It happened on a Tuesday, under a sky so clear it felt like a lie.
Jace had been gone for two hours, and for every minute of it, Ren sat on the porch, counting his breaths. One. Two. Three. He was trying to unlearn the habit of looking for shadows in the trees, trying to convince himself the rustle of leaves wasn't a hitman's boot.
When Jace finally returned, he wasn't empty-handed. He was carrying something wrapped in a moth-eaten wool blanket. He laid it on the scarred wooden kitchen table between them without a word.
Ren looked at it.
It was a guitar—but barely. The wood was scratched and sun-bleached, smelling of cheap tobacco, sea salt, and decades of tavern smoke. It was missing the high E-string, and the bridge looked like it had been glued back together by someone with shaky hands.
"I found it in the back of a market stall," Jace said, his voice low. "The old man said it hasn't been played since the eighties. I gave him twenty euros and a pack of cigarettes for it."
"Why?" Ren asked, his voice barely above a whisper.
He looked at the instrument with something close to horror. To Ren, an instrument was a sacred, terrifying thing. It was precision. It was control. It was a weapon of his father's will.
"Play something," Jace said.
It wasn't a command. It was a plea.
"Jace, I don't play the guitar," Ren said, his chest tightening. "I play the Stradivarius. I play the works of dead men with absolute perfection. I don't… I don't do this."
"Your Stradivarius is a pile of splinters in an evidence locker in Hamburg, Ren," Jace said, his voice soft but unyielding as he stepped closer. "And perfection? Perfection is what almost killed us. It's what made you a prisoner before I ever met you. Just… make a sound. Any sound. For me."
Ren's fingers trembled as he reached out.
He'd been taught music was a math problem—miss a beat, fail the equation.
He pressed his fingers against the neck of the battered guitar. The strings were thick and stubborn, nothing like the delicate gut strings of his violin.
He strummed a chord.
It was hideous.
Out of tune. Sharp. Raw. A metallic buzz that scraped against his nerves.
Ren flinched, instinctively pulling his hand back, his eyes darting to the doorway, waiting for his father's shadow to loom over him. He waited for the cold, biting correction of a bow across his knuckles. He waited for the lecture on discipline and legacy.
The house remained silent.
The only sound was the distant crash of the Atlantic.
Ren looked at Jace.
Jace wasn't scowling. He wasn't disappointed. He was watching Ren with something dangerously close to pride.
"Do it again," Jace whispered.
Ren strummed again.
And again.
He started to find a rhythm—not a classical one, but something uneven. Something alive.
Then Jace reached into his pocket and pulled out a small wooden box. It was the only thing he'd managed to save from the loft before it was raided—a pair of custom drumsticks, weighted and scarred from years of use.
He didn't have a drum kit.
He didn't need one.
He began to tap on the edge of the wooden table.
Tap. Tap-tap. Thud.
It wasn't a symphony. It was messy. It was the Maestro with a broken guitar and the Guard keeping time on a piece of furniture. But as the sun dipped below the horizon, painting the room in deep gold and amber, the noise began to shift.
It became something else.
A melody.
A harmony built from the wreckage of their old lives.
For the first time in years, Ren didn't look at his hands to see if they were perfect.
He looked at Jace.
"It sounds terrible," Ren laughed, the sound breathless and real, sharp enough to sting his eyes.
"Yeah," Jace grinned, his gaze dark and warm as he kept the beat. "It's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard."
Ren didn't stop.
He didn't flinch.
He just played—letting the imperfect notes spill into the ocean air, free from the metronome that had once controlled his every breath.