CHAPTER ONE

Isabella Hartley stood on the cold, tiled platform of a Brooklyn subway station, her tiny fingers coaxing a soulful song from her treasured violin. The walls were concrete, and the sound ricocheted everywhere at the same time, interspersed with the morning commute and a distant rumble of trains approaching. Auburn, with heavy streaks of purple, her hair fell over her shoulders as she translated all the passion and pain she possessed into the music. Each stroke of the bow quaked with the memory of that horrible day — a public panic attack at her Juilliard competition, which had left her reputation in tatters and her feelings raw. On that stage, under the gnawed and blaring skin of the underground's fluorescent lights, Isabella's performance was as much a desperate plea for redemption as it was an act of art.

They were surrounded by hundreds — no, a thousand — of indifferent faces that started to fade into the background as Isabella became absorbed in herself. And then there was the one —The Weirdly-Quiet, head of the department there, among the mundane — a man of presence, though, don't get me wrong. His eyes were cold blue daggers tracking her every move. His upper body was camouflaged by the wrinkled leather of a shabby jacket and a jagged cap, but there was an unmistakably threatening quality in the way he looked at her — as though he harboured secrets of his own.

Isabella's heart thudded faster with every quaking note, not just because the anxiety that had ruined her career still hovered in her chest like some morbid spirit but also due to the inscrutable look on her. In her audible delirium, she felt hope and despair intertwine, and as thoughts passed around her, floating along black whispers spread legs and arms into pneumatic encasements they just… whispered, sounding loss and floundering beneath her, and she exhaled in some light jewellery prism was otherwise not comprehending heavier envelopes of mental text — she the only real captivator, choicely unaware of anything judging her but the silent beholder. Out of loss, isolation and the desire to belong, this music was born. Each discordant note and harmonious chord echoed a tribute to her strength and fragility in those moments that mattered more than a lifetime.

When the last note faded into silence, the platform fell into an uncertain hush. Isabella lowered her violin gradually, glancing around at the people who were now exiting. That was when she caught sight of the mysterious on-looker again, as well — one last linger of a glance, gentle not necessarily but neither cruel, heavy with her unaskable questions. In his eyes was a promise — or perhaps a warning — that something deeper than either of us would grasp was happening. For what less could it be at that hour, when the air became cooler, and those trackless whistles of a coming train mingled tonite upon each pulse of her heart. Isabella inhaled deeply, her breath quavering as she grasped her instrument, stepping off the platform, the trailing memory of her soulful tonality lingering behind her, the weight of that ghostly stare with her, a ghostly omen of things yet to come.

After the audience's murmuring response to her performance, Isabella stepped all the way back into a dark corner of the platform. The echoes of her violin drifted into the choking silence of her isolation. She flopped onto the cold, splintered seat bench, eyes shining with remembrance. In the gloom, the colourful trails of her public meltdown seeped up like ghosts. The indictment, the scathing, penguin-pecking court of public opinion at the Juilliard competition, the giggles and the risibles and the collective viral hellscape that had cleaned and jerked the way we all now live — it all coalesced into one terrifying thing called, yes, alienation.

Her mind flitted over jigsaw images: the bite of the judge's phrases, the wracking pressure of panic and the sharp pain of being vast, utterly alone. She was trapped in a room of her own making, and every musical note failed her, and every silence created a valley echoing with regret. She felt like too much of her life, the past crashed down on her shoulders, and time lost all meaning.

A murmur of voices in the distance called her back from her reverie. Initially, she mistook it for the ordinary cacophony of the station, but when the muted whispers coalesced into actual words, Isabella turned to eavesdrop on the fragments of conversation. "I have the mistress — in sackcloth. The mistress in sackcloth — before the master in sackcloth." The sound sent shivers up her spine instantly. She is still haunted by what once terrified her. Her heart beat quickly as she glanced around, but its source was concealed in the bustle of the faceless mass surrounding her.

As though, for a full minute, she was without this, left with the heavy silence and the errant sounds of her thoughts. And as the tanking dread re-emerged, Isabella's tenuous strands of karma started to unravel, lighthouses were lit, all turned to her. When the vague speech went away, she felt nauseous and she thought maybe her painful past had really left her alone, or maybe it just had a different way of chasing after her.

Later in the evening, as she sat in the small sanctuary of her own apartment, minding her own business, a gentle knock at the front door broke the silence and pulled Isabella out of reverie. She had opened it to find an ornate envelope with a crest that glittered perplexedly in the lamplight embossed on the front lying on the peeling doormat. Next to the dreariness of her hardscrabble living conditions, the envelope was an improbable sheen of luxury, rolled in her palm, embossed and mute. Isabella's heart raced, and she took care to lift it, the silken paper new to her worn, calloused fingertips. A name she associated with both power and a long history of manipulation, a name that inspired both hope in her and a wonderful, fleeting terror.

Quavering she retrieved the invitation from the envelope and carefully unfolded it as if it were two pieces of folded paper hiding some secret. The lyrical writing spilt across the page, soliciting her to play at a private gala at the grand Drake Tower. The invitation was a second chance, a way for her to reclaim her glory that had been ripped from her by a public shaming that now haunted her sleep. But there was also an ominous quality to the persuasion; the carefully chosen words felt like they came heavy with shadows as if the offer was offered with strings attached, the kind you don't see until it's already tying you up.

Isa's heart raced as her gaze landed on the invitation, the gravity of its implications sinking into her chest. It was a chance to change her life, a way to pull herself from the depths of despair and play her music once more for the people who mattered. But as she examined the embossed crest closely, it gleamed in the dim light in a way that they seemed almost… alive. The glimmer — inconspicuous, all but absent — quickened with a sort of dreadful thrum to her pulse. That bracing reminder tempered the fragile spark of hope and possibility that had just started to flicker back to life inside of her. In that slow-burning moment, Isabella sensed that this invitation was different somehow, a meeting of worlds that could lead to something or nothing but promised both.