Page 34 of Lethal Obsession

I take a final look at the seats as the lights dim, then turn my attention to the stage.

The musicians begin filing onstage to rising applause, taking their seats and tuning up. My stomach flutterings get wilder, my teeth gritted so tight my jaw hurts. I’m wearing a simple sleeveless floor-length black dress, cut in an empire line to fall directly from beneath my breasts, since I can’t bear anything constricting my breathing when I play. Many pianists wear glamorous fitted gowns, but I’m nowhere near confident enough to pull off the thigh-high slits and bold colors they do. This dress is a floaty dream of chiffon over silk that weighs barely anything. Tonight I’m all about comfort—and a thousand prayers that I don’t fuck up.

It seems an agonizingly long time before the orchestra settles. Finally the oboe plays the A that signifies the final tuning check, and a moment later, the First Violin nods at me.

I take a deep breath and step out onto the stage.

The swell of applause almost makes me lose my footing. Even though I was expecting it, and despite having been an attendee at concerts here many times before now, it’s still a head trip to be the focus of an audience on this scale. I stare at the polished black surface of the grand piano, staying focused on it as I walk to the center to acknowledge the applause, my heart thundering. Blinded by the lights, I smile into the terrifyingly black void beyond them, then walk to my seat at the side of the orchestra, where I will wait until it is time for me to play.

I rise almost immediately with the rest of the orchestra as Director Dittorio comes onstage. The audience come to their feet as well, greeting him with respect, as well as a few dry, knowing smiles.

Respected, our acerbic director definitely is. Beloved, he most definitely is not.

Not that he cares. Dittorio isn’t here to be loved. He stalks onstage looking neither right nor left, glares at his orchestra, then raises his baton. He brings it down, and the performance begins.

I sit through the overture, eyes fixed on Dittorio to maintain my focus. Once on stage, I never allow myself to look into the audience.

I made that mistake once.

That fateful night in London when I slipped my security detail was the one and only time I ever looked into the audience after I took the stage—only to find Alexei staring straight back at me.

I’d never played the way I did that night before, and I never have since. Something happened to me on stage when I locked eyes with him, something I’ve never been able to describe to others or even understand myself. All I know is that my playing that night came from a place inside me I can’t seem to find alone, no matter how much I practice. A wild, storm-tossed place that edges right to the precipice of chaos without tumbling over the edge.

That night gave me a reputation, one I’ve never quite lived up to since. I play close enough to it that my tutors praise me and critics admire my precision.

But I’ve never found that reckless abandonment again. And deep down, I’m not certain I ever want to.

The emotions I felt that night went on to lead me to the edge of sanity and kept me teetering there for a full year, right up until Alexei Petrovsky flatly rejected me on a darkened terrace.

And no matter how composed I’ve appeared to others since, I know just how close I came to toppling into the abyss, not just during that year but in the one that followed it, right up until now.

So I don’t look into the audience anymore. Once I’m onstage I don’t look anywhere but at the conductor and his baton. Playing is my refuge, just as Seline said, and when I’m performing, it’s a sacred one.

The overture finishes, and time slows as Dittorio leaves the stage in between pieces.

Breathe in, Ofelia. Breathe out.

I stare at a place on the polished floor, aware of the audience shifting and coughing in the darkness. Then the First Violin turns to me, and I feel the warmth of the spotlight.

I stand up, this time barely aware of the audience’s applause, and cross the stage to take my seat at the piano.

Dittorio reemerges, and the applause swells.

He raises his baton, and I lift my hands over the keys.

Breathe, Ofelia.

He lowers his baton. My hands come down onto the ivory in the triumphant opening strains of the Allegro that I’ve practiced until my fingers hurt, and we are away.

The auditorium slips away, and I lose myself under the demands of the complex passages. Dittorio is no longer my tormentor but my trusted guide, controlling the orchestra behind me with exquisite precision, allowing me to focus entirely on the music flowing through my fingers and out into the vast darkness beyond.

The passionate Allegro soars and swoops, testing me to the limits until it ends with a final flourish and the orchestra pauses, taking a breath between movements to regroup.

I no longer need to remind myself to breathe. I’m caught in the flow, the current of the arrangement coursing through me even in the silence. I keep my eyes trained on the keyboard, but I’m intensely aware of the audience beyond the footlights, attuned to their every stir and cough, the vague shifting of shadows.

Then we enter the Adagio un poco moto of Opus 73, the slow but playful movement that is my favorite. I always see pieces in my mind as I play them, and the Adagio in Opus 73 always feels to me like a scene from an Austen novel: girls in dresses dancing through a summer meadow, then running down an old bridle path.

Emotion swells inside me as if I can smell the meadowsweet, feel the warm earth beneath my feet. I dance beneath towering beech trees in my mind, through soft summer breezes, laughter in my heart and on my face. Then the movement ends, the orchestra pauses, and when we begin the third and final movement, in my mind we march out of the meadow and toward the distant city.