The Protector (Lone Wolf, Book 1) (24 page)

As we walked down the hallway
toward the stage, I wondered who we’d get to replace Bob.
 
As we drew our instruments out of their
cases, tuning them subtly, listening closely to the strings, I kept glancing at
the wind section…it seemed so empty without him.
 
Bob was a funny guy.
 
Usually for Sunday matinees, he wore a top hat that his kids, long ago,
had decorated with ribbon.
 
It’d become
a sort of hallmark of Sunday concerts.
 
It was such a silly thing, but not seeing that top hat in the wind
section…there were a million times a day that I realized that Bob was really
gone.
 
But it hit me particularly hard
at that moment.
 

Amelia was in her usual rare form,
and was barking orders about something or other, when I saw a movement
backstage.
 
It was almost as if a shadow
fluttered around the corner, but the slight movement drew my eyes
nonetheless.
 
And there, standing in the
center of the hallway, with her hood up, was Mikagi Tasuki.
 

And she was staring straight at me.

She caught me glance her way.
 
And then she tilted her head and beckoned me
forward.

What the hell?

I glanced sidelong at Tracy, but
she was doing a quick, quiet run through of scales—not something orchestra
members usually do, but I knew that it was her ritual calming exercise before
any concert.
 
I stood as quietly as I
could—orchestra members were still coming and going at this point—and hobbled
across the stage toward the back hall.

“I don’t have long,” said Mikagi
the moment I got close enough to hear her throaty whisper.
 
Her eyes were narrowed as she gazed at me,
and she wrinkled her nose.
 
“You’re in
trouble.”

“Excuse me?” I said, leaning
against the wall with my shoulder.
 
This
really wasn’t what I’d been expecting her to say—frankly, I hadn’t even been
expecting her at all.
 
When I saw her,
dressed all in black, from her black mary janes to her black tights to her
black dress and hooded jacket today, I realized, she looked exactly like the
person I’d seen on all those videos.
 
But this wasn’t the Mikagi Tasuki I’d thought was a great star.
 
She wasn’t at all how I imagined her.

She stared at me with unblinking
eyes.

“You’re in trouble,” she repeated,
lifting her nose and grinning at me, her eyes practically twinkling.
 
“But you play well.
 
It’d be a sin to lose you.
 
Don’t trust anyone, all right?” she asked
me, her head to the side.
 

“What are you talking about?” I
asked her, mouth open.
 
The time for
politeness was over.
 

She leaned forward, her smile
deepening.
 
“Trust me when I say we’ll
see each other again,” she said.
 
I
straightened at that, frowning.
 
And
then Mikagi Tasuki walked past me, trailing her fingertips over the back of my
neck.

Exactly like…during the concert…

My jaw dropped open, and I turned
to ask her if it had been
her
who’d kissed my neck in the darkness of
the unlit concert hall…

But somehow, impossibly, Mikagi
Tasuki was no longer in the corridor.

She was gone.

I limped back to my chair in a
daze.
 
What the hell had she been talking
about, trust no one?
 
It was a bad line
from untold numbers of movies, it didn’t actually
work
in real
life.
 
And what did she mean that I was
in
trouble
?

The concert passed by as quickly as
a summer’s breeze.
 
As much as I wanted
to be wholly consumed by the music, I found that my attention kept drifting,
looping back onto painful subjects that not even the hum and vibration of the
violin could quell.
 
There was too much
for me to think about.
 
Mikagi’s
warning.
 
Bob’s murder.
 
The attempts on my own life.
 
Layne’s red eyes.
 
Okay, let’s be honest:
 
everything else about Layne.
 
Layne herself.

As my bow swept across the strings
in the last song of the afternoon, I found myself staring at my mother’s ring
as it drew close to my face and then away, born in a rhythmic back and forth
from the music that I made with my new instrument.
 
The violin sung in my hands, the strings vibrating with life and
music, and the garnet flashed in the overhead lights.
 
I’d guess that little superstition that I’d had about the ring
possibly keeping me safe wasn’t very accurate.
 
Bad things, very bad things, had happened since I’d put it on.
 
But that’s all it had been:
 
a silly superstition.
 
It still made me happy to have my mother’s
ring against my skin, the reminder that somewhere in this world, good things
really had happened.
 
My mother and
father together had been wonderful.

As the music swelled around us, my
heart skipped a beat.

The connection that I’d felt for
Layne…I wondered if my father had ever felt that for my mother.
 

The music ended, and I was still
turning that new idea around and around in my head as we held our instruments,
drawing out the last note.
 
There
weren’t many people in the crowd, but the ending applause was warm and robust,
a few of the older members in our crowd actually standing and applauding
enthusiastically.
 
I grinned at that,
resting my violin’s base on my knee.
 
It
was another concert done, and—despite my thoughts being in a million places at
once, despite Mikagi’s warning turning over and over in my head—it was a
concert done well.
 

The audience members smoothly
exited their seats and poured out of the hall pretty quickly, and I thought the
hall was perfectly empty.
 
I’d swept my
eyes over the attendees, and I hadn’t seen Mikagi—she must have really
left.
 

As the orchestra members began to
pack up, I felt a gaze on me, and as I was folding up the last of my sheet
music, I saw a hand wave from the edge of the stage.
 
I glanced up, eyes drawn to the motion, and then my eyebrows
furrowed.
 
The beautiful woman with
long, wavy blonde hair who stood at the foot of the stage looked familiar.
 
She was also staring straight at me, her
friendly grin deepening when she saw me glance up.

“Elizabeth Grayson?” she called out
to me.
 
I nodded and stood a little
unsteadily, hopping across the stage toward her.

I remembered why I’d thought she
was familiar now as I drew closer. This had been the woman sitting with my
father at the concert with Mikagi Tasuki, I remembered now.
 
As I got closer, able to see the shape of
her face, I inwardly sighed.
 
Drat.
 
This was Magdalena Harrington, a friend of
my father’s.
 
That’s why she’d seemed
familiar at the concert then, too.

It’s not that she was super
forgettable, but my father had a lot of high powered friends, and they all ran
in the same crowds and cliques.
 
Magdalena, like many of them, always came to my father’s large New
Year’s party that he threw every year, and I only remembered her name because
I’d thought it was very pretty when I was a kid.
 

I’d also thought, when I was
little, that she was one of the prettiest woman I’d ever seen.
 
She hadn’t changed much, over the years,
which I thought was criminal.
 
She had
long, white-blonde hair that flowed over her shoulders in elegant waves, and
her petite form was encased today in a gorgeous, rich plum dress that was
sleeveless, and timeless with its boat neckline and attractive shade of
purple.
 
She smiled up at me as I
approached the edge of the stage, her impeccably make-upped lips stretching
into a pretty, ruby-red curve.

“How are you, sweetheart?” she
asked me, then, leaning forward and enunciating the term of endearment like
she’d last talked to me a week ago, and not years ago.
 
She’d always been a little overly familiar
with me, I remembered.
 
I saw her once a
year, and I hardly ever talked with her, often forgetting her name, but she was
a colleague of my father’s, and I always tried to be as polite as possible to
any of my dad’s friends, even if they were overly familiar and fake.

“I’m doing fine,” I told her with a
grin.
 
“How are you, Ms.
Harrington?”
 
There was always that
second of terror after I used a name with Dad’s friends that I’d remembered it
wrong, somehow, and that would be an almost unforgivable faux pas among the
elite who believed, utterly, that the world revolved around them.
 
But her smile deepened even further, and it
seemed I was in luck.
 
This
was
Ms.
Harrington after all.

“I’m delightful, just delightful,”
she said, clipping the words smartly.
 
“Now look, dear,” she said, wasting no time to get to her point.
 
“Your father is turning sixty this
week.
 
Sixty!
 
That’s a big number worth celebrating, and several of his old friends
got together…well, we’re throwing a party for him tonight,” she said, leaning
forward, her bright eyes unblinking.
 
“I
know it’s dreadfully short notice, but do you think you could attend?
 
He’d love that so much.
 
It wouldn’t be a proper surprise party
without you!
 
You know how much you mean
to him.”

This, I began to realize with slow,
cold dread, was going to be one of the most bone-crushingly boring nights of my
entire life.
 
It wasn’t that I didn’t
want to make an appearance at a surprise party for my father.
 
That was a very sweet idea, and it had been
very nice of whoever had taken the time to organize it.
 
But it was going to be a bunch of extremely
rich people being pretty snobby with each other, my father keeping the peace
between old rivalries, and everyone being nice to me and asking about the
orchestra, but it would all be extremely
fake
, because of course they
didn’t care about me or the orchestra, and most of them were only at the party
to put in an appearance so that they could be seen to somewhat care for my dad.

To be fair, there would definitely
be people at the party who were my father’s actual friends.
 
People who genuinely cared about him.
 
But I’d been to enough of these stale,
mind-numbing functions to know that there were many more people who went to
these sorts of things to look good than those who genuinely cared about what
they were attending.

So, yes, God—it would be
boring.
 
It would be
extremely
fake, and involve a lot of holding a drink in one hand and trying to be polite
to everyone while swallowing my nausea at the casual mentions of millions of
dollars being thrown around so that they could try to outdo each other in the
richest pissing contest imaginable.

But this was for my father.
 
And I would do it because I loved him.

“Absolutely!
 
It sounds great,” I told her in what I hoped
to be my most sincere voice.
 
I glanced
down at my slim wristwatch.
 
“When is
the party?”

“Well,” she said with a frown and a
sympathetic, embarrassed chuckle.
 
“Would you believe it’s pretty darn soon?
 
Within the hour, actually.
 
Dear, I know this absolutely dreadful short notice,” she said quickly
when I blanched.
 
She put on her most
soothing expression and checked her own wrist watch, a gold number with inset
diamonds around the face.
 
“And I really
wish I could have given you more notice, but I was only informed of it myself
just this morning by Jerry.
 
You know
Jerry, right?”

I didn’t, but I shrugged, glancing
backward at my violin and somewhere metaphorically miles away—but only leaning
against the far wall in the back hallway, I knew—were my crutches.
 
I was getting pretty tired standing on only
one foot.
 
The crutches, of course,
wouldn’t look good against the clothing I’d have to wear for such a function.

“I didn’t bring a change of
clothes—” I began, realizing that I would need a cocktail dress at the very
least to attend this thing in, but Magdalena shook her head, her smile
deepening.

“Don’t even worry about it,” she
tsk-tsked.
 
“You look stunning.
 
What you’re wearing is perfect.
 
It’s much more a casual thing, really, than
a big party.”
 
I grimaced at that.
 
I was dressed in a pencil skirt and a really
nice blouse—it was hardly casual.
 
“We
just wanted to surprise your father, show him a good time,” she said, inclining
her head toward me with a wide smile.
 
“Please tell me you’ll do it?
 
It
won’t be the same without you!”