Perviously from the last chapter...
The grand piano stood on a raised dais, slick as oil and gleaming like it knew it was about to taste blood. Its curved body reflected the crowd gathered below—vampires and nobles, silk-draped courtiers and jeweled pets—all hovering like sharks scenting the first spill of crimson.
Lucien, the pianist, moved with the kind of elegance that came from years of being watched. He seated himself with the easy grace of someone born to play, then flexed his fingers, long, precise, like blades clicking into place.
I swallowed and tuned my violin, pretending not to notice how my hands trembled. The strings felt tighter tonight, like they knew what was coming.
Across the room, Julian stood motionless, his expression carved from ice. But I could see the tension in his posture, in the small way his jaw ticked. He was afraid.
Lucien began.
His fingers danced over the keys in a display of polished perfection—impeccable rhythm, flawless technique. The melody shimmered like crystal… and cut about as deep. It was beautiful, yes. But soulless.
The vampires murmured their approval like it was a toast. Dain's smirk widened.
Then I lifted my bow.
The first note I played wasn't pretty. It wasn't clean. It was raw, splintered around the edges, cracked open and bleeding. But it was real. It vibrated through the air like a held breath. And the room went still.
I closed my eyes and let go.
The music clawed its way out of me. I didn't coax it. I bled it, one aching note at a time. I played like I was carving my heart out and nailing it to the strings. The sound wound through Lucien's polished phrases, wrapped around his notes like smoke and squeezed.
He stumbled.
I felt it: the brief hesitation in his tempo, the uncertain touch on the next chord.
But I didn't stop.
The violin hummed in my hands like it had found its voice at last. The strings burned beneath my fingertips, glowing faintly with each aching crescendo. Lucien's playing grew rushed, desperate. Hiis perfect mask slipping. Sweat dripped from his temples. His breath turned shallow.
And then...
A strangled gasp.
Lucien's hands slammed down on the keys with a thunderous, discordant crash. He jerked upright, eyes wide and hollow, like someone had sucked the light out of them.
One final note lingered in the air between us. Pure. Crystal-clear. Terrifying in its perfection.
And then he collapsed.
Silence. The kind that feels like it's holding its breath.
Then the hissing began.
"Soulthief," a vampire spat, voice sharp as broken glass.
The word spread like wildfire—Soulthief. Soulthief.—hissing through the crowd, infecting the air itself.
Julian was at my side in a blink, shoving me behind him like a shield. "He didn't know," he growled, low and dangerous.
Dain knelt beside Lucien's body. His fingers pressed to the pianist's throat, checking, judging. When he looked up, his smile was gone. "Oh, but he does now," he murmured.
The Conclave's enforcers emerged from the walls like shadows waking up. Their masks were featureless, gleaming obsidian, and they moved like they'd done this before. Many times.
A hand gripped my wrist, tight, urgent.
Sister Veradine. Her blindfold was damp, streaked with what I swear were tears.
"Quickly," she whispered, pressing something small and warm into my palm. A clockwork locket. It pulsed with life against my skin.
There was no time to ask. No time to breathe.
Julian grabbed my arm and pulled, dragging me through the fraying crowd, through a tunnel of shouts and gasps and the sudden crackle of spellfire behind us.
We ran.
And behind us, Dain's voice followed, soft and terrible, the whisper of a blade sliding between ribs:
"History is a wheel, Julian. And you're just another spoke."
***
The locket burned in my pocket.
Not literally. But it might as well have. The weight of it was a brand against my skin, a reminder of what I'd seen. What I couldn't unsee. Lucien's eyes, glazed and lifeless, haunted the edges of my vision no matter how tightly I shut my own. He had folded in on himself like a marionette robbed of its strings, his final note still echoing in my skull.
Soulthief.
The word pulsed inside me, black and poisonous. It didn't just settle in my chest, it coiled there, alive with guilt and rage and something darker I didn't dare name.
Julian had vanished into his study the moment we returned to the Spire. I hadn't seen his eyes. Hadn't heard his voice. Only the muffled scratch of paper burning and the clink of glass tumblers. Bourbon. Always bourbon.
I pressed my ear to the heavy oak door, but heard nothing. Just silence. That was good. Or bad. I couldn't tell anymore.
The Spire felt colder than usual. Colder than it should. I slipped out through the servants' passage, where moonlight barely touched the stone. My violin case bumped against my spine, its presence a familiar comfort, an anchor in the unmoored haze of the past few hours.
New Avalon welcomed me like it always did with teeth.
The city swallowed me whole in its metallic throat. Neon flickered in puddles. Gutter steam hissed like warnings. Somewhere, a street preacher screamed about redemption. Somewhere else, someone wept. Neither sound mattered more than the note I carried in my coat pocket.
The Velvet Nocturne.
The name was scrawled in ink that shimmered red when it caught the light. Below it, directions. Vague, but insistent.
I found the place tucked beneath the bones of a once-grand theater, its rotting facade like a mouth forced into a smile. A cracked sign above the alley door buzzed erratically, a broken harp flickering in and out of existence.
The bouncer didn't speak. Just stared with dead eyes and iron teeth as he stepped aside. I slipped inside.
The air changed.
It wasn't just thick. It clung. Smoke layered over perfume, and beneath that, something sweeter and rotting. Like fruit just past ripeness. Like memory gone sour.
And then—music.
The Orchestra played beneath sagging velvet curtains, their instruments too polished for a place this decayed. They wore tattered suits and empty expressions, each stroke of bow and press of key mechanical and precise.
No conductor stood before them.
Only Maestro.
They were rail-thin, wrapped in a threadbare tailcoat that hung from their shoulders like old skin. A porcelain mask cracked at the corner, grinned eternally at the room. Painted lips. Hollow eyes.
Every hair on my arms rose.
The music didn't fill the room. It invaded.
It slid into my ears like oil, slow and clinging. Every note burrowed under my skin. Around me, the crowd moved in time, swaying gently, caught in some unseen current. A woman near the front wept, her mascara tracking rivers down her cheeks. A man laughed, sharp and fractured, like something had broken inside him and found joy in the ruins.
I stood still. Too still. My breath shallow, as if the air here didn't want to be borrowed.
Maestro tilted their head. Their bow paused mid-stroke.
The final note slithered out of the strings like a sigh, trembling with something unspoken.
Silence fell. But it wasn't restful. It buzzed.
The crowd blinked, dazed. Coins clinked onto the stage like rain. Some offered jewelry. A few left teeth.
And then Maestro moved.
Their porcelain face turned toward me as if they'd known I was there all along. The mask's smile didn't shift but somehow, it felt wider.
They stepped forward, slow and deliberate, and extended one pale hand toward me.
"Ah," they purred, voice like silk soaked in wine and ash. "Our guest of honor."
***
Julian's POV:
Julian knew the scent of fear. It clung to skin. It lived in the spaces people left behind.
Ari's fear still lingered in the Spire's marble halls—sharp, acrid, and unmistakable. It threaded through the velvet drapes, seeped into the stone. A boy's fear, brittle and wild. It left a trace, like blood in water.
His room was empty.
The bed, untouched.
The only sign he'd been there was the note, folded neatly atop the pillow like an afterthought. Gone to find answers, it read, the ink rushed, the corners smudged. Julian crushed it in his fist, the parchment crinkling like dried leaves.
Ari was gone.
Julian stood there a long moment, staring at the bed as if it might speak. The mattress still held the ghost of a body. One too small, too reckless for the city that waited beyond the Spire's gates.
And the city...
The city was a monster. It devoured the curious. It swallowed the soft.
Julian moved like a shadow through New Avalon's gut, his coat trailing behind him like smoke. He slipped between neon-lit alleyways and the guttural wail of sirens, past doorways that coughed out drunks and prophets in equal measure. The underbelly of the city opened to him like a wound. He knew its rhythms, its rot.
It had always spoken to him in the language of violence.
He followed whispers, traces of Ari in the tremble of a dealer's hands, in the way a street preacher cut off mid-sermon to avoid his gaze. Through the stench of piss and damp concrete, Julian listened for the boy's heartbeat in the bones of the city.
And then—music.
The sound lured him like a thread pulled tight. It oozed from beneath the crumbling facade of an old theater, curling through the street like incense. Strings and horns in chaotic harmony, like something beautiful being strangled.
The Velvet Nocturne.
Julian's lip curled.
The entrance was barely marked, just a rusted metal door pulsing faintly with bass. He didn't knock.
He kicked it open.