Chapter 24
T he clock moved another minute. She was late. I toyed with the silver ribbon tightened on my wrist. It was never my intention to leave Dalia’s ribbon with Eva, Evangeline, or whatever her name was.
The moment she was out of sight, I took back what belonged to me. Her silver ribbon. Unfortunately, no one could capture my interest, which led to Eva calling me a selfish prick and warning me someone like Dalia would never fall for me. It shouldn’t have disturbed me, but it did for a whole day because an insane part of me really did entertain the idea of her falling for me.
Could she? No, you’re an unlovable monster.
What if I forced her to love me? Didn’t work so well in the past for you.
Why should I care about her love? Because you want to take everything from her. Everything. And that would be the most precious prize.
“Shut up,” I groaned to the voices in my head.
I found myself irritated, nursing a general disdain for most people, yet paradoxically, I wished I could remain just as indifferent regarding Dalia. It was bad—daydreaming about chasing her, perverting her, forcing her to play with me for hours kind of bad.
And I surely didn’t like to wait.
I’d left the back door open for her so she couldn’t have possibly got lost. I clenched my jaw. I was waiting for a woman I was sure of despising behind the almost fallen curtain of an empty opera house in front of some vintage piano like some desperate fucker. My mother would be proud. She couldn’t get me to sit more than five minutes in front of that instrument.
“Sorry I’m late.” Dalia crossed the doors, cradling her violin case as she arrived from backstage.
I noticed the gloss she wore on her lips and how her skirt was shorter than usual. Did she do that for me? Or was it a distraction to keep me from seeing that her hair was messy and her eyes were red?
“What happened?” It wasn’t a question but a demand.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Then you should have hidden it better.”
I’d noticed the colors draining from her face in the boutique earlier. Compared to the way she usually looked—animated with a rainbow of emotions—she looked like a freaking corpse. It pissed me off because it wasn’t her, and someone had deprived her of her colors.
“I had a fight with my father. None of this is any of your concern.” She brushed me off.
I couldn’t help the smug scowl spreading on my face. I was very much interested.
“What were you doing in town anyway?” she asked.
“I was getting myself a tailor-made suit for the occasion,” I said, leaning against the piano. “Let me guess, your daddy doesn’t understand you, and you got into a fight?”
Her eyes sliced straight to mine. “You’re the last person I’d talk to about my father.”
“I disagree; let me tell you why.” With a wave of my hand, I enumerated the facts. “First, I’ll take your defense and will never get bored listening to your complaints. Second, I understand the concept of disappointing people. Third, I didn’t plan this charming meetup for you to think about any man other than me.”
“It’s just that he doesn’t want to accept that I’m a grown woman, and I’m lying to him, and I hate lying! I’m tired of him dictating my whole life. I hate hurting him, and I’m just—” Her words spilled out in a frenzied torrent, each sentence tumbling over the next until she finally paused, gasping for breath. “I wish he could just listen. I’ll never be like Mom. I’m imperfect, and I can’t be what he wants me to be without feeling lonely and unhappy.”
As fate would have wanted, I had dedicated the bulk of my day to digging into the sordid details of the Mercier’s business, starting with the discovery I had made four years ago about the weird amount of money he’d received ten and fifteen years ago. After weeks of meticulous investigation, I finally stumbled upon the treasure trove of information I’d sought. Information that could potentially bring down Dalia’s father. I just needed more time to be sure this wasn’t an unfortunate coincidence. Plus, I didn’t want to end all of this quite yet.
Wielding power also meant knowing when to bide your time.
“You should be honest,” I told her, rethinking my strategy. His own daughter was turning against him and confiding in me .
It was like knowing you could win a chess game in three moves: too easy, boring, and predictable. Instead, I’d make the game last longer, change my strategy, and deprive the king of all his pawns until it was just him and my allies. And maybe Dalia could be one of them.
“No.” She shook her head.
“Why? Afraid he would stop loving you?”
She thinned her lips. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Ouch.” I pretended to be offended. “Growing up as someone who was never wanted, I think I do.”
“You never talk about your grandparents or your father.”
“They never took any interest in knowing me,” I said. “And I didn’t turn out that bad, did I?”
“You’re lonely, and you desperately seek attention. You’re not a good example,” she whispered before glancing around as if she had just noticed where we were. “Wait… Are we—”
She had dashed down the hallway, unaware that she was veering toward the backstage of the ruined opera house through the new emergency exit. All she needed to do was push aside that half-slumped velvet curtain to step onto the desolate stage she so eagerly sought.
Her gaze swept over the debris littering the area beside us, the cables dangling like vines and an old chandelier put aside on the floor with the rest of the decor. The stale air of this macabre opera had long ceased to draw breath. The construction tools had been put aside, the floor creaking beneath our feet with splintered remnants of broken wood. This place was even more horrendously scarred than I was.
“It’s the opera house…” Her voice shook, her big eyes wide open as she twirled around the place. “Are we even allowed to be in here? Wait, am I going to play here?”
“Maybe.” I didn’t delve into the subject of how I’d convinced the worker lady to turn a blind eye and give us the stage for an hour in exchange for getting her ex-husband to pay the child support he owed her.
“For real? I’m going to play here?”
Her eyes lit up, and a not-so-subtle smile played on her lips. She took a few steps forward, casting a fleeting glance behind the half-slumped curtain at the barren expanse where an audience should have sat. Not that she’d see anything from here—only one of the backstage lights worked, illuminating the space, while the rest lay cloaked in darkness. Yet she retreated back, a veil of sadness clouding her eyes.
“I don’t think I can.” Her lower lip shook. “I’m… I’m scared that if I play… It’s too soon. I’m not ready.”
She was haunted by Los Calaveras, but she’d have to get over her fear. “It’s just you and me, no public.”
“But I…”
“Isn’t that opera the reason you’re here, and now you want to back off?” I lifted a brow. I wasn’t ready to let my grand gesture be tarnished by those guys. “We could stay behind the curtain. Baby steps.”
“Okay,” she breathed, balling her hands at her sides. “You’re right. We’re still on the stage but without the public.” Then she drilled her eyes on the piano. You’d think it’d have been big enough for her to notice it sooner, but no. “Wait, is someone going to join us?”
“No, unless you wish to upset me.”
“But who’s going to play the piano?”
“Me,” I deadpanned, the sheet music already on it.
She laughed, but when I didn’t budge, she parted her lips. “You? You play?”
“Does that surprise you?”
“Yes, you never mentioned anything about it, and you’re not the type to—” She gulped. “Let’s just say playing an instrument requires sensitivity.”
“Despite my mother’s dedication in teaching me her art, I assure you I’m as terrible as most common mortals out there.”
“I’m sure you aren’t.” Her eyes briefly darted to her ribbons tightened on my wrist, probably her silver one, before returning to meet mine. With a coy gesture, she crossed her legs. “Let’s play this duet together.”
She took her violin, and I confronted the piano, cracking my neck to the side. For some unfathomable reason, my heart thrummed with an erratic rhythm, a disconcerting anomaly as though my own emotions dared to defy my meticulously crafted control. The unwelcome intrusion irked me.
“Are you okay?” Dalia asked.
“I’m fine,” I grumbled.
This was ridiculous. I should just have asked someone else to play. But I didn’t want someone else to play with her tonight, so a choice had to be made.
“You start when you’re ready.”
Fingers fumbling on the piano keys, I attempted to follow the sheet music. The notes slipped through the spaces between my uncertain touches, a mocking reminder of my estranged relationship with this instrument. I stole a glance at Dalia, her bow gracefully gliding over the violin strings with practiced precision. Perfection.
She led the melody. I only accompanied her except when the piano had to speak instead of the violin, and my cadences were off-key. I’d never felt so incompetent. The piano’s lackluster tones clashed against her violin’s eloquent phrases.
She was right; my mother had composed a duet from two opposing forces. The piano’s melody was akin to a lullaby. It was like a battle between light and darkness.
The room dissolved around her, and her performance clawed its way into my depths. A deceptive warmth, like a wave, momentarily thawed the titanium fortress within me, infusing my dark cells with a riot of colors. She wove an illusion until reality yanked me back and murdered it. The warmth vanished. For a fleeting moment, Dalia’s melody had a grip on my ghosts, but now it was too late. Even her melody couldn’t soothe, not when the echoes of a familiar tune surfaced. Could it be? I identified the passage and continued playing, my gaze lost in the abyss.
“I can’t believe it worked.” Dalia laughed, her last note lingering in the air. “This full melody, together, it’s so beautiful. It was meant to be a duet, don’t you think?”
Of course it was similar. It was a piece of music I had long forgotten.
“Levi,” she called, probably not for the first time.
An angry twitch contorted my features. “Around measure thirty in the piano sheet music, a part resembles the beginning of ‘Your Song’ by Elton John. It lasts about eight seconds.”
Dalia meticulously examined the sheet, scrutinizing each note and comparing them with the piano sheet music from Elton John she searched online on her phone.
“You’re right,” she acknowledged after several minutes. “Is that it?”
She replicated the segment on her violin.
“Yes.”
“There is a sixteen-bar segment, eight seconds if you prefer, that matches the harmonic progression of the beginning of ‘Your Song.’ In Lucie’s scores, the same melody is repeated and varied: Mi ? , Mi, La ? , So ? , these four chords forming your name. In ‘Your Song,’ it’s similar except one chord is missing—the Mi . That’s our first clue.”
Guess we all learned today my mother’s inspiration for naming me Levi.
“I also noticed that the rhythmic pattern repeats itself frequently throughout the composition. Always in the same order. It’s constant, which is weird coming from Lucie,” Dalia mumbled to herself. “Listen.”
Dalia proceeded to craft a rhythm, her finger tapping the piano, a mixture of short and long notes.
“Do it again,” I demanded.
I took the piano sheet music and wrote the long notes in the form of lines and the short notes in the form of points. When she finished, I gave it back to her.
“Morse code?” She frowned. “How did you know?”
“In sixth grade, I created a script that changed the keyboard functions. Letters became Morse code. It was to piss off a teacher. He ended up resigning and breaking his computer. Fun times.” I didn’t mention that he was the tech teacher. But Dalia wasn’t listening to me. She had her head buried in the score, referring to each line and dots to translate the Morse code into the alphabet.
“That’s it,” she said. “The rhythm forms ‘Your Song’ in Morse code. You were right, Levi, she hid this music in her score. You’ve got a great ear. Now we’ve got to find out why she chose this music in particular.”
Dalia smiled. I didn’t.
The realization, like a venomous serpent, coiled around my psyche, injecting a perverse sense of accomplishment into my veins.
I was right.
“She always cooked the same meal while putting that music on repeat. Every damn day. My mother never missed one routine of hers. She was not made for the unexpected.” I said this out loud, not that I meant to.
“It must have been special to her,” Dalia whispered in that soft voice of hers.
Oh, it was.
“The last time she tried to put that song on again, I was so pissed because I needed to goddamn focus. Imagine hearing the same song on repeat for sixteen years—you’d go crazy. She obviously didn’t stop the music and continued to act as if I didn’t exist. So I broke that damn stereo. I wanted to take that away from her. She went insane, trying to repair that thing like her life depended on it. I told her she wouldn’t even be half as worried if it was me bleeding on the floor, that I loathed her and wished she had never given birth to me.”
Dalia remained mute, the silence broken only by the cracks of construction tools.
I mechanically traced the edges of the piano keys. “She died the next day.”
This charade, a masquerade of melodies and hidden messages, concealed the answer I was seeking—that I, in my unwanted existence, was the catalyst for my mother’s tragic finale.
Mother dearest did all of that just to get to this conclusion. And here I thought that maybe it wasn’t all because of me that she died. That someone else was to blame. An explanation. That I could stop feeling this way. But no, it was all me.
“It’s not your fault.” Dalia leaned forward, her hand hesitant to reach mine. “You played beautifully tonight, and she’d be proud of you. She wanted you to play again. That’s why she created a piano score. It makes so much more sense because she taught you how to play.”
No, that music score was only a confirmation.
My jaw clenched, and I laughed. This charade was over.
She had never loved me. She died because of me. I should have never been born. My laughter echoed even more in the room. Dalia looked at me as if I had lost my mind, though that didn’t stop her from continuing her speech.
“She created a duet, so maybe she didn’t want you to be alone, just like she was.”
I stepped up from the piano, and pointed at Dalia. She was right. She was goddamn right. “I couldn’t have decrypted the music score alone. You’re the one who solved this because you knew her.”
Dalia’s bright smile illuminated her face. “Maybe she wanted us to connect after all these years of not talking?”
“Impossible,” I denied between clenched teeth, my fingers curling around the piano’s lid.
It was not thanks to my mother. She did nothing. It was me. Not her . She couldn’t have planned this. I did. I implicated Dalia because I wanted to, not because it was another scheme of my mother’s to torture me with what I couldn’t have.
“You should leave. We’re done with all of this.” My words were shards of rage, each one laced with bitterness.
It felt like my brain was on the brink of an explosion, a chaotic tempest brewing within the confines of my skull. I teetered on the edge of losing the calculated chess game against my mother’s ghost.
“There’s more to it.” Dalia tried to hold me back. “Together, we created a third music score. I think it’s the final key to whatever you want to find! This is not over. It has to—”
“Forget about it. I’m done,” I bellowed. Done playing my mother’s game.
What could she have to say that I didn’t know anyway? She was dead, and the dead lost their right to speak, especially the ones who chose the easy way out.
There was nothing more to find.
It was all my fault.
Now I could finally move on and forget about her and this fucking hope.
Feelings, fucking weakness.
“Levi, no, there’s more to—”
“I told you to give it up!” I roared, my fist crashing against the piano keys. The instrument wailed in protest. “It’s over .”
Dalia flinched, her eyes widening. The veneer of composure she had worn was tearing apart to reveal pity . I’d vowed no one would ever look at me like that ever again. I erased the angry lines from my face and regained control of my emotions by readjusting my uniform.
“You’re scared,” she mumbled.
“Don’t ever bring her up to me anymore, or those scores,” I ordered. “Now get out of here if you’re only here for my mother.”
I could never have Dalia.
She delicately placed her violin into its case and, with measured steps, approached me instead of running away. She inched forward, and on her tiptoes, she kissed my cheek. It was soft. Warm. Tingles on my skin.
“Thank you for letting me play at the opera house tonight. It was magical.”
The reminder of her kiss lingered on my cheek. No one had ever kissed me on the cheek before.
She turned back one last time before leaving and smiled. “I didn’t meet you here only because of Lucie.”
And that was why the queen always overpowered the king in a chess game.