Violinist (CENTURIES series: Book #4)

20

• The music is for the second half of this chapter. You'll know when. •

A year. That's how long it had taken him to find a way out of Kuwait.

"After they gave up on me..." He was far away again, head dropped as he recounted the story that was his brutal start to a new life. "After the government told me they couldn't do anything for me... I went my own way."

"You found your own way home," I whispered.

"They wouldn't grant me a passport since there was no proof other than my language that I was American," He shook his head. "It wasn't enough. I could've been a sleeper agent or a terrorist waiting to be launched into action..."

We were sitting on the couch again, me in my armchair, him on our white couch. We were getting somewhere. He was talking. I was breathing. But for how long?

He wasn't wearing his trench coat for once, nor his boots. To an outsider, he almost looked... normal. Like a regular person. A cup of tea stood in front of him, a cup he tiredly reached for and sipped.

"I did what I had to do," He shifted, running a hand through his hair. "I got in touch with people who could get me to the States. Work was their price."

I wasn't going to ask what work he had done. I knew it wasn't herding sheep or stacking bread baskets in an idyllic village somewhere. He didn't tell me and I didn't ask. He did what he had to do. It was in the past now.

"And then... you got to New York?" I asked. It was another large question of mine; Fifty States. Had he drawn from a hat or had he chosen? If so, how? And why?

Tony slowly moved and looked out of the window, glancing out at the city. It was overcast, melancholic, light rain drizzling down, but even so, I knew he saw the same as me.

"This city..." His voice grated along the syllables. His eyes seemed to deepen as he stared out at his home, the place his heart had called out to. "People come here to find themselves... to make themselves something..."

And he had come here for the same reason. Thousands of people arrived to the city daily. Billboards, nightlife, voices, faces, souls everywhere. So much possibility. So much life.

And there he walked, a dead man.

I swallowed dryly. "You've been wandering the streets for seven years..." I saw his eyes slowly shift and lower to the floor again, the shadows casting over his face. "That night... at the club. In the alley... was that the first time you..." Found something. I couldn't get the final words out.

"I'd given up." His voice expelled the empty words like leftover air. "I was so close to just..." His head lowered to his chest, and I noticed he had shut his eyes. He had been so close to ending it. "I was already dead. Nobody knew me. Not even myself. That's when I heard it." My gaze dropped to his palm and saw it slowly curl to a fist. "That sound."

Like choreographed, we both turned our heads towards the suitcase. On top of it laid the violin, silent as tools were until they were used.

"Something snapped," He glared at the instrument as if he was expecting it to laugh at his statement. Something might've snapped, but not the strings. Even under his torture. "I knew that sound belonged to me. It was in the wrong hands, and I just... couldn't..."

"You stole it," I watched him grit his teeth, his face hardening. He had stolen it to study it, to figure out why the tool compelled something inside him.

It spoke to the dead.

"That night in the subway was my first... the first time I..." His lips shut and he now stared at the tool, anger lighting up in his eyes; The first time he had played it in this lifetime perhaps, but it wasn't telling him how he learned to play it in his previous. Always mocking him with answers, just beyond reach.