Chapter 4 - The Walk Down the Aisle
Down in the auditorium, stagehands were frantically lifting the fallen maestro onto a stretcher while paramedics pushed their way through the heavy velvet backstage curtains. The orchestra members were standing in stunned clusters, whispering among themselves, realizing the benefit concert was over before intermission.
The house manager rushed to the edge of the stage, grabbing the standing microphone.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please remain calm. Maestro Bell is receiving medical attention. Tonight’s performance is—"
“Continue the movement,” a clear, bell-like voice rang out from the center aisle.
The entire hall went dead silent.
Four thousand heads turned.
Elena Moretti was walking down the center aisle of the Westbridge Opera House.
Her gray cardigan was gone, left behind in the box. The ivory silk dress caught the amber stage lights, making her look like a phantom carved from light and shadow. She didn't look down. She didn't look at the whispering patrons or the staring socialites.
She walked straight up the iron side-stairs of the stage, stepping past the paramedics who were carrying Adrian Bell toward the exit.
Bell, pale and clutching a hand to his chest, opened his eyes as they passed her.
He caught her arm with a weak, trembling grip.
“Elena...” he wheezed, his voice barely audible over the murmur of the crowd. “The orchestra... they’re lost. They don’t know the German cuts.”
Elena stopped. She looked down at her aging mentor, her face softening for a single, fleeting second.
Then she pulled her arm free, straightened her shoulders, and whispered back:
“Then I’ll teach them.”
She walked past the stretcher, stepped over the tangled cables, and stood directly in front of the ninety-six musicians of the Westbridge Symphony.
The concertmaster, a legendary violinist named Julian Vance who had sneered at Elena in the lobby thirty minutes earlier, stared at her in utter disbelief.
“Who the hell are you?” Vance demanded, lowering his bow. “Where is Bell?”
Elena didn’t answer him with words.
She reached down to the mahogany podium.
Her fingers closed around the heavy wooden baton that Adrian Bell had dropped.
May you like
She lifted it.
The silence in the four-thousand-seat auditorium became absolute, suffocating, and reverent.
