Moving the plot along. Angst with a side of UST and steaming hot rage. Thanks to all my reviewers.

Chapter Nineteen: Cease This Torment

He stumbled out of a room, looking like something the cat had just dragged in. She was perched on the sofa, thumbing through a book she had absolutely no interest in. He was a mess, and he smelled. But the look in his eyes was pure triumph.

"I know your secret," Artemis pronounced, with the air of someone deeply pleased with himself. Holly managed to conceal her shock. This was the least cutting he'd been for weeks.

"My secret?" she questioned cautiously, wary of him suddenly reverting to the icy arsehole she'd been dealing with for weeks. She set the book aside.

"Your secret. The one you so dearly did not wish me to know." He was clearly bursting with pride at his cleverness, but she played along.

"Is that so. Well, do tell me, then. What is this great secret?"

"You're a fairy," he said smugly, and against her will she felt herself be moderately impressed. With all the things she'd let slip though, especially healing Butler, she'd still thought it would have taken him longer. Except…

"You are aware," she said tartly, "that before your temper tantrum three weeks ago, I was going to tell you of what I am? That it was never truly a secret, and had you asked me these past weeks, I willingly would have told you? Did that slip your memory, o brilliant one?"

She could see him visibly deflate in front of her. "Well, yes, it might have," he growled, and made a concerted effort to return to his aloof persona of recent times. However, she could see right through it. "Are you ready to go above for rehearsals?"

"Of course, Artemis," she replied, still fighting to hide a smile. "Are you pleased with how things are progressing? Dress rehearsals are next week."

"I am aware," he snapped, obviously still stinging from her lack of shock and horror in the face of his news. Still, his pride in his work was obvious. "The managers will require some more… guidance in the direction the production must take, of course, and the dancing is still a lamentable mess, but -" He stopped abruptly, a coolness creeping into his eyes, and he straightened, seeming taller and thinner than ever. "Not that it is any of your concern," he said coldly. "You sing. That is all I require of you."

Once, she might have shouted at him. Might have taken offence at his rudeness, but no more. She had spent too long his prisoner, too long confined from the world she knew and loved, and so she hid her smile and nodded demurely, following him to the hidden door. But inside, something in her rekindled, a flicker of hope.

The ice was cracking.

xx

He was late to fetching her from rehearsals, and he nearly ran as they trod the now-familiar paths to the fifth cellar. He pulled her along with him, more contact than he usually allowed, his bony hand tight on her forearm.

"Late to an appointment?" she quipped, and he rumbled an angry noise deep in his throat.

"None of your concern," he grunted, throwing open the door to the house beside the lake, nearly dragging her to her bedroom. Every police officer's instinct in her was screaming that he was up to something, and she had learned by now to listen to that little voice. She looked at the floor blankly as he pushed her through the doorway to her room, and raised her eyes to his meekly.

"And stay!" he instructed, and she nodded, watching as he slammed the door. She heard the lock click and waited a handful of minutes before retrieving her tools from their hiding place. Her underwear drawer, certainly not the most creative of places, but Artemis would never dare to look there. Hell, he turned crimson all the way down to his collarbones every time he handed her a stack of washed laundry, and she would find her undergarments at the very centre of the bundle, out of sight, but apparently not out of mind.

A long, thin nail, and a hairpin, and she'd picked this lock before a dozen times. She stood on her tiptoes and began, and it took her only moments for the door to swing open. She could hear voices and so she tiptoed towards the source of the noise - his study, the room she wasn't supposed to know about. He'd left the door carelessly open, but then she supposed he had no idea she could pick the lock and get out of the bedroom he was so fond of caging her in. She could hear his smooth, icy voice, and one other, a gruff angry one that was strangely familiar…

"I do not have an iota of sympathy for you, Mud Man," Julius Root barked, and her heart leapt. Regardless of common sense informing her there was no way the commander was in that room, she peeped around the corner, to find his grizzled face staring down from a large screen mounted on the wall. "I have no idea how you learned of even the slightest of our secrets, but I don't care. Short would not have told you." She felt a pinch of guilt. "What is it you want? Gold? Favours? All the magic belowground will not fix that ugly mug of yours."

"Hardly," Artemis countered smoothly. He faced the screen, flawless in his evening attire, not a hair out of place. He was a far cry from the bedraggled creature who had confronted her hours earlier. "My desires are not so mercenary as you may think. I require only one thing to satisfy me, and I already have it in my possession."

Me, she realised sickly. He means me.

"Absolutely not," the commander was roaring, and she felt a surge of gratitude. "Short is one of us. She must be returned to us. She does not belong aboveground, and she would be a constant security threat. She is one of us. If she is not, we will be forced to -"

"Blue rinse me?" Artemis asked smugly, and Holly felt a stab of astonishment mixed with fear. No. They couldn't. But how did Artemis even know of that technology? It wasn't in the Book, however he'd got his hands on a copy of it. He certainly hadn't touched hers. She touched it lovingly, and listened to the commander's splutters.

"How do you - what - see here, Mud Man, we'll do it!" he blustered. "The Council deems one fairy life to be acceptable risk to take out an enemy of the People!" The Council. Interesting, that he'd mention them. So they might consider her acceptable risk, but Julius didn't. Thank Frond for that.

"I don't think so," Artemis retorted. "Beside, from what I understand of your kind, you value life above all. You would bio-bomb the entire Opera House, messieurs? And kill all of the innocent people that work and study here? How very terrible of you. I thought I was supposed to be the insane murderer out of the pair of us. My demands are very simple. Let me have Captain Short, or I will expose the existence of the fairies to the world."

"Like hell," she said, stepping out and into the study. Artemis whirled around, the expression in his eyes utterly dumbfounded. But he was not a man to be shocked for long, and he turned once more to the screen, just long enough for the commander to bark, "Short!"

Artemis cursed under his breath, and smacked a palm down on the keyboard. The screen went blank and when he faced her once more, his eyes were white hot with rage. "I locked you in your room," he seethed, and she followed him out into the sitting room, hot on his heels.

"I've never liked being caged," she spat back at him, rewarded by his flinch. "Bastard! Expose my kind to the world! You cannot! It would mean total chaos, war between the world above and the one below, and - Oh, you know all of that, you monster," she screamed at him, enlightenment hitting her like a wave. "You just don't fucking care. As long as you have your fucking music and me to toy with, you don't give a damn about the billions of lives that would be lost!"

He laughed coldly, and in one swift movement tossed his mask to the table. "Face the monster, then, since you are so quick to call me one. You overestimate your importance to me, my dear," he sneered, and she saw red.

"'Let me have Captain Short, or I will expose the existence of the fairies to the world,'" she mimicked cruelly. "Sounds like you want me pretty bad, Artemis."

"To sing in my opera!" he shouted. "Nothing more! You are a trifling thing with a pretty voice, and once my opera is complete I shall have no more need of you!"

"Bullshit," she snapped. The icy silence of the last few weeks had burst, and the room was awash with the long-repressed flames of their dual attraction and loathing of one another. "If that was the fucking case, you would have said so. You want to keep me forever, you twisted bastard, and I will not stand for it!"

"You think I wanted this?" he asked furiously, running his spider hands through his dark hair. "To be enthralled by you, infatuated with you? To be tormented and teased and entranced by you? I never wanted this!"

"And I did?" Holly shouted back, jumping onto the coffee table to look him better in the eye. Maskless, hands on hips, lips set in a scowl - and yet for the first time Artemis didn't frighten her. Didn't make her spine tingle and her skin crawl with the desire to flee from him. Now, she wanted to be close, wanted to beat her fists against his starved frame and shake him like a rag doll until he understood. "You think I wanted to be abducted by some crazy Mud Man and forced to sing his bloody opera? I was happy as a police officer! I loved it! I didn't need to be saved from my humdrum existence to fulfil some stupid ideal of being a singer! I was happy as I was!"

"Lies!" he bellowed. "You love to sing, you crave it. You were like a flower without sunlight, a bird without flight, when I first encountered you. Airless, starved of song, you were suffocating under the weight of what you denied yourself. Music runs through you as much as it does through me, a vein of gold through stone, and you cannot deny it!"

"I cannot?" she questioned, when her voice returned to her, outraged and furious. "Music is only one part of who I am! I am a captain, a daughter, an elf, not just a singer! Why can't you get it though your head that there are more important things than music?"

"Oh, do go on," he snarled through clenched teeth. "Tell me, o wise fairy, of what could possibly be more vital, more essential than music!"

"Life," she replied, her voice softening. "Duty. Camaraderie." She hesitated a moment, and then added: "Love."

She could see so much of his face, now. Decades of wearing that mask had left his expressions open and unguarded, considering his face was usually completely hidden. His lips twisted, his brow furrowing, and his eyes, usually all she could ever see of his face, narrowed with a harsh disdain. "Ah," he growled, the lovely tones of his voice distorted by his rage, "I see. Love. Still, you will forgive me, I think, Holly, if I neither comprehend nor confirm the importance of love. After all, no one has ever given me that sweetest of gifts." He snatched up the mask from the coffee table she stood on, and waved it at her. "After all, this is a face not even a mother could love, Holly, and no one else since has done anything to change my mind."

He really was the king of storming away angrily, she reflected, even as she opened her mouth to tell him that his claim of no one ever loving him was not entirely true.