Christine sat shivering on the bedroom floor, her ear pressed against the seam where the little door met the wall, waiting to bear the brunt of whatever unpleasant passion would take hold of Erik after her display at dinner. Would he scream and foam at her again? Fall at her feet, crying and begging for foregiveness? Neither appealed to Christine, but the silence outside of her room somehow bothered her more. There was nothing upon which she could judge her captor's mood—no frustrated chords from the piano, no laughing and ranting under his breath. Perhaps she caught trace of his feet shuffling across the rug in the sitting room, or perhaps it was only her labored breath.

After a certain, interminable length, when it seemed clear that Erik intended to leave her in peace, Christine rose up from the ground. The wine had her reeling; as she steadied herself against the wall, she contemplated opening the door and approaching him by her own volition. She was not so drunk, however, that she'd forgotten how well confronting Erik had ended in the past. And so, both terrified and annoyed, Christine resolved to do as she had originally planned that evening and take her bath.

Swaying, she padded her way to the bathroom as delicately as she could manage, opening the door with the sort of concentration that only comes to the inebriated and paranoid. The gas lamps flickered on, a clever trick of Erik's that once dazzled Christine and now bored her. Though the room itself was small, the way the wicks dimly flickered across the chestnut paneling and creamy damask wallpaper gave it an unfathomable quality; if Christine squinted, the tiled floor bled into the shadows and beyond. It was only the claw-footed bathtub that interrupted the illusion—mundane, almost awkwardly large, the exposed tap pipes a utilitarian mark on an otherwise indulgent setting.

The luxury of hot bath for one and oneself only was not something lost on Christine. As a child, her Papa insisted she content herself on whatever clean water the Lord provided them, whether it be a stream or a cracked basin in a shabby inn. As a young woman, it was in the tepid bath water the Professor's poor maid Agathe lugged into the family tub once a week. And by the time Mama and Christine had settled into their cozy apartment on Rue St. Honoré, it was at one of the public baths that had become all the rage in Paris—much to Agathe's great relief.

On the one hand, the public baths always guaranteed deliciously warm water, enough that Christine could submerge herself entirely below the surface for as long as her heart desired. On the other hand, it meant sharing the water with strangers—women young and old laughing and gossiping with each other like they were having tea at a café, so fecklessly flaunting their naked bodies that it made Christine embarrassed for them. She never lingered longer than she had to, scrubbing herself as hastily as possible, talking to no one, and wrapping herself in the thickest towel she owned.

But here, five stories below the ground, Christine could soak for as long as she'd like, a gift that was soured by the fact there was not a single room in Erik's house that ever felt completely private. Even the bathroom was suspect—the very first time she had attended to her toilette, she had kept a pair of sewing scissors by the lip of the tub, in terror that the wretched man's malice extended beyond words. She could not say when they had disappeared over the last several days. Hadn't she tucked them away neatly in the vanity drawer? Or did she misplace them in a basket of yawn?

But Erik had remained a gentlemen in most respects, had not laid a finger on her since that awful night she had seen him.

Moreover, if Erik wanted something to disappear, it disappeared.

Turning on the ivory taps, the five stories weighed even more heavily upon Christine.

—

There was normal quiet—the kind of quiet that amplified street noise or birds whistling or footfall, the kind of quiet that was not really quiet—and then there was the quiet found only found trapped below the earth. And even that could not compare to sensation Christine experienced as she slid into the bath, submerging herself entirely under the perfumed water, save for the very front of her face. Here, there was nothingness—only the sound of her heart beating in her throat. Here it was easy to forget her predicament and let her mind drift far—farther than the house on the lake, farther than the magnificent lump of the theater.

Eyes closed, hands at her side, she thought, as she frequently did, of the Vicomte; if she concentrated enough, she could remember how it felt—the two of them at the beach, lying out on their backs in the water.

"Why won't you float with me, Christine? You can swim, can't you?" His crooked grin, the sprinkling of freckles on his golden face—young Christine would have walked into the sea to keep the image burned into her head, to not let it slip away the same way she had let her mother's. "I bet you're scared, that's why."

"I am not scared," she huffed, arms akimbo. They were both standing up to their waists in the water—Christine in an old dress and ragged tights, Raoul in cropped trousers that made him look less like a noble and more like a shiphand. "I just don't like it, my liege."

"Don't like it? What's not to like?"

She sucked on her lower lip and thought for a moment. "I can't see the beach when I'm on my back. I can't see you or Papa. I can't see the island out there. Or the peanut vendors on the beach." She skimmed her fingers across the brackish water and turned her head towards the horizon. "All I can see is the sky, and what would I do if I floated away from here without knowing it?"

The boy remained silent, and Christine could have almost imagined he had actually disappeared, when she saw his hand grab one of hers and lift it up from the water. Her eyes followed in its direction, until she met the vicomte's.

"It's simple," he answered. "I would never let that happen."

They stood like that for some time, nothing but the sound of the tide and other vacationers enjoying the beach ringing in their ears. Something in Christine's chest compelled her to lean forward, as if she could look deeper into Raoul's eyes, as if she could wordlessly communicate how perfect the moment felt.

And then—suddenly, shockingly—-she felt herself falling, Raoul's foot cuffing the back of her ankle with enough force to send her backwards and into the water. Splashing and gasping, her long hair lank across her face, she tried to curse the rotten boy next to her, mouth filled with the taste of salt.

"I have half a mind to scream for the police," she sputtered.

"Don't," Raoul replied.

As she moved to find her feet and rebuke him, a hand was laid across her belly, just skimming the sodden wool.

"Don't," he repeated. And he quietly laid back against the small waves to join her. If Christine had any will left to leave, it was snuffed out by Raoul's hand leaving her abdomen to encircle her wrist. His touch was gentle and timid, as if he could scarcely believe his own boldness, his cold fingers stroking the pulse at her wrist.

The two of them bobbed like corks like that for some time, Christine's ears ringing with the strange ambience of the sea; the only thing that broke her line of vision with the impossibly blue sky above her was the occasional solitary gull. She thought of what she had told Raoul—that she was worried the water would whisk her away from home—and decided that, perhaps, like this, with the Vicomte by her side, it might not be so terrible.

Now, as she languished in the bathtub, the bath oils filling her nostrils, she conjured the tight feeling in her abdomen that ached her that afternoon so long. It had always followed her—from the cusp of womanhood to now. Every handsome man who had ever smiled at her at the Conservatoire, the unending glimpses of shoulders and thighs in dressing rooms, the back muscles of construction workers on the street—it found its way.

"Pristine Christine," she had heard some of chorus women snickering one afternoon not so long ago, when she turned down an offer to go dancing with them at the Moulin de la Galette for the dozenth time in months. Pristine Christine. She had a reputation, it seemed, and she couldn't decide if she hated it. At least she was left to her solitude, with no assumptions about who Christine was when she was alone in her bed.

Pristine Christine. It echoed in her skull every time her fingers slid down beneath her nightgown, made the tightness down there even stronger and warmer than it would have been if people had minded their own business, if they had not put so many expectations on her. All of them—Papa, the Valeriuses, her voice teachers, the company, Erik, the world itself—they all wanted to keep her young and naive.

Naive. She watched her poor Papa heave his last choking breath before his eyes closed forever. How could the world ever call her that, when she had spent weeks starving and shivering in the wilderness because of his own ghosts? How could anyone even think to use that word when she was now buried alive with a demon who hungered for her very soul? They called her pristine, but she had been damned a hundred times over and would be damned another hundred, if her current trajectory was indicative of anything.

Why fret over something as small and sweet as the way her hand made her feel?

Christine's eyes screwed shut, her back arched up from the porcelain beneath her, the tips of her breasts rising into the cool air. Her finger tips grazed a point of such sweetness that she could hear soft gasps over the beating of her heart, over the sloshing bathwater.

There was the Vicomte's hand, now larger and lightly calloused from his naval training. There was the sensation of her slip running over her nipples as she tugged it over her chest every morning. There was the portfolio she found in Erik's library, a print of a woman spread out wantonly on sofa, her skirts hiked up over her knees, and no underthings to be found. They were one and the same, both pretty heads thrown back, although the subject in the drawing was not using her hands to find the same pleasure. Christine was so close to something wonderful, the images running together until they were nothing but a sickly smear of flesh and angles and sparks.

And then she opened her eyes.

This was her fourth mistake.