Notes before the story always make me feel pretentious, like I have something so fascinating I must share it with you. I'm only writing an A/N today because I had told my beta, Tywyn, that nothing that happens in this chapter was planned. If you're a writer you understand that characters sometimes decide for themselves what they want to say and what they want to do. I am going to go with it and hope it works out in the end. If you aren't a writer,I probably sound crazy. Also true.

And as always, thanks to all of you for the feedback, both in reviews and in emails. I might slow down with the story since I'm writing a mainstream novel at the same time called The Countess of Suburbia. Shameless plug:)

Without further ado, I believe Erik has something he wants to say. :)

Ch 28

Julia had a way of making me feel both elated and disgusted.

By the time she had sat down at the bedside there was nothing more she could do to strip away my masculinity. I was at her mercy, forced to remain in her guest bed while the deep bruises to my legs healed and I could walk again.

Julia insisted that I change out of my clothes, which, for the most part, I had been wearing for well over a day. The once crisp white shirt was painted in splatters of deep red dried blood and black streaks of mud. Tears exposed scraped skin beneath as well as various other marks from the fight.

Like a child, I was forced to undress from my sullied clothes before she would allow me to eat. Fighting her would only prolong the inevitable, and I said nothing as she unbuttoned my shirt, helped my arms through, and set it aside. That was how she left me, explaining that she needed to clean the scrapes and examine the bruises.

Her eyes narrowed in sympathy pain as she took in the canvas of vibrant colors that had become my chest, stomach, and back.

"They should all be ashamed of themselves," she said under her breath. "I'll bring you more medicine in the morning. Laudanum if I can find it. For now, one of the pills should see you through the night. I'll leave you something should your stomach betray you in the night" She then pulled her chair closer and turned the lamp higher so that she could see the wounds better.

My stomach growled. The smell of food in the air was unbearable.

"Must I ask for permission to eat or do you intend on governing that as well?"

She ignored me as she touched my left eyelid. I pulled back slightly at the pressure and she stopped, half-smiling as she started to reach farther up, where the hair I had all of my life grew thin. I would have preferred going bald completely, I think, to a hairless patch of skin at my left temple and a thin, dull covering of light hair over my skull.

"Please don't do this," I whispered. "Bring me a mirror and I will do it myself."

"Close your eyes," she replied. As she spoke she still insisted on touching me and I shuddered as her fingers lightly traced along what no one had ever touched before.

My eyes closed slowly and I felt the chill of a damp rag at my temple. "I'll fix another compress but you must keep it over your eyes all night long, is that understood?"

"If I may finally eat, I will agree to anything," I replied.

"How useful are your fingers?"

A wicked thought crossed my mind and I almost snidely invited her into bed to find out. With a smirk, I flexed my hand and she held out a spoon. She started to place the bowl in my lap but stopped herself. I glanced up at her face and she returned my expression.

"You're in enough pain as it is. I'll save you from burning," she said. Then she rolled her eyes as though her thoughts were not as lecherous as mine. "There is nothing endearing about your vulgarity, and don't even start with me. I see everything you're thinking in your eyes."

"I suppose you're thinking of nothing more than sewing and spice gardens?"

"Women don't think as lewd as men."

"As lewd? Meaning that they do indeed have improper thoughts," I said for my own amusement of watching her blush. My days beneath the opera house proved without a doubt that the thoughts in the minds of women were far more perverse than anything I had ever heard in my own mind. Dancers, I would say, should have always been required to go straight from the stage to confession to keep them from Hell.

"Not as improper as you. Now sit quietly or I'll put your supper out for the tramps."

"Not as improper. Pah! Apparently I'm delirious," I muttered.

"Then eat something. The medicine will disrupt your stomach."

Her change in demeanor stopped me from reaching for the bread. There was something she wasn't telling me. For a moment I stared at her, studying her expression. The smile on her face, though faint, was forced. I could tell by the way it contradicted the sadness in her eyes.

A thousand times before I had seen her feign mirth. If Louis beat her but didn't bruise her face, she would be out the next day chatting with Madeline about gardening or her neighbor, Penelope, about cooking. She would laugh and talk for hours, showing a mask entirely different from mine. Her mask was transparent. There was still sadness in her eyes, tucked neatly into place behind the charade of contentedness with a man she feared.

Her sudden forgiveness for all I had said was a bold-faced lie. She was doing to me what she would have done with Louis the morning after. There were no words to describe the shame I felt lying in bed, allowing her to care for me. I had become him, different yet the same, inflicting pain and being rewarded.

"I would never strike you," I said suddenly. Too suddenly. She looked up from my ribs and narrowed her eyes. As quickly as she had looked up, she glanced away. I decided to continue, to press on through the mangled mess I had already gotten myself into. "I shouldn't have raised my hand at you."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," she said under her breath. "Now sit still. I think you've broken a rib."

"Julia—" I grunted more than said her name. There is no doubt on my mind that she pressed two of her fingers into my flesh to force me into silence. However, pain didn't easily deter my intentions.

"Erik, it's been a long day and it's very late. I have two children up stairs, a household to tend to in the morning, and I would rather not spend an hour arguing with you down here. Now please—"

"In your dining room, when I came to look for Alexandre, I forced you against the wall and you thought I would strike you," I said without taking a breath.

She had drawn her hand away from me and sat staring at the edge of the sheets. "I had hit you first." She was breathing harder, her chest rising and falling.

She had hit me first, but that wasn't the point or even a concern. "You are a woman," I replied. She visibly shuddered. "I would never hit you, or Madeline, or Meg, or even Christine."

Julia turned away and opened the bedside drawer. "How many nights did you watch?" she asked. Her voice had turned higher, deceptively more pleasant as she struggled for her composure. She was still treating me as she would have treated her dead husband.

"Watch?"

"Him hit me. And don't say you never watched because I saw you at your window one night, the last night."

That was the night before I stopped his hand forever. He had done more than just hit her. He had forced her to please him as well. At my writing desk, I heard the familiar sounds from their house of a one-sided argument. Julia had started to close the windows, knowing that his voice would raise. Silence had come too soon. I looked out the window and saw what he was doing to her within sight of the neighbors. That, more than anything else, had led to his death. It would be an insult to swine to call him a pig.

I had always known why her rule in our relationship was that I was not allowed to request her company. The candle in the window was power, strength she had not possessed that night, that final night. She could offer or deny me as she saw fit, sating her needs over mine.

"How many?" she persisted.

"Once was too much."

"More than once?"

The insistent need for a confession released a trap door inside of me. There was no farther I could sink. Dante's Inferno was mistaken as I had found the darkest, most malevolent corner of Hell. And I intended to explore it thoroughly.

"What does it matter? Once, twice, a thousand times? Enough that I am a worse person than he ever was," I replied. "May his soul rot for eternity."

"And what about your soul?"

I glared at her. "The first night I sat at my desk and listened to him hit you, I lost my soul."

"And every time after that?"

My eyes fell away from hers. I had never expected to tell her this. I had never expected to tell anyone. "After that there was nothing. Anything considered self respect left me long ago, well before I ever knew you. If there is a list of wrongs that the Devil keeps, then I shall be his most prized gift."

"What about the night you killed him?"

Wide-eyed I stared at her, busted lips parted, bruised face unable to show that I had blanched. "How did you know?"

"I heard you talking when you strangled him," she said. She looked away as she spoke, staring at the dresser. "I thought you would come into the house and kill Lisette, then rape me, so I hid. I couldn't let anything happen to her, and I was," she paused and swallowed, 'sore from the night before. I took her from her bed and hid her in the cellar. She fell asleep in my arms, and I listened to you tell him exactly why he would die."

She had known. For years she had always known that I had killed him, that I had strangled him in the garden. She heard—and possibly watched—as I took his body under the arms and dragged him down the path, tossed a rope over a branch, and hung him.

"After I heard you speak, I knew you would not harm me, at least not physically. That was why I approached you."

"As a favor?" I asked. How I hoped that wasn't true. How I prayed that she had not given me the last five years of something as near to joy as I would ever know out of gratitude. I wanted her to love me. I wanted her to care for me as much as I realized I cared for her. My reason for killing Louis Seuratti had always been music. I couldn't write if he hit her, if he threw her against the wall or forced himself onto her. But there was more. I couldn't write because I couldn't think and I couldn't think because she was on my mind.

She had been embedded in my thoughts far longer than I had ever known.

"No, it wasn't a favor."

"Then why?"

"Because I could hear you playing music late at night when the windows were open in the summer. Once in a while, I could hear you singing softly and no matter what had happened, it made me feel safe and it made me dream things…"

"Things?" I asked, barely able to speak.

"Things that were beautiful."

Whatever she had given me for pain had to have made all of this into an elaborate hallucination. I purposely dug my fingernails into the palm of my hand. God in Heaven, it was all real. Everything she said was real.

"Beautiful?"

"Things that made me…I don't know what it made me but I asked Madeline about you and she said nothing. She tried to tell me there was no one else in the house but I told her I had seen you. I tried for weeks," she paused, deciding whether or not to continue, I'm sure. We were like two drunks sitting in a pub, divulging the most fragile parts of our souls. Perhaps she had taken a pill as well.

"What did you try?" I whispered.

The clock chimed midnight and stole the rest of our conversation. My heart sank, knowing she would soon leave me for her own room. I was tempted to ask her to stay with me just once so that I could feel the warmth of her body beside mine when I woke.

With a deep breath and a yawn, she tossed bandages into the drawer, stirred my soup, and did a final survey of the room.

"Do you need anything for the night?"

Her question was one that would not receive an honest answer. I shook my head. Then she left. I never touched my food. I was hungry in a way that food would never fill.