she said with a wry laugh, having begun to doubt she would ever fit in.

"I meant it only as a compliment, signorina."

"Miss Grendahl!"

At the sudden sound of Madame Giry's clipped voice, Christine turned.

"A word, if you please."

Christine warily approached, and Madame took her arm, leading her back to the dressing room.

"Go on, Señor," Madame ordered, "this will take some time."

"Have I done something wrong?" Christine asked, glancing back at Piangi before entering the chamber. He looked disappointed but turned and walked away.

"You won't be dining with the others tonight."

Christine's brows drew together in a frown. "Oh, but ..."

Still unsmiling, Madame handed Christine an envelope.

"This is for you."

Christine's breath stalled in her lungs, her eyes going wide as she stared at the extended parchment. She felt dizzy as the world went out of focus, though somehow she remained standing. Rimmed with a thin black border, the missive bore her stage name in flowing bold black script, imperious but beautiful all at once –

Miss Grendahl

He had sent her one of his infamous notes.

"A word of caution," Madame continued. "Señor Piangi is harmless, but his companion is not. I strongly advise you not to keep company with him when absent from the stage."

Christine had no interest in the gregarious little man beyond his role as her lead and certainly did not fear the waspish La Carlotta, but she could think of no answer to give.

Her mind seemed vacant of anything but the note she held in her hand, which now trembled.

Madame slipped silently from the room. Christine stood paralyzed, unaware of her exit.

After a long moment she slowly moved to her dressing table, as if walking through water, and sank to its cushioned seat. She fingered her fraudulent name on the envelope then turned the parchment over and stared at the small skull of red wax that leered at her, before slipping her finger beneath and breaking the seal, opening his missive. Her heart pounded so hard she could feel its reverberations inside her head, and she inhaled a deep steadying breath then read the single line of script:

Your presence is required in the chapel at nine o'clock tonight. Do not be late.

~ O.G.

.

Christine let out a harsh, brittle laugh that came as more of a sob.

So, the Phantom had summoned her. The great Opera Ghost had made his demands. To meet in the chapel, of all places ...

What game was he playing this time?

She should refrain from blind obedience to appear at his command and not award him the satisfaction. She should leave her room this second and join the others in the dining hall. She should … she should…

Her eyes fell shut, her heart drumming in her ears.

Even as the rebellious thought crossed her mind to ignore his brusque note, aided by the many reasons it would be wise to do so, deep in her heart Christine counted the minutes until she would see him again.

.

xXx