For many days, he had simply felt like dying. Hunger and thirst held little sway over his despair, and when he was not lying in the bed that he had shared with Lily, he dragged himself over to the organ to play long, meandering and mournful improvisations.
He tried to take comfort in the fact that Lily would have a good life, that he had given her the only gift he was capable of truly giving. But righteousness was a cold and lonely business, he found, and he could not help but wish almost every moment that she was back at his side.
He had ceased to visit Christine or to give her lessons. She did not matter now. No one mattered. Nothing mattered.
The sound of a firm, purposeful step woke him with a start, and he realized he had passed out on his organ. Instinctively, he felt for his mask, still reassuringly in place, then jumped from the stool, ready to strike.
He nearly did strike when he saw it was La Giry, making her way down the ledge into his lair. She was carrying a heavy basket and a worried expression on her face.
"What do you want?" he snarled. "You are not welcome here!"
"I know that, or else I would have come sooner," the pragmatic ballet mistress replied curtly but calmly. "First of all, nothing has gone missing from the kitchen in days, so I knew that you were probably trying to starve yourself to death and –"
"What does that matter to you?" he snapped.
"It matters because you will need your strength," Madame Giry replied evenly.
He gave a bitter laugh and eyed the woman narrowly.
"And what havoc have you come to wreak upon me now, Madame?"
"I have made a mistake," Madame Giry said simply.
Her words chilled him to the bone, and his sneer vanished, replaced by anger and anxiety.
"What do you mean?"
"Evidently, Monsieur le Vicomte's idea of taking care of Lily and mine were not exactly in harmony," Madame Giry said with a burst of her own bitterness. "I had assumed that he would see to it that she had a small income, a flat, perhaps a position in some shop or other."
He could feel his nails digging into his palms, and the pain was the only thing that kept him from seizing the woman and shaking her.
"But instead, he simply made her a servant in his home," Madame Giry continued, her own voice tight and angry. "And not even a parlourmaid. Lily is their scullery maid!"
Madame Giry walked over to his desk and set the basket down, unpacking the food in it.
"And to think I had trusted that boy to have some sense, some feeling of obligation and decency," she muttered. "But between working in the scullery and fending off the advances of Comte Philippe –"
"What!"
The word exploded from him. A fine red mist clouded over his vision, and his throat was dry from blood lust.
"How did you learn all this?" he asked in a remote voice, as if he had already resolved to kill the boy and was merely asking out of passing curiosity.
"I went with Meg to visit Christine," she said. "Christine and the boy are married now. It happened not long after the ball, very quickly and very quietly."
"Hang Christine and the boy!" he roared, some small part of his mind unable to comprehend that it was he who was saying that. "Where do I find Lily?"
"I will tell you that when you have had something to eat," Madame Giry replied firmly, gesturing at the plate of ham, bread and cheese.
"Damn you!"
"As you like, but you'll eat before I give you a single direction."
And so it was that an hour later, he was crashing through the Parisian dusk on the back of trusty Cesar, with his destination clearly in his mind – the estate of the de Chagny family. He would get Lily back, come hell or high water. And if it just so happened that he killed that cruel young man in the process…well, so be it!
A/N: My apologies in taking so long to update. I was trying to figure out just what kind of injustice to make Lily suffer, LOL! I know this chapter is short, but it's really just to set the stage for the next bit of goodish action...
And...I already have in my mind the next fic I'm going to write after this one is over...it's gonna be good...you're gonna like it...:D
Yours in mischief,
Kate September