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She doesn’t even grace my comment with a look, just an eye roll and a small huff I have catalogued, against my will, as the sound she makes when I have said something she finds irritating but cannot immediately argue with.

She lifts the violin to her chin. The movement is stiff, but it is practiced, and she begins a series of cold, mechanical warm-up scales.

Outside, the sky has turned to a deep, ink-black, and the rain has started to hammer against the glass with increasing conviction, only adding to the tension in the room.

“So,” I begin, my hands hovering an inch above the keys. “Where do you want to start, Vance?”

“The beginning is usually a solid option,” she replies, her voice dripping with that signature, icy sarcasm.

Fuck. She is infuriating.

I get up to hand her the violin part. She takes it without looking at me, flicking through the score effortlessly—as someone who reads music the way other people read text.

“I’ve played this before.” I tell her, watching her eyes track the score. “Usually as a solo.”

“That’s nice.”

Nice? She is pushing me. Genuinely pushing me now.

I don’t argue, though. I don’t even look at her. I don’t have time for her shit. I simply drop my wrists and begin.

The opening is a haunting, minor-key landscape that bleeds seamlessly out of the Steinway. I know this piece the way I know most things I love—instinctively, physically, and in my bones rather than my brain. I have played it a hundred times alone in the dark. Sharing it feels wrong in a way I did not anticipate. Sharing it with her is entirely too vulnerable.

Usually, I’m the one who dictates the tempo and commands the melody, the one who makes the room bend to my volume and whatever feeling I choose to put into it. This piece requires a level of absolute restraint I’ve never been particularly good at mastering. She has the lead here. I am forced into the background, and every instinct I have is screaming at me to take it back—to fill the space with something that is mine and overpower her.

But that’s exactly why I chose this piece.

I didn’t do it to show off or to drown her out with the dominant piano part. I did it because I wanted to see her exposed and leading—stripped of the technical safety of her usual pieces. I wanted to see if she could actually feel something, or if she was as hollow as she pretends to be.

Then, she joins in.

The sound of her violin is—God, it’s incredible.

The rich, dark tones hold a bruised kind of beauty that catches me completely off guard, vibrating straight through the room and into my chest. But as the melody winds through the room, the flaw immediately reveals itself. It’s that same artificial stiffness I’ve watched from the back of the auditorium for the last year. She’s not only tense. She is over compensating.

Seeing her up close, I understand it differently now. Hypermobility. Every phrase is being held in, controlled, fighting against the white-knuckled grip she has on it. I hadn't noticed before, but her fingers seem to be bending inwards at the joints. It looks bloody painful. When she reaches for the upper register, I can see the exact moment her shoulder argues with her.

“Relax,” I say quietly. “Play from your heart, Vance. Stop thinking so much.”

She doesn’t respond. She just keeps going. It is excruciating watching her and even worse listening to her.

We push through the opening phrases, but it’s more like a battle, not a duet—two separate arguments that are happening in the same room. A room that I wish I could exit.

The music clashes, pulls, and refuses to settle into anything coherent. The rain lashing against the glass is the only thing that has any actual rhythm.

When the last note of the passage finally turns into silence, she lowers her violin bow. Her chest is heaving. Her face is deeply flushed, her eyes glassy with what I can only imagine is a volatile mix of physical exhaustion, and an emotion sitting right underneath. She looks dangerously close to a breaking point, but she refuses to let me witness it.

The Ice Queen won’t let anyone see any real emotion or feeling.

The stillness that follows is thick enough to choke on.

“Well,” she breathes, her voice merely a whisper. “That was a start.”

“More like a disaster,” I state. The piano bench creaks under my weight as I stand. “Do you need to stop?”

I refuse to spend another minute doing this, dragging ourselves through this if she can’t even play properly.

“I am not stopping, Thorne.”