Three months of silence is a long time for a boy who had finally learned how to scream.
Ren Laurent sat in the dressing room of the Palais Garnier in Paris, the final stop of the Philharmonic tour. He looked at himself in the mirror, but he didn't recognize the person staring back. He was thinner, his cheekbones like glass shards, his eyes hollowed out by a hundred nights of sleeping in a gilded cage.
He hadn't seen Jace. He hadn't heard a single beat of a drum. His father had taken his phone, his laptop, and even the hidden scrap of paper on that first night back at the estate. He was a ghost in a tuxedo, a masterpiece that was rotting from the inside out.
"Five minutes, Ren," his father said, stepping into the room. Arthur Laurent looked triumphant. The tour had been a financial marvel. The "scandal" of London had been successfully spun as a mental breakdown, and the world had swallowed the lie.
Ren didn't look at him. He just picked up his bow. "After tonight, I'm done. That was the deal."
"The deal was that I would protect your friend," Arthur said, adjusting his cufflinks. "And I have. Mr. Vanderbilt is currently working in a warehouse in the East End, likely forgotten that you even exist. You, however, have a contract with the Berlin Symphony starting in June."
Ren's hand tightened on the bow until the wood groaned. "I'm not going to Berlin."
"You'll go where I tell you to go," Arthur whispered, leaning down. "Unless you want those fingerprints to magically reappear in a new police report. I kept the originals, Ren. I'm not a fool."
Ren felt the air leave his lungs. It was never going to end. The sacrifice hadn't been a one-time payment; it was a subscription to a life of misery.
He walked out onto the stage of the Palais Garnier. The gold leaf and red velvet were suffocating. He took his seat, the cello between his knees, and looked out at the Parisian elite. He expected to see the same sea of bored faces.
But then, he heard it.
It wasn't a cello. It wasn't a violin. It was a low, rhythmic thumping coming from the back of the hall. Thump-thump-thwack. Thump-thump-thwack.
It was the rhythm of "The Echo."
Ren's head snapped up. In the back of the standing-room section, a group of kids in leather jackets and torn jeans were holding up small, portable electronic drum pads. And in the center of them, wearing a familiar black hoodie and a grin that was pure, unadulterated war, was Jace.
Jace didn't have a motorcycle here. He didn't have a crowbar. He had an audience.
He hit the pad one last time, a sound that cracked through the hall like a gunshot, and then he raised his hand. On his palm, written in thick, black ink that everyone in the front row could see, were two words: PLAY LOUD.
The conductor raised his baton, expecting the somber opening of Dvořák.
Ren Laurent looked at his father in the wings. Then he looked at Jace.
He didn't play Dvořák. He stood up, picked up his cello like a guitar, and struck the strings with a jagged, distorted chord that tore through the Palais Garnier like a chainsaw.
The Third Symphony wasn't a piece of music. It was an escape.