Hello, little bird.
She stood up, grabbed her cane, and turned away, disappearing into the bustle of the restaurant.
Go home, Milo.
The voice was my father's. But the warning was my own.
"Fuck off," I told his ghost.
I stayed on the sidewalk, rain soaking through my jacket, staring at the empty piano bench. I didn't even feel it. I hadn't felt cold in days. Hadn't felt much of anything except…this.
She emerged ten minutes later, cane in hand, and walked toward the bus stop. I followed at a distance. Watched her board. Watched the bus pull away.
Then I drove to her building and sat outside until three in the morning, watching her dark window, wondering what the fuck was happening to me.
Day five became day ten.
Day ten bled into two weeks.
And I still couldn't stop.
CHAPTER 6
RAVEN
The presence returned night after night.
I felt it the moment I sat down at the piano. A shift in the air, subtle as a change in temperature. A prickle on the back of my neck.
Someone was watching me.
I'd felt it every night for the past fourteen nights.
I knew it wasn't Viktor. He had that same predatory stillness that made the hairs on my neck stand up, but Viktor's watchfulness made my skin crawl. Like the attention of a perverted uncle who hated you because he was attracted to you and knew he shouldn't be.
No, this was different.
I didn't just feel watched. I felt hunted. And yet, not in a threatening way.
I settled my fingers on the keys, letting muscle memory guide me through the opening bars of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.The restaurant murmured around me as I played—the clink of silverware, the low hum of conversation, the muted laughter from the bar.
But beneath it all, I tracked him.
He was near the back tonight. Not the service alcove where he'd been two nights ago, or the bar where I'd sensed him yesterday. Instead, he was somewhere by the far wall, where the booths curved into shadowed privacy.
I couldn't explain how I knew it was the same person every time. But I did.
First, there was a scent. A barely there, clean, masculine scent, woven through the restaurant's usual cocktail of expensive cologne, wine, and Viktor's ever-present mint. Like standing at the edge of the ocean at dusk.
And something else. Something familiar that I couldn't quite place, sitting just out of reach in the back of my mind, like a word on the tip of my tongue.
I frowned as I tried to place it, my fingers pressing harder into the keys.
The Moonlight Sonata was supposed to be delicate, restrained.
But tonight, I played it like the challenge it was.
The notes built, the tempo increasing, my left hand driving the bass line with more force than the piece required. I felt, rather than heard, the shift in the restaurant's energy. Conversations paused. Someone near the piano stopped mid-sentence.
