Page 17 of Malice in e minor

“Aurelia, I have about a dozen unfinished pieces on my laptop. My mother fell and broke her hip. I’ve been so worried, I haven’t been able to work on them. This Luca guy offered to pay for her treatment, which takes a huge load off, but I think I’m still in fight or flight.”

“What do you need to settle in?”

“I think just time to get used to this being my new norm.”

I could deal with everyone hating me except the dancers. I had ample experience dealing with weirdos like Gadreel. I just needed more than five minutes to deal with all of this.

“Let me see your schedule,” Orion demanded.

I resisted the urge to get him to say please because he’d been mostly helpful so far. I pulled it up and handed him my phone. He gave it a brief glance and handed it back. My schedule wasn’t super extensive.

“Klaus is a drama queen. If you’re going to be his assistant for orchestra until the end of the year, get his coffee right. He’s not going to tell you how he likes it so he can yell at you. Don’t make it from the regular coffee machine. Go to his office and use his special coffee and he wants exactly two hazelnut creamers.”

“His office is under the orchestra pit,” Aurelia said. “He’s not wrong. There’s been instances where someone was on probation and couldn’t audition for orchestra, so they were his assistant. He loves making people cry.”

“Good thing I have no feelings,” I deadpanned.

Good luck with that. There were some folks who couldn’t go out to eat, buy groceries, or deal with customer service without berating someone and trying to make them cry. I’d dealt with all of them. I was the reigning champ of that battle of wits.

Aurelia just laughed.

“Use that. I want you to pick one piece that resonates with you and work on finishing it. Obviously, I won’t be grading you, but I’ll be one of your composition professors next semester if I’ve been assigned your advisor. This will give you a leg up.

“Obviously, you won’t be working on everything that strikes your fancy. I’ll be preparing you to take commissions and write for any job. Sometimes, taking a commission you absolutely know is going to make you miserable pays your rent and opens the door to all kinds of new work. That’s all for today. Book a practice room and do what you need to do to prepare for Klaus. That man is a lot.”

Okay, so I was officially getting excited about Blackvale Academy. I was excited for the assignments Aurelia was going to give me. She’d written for orchestras, movies, and musicals. I liked my creepy stuff, but I also loved a challenge.

I just had to get through the challenge of orchestra practice later.

Iwasn’t meeting with my performance advisor until tomorrow and I had a few hours to go until I was needed at Nutcracker rehearsals. It was pretty easy to figure out how to book a practice room. There were plenty, so I had no problems.

I was starting to get excited about all of this, but I was still on edge and playing my violin was how I dealt with all of that. I wasn’t technically in orchestra this semester, but my mother and I did have some Christmas traditions.

We did The Nutcracker twice every year growing up. Once was with me playing in the orchestra and then we’d go watch a performance so I could enjoy the dancers. Sometimes, we didn’t have a ton of money, but there were usually dance schools doing a performance so we weren’t paying for professional ballet tickets.

We went every year until I went to undergrad and I had some fond memories. Tchaikovsky might not have liked the score he wrote, but I did. It wasn’t exactly my usual style, but I had a fondness for it.

I launched into the Adagio from Act II of The Nutcracker. That one always hit me in the feels. Tchaikovsky wrote that movement after his sister died and I could always feel the grief in the soaring notes.

I knew Rue was playing the Sugar Plum Fairy and Cullen was playing her Cavalier, so they’d probably be dancing this unless Blackvale changed the staging so whoever was playing Clara and the Nutcracker did it. I couldn’t wait.

I was usually zoned out when I played, but I could hear someone in another practice room join me and start playing the cello solo that joined the violin. They were good. I liked solos, but I loved feeding off other artists. We rose until the final notes of the piece were played.

I took my violin off my shoulder and closed my eyes. That was nice. This was what I was made for. I meant to take a minute just to enjoy it when the door flew open and a man was in my personal space.

He was tall with a shock of purple hair. He was covered in swirling black tattoos all the way up to his chin and he had a ring through his septum and lip. He was exactly my type, but he also had me cornered with only an expensive, hard to replace violin as a weapon.

“Woah,” he said, holding his hands up. He had a sexy voice and an accent I couldn’t place. “I was sitting with Meadow while she was practicing her cello. I came to see who inspired her the join in. That was fucking gorgeous. I guess I should have knocked, huh?”

“That would be wise because if I ended up breaking this expensive violin, I would have shoved the pieces up your ass.”

His face brightened.

“I’d give you my real name, but you’d mispronounce it with a song and I’d have to kill you. You can call me Topher.”

“Harlowe.”

I couldn’t figure him out. I didn’t think he was a dancer or a musician. Well, I knew he wasn’t a dancer. He would have had to dye his hair back if he was a dancer because the Nutcracker was only a few weeks away and they would have done promo photos.