Violinist (CENTURIES series: Book #4)

3

• Sometimes, the music is just mandatory •

He pressed the bow to the strings. I held my breath, and so did the world as it waited for his next moves, waited for the unexpected. Eternities managed to pass by in just seconds, but then, with a long, slow exhale, it happened.

He let the bow glide across the violin, and like that, every sensation evaded my body; Just one, long note bled from the strings, but I was nailed to my spot, unable to move.

The second note then came, and then the next, and the next. In a violent crescendo, the notes came and flooded until they pierced my ears in a high shrill, and then...

Silence.

My breath froze. The air froze. Even the world froze.

Then... He begun anew.

His fingers wielded the strings with care, almost beautifully, like he was greeting an old lover. One he ended on bad terms with. It was a sad hello... if it even was hello at all. When the next note struck, I quickly realized it wasn't a sad, old lovers reunion.

It was two enemies colliding once more.

The tune changed completely, and suddenly, it was bitter, like the old taste of alcohol on someone's breath. Next moment, bitter turned into disgust. And then disgust turned into anger.

Within seconds, the tune began to grow wild, uninhibited. It was haunted, strident. Manic.

And then... beautiful.

My heart thudded hard in my chest as he played the strings. Played them. Like a fragile soul, he made it believe everything was okay before striking once again, pouring buckets of ice cold wrath over it. And then he soothed it again.

Back and forth. Hate, love. Love, hate. Like a cruel mistress, he wheeled his lover in, then pushed it away; Wheeled it in... throttled it away.

But then it became insufficient. The torture wasn't enough, he wasn't satisfied... he craved... more.

The confusing lovers spat quickly turned into a heated argument as he sloped the bow over the strings and forced them to suffer. He was aggressive. Brutal. He didn't hold back. He hit each string with the bow, sawed across them and then dragged out their screams until they wept. Until they bled.

I suddenly understood him. When he had called the former owner of the violin a butcher, he had been right.

This... this was how to play it.

He played it. No, he felt it. He was moving with each note, his brows creasing and his lips flattening as melancholia mixed with turbulence. He was wild. He played like he was insane. Like a puppet master guiding his puppets until their strings wound up and finally snapped. And yet, he still kept playing. He danced with the violin, fought with it, battled with it while the tune only got crazier and crazier.

And yet, he was in complete control.

As insane as the music got, he was still it's master. He decided what it was allowed to feel. When it was allowed to scream. To bleed. Not one single time did it disobey him. A part of me wondered what he'd do if it did. How would he make it suffer then?

His upper lip curled back when a note of something foreign to me, but poisonous to him vowed itself into the notes; something I thought I knew, but now was proven vigorously wrong. Nothing I had ever felt compared to what he was feeling right now. Like the seas that pooled in his eyes, seas of unknown and undiscovered feelings and emotions flooded from the instrument he used to harvest them with.