Page 78 of Angel's Mask

Adèle gave him a sympathetic look, like she might give a sweet, stupid child. “The way she sang, my boy. The way she always sings lately: like someone truly in love.”

Raoul frowned. He couldn’t argue with that. All he could do was hope against all reason that maybe that love was for him, and not this mysterious other. It was a foolish hope, he knew.

“Adèle! The wine!” Antoine yelled from another room and Adèle rolled her eyes.

“What on earth do you see in him?” Raoul asked, resigned.

“Well, he does have a massive...fortune.” Raoul blushed to his ears and Adèle let out another husky, musical laugh. “Is that not enough?”

“He doesn’t though, you know. Have a fortune,” Raoul said without thinking and Adèle raised a dark brow. “He used to, but he’s spent it all. Sold half his estates. In a year he’ll have nothing if he’s not careful. That’s why he’s hoping to marry my poor sister.”

“Does Philippe know this?”

Raoul sighed again. “He does. But our father and Antoine’s died on the same day in the same disaster. Philippe thinks that makes them brothers of a sort. As if he doesn’t have a brother already with actual morals.”

“Perhaps it’s your hero’s heart that he finds so tiresome,” Adèle said, but her face and voice were kind. “Don’t worry. I like it. I think Christine might too if she had the chance.”

Raoul’s heart leapt as she smiled. “Do you think I have a chance?”

“I have no idea, darling, and I do want you to be ready to have that heart of yours broken if she does belong to another.”

“I’m willing to risk it.”

Adèle sighed, patting her skirts as she stood. “Well, then I think I’ll head home now to wait for her. To our flat. At number ten onRue Notre Dame des Victoires,” she said pointedly. “Do tell Antoine...something.”

“Thank you,” Raoul said, his hope surging. “I will call until she sees me.”

“And what will you do if she tells you she’s taken?”

Raoul set his jaw and his heart in determination. “I will ask who this man is and demand to speak with him, so I can tell him he should treat Christine with respect and honor. She deserves an honest man. A good man. Not someone who hides his face from society or the world.”

Adèle looked at Raoul with a final, pitying sigh. “You are right, dear Vicomte, she does. But so few of us get what we deserve.”

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Christine dreamed ofher father, standing by the sea. She could hear the pounding of the waves as she chased after him to the shore, trying to glimpse his face one last time. And then he was gone. It was just her and the endless, roiling ocean and far off, the boy she loved was pulled under the waves.

But it was alright. She wasn’t alone. An angel was with her, holding her back from the void. The waves struck the sand in an insistent rhythm, even as the feel of his hands on her skin ignited a new fire within her. She tried to turn to see him, but he disappeared too, even though she could feel his breath against her skin.

“Christine, you have to see.” Her father’s voice was calling to her, sad and distant. Or was it the angel’s? The waves beat harder. Louder. Loud as a heartbeat against her ear. But whose heart could beat beneath the sea? Was she drowning? “You have tolisten.”

Christine startled awake, the sound of a heartbeat still steady near her cheek. She blinked to no effect. Alarmingly, she couldn’t see at all, but her head was resting against something warm. No. Someone. Because she had asked him to hold her, after.

The memory of the night before flooded back. The stage. The dark. The songs. The ecstasy more exquisite than anything she had ever dreamed. And her angel with her. He had covered her eyes. And now she was in his arms, listening to his heart and his breath; pounding waves and the rising wind of a storm that was on the cusp of overwhelming her.

Christine’s hand shook as she raised herself and pulled the blindfold from her eyes. She turned from him before she did. She couldn’t look. Not yet.

The room was strange. The light of a few low-burning candles was swallowed by walls hung with black cloth, like the curtains in the wings and the floor was covered in dark, thick rugs. Amid the curtains were paintings that she could not concentrate on enough to make out. They were in a large four-poster bed like nothing she had ever seen, carved from ebony wood to look like it was still a living tree. The other furniture in the room was old-fashioned and mismatched. But the strangest thing was the complete lack of windows.

She remembered being led down so many stairs the night before and now it made sense. Her angel’s home she was underground. But why would an angel need a home with a bed and carpets and candles?

She turned back slowly, her own heart pounding as she looked on her angel at last.

He was still asleep, his dark hair spread around his head in a cloud that nearly matched the black sheets of his bed. The visible skin of his neck and chest was deathly pale and somehow thewrong. His hands were strange too, long and thin, with the same pallidness and odd texture. Christine shivered to remember how they had undone her the night before. All of him was lithe and angular, and even lying down she could tell he was tall. He was still wearing a mask, of course. He looked utterly vulnerable, lying in that bed in a peaceful slumber. And so completely human.

She could see him breathing. She had heard his heart.

A gasping sob escaped her throat, shattering the silence, and the stranger’s eyes flew open. If there had been any doubt in her heart before then, there was none now, because the eyes that met Christine’s were the same golden eyes she had seen last night and dreamed of for months before. Eyes that had made her believe in ghosts and angels in the dark.

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