The Protector (Lone Wolf, Book 1) (14 page)

And that—pardon the
superstition—was a pretty rotten omen for the concert itself.

“I need another cigarette,” Bob
muttered, and walked down the hallway, back the way we’d come, toward the back
door.

Swallowing down my worry, I
continued to walk slowly down the hallway, limping along with my crutches, my
violin case dangling from my fingers.
 

I found Tracy standing outside the
bathroom, leaning against the wall with a paper cup of water in her hands,
taking deep, calming breaths.
 
It was a
pretty common occurrence to see her doing this before a performance—it was her
habit to get in the zone for each concert.
 
But today her face was tight and hardly calm from the exercise.
 
The worry lines around her mouth were more
pronounced, and she was holding her eyes shut tightly—she looked tense enough
to snap.
 

My cell phone in my handbag began
to vibrate.
 
I leaned against the wall
next to her, propped one of my crutches between us and fished in my purse for
the slim smart phone.
 
The screen was
lit up with one familiar, comforting word on the caller ID.

“Hi, Dad,” I said warmly, pressing
the phone to my ear after hitting the green button.
 
“Are you here yet?”

“Just got here,” he said on the
other end of the line—I could hear the murmur of loud voices in conversation
behind him.
 
He was probably in line at
will call.
 
“I’m so proud of you,
sweetheart!
 
Performing with Mikagi
Tasuki is such an honor.
 
Almost
everyone at the packing plant got tickets, even!” he chirped.
 
“This is going to be such an amazing concert.
 
Knock ‘em dead!”

I chuckled and shook my head.
 
“I’ll do my best, Dad.”

Ever since my very first concert
with the Boston Philharmonic, he’d never missed one.
 
He always bought front row tickets, or as close to front row as
he could get, and he always brought roses for me.
 
I’d like to point out that we do practically weekly, and
sometimes bi-weekly concerts.
 
In the
beginning, I was a little embarrassed by his overwhelming enthusiasm—I mean, he
gave a standing ovation in the beginning when
no one else did
.
 
But, over time, I came to realize that this
was the way my father related to me.
 
He
was supremely proud of the fact that his daughter, while not having taken over
the family business, loved her job enough to share it, and was pretty good at
it.
 

So he was always there, always
supportive.
 
And he called before every
performance to wish me luck.

I ended the call and slid the phone
back into my purse as I considered things.
 
I was a pretty lucky lady.
 
Yeah,
there was the obvious negative of having been held at gunpoint last night.
 
Yeah, there was the fact that someone had
tried to ram my car off the road and, effectively, murder me because my father
made a bit too much in profits from fish last year—a really rotten motive for
murder, if you ask me.

But I had a father who really gave
a shit about me, even in his older age.
 
Enough to stand in line once, and sometimes twice a week for tickets his
daughter could have given him for free.

It was a little embarrassing,
mostly sweet, and wholly love-filled.
 
But that was my dad, in a nutshell.

But the smile slipped from my face
when I glanced sidelong at Tracy who was shaking her head, crumpling the
now-empty paper cup in her hand as she grimaced and bit her lip.

“Something’s wrong,” she
muttered.
 
I raised my eyebrows.

Granted, the latter half of last
night wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, and it hadn’t been fun.
 
But even after all of that, even after being
held at
gunpoint,
I didn’t have any sort of bad feeling—just general
nervousness of performing with a star of Mikagi’s caliber.
 

Whatever everyone else was feeling,
whatever “bad feeling” permeated the air…I couldn’t sense it.

“I think we’re all just feeding
into one another’s nervousness,” I told Tracy soothingly.
 
“Honestly, Tracy—what could possibly go wrong?”

The lights flickered overhead.
 
The sign of five minutes to curtain.

“Crap,” I muttered, shoving the
crutches under my arms again.
 
“We’ve
got to get going.”

“I’m not even
tuned
yet,”
muttered Tracy, cursing under her breath as she dashed down the corridor.

Then it was just me and my violin
and my damnable crutches, trying to hurry down the hallway as quickly as I
could.
 
Everyone else was, of course,
already in their seats.
 
Leave it to me
to be late.
 
I muttered some expletives
under my breath, too, and kept hobbling as quickly as I could, which I would
like to point out wasn’t quick at all.
 
God, I was going to catch it from Amelia…

The hair on the back of my neck
began to stand up, the skin on my arms rising into gooseflesh.
 

I had the feeling that I was being
watched.

This was ridiculous.
 
I was in an empty corridor, yes, but I was
in a
packed
concert hall.
 
I
wasn’t even going to dignify that creepy little feeling with the response of
glancing over my shoulder.
 
The events
of the past few days were just making me a little jumpy, that’s all.
 

But then I did dignify that feeling
because I couldn’t help the instinct.
 
I
glanced just a little behind me, ducking my head as I turned.

I went cold.

There was a figure, all in black—a
black trench coat, no less—standing in the center of the hallway behind me as
the lights flickered overhead.
 

I hadn’t been expecting anyone, but
in the flickering lights and with the shadows and the trench coat and the
distance…my heart was in my throat.
 
Yes, the events of the past few days were
definitely
getting to
me.

“Hello?” I called, cursing myself
wordlessly for my voice being so shaky.
 
“Can I help you?”

The lights came on fully again, and
the hooded figure—it was wearing a
hood
, I realized—began to stalk
toward me.

It was so
fast
, the black
trench coat flaring out behind it, the hood eerily big and wide, like a monk’s
hood, but completely shadowed so I couldn’t see a face…the figure seemed to
race
toward me, without its feet really touching the ground.

It stopped right in front of me,
was taller than me, and even though we were a foot apart, I
still couldn’t
see a face
.

The flickering lights steadied
overhead.

And then they went out.

I stood my ground.
 
My heart pounding through me, my good leg
shaking like a leaf, but I still stood my damn ground.

And the lights came back on.

Mikagi Tasuki removed the hood from
her head, the trench coat flaring out around her as she stared at me with
narrowed, dark eyes, her head to the side a little.

“Ms. Grayson, is it?
 
Violin?”
 
Her heavily accented English was so soft, I had to strain to hear
her.
 
I gulped and nodded, my heart
still thundering through me.

She smiled at me a little as the
lights flickered overhead again.
 
She
had a very wide smile.
 
A very bright
smile.
 
But it didn’t exactly reach her
eyes.

And, for a moment, it had seemed
that her eyes had flickered somehow, too, just like the lights…but I wasn’t
exactly certain what I thought I’d seen behind them.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured,
unbuttoning the top few buttons of her trench coat as she raised her chin.
 
Her short black hair swept against the back
of her neck, reflecting the lights overhead brightly, like every strand of her
hair practically glowed.
 
“I am afraid
that I am dreadfully late,” she said slowly, carefully, as she folded the coat
over her arm and watched me with her chin up, her eyes unblinking.
 
“We will go to the stage together?”

“Yes,” I managed, taking another
deep breath of air.
 
God, I was getting
so easily spooked.
 
It was only
the
star of the entire concert
.
 

So why had I thought that there was something not
quite right about her?
 

My skin still had goosebumps as we
began to walk down the corridor together, me hobbling, her striding easily with
her long legs, as graceful as a predator as her high heels clicked against the
linoleum floor.

We reached the stage just as
Amelia’s face was beginning to turn the same shade of red as a cherry.
 
Her expression went from pure, potent rage,
upon seeing me, to incandescent bliss when she spotted Mikagi.
 
The buttons on her blazer practically popped
right off as she puffed up with happiness and pride, lunging at Mikagi to draw
an arm around her and propel her toward the stage.

For once, Amelia’s rage was
perfectly justified, by the way.
 
It was
terrible
to show up right when the curtain is about to rise.
 
I should have been in my seat for at least
the past half hour, tuning my violin, setting up my sheet music and focusing on
having my instrument and me ready for the performance—and instead, I’d been
getting spooked down in the hallway.
 

Normally, we don’t use a curtain at
the concert hall—the audience files in and listens to us getting ready, which
is part of what makes the symphony so intimate.
 
But because of Mikagi, we’d wanted to make the show a little
more…showy, and we’d brought our old curtain out from storage just for the
occasion.
 
This was wonderful, because
as I did my best to hobble across the stage quickly, I was shielded from view
by the audience.
 

The billowing red fabric of the
curtain shut out the scene of the packed concert hall, but it did nothing to
shut out the noise.
 
We had soft mood
music piped in over the loud speakers as everyone was getting situated, and it
was practically drowned out by the ambient roar of murmuring voices and
laughter from the audience.
 

They sounded
really
excited
to be here, and that excitement was catching.

My violin out of my case, held
tightly against me, and the crutches left back stage made for an interesting
trip across the wood floor, but I managed, limping heavily, to finally get to
my seat.
 

Mikagi got out her own violin, a
beautiful black instrument that had probably been custom-made for her (it
looked like the kind of instrument a rock star would have), and she began to
pluck quietly at the strings, tuning it expertly, a little off center of the
stage as she held her head to an angle and glanced sidelong at the orchestra
behind her.

We took our places.
 
We held our instruments expectantly.

And the curtains rose as the first
note sounded out, mournful and plaintive and sweet, summoned from Mikagi’s bow
as it dragged almost violently across her violin.

We began to play.

We drew music out of our own
instruments, at times mournful, at times jubilant.
 
As the concert progressed, Mikagi strutted wildly across the stage,
pirouetting and dancing along to the music that was all but conjured from her
violin.
 
I had never witnessed such a
beautiful performance in my entire life—she
embodied
the music she was
playing.
 
As Mikagi moved, my eyes
couldn’t help but follow her, even though I was supposed to be keeping close
attention to my sheet music, to Amelia who conducted us,
and
to
Mikagi…but I could really only watch Mikagi.

But we played flawlessly, all of
us.
 
The rehearsal may have been a bit
botched, but the concert itself seemed to be going off without a hitch.

During a lull in the string
section, I glanced toward the front row.
 
The lights were backlighting the audience for this number, and I could
make out some familiar faces out there.
 
I scanned the first row, and then the second—I couldn’t quite remember
where my father said he’d be sitting.
 

Ah, there he was—in the third
row.
 
I listened to the music building
in intensity and glanced from my sheet music back toward him.

Huh.
 
That was strange.
 
He was
sitting next to a woman, and he seemed to be in deep discussion with her.
 
His face looked clouded, and he tensely
whispered into his companion’s ear.

She was gorgeous, though I couldn’t
tell what sort of age she was from my furtive glance.
 
She had long, white-blonde hair that curled down and around her
shoulders.
 
She was wearing a stunning
black dress that showed off plunging décolletage.

I wondered if my father had brought
a date.
 
If he had, good for him—it was
about time.
 
I hoped that was who his
companion was, but somehow, I didn’t think that was the case.
 
This was a woman who looked really familiar
to me—I’d seen her at my father’s parties over the years, I realized, which
meant that she was probably a colleague of his, and my father would never dream
of dating someone in his extremely rich friend group.