DUO SOLARA

Off-Key

Adrien's POV [ 30 Minutes Earlier ]

The glow of the phone screen was the only light in the bedroom.

On the loop’s tenth playback, I still couldn't look away from the way the camera caught her shadow against the studio floor. The video was everywhere now—reposted on academy forums, forwarded in group chats, dissected in the comments. People talked about the timing, the dynamic, the effortless way the piano seemed to bend around her movements.

They didn't see the hours of quiet frustration that came before it. They didn't see the way she held her breath whenever she landed a turn, as if waiting for someone to tell her it wasn't enough.

"Adrien."

I flinched, thumb instantly sweeping the screen black.

Léa was leaning against the doorframe, her posture small, her hand resting hesitantly on the brass knob. She looked younger in the dim light, her eyes flicking nervously toward the stairwell behind her.

"Father wants you," she whispered. "In the study."

A familiar, heavy dread settled in the pit of my stomach. "Now?"

"He saw it," she said quietly. "The video."

I let out a slow breath, tossing the phone onto the bed. "Go back to your room, Léa. I'll handle it."

The hallway was quiet, the dark wood paneling swallowing the sound of my footsteps as I walked toward the heavy oak doors at the end of the corridor. I didn't knock. I just turned the handle and stepped inside, pulling my usual mask of careless indifference into place before I even crossed the threshold.

Father sat behind his desk, illuminated by the warm desk lamp. A glass of scotch sat beside a stack of academy reports, untouched. He didn't look up immediately. He finished signing a document, capped his fountain pen with a sharp, deliberate click, and finally raised his eyes.

"You're making a spectacle of yourself," he said, his voice level, devoid of any warmth.

"Good evening to you too, Father." I leaned against the doorframe, keeping my hands in my pockets. "I assume you're referring to the rehearsal clip."

"I am referring to your complete lack of focus," he corrected coldly. "You are wasting your time playing accompaniment for school competitions when your sole priority should be preparing for your solo evaluations."

"It was a practice session," I said, my jaw tightening despite my best efforts to stay detached. "The academy posted it. I didn't ask for it to go viral."

"And yet you let yourself be dragged into her orbit." Father leaned forward, resting his hands flat on the desk. "Camille is a distraction. She lacks the pedigree, the discipline, and the emotional restraint to ever succeed on a global stage. Associating your name with hers degrades your standing."

Something hot and sharp flared in my chest.

"Don't talk about her like that," I said, my voice dropping its easy edge, growing dangerously firm. "You don't know anything about how hard she works."

"I know talent when I see it, Adrien, and more importantly, I know ambition without grounding," he replied smoothly, unimpressed by my tone. "She is dragging you down into her frantic, desperate reach for relevance. Which is why I have already finalized the arrangements. You are going abroad next month. You will continue your studies in Vienna under a master who understands how to cultivate actual genius, far away from this academy."

The air left my lungs. "Vienna? You didn't even ask me."

"I do not need to ask you. I am securing your future."

"You're controlling it!" The wall I had built up finally snapped. I took a step toward the desk, my hands clenching into fists. "You don't care about my music! You just want me tucked away in some rigid, sterile room where you can dictate every breath I take!"

"Watch your tone," he warned, his eyes narrowing.

"She works harder than anyone in that building!" I yelled, the anger boiling over, defense of Camille mixing violently with my own suffocating rage. "She bleeds for what she wants! She doesn't have a father orchestrating her life from behind a desk, buying her way into concert halls—"

"Enough!" Father stood up, his chair scraping harshly against the floor. "You will not speak to me with such disrespect, least of all over a girl who means nothing to this family!"

"She means more to me than this house ever has!" I spat back, the raw, ugly truth tearing out of my throat before I could stop it. "You sit in this room pretending you're protecting us, but you just want to control everything because you failed to control *her*! You drove Mother away, and you caused her death—"

*CRACK.*

The impact was fast and blinding.

My head snapped to the side, the sharp shock of his palm against my cheek ringing through my ears. The sting burned white-hot across my skin, shocking the room into a sudden, suffocating silence.

Father stood over the desk, his hand still suspended in the air, his chest heaving slightly. His face was unreadable, rigid with an icy, terrifying fury.

I stood frozen, the side of my face burning, my pulse hammering in my ears. I didn't touch my cheek. I didn't say another word. I just stared at him, the final thread of whatever bond we had left snapping cleanly in the dark.

I turned and walked out of the study.

In the hallway, Léa was standing near the balustrade, her hands pressed over her mouth, her eyes wide with terror. She had heard everything.

"Adrien..." she whispered, taking a hesitant step toward me.

"Go back to your room, Léa," Father's voice echoed sternly from the doorway behind me. "Now."

Léa looked between us, her lower lip trembling, before she turned and ran down the hall, her bedroom door shutting with a soft click.

I didn't go back to speak to her. I couldn't.

I shoved my bedroom door open, stepped inside, and locked it behind me.

The room felt entirely too small. The silence was deafening, pressing against my temples until I couldn't breathe. I paced from the window to the bed and back again, the burning on my cheek radiating down my neck, my hands shaking violently with an adrenaline rush that had nowhere to go.

Vienna. Control. Mother.

And Camille.

My thoughts kept slamming back to her face in that video. To the way she looked at breakfast, probably carrying the weight of her own mother's coldness. I had stood in that study and fought my father for her name. I had let him strike me because I couldn't stand hearing him minimize the girl who gave everything to the stage, the girl whose quiet determination was the only thing making the suffocating air of the academy bearable.

I wanted to see her. I needed to see that something real still existed in the world, that all the pain and the noise inside my head wasn't for nothing.

I couldn't stay in this room. The walls were closing in, smelling of my father's house and my own helplessness.

I grabbed my coat off the chair, unlocked the door, and slipped out into the quiet night.

---

The cold night air hit my face like a slap of its own, soothing the lingering burn on my cheek. I didn't have a destination. I just walked, my hands shoved deep into my coat pockets, trying to force the pulse in my throat to slow down.

I turned onto a quieter street near the academy, the orange glow of the streetlamps cutting long shadows across the pavement.

Then I saw her.

She was walking toward me, her jacket pulled tight against the wind, her head down.

For a second, my heart stopped. It felt impossible, a cruel trick of the quiet night, but as she raised her head and the light caught her eyes, the knot in my chest loosened just a fraction.

Camille.

She stopped in her tracks, completely caught off guard. "What are you doing here?"

I looked at her, fighting with everything I had to pull my usual, easy mask back over the raw, bleeding mess inside my chest. She couldn't see the handprint on my face. She couldn't know about Vienna, or my father, or the fact that I had just ruined everything in my own home defending her.

"I was going to ask you the same thing," I said, forcing my voice to sound light, forcing a small, faint smile to my lips.

She glanced behind me, cautious. "What time is it?"

"Late enough that you're not supposed to be outside."

"Neither are you."

I swallowed down the lump in my throat, looking at her in the dim light. "I know."

She stepped closer, her sharp eyes scanning my face, sensing the quiet shift in the air even if she didn't know the cause. "What happened?"

"Nothing," I lied smoothly.

She almost smiled, that guarded edge softening for a fraction of a second. "That's my answer too."

I looked at her, standing there under the freezing streetlamp, and for the first time all night, I let out a real breath.

"Maybe we're both having a bad night," I said softly.

[Back At Home]

The sound of my own footsteps echoed hollowly against the pavement as I walked back through the quiet streets. The cold air stung my face, but it felt distant now, dulled by a heavy, paralyzing numbness.

A coward. You don't have the stomach to want something that might break you.

Her words kept looping in my head, sharp and precise, cutting straight through every wall I had ever built. I had stood in my father's study an hour ago, taking a blow to the face to defend her name, convinced that what we shared at the piano was real. I had gone out into the dark looking for her, hoping for a single moment of clarity in a night that felt completely broken.

Instead, she had dismantled me with the exact same coldness my father used.

I reached the wrought-iron gates of the house, pushing them open silently. The mansion was dark and towering, a grand tomb of marble and polished wood. I slipped inside, avoiding the creaking stairs, and made my way down the dimly lit corridor toward my room.

I didn't look toward my father's study. I didn't check on Léa.

I pushed my bedroom door open, closed it quietly behind me, and stood in the dark.

The silence of the room closed in, heavy and suffocating. The air still smelled faintly of the cologne I’d put on earlier, of the routine I’d maintained before everything unraveled.

I leaned my back against the heavy wooden door and slid down until I was sitting on the floor, my knees pulled up, my hands hanging loosely over them.

My father's words echoed from the left side of my mind. She is a distraction. She lacks the discipline, the pedigree. Associating your name with hers degrades your standing.

And then Camille's voice answered from the right. You sit at the piano and smile for everyone, but you don't actually risk anything. You're a coward, Adrien.

They sounded so much alike.

My father saw me as a pawn to be sent to Vienna; Camille saw me as a spoiled child who played at music because he had nowhere else to go.

A single, hot tear spilled over my lashes, tracking slowly down my cheek before pooling at the corner of my jaw, right over the burning bruise my father had left behind.

I didn't wipe it away. I just sat there in the quiet dark, letting the cold realization settle over me: I had fought for a home that didn't want me, and I had fallen for a girl who thought I was nothing.

Eventually, the ache in my limbs turned into an exhausting, hollow weight. I forced myself up off the floor, kicked off my shoes, and crawled onto the bed without turning on the lights or changing out of my clothes.

I pulled the blanket over my shoulders and stared at the dark ceiling, waiting for sleep to take over, knowing that when the sun came up tomorrow, nothing would be the same.