Waiting in the Wings (Love Never Dies fanfic)

Encounter

Author's note: In the French game of hazard, the player throws dice against the house, and if he rolls the number stipulated (the 'main') then he has won on the spot. But in the card game vingt-et-un, the reverse is true: the gambler makes his play, and then the house plays last to see who wins...

Chapter 2. Encounter

The chorus girls had gone now, clattering and shrieking their way to their next change, and the corridor from the dressing-rooms was dark and quiet: too quiet. Where was she? And where — suspicion flared instantly, full-grown from the first, as he glanced round for the flicker of a mask — where was he?

Not here. Out front, then: surveying the ticket take, overseeing the seating, greeting the customers? Raoul didn't think so, oh no.

That creature — that creature who'd leered and taunted him, driven him to that unspeakable gamble — had been watching Christine's dressing-room, and maybe he'd enjoyed the view; but he'd been watching and waiting.

And if I go there now, Christine? If I go to call for you in coat and gloves and rattle at the door... will I find it locked? And will I hear a voice — that voice — inside? Oh God, Christine — angel—

It was like a nightmare. A nightmare in which the phantoms of the past sprang up again and again on every side, hydra-headed, and everything he'd thought secure could drop away from underneath him.

He'd made the winning throw: he'd rolled, and nicked the main. But the game had been changed. And when the cards were on the table and the stakes were down — the dealer plays last...

Oh, why had he taken that bet, why — why? He'd needed no goading, for all his bravado of anger; he knew well enough at heart that he'd leapt at the chance, sore and afraid, and drunken enough to be desperate to prove he was neither... Just as he'd plunged at Monte Carlo, when Spezzioni sat there cool and mocking behind the bank, and asked — insinuated — if the Vicomte was sure, quite sure. He'd never been more sure of anything in that moment than the need to prove the man wrong, wife and home and sanity all cast aside: and where had that madness brought him but here, into the new domain of his oldest enemy... with his whole life on the table in another rigged game.

He'd let his rival set the terms, and been played for the drink-sodden sot he was: the man who could gamble his wife in a New York bar for the sake of his own pride.

Raoul groaned. "Our Christine shall choose tonight"... Yes, let her choose! Let it be over, this trickery and torment — let her see the worst of me and take me or leave me as I deserve. But let it be an open fight...

For him to lose, Christine had only to continue as agreed: to play the good artiste, the loving mother, the loyal wife. To sing — as she thought — to save her son and husband from indebtedness and shame. To keep the show on the stage at all costs. For him to win... she must first overturn everything on his bare word: all those qualities that made her Christine.

And now that fiend was laying down his cards in her dressing-room and making his play, in those same hypnotic tones that had lured her worthless husband out of what judgement he'd ever had. And he, Raoul, that husband, had nothing to set in the balance save love — the love that had failed her so often before.

The knowledge of what he had done half-choked him. He should have told her. Should have told her the truth of that choice, however much shame it drew; should have told her what she risked and what he had brought about. Not to win that accursed bet, but in the cause of honesty alone, if they were ever to live with one another again...