Standard disclaimers apply.
It is the headline of every paper the next morning: Vicomte de Chagny found dead, cold and pale and naked, strangled with the clean white sheets of his marriage bed.
He runs the whole way back to the opera house, not caring if wide eyes follow him in the street. What's one more reason to stare, after all? Mask stark against the early morning shadows, cape flapping behind . . . It's a relief to be enveloped by the darkness of the sewers once more, if only for a moment. Then reality crashes down again.
This isn't what he wanted.
She is exactly where he left her, slumped in his chair, and he kneels before her. He's out of breath — from running, but also fear. He knows how this looks. After all, he's done it before.
"I swear to you, Christine, it wasn't me. I surrendered. I would never go back on my word."
It is imperative that she understand this.
Her eyes are dull as she stares into the darkness beyond the lake. Listless. "Of course not," she says finally, her voice hoarse. It sounds nothing like her normal one now, but it feels as if a weight has been lifted from his chest regardless. "If I thought it you had, I would never have come here."
"But–" the words catch in his throat, too personal, too dangerous, but he must know for sure "–you were there? You . . . You saw it happen?"
She nods, seems to fold into herself. Cringes violently. "God, yes," she whispers. "I wish I could have been anywhere else."
It's a strange choice of words for one who lost her husband; should she not wish that he had been far away instead, to escape the hands of the killer? But she is distraught, and not thinking clearly. Traumatized. As she well should be.
After all, she'd been terrified by less before.
Yet he presses a little harder, testing the boundaries. "Did you see him? It was a man, was it not? I'm sure the Vicomte must have made other enemies apart from myself, in his arrogance–"
"He was not arrogant!"
She springs to her feet, eyes glazed with a terrible desperation, and he quiets immediately. Too far, then. "Of course," he says slowly. "But nevertheless, he was an important figure. Those kinds of people have rivals."
"It was dark." He had forgotten when the Vicomte was killed, where he was and what he was doing, but it comes rushing back to him now. He clenches his fists, wants to stride away. Resists. Christine is his no longer, if she ever was. "I saw nothing. I only heard it." There are tears in her eyes now, and he thinks briefly of wiping them from her face, but he can't bring himself to raise his hand. She shivers.
"And then I ran."
Reviews are confidence boosters. It's only getting darker from here (oh this is fun :).
Much love,
KnightNight