Late one night it dawned on Erik that in the past, not long after he had met Gaia, they had spoken before about her desire not to marry. According to her, she wished to marry but only out of love. Yet, she had agreed to consider Erik's proposal for the future when she had immediately turned down the proposal of so many men.
Erik went immediately from happy and proud of himself to uneasy and curious. The only good explanation Erik could think of was that she had been too afraid of him to simply say no, a thought that made him furious. After all of her talk that he was not his face, she was still terrified of him! All of her talk had been nothing more than lies, sweet words to try and appease him. But could he really blame her? He had been rough with her the night she tried to remove his mask, and the thought in Italy was that alcohol merely amplifies your true nature. Loving people are aroused, sad people become depressed… Erik must therefore have been naturally violent and angry. He supposed it wasn't far from the truth, considering his past. Telling her of the murder he had committed had been a mistake!
Another explanation Erik considered was that she had decided to lower her standards after all. Gaia had mentioned before that she thought her standard of love was too high; well perhaps in the light of her worries of disappointing her family, she had decided to drop that standard to one of friendship and comradery. Maybe simply being able to tolerate him would be enough for her to marry him someday. This thought didn't infuriate him so much as it wounded his heart. This was his own fault, he knew; dwelling on what it would be like to be married to Gaia had made his feelings for her more complex than they had ever been. In his fantasies she was everything he knew her to be: stubborn, full of life, passionate, private... but she was also things Erik saw in her more secretly. She was a passionate lover in his dreams, a wonderful mother and wife, private against the world but confiding in him all of her secrets and dreams, things he had only caught a glimpse of since meeting her. Since proposing to her he wanted little more than to be her closest friend and confidant, and to learn as much about her as he could.
These fantasies of their married life together left Erik clinging to one last explanation for Gaia's reaction to his proposal. Maybe, just maybe, Gaia loved him. The thought had started out like a seed in his mind, tiny and fragile. Slowly it grew, fueled by his fantasies and his quiet observation of her as time passed. There were times he dared not think about it for fear of going mad with curiosity, but somehow the vines of this idea wrapped their way into his consciousness even when they were most unwelcome. Erik occasionally found himself daydreaming about the idea at the quarry, a mistake that nearly decapitated him more than once as his mind was anywhere but on the rocks moving just above his head. When Gaia would meet him at the work site to walk with him home for lunch, he could no longer turn a deaf ear to the catcalls and often crude comments of the men in the site.
It reminded him so much of a fairytale he had grown up reading. La Belle et la Bête. The Beauty and the Beast. It was a traditional French story that was without a doubt centuries old, but was first written and published by a remarkable woman author nearly a century before Erik was even born. The copy in his mother's library had been perhaps half that old, but immensely valuable nevertheless, and it had captivated him from the moment he read it. La Belle et la Bête told the story of a merchant and his youngest daughter, who had been so beautiful she was given the name Belle. One night the merchant became lost in a thick forest, and sought refuge in a castle. Inside the castle he found a beautiful rose, one he desired to give as a gift to his daughter for her patience while he had been away. This did not bode well with the beast, who had been watching the merchant from afar. Because the merchant had abused the Beast's hospitality and attempted to take his most valuable possession, the merchant must stay in the castle forever as a prisoner. The merchant explains that the rose was a gift for his daughter and that he meant no harm, but the Beast will only set him free upon striking a bargain; he would trade the merchant for the man's youngest daughter. The merchant returns home and the girl goes willingly, glad to trade her life for that of her beloved father. Upon realizing the girl's beauty, the Beast treats her as his guest rather than as a prisoner, and his kindness eventually wins over the girl's affections.
Every night the Beast asks her to marry him, and every night the girl refuses. In her dreams she is approached by a handsome prince, who begs to know why she is refusing his proposal. She sees no connection between the prince and the Beast, and can only answer that she loves the Beast only as a friend. It is not until she leaves the Beast to visit her family out of homesickness and discovers he is dying of heartbreak at her absence that she discovers she truly loves him. When her tears transform him into the handsome prince from her dreams, she finally agrees to marry the Beast, and like many fairy tales they live happily ever after.
Erik could not help but sense perhaps this story was more true than its creators could have originally known, at least to some extent. No matter how much he wished to be loved… he was still a hideous Beast. What woman could love a Beast as more than just a friend, a pet to pity and dote upon? No illusion he knew would ever turn Erik into a handsome prince fit to marry a beauty like Gaia. There simply was no magic like the magic told of in fairy tales.
But the dreams would not stop. Belle dreamed every night of her handsome prince, and Erik dreamed every night of his beautiful princess. Every night seemed to last decades, each and every moment of their lives together playing out in his mind, so realistically he was loathe to wake every morning to the dreariness of real life. Each night the dream was different, and tonight's dream had a strange feel to it… something was wrong. There was a great sense of unease lingering throughout the dream, in spite of the imaginary couple's happiness. The disturbance was so great it caused Erik to wake well before his usual hour. It was mere moments after Erik woke that he heard movement from upstairs and the cluttering of something hard hitting the floor.
Bolting up the stairs, Erik froze outside Gaia's door, listening intently when suddenly there was a loud crack and a muffled yelp from inside. Reaching for the handle Erik's heart sank when he found it locked. He reached desperately on top of the door frame, praying more earnestly than he had since he was a boy to find a spare key. To his immense fortune his hand fell upon the metallic key and in moments the door was open.
The sight that greeted him sent him into a rage far worse even than he had entered in during his fight with Marco. The same man was in the room struggling with a nearly naked Gaia, most of her thin summer nightgown having been torn off in her struggle. She was gagged with the man's shirt, and he had somehow managed to bind her hands with a leather belt. Gaia kicked at Marco ferociously, pausing only to acknowledge her savior's presence by exclaiming his name through her gag. Her relief upon seeing him vanished the instant he attacked Marco with the fury of a wild animal. While his eyes were harder to find in the shadows than even in the day, she knew the moment she saw them there was a lust for blood in his heart.
The men struggled on the bed, and Gaia yelp when Marco was nearly shoved down onto her. Using what little momentum she could gain from her still free legs, she moved out of bed to watch the fight unfold in terror. Marco was drunk and unsteady on his feet, but he fought as if for his life against Erik, as if knowing by instinct the masked man would not stop until blood was spilled. With all her might Gaia tried to reach her gag but was unable to free her hands to do so, rendering her completely incapable of calling Erik down from his madness. In a whirlwind of movement, Erik smashed a vase into shards against a wall, wielding a hefty piece in absence of his knife. The masked man grabbed the Italian by the throat, and dragged the struggling man to one of the windows Gaia had left open earlier to let in a breeze, and unbeknownst to Erik the very same window Marco had slipped in through.
Erik held the shard of glass firmly against the man's gut as he pushed the man back out the window, suspending him only by the throat. "Do you still not know who I am, Signore?" Erik demanded in a low whisper, throwing his voice directly to the man's ear without even opening his mouth. The man gaped in horror and fumbled in his pocket, a gesture Erik was too maddened to notice. "I am the Angel of Death, the Collector of Souls… and your time has come," Erik hissed, punctuating his last remark with a sharp stab to the man's gut. This movement was followed by a bang so loud Gaia yelped under her gag, a sound which developed into a scream as Marco was catapulted over the ledge of the high second story window onto the street below, and Erik fell backwards clutching his shoulder with one hand while the other hung limp and useless at his side.
Giovanni came into the room as fast as his legs could carry him, eyes widening in shock and horror. The old man moved first to his daughter, who even bound and gagged was hurrying to Erik's side in an attempt to help him. Giovanni tore the gag off Gaia who immediately called out for Erik, who now leaning against a wall, faint from pain and blood loss. As soon as Gaia's hands were unbound she cupped her savior's face and kissed him soundly. "You're going to be okay, Erik, I'll go fetch the doctor right now," she promised, standing and moving past her father to pull on her robe and head towards the door.
"Gaia, what happened here?" The old man demanded, kneeling to inspect his adopted son.
"Look out the window Papà, and you'll see," Gaia promised as she all but ran out the bedroom door, breaking into a full sprint as soon as her feet touched the cobblestone outside. Giovanni did as he was told, standing to look down out the window in horror of the sight that greeted him there; Marco's body was twisted at an unnatural angle, back surely broken from the fall. If his neck had not snapped as well, Giovanni was certain the boy would die from the bloody wound in his gut, though the old man felt little remorse; it was a better fate than he deserved for the crime he had intended to commit.