Page 74 of Crescendo (Beautiful Monsters #1)

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Daniela

The first time I ever saw a cello being played, I froze in my tracks and stared.

What an ugly instrument. It wasn’t beautiful and elegant like a harp or shiny like a flute.

It was huge and ungainly, manipulated with a stick held at an awkward angle.

When the cellist began to saw at the strings, I’d expected some harsh sound, like the kind made when you tug on a taut rubber band.

Instead...music poured out, more beautiful than anything I had ever heard. Bach read the title of the booklet the player read from. I knew then that I would do whatever it took to master that big, hulking piece of wood. I would make it sing for me.

The one Espi has brought me is old. Scratches scar the body of the frame, and the bow is made of cheap fiberglass and plastic rather than the one of Pernambuco wood Vinny gave me.

Touching them both, however, is like reconnecting with an old friend.

I can’t stop myself from easing it from the case, holding the familiar weight of it balanced between both hands.

Before I know it, I’m sitting on the end of the couch, the bow is in my hand, and. ..

I play. I breathe. I feel. I’m Daniela again, and for as long as I manipulate the strings, fear cannot touch me. The room fades. The pain dissipates.

I’m whole again.

The notes come before I can even register the song being played, not that it really matters. I let myself play, and I know deep in my heart that it could be for the last time.

And...

It isn’t enough. For the first time, the motion of my hands and the sweet melody they create doesn’t take me away—something keeps me tethered to this couch and this floor.

Someone. I open my eyes and find him watching me, only the devil isn’t impressed by my song.

He watches me try to fly, and he yanks me back down by my already broken wings.

I’m anchored to him, no matter how hard I try to resist.

My fingers move faster in defiance. My movements are stronger. I can barely hear the song, but I know I’m playing better than I ever have in my life—and on an inferior instrument than the many Vinny supplied me with—but...it still isn’t enough.

Lucifer keeps me here. He won’t let me go.

Tears spill from my eyes, sliding down my cheeks and mingling with the feel of the tuning pegs against my neck, but the devil doesn’t give a damn.

He watches me drown. He waits for the very moment I realize I’m stuck, and then he storms out of the room and slams the door to the apartment in his wake.

“Damn.” The artist’s voice fills the space the final note of music leaves behind, and I glance over and find him crouched beside me, shaking his head. “Damn, Pyro. You definitely weren’t kidding about being one hell of a musician.”

“I’m nothing,” I insist, gently tilting the cello back in its case.

Vinny, for all of his cruelty, was correct in his assessment of my talent, at least. I was raw. Rough. Untrained. Untested. It was the same assessment every judge at every audition I performed would give. You are good now, but with some work, you could be...

The term always varied, but the sentiment was the same. With training, I could be a true cellist, but at the moment, I am nothing more than a finger painter compared to a serious musician.

“I dunno,” Espi says, shaking his head. “That sounded damn good to me.”

“Thank you.” I let myself smile while I wrestle the case shut. Only then can I think again.

Vinny, Lucifer, his plan... Those are the only things that matter now. Music is just one of the many things I’ll have to leave behind.

But the thought hurts less than I thought it would. When I run my fingers along the side of the case...all I can see are piercing blue eyes daring me to fight him—and I hate him so much that it burns.

“I’ve gotta jet.” Espi rises to his feet again, swiping a hand through his hair. “I’ll try to stop in to see you later. Stay strong, Pyro Girl.”

He heads for the door, but before he can even get it open, Lucifer returns.

“We need to talk,” he starts, pushing his way in, and a part of me suspects that he never truly left, but waited near the door, listening in.

Espi looks past him. As slender as he is, he has no trouble slipping past the devil and darting down the stairs. “Bye, Danny ,” he calls over his shoulder.

I hear the door on the lower level slam shut, and I can’t help the question that trickles from my throat before I can reel it back in. “What happened between you two?”

The devil whirls on his heel to stare me down with hellfire in his eyes. “Wouldn’t you like to fucking know?”

His tone is a lashing whip, but some sick part of me relishes the sting .

“I would.” I’m too tired to lie or cower from his rage the way I did around Vinny.

He’s poisoned me with the truth, and even now, he can’t resist stabbing me with another taste of it. I can see it in his eyes—but, this time, he holds back. “That’s none of your damn business.”

I settle my hands on my lap and tilt my head to observe him carefully. Drawing this secret out of him will require another one of mine, I suspect. Our little game of tit for tat knows no end.

“Do you want to know when I really hated Vinny? Truly hated him?”

The devil remains motionless near the open doorway. He’s curious, but he won’t admit it out loud.

“It wasn’t when he killed my family,” I add, though the words hurt to leave my throat.

“It wasn’t even when he tortured my first few maids or kept me prisoner.

I truly didn’t start to really hate him until nearly a year in, around the first anniversary of their d-deaths.

..” The memory tugs at my consciousness and it’s harder to speak.

I try to. I need to...but it’s only when the devil shifts to face me fully that words actually leave my lips again.

“He signed me up for an audition. For fun , he said. Fun.” I shake my head at that.

I can still remember the elegant theater. He took me himself that time, and he sat in the audience, watching from beyond the judges. I still remember his smile.

“I played, but when I was accepted into the next round, Vinny said nothing. Then the next, and he was silent. It was only when they offered me a job in the orchestra that he made me...” For a split second, the room disappears.

I see the interior of the theater and the rich backdrop of the ruby curtains that shielded the stage.

I see the face of the director who praised my talent and offered me a spot.

And I see Vinny, his gaze malicious as he made me turn them down.

“I knew then,” I hear myself say as if Lucifer were there with me, watching four years into the past. “I could see it in his eyes, what he was. What he had become. A monster.”

It feels so strange to admit it all out loud.

Vinny could torture me for weeks and I could still love him.

I still recited that stupid list in my head: He likes to read, he likes the color green, he loves classical music .

Only then did I see what lurked within the shell of the man I’d once called my best friend.

“He made me turn...turn them d-down. Every year after that, around the same time, he forced me to audition again—a different theater every time. Sometimes he watched me, sometimes he wouldn’t.

This time...” My throat aches. I have to stop talking and gulp at the air just to keep from being swept under again.

Pain has a different flavor here than it did with Vinny.

It’s a potent, powerful drug, and once it hits.

..all I feel is rage. I can only see fire, hot and burning, licking at Vincent Stacatto’s skin.

In Lucifer’s realm, pain is nothing more than hate, and I won’t survive the reckless high it brings.

“This time, I knew the theater. I had only been there once, five years previously...but I knew the general layout of the area. Vinny couldn’t accuse me of lying if I said that I wanted to take a walk home from the subway station.

A week before that, I had sold one of the pieces of clothing he gave me—a designer shawl.

I used the money to pay off some thug I met on a street corner to have men waiting in an alley for a ‘young woman who looks like me’ that night.

They...they could do whatever they wanted to her, just as long as they killed her.

Slow. Quick. It didn’t matter. She merely needed to d-die. ” My voice cracks.

The room starts spinning. The shadows distort and become the two men whose death warrants I signed the moment I just lay there and let them try to get their bit of fun in before killing me.

Maybe...I even felt like I deserved it—the pain, the humiliation, the brutality.

Maybe I’d needed to feel it all just to erase the harsher ache of flirting with the only future I had ever envisioned for myself and having to walk away.

Maybe...maybe.

It’s only when a hand falls on my shoulder that I realize I’ve said all of that out loud.

The fingers clench, gripping me down to the bone, but not because of what I’ve said.

I’m choking. Tears spill down, blurring my vision, and I can’t keep up with whatever sound is leaving my mouth now.

My ears cringe from it. At some points, it sounds like laughter. At others, it sounds like sobs.

The devil waits until I catch my breath and smother the sound, but for some reason, he doesn’t pull away.

When I gather the nerve to look up, I catch the tail end of a searching look. It’s confusing that I don’t find the things in his eyes that I expect to or should—no hate, no disgust, no pity. I look into his gaze and I see myself staring back, my eyes wide, my hair a mess.