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“I hate everything,” I say.

“Love you too, Bow-Peep,” she mocks as she exits my room, giggling to herself.

The door clicks shut behind her, leaving me alone with the suffocating silence of my own thoughts.

I don’t move for a long moment. I just stand in the silence she left behind. Eventually, I end up on the floor. For hours.

It isn’t intentional or for any real reason. My spine settles against the cold wooden floor, my violin case beside me as I frantically search for score recommendations. I need to find the perfect piece for this damn duet.

Julian Thorne has been a low, persistent frequency of irritation in my life for the last year, a background noise I have learned to tune out and manage. He has never, not once, gotten this close to the things that I keep hidden underneath. Yesterday, he got close. Today, somehow, it got worse.

And the worst part, the part I am not going to say out loud, not even in an empty room, not even to myself, is that the thing prickling under my skin right now is not full of rage.

I knew he was attractive. That is not new information. I have spent a year being extremely aware of that fact, even though I decided not to think about it. Which is to say, I think about it constantly and with great effort. But there was a moment in that corridor, right after we left Mathias’s office, when Julian really looked at me. I told myself I was fine, but I wasn’t.

The memory of his tattoos surfaces without my permission. That is the thing about them. I have tried not to look at them, not properly, which means I have looked at almost every detail without meaning to. Dark ink pressed into his skin like something he needed to carry externally because there wasn’t enough room for it inside.

Those intertwining piano keys, music scores, and roses. What do they mean?

I glance at the clock.

5:46PM. Fourteen minutes. Shit.

I scramble up off the floor as fast as my joints allow me to, though the ache in my shoulder is immediate and sharp. It’s a brutal reminder that spending hours on a hardwood floor with no support does nothing good for my hypermobile joints. I ignore it, as I have been for years.

I have exactly two minutes to change into something more comfortable for the hellish night to come, before I talk myself out of going completely. Pulling on a pair of soft, black sweats and matching hoodie, I tie a matching black bow in my hair. My hands are steadier than I expect them to be. I’ll take the small victory.

This is fine, I tell myself. This is a practice. This is music. You know how to do music.

I breathe through the ache in my shoulder and grab my violin case, the familiar weight settling into my hand.

He does not get to see me tremble, not again.

I open the door. The corridor is particularly quiet in the early evening. Somewhere on the floor above me I can hear the faint sound of a cello, someone running over the same phrase over and over again in the obsessive way we musicians do.

I know that feeling intimately.

Come on, Ellise. Let’s go.

6

Julian

The crown jewel of Belrose, in my eyes, is Practice room C.

With floor-to-ceiling glass looking out over the jagged skyline of Manhattan, it is the only place in this architectural tomb where I can actually draw a full breath.

Most of the practice rooms here are windowless, suffocating boxes that smell like old rosin and the desperation of people who have been in them too long. Walls that close in on you. Ceilings that sit too low.

Practice Room C is different.

The glass walls make you feel like you are playing on the edge of the world.

In the center of the room sits an ebony-gloss Steinway grand. It’s a beast of a piano. There’s no other word for it. It commands the space with raw authority. I’ve played Steinway’s in concert halls. Hell, I own two of them, but none have the presence of this one, in this room, at night. It is the only thing within these walls I truly respect.

I book the room every evening at six.

Not officially, of course. I don't follow the rules for anything. But at Belrose, everyone knows that Practice Room C at six o’clock belongs to me. I never made an announcement. The unwritten rule simply materialised, and no one dared to contest it. So, I guess that made it mine.