Page 91 of The Darkness is Calling

sent you this picture?”

“I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter anymore.” I throw the phone back into my bag.

“Ekaterina, please,” the organizer urges me,

growing more and more agitated. “You need to go onstage.”

Beside me, Oksana carefully strokes my arm, her eyes a mixture of pain and outrage.

“Maybe it’s edited,” she says, trying to soothe me.

Dima, his face almost furious, tries to defuse the situation too.

“Focus on the performance, and he will probably show up, if he hasn’t already. I’ll try to find out what that picture is about, because something isn’t right.”

My shoulders drop, but disappointment has already begun carving its way into my soul, sinking in painfully deep.

It’s impossible not to suspect that Artem simply decided he no longer wanted to come, that he had something more important to do than be here for me.

He was with that blonde.

“I don’t care anymore, Dimitri,” I say, walking toward the stage. “He’d be better off not coming at all.”

It takes a lot of effort to force a false smile onto my face, but every step I take beneath the spotlight tears another piece out of me. By the time I sit on the bench, I am hollow and empty of any hope.

If something serious had happened to him, Dima would have been the first to know. But it was clear that even he knew nothing about his own Pakhan, except that he had been spending time at that club.

The place where lifestyle is entirely different from the one I can offer him.

Where drugs make people hear songs unlike the ones played by my piano, and vulgar bodies offer him the chance to amuse himself however his black soul desires.

What the fuck am I talking about? “Soul”?

When did I forget that Voron is a monster who does not possess that human feature?

My hands tremble, and I almost feel like laughing at the irony of this moment. A pianist with shaking fingers before a recital she must perform in front of several hundred people.

No pressure, Ekaterina.

Anyway, the entire charm of this evening has gone straight to hell, replaced by yet another painful memory.

I draw a deep breath and come dangerously close to deciding that this will be my last concert. I don’t think I can go through this kind of pain again.

And disappointment.

But since I am here, the moment reminds me of the final song of a wounded swan, bleeding on the inside, wanting nothing more than for silence to find her and make her forget about everything that hurts.

I begin to play, letting go of the false smile, but I change the program from the start. The first piece should have been full of joy, but I move straight into Chopin’s sorrow, with Prelude No. 4.

And I keep it that way until the end of the performance, moving through every piece in shades of gloomy gray, finishing with Ludovico Einaudi’s Experience.

The piece I played for Artem, but which now feels like a farewell song.

With every second that passes painfully through me, I realize I let myself carried away by a false illusion, thanks to a man who just had a carnal desire and took what he wanted without caring about my heart. I was the little secret of the most dangerous Pakhan, until another woman’s pleasure became more important to him than a moment that meant everything to me.

That’s what you get for letting your guard down and give free rein to feelings you knew from the start were forbidden and wrong.

Now they are replaced by the image of Artem being touched by another woman.