If it was possible for him to look more handsome than he had before, well, he managed it.

“I am different,” he agreed. “But then, how could anyone not be after hearing you sing?”

I shut my mouth, stunned by the question. “You heard me?”

The tiniest of smiles touched his lips, accompanied by a short, ironic laugh. His gaze broke from mine to focus on one green-vine-covered wall. “With a voice like that, what angel above your head or demon beneath your heel could not have heard you?”

Again, heat rushed to my cheeks. I folded my arms, a gesture that I’d probably hoped would bring comfort, or a sense of protection from his sudden but not altogether unwelcome barrage of flattery. It did neither.

“Stephanie,” he went on, still without returning his eyes to mine. “I cannot hope to put into words the exceptionality of your gift. And I would be a liar—more of a liar,” he corrected, “if I did not confess to you how fervently I wish, for your sake as well as for mine, that I had never heard you sing my music.”

“Your music?” My blush intensified, to the point where I couldn’t have hoped for even one second that he wouldn’t notice. Apparently, being in a dream didn’t change physical responses. Surely I was now as scarlet as half the blooms surrounding us.

“I daresay only Odysseus, in his circling of the Sirens’ island, could have understood the depths of my ecstasy in hearing the perfection of your song,” he continued, his use of the word “ecstasy” causing me to lift my hand to my brow so that I could physically shield my face from his now unrelenting gaze. Probably, in his time, that word hadn’t carried any of the more salacious connotations it did now. Or . . . had it?

“Conversely,” he went on, “only a drowning man could fathom the ineffable agony that came in the moments, in the hours, after you fled my presence.”

Immediately, my head jerked up. “Your presence?”

“I did not mean to frighten you,” he said.

I shook my head, once again lost in the labyrinth of Erik’s words. “Are you saying that was you?”

His eyes shot away, searching the air for the answers he was having trouble giving me. When they returned to me again, they did so only in a sidelong glance, one full of darkness and secrets.

“Stephanie,” he said. “What I have come to tell you is . . . that I have kept from you the whole truth of this place. Of myself, as well. As a result, I am more afraid for you than ever.”

If it was him I’d seen under that sheet and not Zedok, then . . . wasn’t there less reason for me to be afraid now?

“The figure under the sheet,” I said. “It had on a mask.”

“Yes,” he replied, uttering the word like he despised it.

“Zedok wears a mask,” I continued.