Midnight in Miami

Paris, 2:17 AM

The cobblestones of Montmartre glistened under the streetlamps, slick with rain and the ghosts of a thousand love stories. Élodie Dubois clutched her violin case like a lifeline, her breath fogging the air as she ducked into Le Chat Noir, the underground jazz club where the city's misfits came to disappear.

She hadn't planned on playing tonight-not after the scathing review in Le Monde that called her compositions "as lively as a funeral march." The words still burned behind her eyelids. But the weight of her silent apartment had become unbearable, and the club's muffled laughter promised anonymity.

The bartender, a grizzled man with a spiderweb tattoo curling up his neck, slid her a whiskey without asking. "For the hands," he grunted. "Cold makes them stiff."

Élodie flexed her fingers, the calluses catching on the glass. She'd barely taken a sip when the music began.

Not the usual brassy swing of the house band-this was something else. A saxophone's mournful cry sliced through the smoke, a melody so raw it made her ribs ache. On the dim-lit stage, a man with ink-stained fingers and a five-o'clock shadow closed his eyes, bending notes like they were secrets.

"The American," the bartender murmured. "Luca Moretti. Plays like the devil, tips like a saint."

She watched Luca's shoulders roll with the rhythm, his sleeves shoved up to reveal a faded tattoo of a bird in flight. His music was reckless. Alive. Everything her own compositions had failed to be.

Then-

A phrase. A ripple of notes.

Élodie's glass hit the counter with a crack.

It was hers. The opening motif from Rue des Ombres, the symphony she'd been laboring over for months. The one she'd never played for anyone.

The bartender eyed her. "Problem?"

"He's playing my music," she whispered.

"Doubt it." The man shrugged. "That one only plays originals. Calls it 'borrowing from the air.'"

Luca's eyes flicked open-hazel, gold-flecked-and locked onto hers. A dissonant chord. A skipped beat.