Chapter 30
The sound.
It was chaos. A tsunami of human noise crashing against the stage.
Aurora Vitali was the eye of the storm. Her hands—blurs of ivory and flesh—flew over the Fazioli. She was in the coda. The final passage. The climax of her revenge, the moment she and Henrik Sokolov had choreographed with such precision.
The orchestra roared behind her, a wounded animal. The musicians, terrified, played on pure reflex, their eyes darting between the score and the chaos unfolding in the theater.
The chaos.
It was beautiful. It was hell on earth.
The press was a wall of strobing light, flashes exploding, illuminating the scene in frozen frames of panic. People were on their feet, screaming.
“MURDERER!”
“MONSTER!”
Henrik Sokolov, her savior, her ally, stood in the first-row aisle, his face a mask of righteous fury, finger jabbing toward the dark wings where Maximilian Volkov watched.
“THAT’S THE MONSTER WHO DID THIS!”
And above it all, the three giant screens.
They were playing the video on loop. The “final proof.”
The dark silhouette. The Academy building. The flames beginning.
And the voice. The distorted but unmistakable voice of Volkov, roaring over the sound system, battling against her music:
“...LEAVE NO SURVIVORS. BURN IT ALL. LEAVE NO SURVIVORS...”
Aurora’s hatred was so pure, so absolute, it was intoxicating. She was in a trance. The video was her proof. The music was her weapon.
She was about to deliver the final blow. The last cataclysmic chord. She wanted to time it perfectly with the next repetition of “Burn it all.”
She looked up.
She looked at the screens. She wanted to see. She wanted to savor. She wanted to stare at the silhouette of the man who’d destroyed her, at the exact moment she destroyed him back.
The video restarted.
2020-10-17 22:04:15
The street. The black sedan.
The silhouette she hated more than God.
The voice: “...doesn’t matter if old Silveira’s inside...”
Her hatred was so intense she felt dizzy. She stared at the silhouette, trying to pierce it with her eyes.
And for the first time, she really saw the entire image.
Not just the man. Not just the building.
She saw... the car.
In the lower left corner of the frame. A car parked on the street. An old dark Opala, the kind common in that part of the city.
The video was grainy. Green. But the light... the light from the streetlamp, and the first orange flicker of flames on the ground floor... they hit the side of the Opala.
They hit the side window. The passenger window.
And in the glass, for a fraction of a second, there was a reflection.
The video had been shot from across the street, catching the front of the man on the phone. His silhouette.
The Opala’s window caught his profile.
Aurora stopped playing.
It wasn’t a decision. It was a short circuit.
Her hands, which moments before had been hammers of fury, simply... stopped. They lifted from the keys.
The sound of the piano disappeared.
The effect was immediate. Maestro Tavares, whose only point of reference in the chaos was her, faltered. He cut the orchestra.
The roar of the music, the symphony of hell, was cut like a throat.
In the theater, the silence was so shocking, so sudden, that the crowd’s screams died in their throats. The chaos stopped.
Two thousand people—journalists, musicians—all froze.
The only sound left was the loop of the video, now terribly loud in the silence.
“...Burn it all. Leave no survivors...”
And the sound of Aurora’s blood roaring in her ears.
She was standing. She didn’t even realize she’d gotten up. She stood beside the Fazioli, staring.
The video played again.
The reflection.
It was dark. It was grainy. It was almost nothing.
But she was looking.
The profile. The nose. The chin. The hairline.
She looked at the silhouette of the man on the phone. Volkov's silhouette.
Then at the reflection in the Opala's window.
It wasn't the same man.
The silhouette was tall, broad-shouldered. The reflection was... softer. The nose was straight, not strong and slightly aquiline like Volkov's. The jawline was weaker.
She looked at the first row.
At Henrik Sokolov, who now stared at her, face pale, his righteous fury frozen into a mask of... panic?
Her gaze snapped back to the screen. To the reflection.
The profile in the Opala's window wasn't Maximilian Volkov.
It was Henrik Sokolov.
Nausea hit her like a punch to the gut. She grabbed the edge of the piano.
No.
No. No.
The video. The “final proof.” The gospel of her hatred.
It was a lie.
The man on the phone, the man giving the order... was Sokolov.
Sokolov, her savior. Sokolov, the gentle voice. Sokolov, the man who gave her the video.
He hadn't found the video. He had edited it.
He hadn't distorted Volkov's voice. He had distorted his own.
He had placed himself in the shadows, transforming his own silhouette into Volkov's, and used the audio of his own voice to condemn another man.
The room began to spin. The red velvet and gold blurred into smears.
The memory.
The memory that was the foundation of her hatred.
She closed her eyes.
The smell. Violin varnish. Smoke. Burning plastic. The sound. The scream. The thump of the ceiling. The pain. The absolute, white-hot pain of her hand being crushed by the burning piano.
And the silhouette.
The silhouette in the doorway of the Main Hall. Framed by the sick-orange fire of the corridor.
“He was there. He watched me burn.”
The central pillar of her revenge.
But now, with Sokolov's image burned into her retina... the memory corrected itself.
It wasn't a correction. It was an explosion. Her brain, shielded by five years of trauma and hatred, finally released the truth.
The silhouette in the doorway... it wasn't standing still.
The memory returned, no longer in fragments, but in a clear, terrible flood.
The silhouette wasn't standing still. It was moving.
The fire was behind it, in the corridor. It wasn't standing against the flames. It was running away from them.
It was running.
It was running into the Main Hall.
It was running... toward her.
She remembered arms. Strong. Grabbing her. The smell. Not the smell of ozone and cold wool. The smell of expensive wool and smoke. The smell of something burning.
She remembered being lifted.
The scream. Not hers. A scream of effort. A roar.
She remembered being carried, her face pressed against a hard chest.
And the sound. The deafening crack, not of a piano, but of a wooden beam.
The weight. The pain.
She remembered being protected. A body falling over her. A large body that absorbed the impact of the burning beam.
A body that groaned in pain. A pain that wasn't hers.
The nightmare.
The scream. POZHAR! FIRE!
It wasn't an arsonist's guilt.
It was a victim's terror. It was his memory. He was reliving the moment the beam fell on them.
His back.
Oh my God. His back.
The ruined landscape of melted skin. Scars worse than hers.
They weren't the marks of a coward who got caught.
They were the marks of a shield.
He had protected her with his own body.
The score.
The gift. The burned Rhapsody.
“I never forgot how you sounded… before the fire.”
He wasn't a killer keeping a trophy. He was the only other survivor, guarding the only relic.
The training. The cruelty.
“I preferred to be your monster.”
“Your hatred was honest.”
The truth.
The truth was so heavy, so horrible in its complexity, that she couldn't bear it.
He saved her.
He saved her, was mutilated in the process, and then watched her for five years—watched her rot in misery, hating him.
He let her hate him.
He let her believe he was the monster, because hatred was the only thing keeping her alive. The only thing that made her play.
And then he took her. Brought her to his tower. He became the monster she needed. He tortured her (Hein). He forged her (Chopin). He used her hatred—a hatred directed at the wrong person—to rebuild her. To make her strong enough for… for what?
For tonight.
“The Gala isn't your trap, Aurora. It's mine.”
His words from that night. The words she'd thought were a lie, a manipulation.
They were the truth.
He knew. He knew about Sokolov's plan all along. He knew Sokolov was framing him. He knew Sokolov would use the doctored video.
And he let her. Let her be the bait. Put her on the stage.
He put her on the stage… so she would see? So she, with her artist's eyes, her victim's eyes, would be the only person in the room who would look closely enough to catch the reflection?
He wasn't using her as his weapon.
He was using her as his witness.
The betrayal. It wasn't Volkov's.
It was Sokolov's.
The gentle man. The warm voice. The ally. The savior.
He was the arsonist. He was the killer. He was the monster.
He used her. Used her trauma, manipulated her, fed her hatred with lies—all to destroy his rival. He turned her into his puppet, his weapon of personal revenge.
And she? She'd been a fool. Blind. So blinded by her own hatred, so eager to believe the simple narrative of the monster, that she'd done his dirty work.
Aurora opened her eyes.
She was back in the theater. The silence.
The screams had died. Everyone was staring at her. At the woman on stage who had stopped playing.
The video was still looping. “…Burn it all…”
The sound of her own accusation.
She turned. Slowly.
Her eyes swept the crowd.
They found Henrik Sokolov's.
The panic on his face had vanished. When he saw her looking, his face went cold. The mask of the “gentle” ally fell away, revealing what lay beneath. The calculation. The hatred.
He knew that she knew.
And he didn't care. He had two thousand witnesses. Her word against the “irrefutable” video. He would still win.
Aurora's eyes moved.
From the front row to the darkness of the wings.
He was still there.
The silhouette.
He hadn't moved. Hadn't run to the stage to shout his innocence. Hadn't called his security.
He was… waiting.
Waiting for her.
He put her on the stage. He gave her the music. He gave her the strength. He let her see the lie.
And now… he was giving her the choice.
The entire theater was silent, waiting for her to finish her music.
What would she do?
The hatred, the pain, the confusion, the betrayal… all merged into a single new emotion.
Fury.
A fury so pure and so cold it made her previous hatred seem childish.
She had been used. By all of them.
She turned back to the piano.
She looked at the keys.
Her music. Melody of My Revenge.
She had written it about the wrong man.