Chapter 2 The silence between strings

Chapter 2

The Silence Between Strings

The train hummed gently, the countryside whirling past in blurs of green and gray. Isabella leaned against the window, the cool glass pressing her forehead. She hadn't touched her violin in weeks. The bow callused her fingers were softening. The case lay unopened beside her, like a coffin of a forgotten self.

Outside, rain threatened the edge of the sky.

She was headed back to El Monte-her family's estate on the hill. The place she once called home. A place that now held only shadows and secrets.

Her phone buzzed. Damian again. She silenced it. He'd left her voice notes she couldn't bear to hear. Messages filled with concern, warning, maybe even love-but love felt like a luxury now. Grief had calcified her.

The folded note haunted her more than the funeral did.

"He knew something. Let it go."

She wouldn't.

But in this moment, as the train rocked gently and the storm hadn't quite begun, Isabella allowed herself to breathe. Just for a moment. The war hadn't begun yet. The pain was still a quiet echo. The lies hadn't bared their teeth.

Not yet.

From the moment her fingers could stretch over violin strings, she was sculpted-disciplined into a creature of grace, precision, and quiet obedience. Her father, Kennedy Sanchez, had insisted on it. A daughter, beautiful and brilliant, was a necessary ornament in their family's constellation of power. But Isabella was not just brilliant. She was breathtaking.

Her music spoke where her family wouldn't. In the grand halls of politics and private clubs where deals were made over cigars and scotch, Isabella performed-an elegant distraction. Senators applauded. Wealthy donors whispered praises. She was the daughter of the man everyone feared and admired. Kennedy Sanchez: the senator, the womanizer, the manipulator, the kingmaker.

And still, she had loved him.

Despite the rumors. Despite the women. Despite the long nights he never came home and the red lipstick on the wine glass that wasn't her mother's.

Kennedy had built his dynasty with charm and cunning. El Monte wasn't just a mansion; it was a fortress of influence. Hidden rooms, safes in walls, unmarked doors. People joked that if the walls could talk, they'd be subpoenaed.

Isabella grew up with secrets tucked into lullabies.

Her mother, Lourdes Sanchez, had once been a revolutionary before she became a trophy. She'd taught Isabella not to ask too many questions. But her eyes, fierce and silent, always said otherwise.

Over time, Isabella learned that silence was her family's preferred language.

Uncles who disappeared from photos.

A cousin who overdosed under mysterious circumstances.

An aide who "fell" down the stairs a week after threatening to leak documents.

But Kennedy remained untouchable. Charismatic. Invincible. The press loved him. His affairs were spun as charm. His enemies ended up discredited or dead. Isabella didn't question it-not until the violin stopped being enough. Not until her father's funeral.

He wasn't supposed to die like that.

Alone. In the study. A single gunshot. No witnesses. No motive. No fingerprints.

But Isabella had seen the look on Hernandez's face-her father's longtime driver. Fear. Not grief. Fear.

Ander, her childhood friend and now a disillusioned ex-intelligence officer, had refused to talk. When he handed her a small revolver wrapped in a scarf, he wouldn't meet her eyes. "Don't trust anyone," he muttered. "Especially those closest."

Rachel, her older sister and a rising judge, flew in, cried in front of the cameras, and flew out the next day. "Don't dig, Bella," she whispered as she kissed her cheek. "Whatever it is, it's bigger than you."

But Isabella was no longer content to be an ornament.

Music had made her obedient. Grief made her dangerous.

Kennedy Sanchez had been many things. But in his final days, he had changed. Withdrawn. Paranoid. He had whispered things to her-pieces of names, foreign phrases, old friends resurfacing with desperate urgency. He had told her, "If anything happens to me, look in the red ledger. The one I keep behind the mirror."

The red ledger was gone when she searched his study.

So was the mirror.

There was something her father knew. Something that got him killed.

And she was going to find out.

At El Monte, the staff were tight-lipped. The butler, Manuel, said only what he was supposed to. The housekeeper claimed the senator had been under stress. The security cameras had malfunctioned that day-"a technical glitch," they said.

Isabella wasn't naive. She knew these were rehearsed lines.

Late at night, when the house groaned and the wind pulled at the windows, she wandered through the halls with her violin case slung over her shoulder-not for music, but because the hidden revolver fit perfectly inside.

She remembered her father's voice telling bedtime stories. Twisting ancient fables into modern lessons: "Power isn't given, Isa. It's taken. Like a violin-you don't ask permission to play. You tune it. You master it. You make it sing."

Now she understood what he meant.

Power was about control. And someone had taken control of his fate.

She found her father's old tape recorder in his desk. Most of the tapes were innocuous-notes about meetings, policy drafts, ramblings about voters. But one tape-labeled with a faint "E.M."-was blank. Or so she thought.

When played backwards, it revealed a heavily coded conversation. Mentions of a "Project Solstice," a list of names, and references to her.

She was part of something he hadn't told her. Maybe hadn't meant to.

And that terrified her.

Still, she didn't cry. She didn't tell Damian, though she missed his arms and his steady presence. She didn't call Rachel. She didn't ask her mother, who now only wore black and spoke of ghosts.

She trained instead. Shooting cans behind the greenhouse. Reading files. Mapping connections.

If Kennedy Sanchez had been the king, Isabella was the heir. And the kingdom had enemies.

The greenhouse-her father's prized sanctuary, filled with orchids and rare herbs-was reduced to ash in less than an hour. No witnesses. No cause determined.

But Isabella had been in it just hours before, studying documents hidden inside a ceramic planter. Files her father had tucked away, possibly for her. Now gone.

She knew it was no accident.

Then came the break-in. Someone had entered her room and rifled through her violin case. The gun remained, untouched. But a photo-her and her father on the steps of El Monte-was missing.

Not valuable. Not important. Unless the message was personal.

Then Hernandez vanished.

His phone was disconnected. His apartment wiped clean. When she visited, it looked staged, as if someone wanted her to believe he left willingly. But the blood on the bathroom tile told another story.

The pressure tightened.

One night, while reviewing the old tapes, the power went out. Her generator kicked in, but the silence before it roared back was a warning: You are being watched.

She checked her laptop. The files were corrupted. Someone had accessed her cloud drive from an unlisted location. Miami.

There were too many signs.

Too many ghosts breathing down her neck.

The war had begun.

And she was no longer just playing strings.

She was pulling them.