Overture (North Security 1)

Well, she says. I’m sure he turned you down. Liam North doesn’t know how to have fun, which has never seemed like more of a virtue than right now.

Fun? The idea makes me smile. He knows how to fight and work and struggle. The idea of fun is as foreign to him as it is to me. We’re well suited that way. Yes, I admit. He turned me down.

What aren’t you telling me?

That makes me sigh. He really did turn me down. After he kissed me. It wasn’t almost anything. We did actually kiss.

OMG.

Don’t freak out. I know it’s probably inappropriate.

Probably???

God, how to explain the exhilaration of knowing he had chased after me, bursting into a nightclub, breaking through muscled bouncers to make sure that I was safe. And then the way his large hand had cupped my jaw, making me feel delicate.

I want him to do it again. The cursor blinks at the end of the sentence, waiting with an accusatory rhythm. When I press the Send button, I feel only a sense of rightness. It’s honest, at least.

A long time passes with the three little dots hovering where her response will go. She’s writing a long lecture about all the ways it’s wrong for me to lust after Liam, I’m guessing.

But her text is very short. What happens when you leave?

I know what she means. Both of us know what it is to be alone. To be left behind. It doesn’t matter that I’m the one walking away this time. Being adrift at sea is no better than being stranded on an island.

Then it’s over, I say, knowing there won’t be any civic responsibility after that.

LIAM

Leaning back in my office chair, I close my eyes. The strains of the violin wash over me, soothing the rough edges inside me. I’m in agony thinking of the day when the room next door will be silent. What will happen to every jagged, violent thought inside me?

And even still I look forward to the day that she’s gone. Because she shouldn’t be near me, shouldn’t have to soothe the devil that pants and snorts inside me. A goddamn bull, that’s what I am—and her innocence is the red I run toward.

Well, I won’t be able to ignore her today. We need to talk about the e-mail from Kimberly Cox. Good news, the subject line says. She goes on to explain that Samantha was given a short mention in the digital edition today to raise publicity for the tour, in advance of her deeper profile in the print magazine.

There are a hundred amazing things about Samantha Brooks. The mention could have shared any number of those things. The way she plays like a goddamn angel. The way she mastered violin beyond what most grown men can do at the tender age of six. The way she infuses new life into the classics, drawing the interest of maestros and luthiers from around the world.

Of course the mention doesn’t say any of that.

That would make too much sense.

Instead it laments the mark of grief that Samantha still bears from losing her father at a young age. She used to hide under the desk in his office in Saint Petersburg.

In fact she was there the fateful day that he died.

The sentence makes my blood run cold. I never should have let the damned reporter speak to Samantha alone. Except that she’ll be alone on the tour. I can’t stand next to her for the rest of her life, putting limits on how much she says.

I stand and follow the music like she’s the goddamn pied piper. I want to follow her anywhere, everywhere, want to drown if that’s where she leads me—and I suppose I’m halfway there.

It’s my habit to wait until she finishes a piece. The last note sails through the air, sweet and melancholy. There are only four fucking strings on the instrument. She imbues each and every touch of the bow with some new emotion. It reaches into the hard core of me, deadly, devastating.

“Did you read it?” I ask, my voice a harsh echo in the chamber.

She blinks at me as if coming out of a deep sleep. That’s what music is for her, a kind of trance. Her cheeks are flushed with awareness. “Read what?”

“The e-mail from Kimberly Cox, the reporter from Classical Notes.”

“Oh, about the digital feature? Yeah, that’s cool.”

Cool. Not the word I would have used to describe it, but then I know that her father didn’t die of a heart attack. “They printed the story about your father.”