Chapter 3The Fire’s Witness

The air in Brandt’s workshop turned brittle. Solana’s fingers still tingled from the photo on her phone—the diary, open, vulnerable, in someone else’s possession. Twenty-four hours. Maybe less now.

“Say something,” Damien said, his voice flat.

Brandt’s hands kept trembling. He looked older than he had an hour ago, the wrinkles around his eyes deepening like cracks in drying clay. “Your mother—” he started.

“Don’t.” Damien stepped forward. “Don’t you dare bring her into this.”

“Victor has my daughter.” The words came out raw, scraped from somewhere hollow. “She’s twenty-three. Works at a gallery in Berlin. He found her in three days. Three days, Damien. What was I supposed to do?”

Solana’s throat tightened. She understood parental pressure—had lived inside it her entire life. But this was different. This was a noose.

“You were supposed to tell us,” she said. “We could have protected her.”

“Protected her?” Brandt let out a broken laugh. “You’re two kids running from the most powerful man in the Bow Society. You can’t protect a houseplant.”

Damien moved toward the desk where the diary sat. “We’re leaving. Now.”

“No.” Brandt’s voice hardened. “You’re not.”

A click. The workshop door swung shut, and Solana heard the deadbolt slide home. Brandt’s hand hovered near his pocket, where she now saw the outline of a phone.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I loved your mother. But I love my daughter more.”

Then he pulled out a lighter.

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The first flame caught on a pile of wood shavings near the workbench. Solana watched it spread with the terrible fascination of someone seeing their future burn.

“The skylight,” Damien said, already moving.

Smoke curled upward, thick and chemical. Solana coughed, her eyes streaming. The diary—she grabbed it from the desk, the pages warm through the leather cover. Brandt was gone, slipped out through a side door she hadn’t noticed, and the lock on the main entrance held firm.

“Help me with this.” Damien was already on the workbench, shoving at the skylight’s frame. The glass held. The fire crackled behind them, eating through the shavings, reaching for the shelves of aged wood and varnish.

Solana climbed up beside him, the diary pressed against her chest. The smoke was getting thicker, the heat pressing against her back like a hand. She could smell her own hair starting to singe.

“Together,” Damien said. “On three.”

They slammed their shoulders into the frame. It groaned but didn’t break.

The fire found the varnish shelf. Flames leaped upward, painting the ceiling orange.

“Again.”

This time, the frame splintered. Glass rained down around them, and cold night air rushed in, carrying the smoke with it. Damien hauled himself through the opening, then reached back for her.

Solana handed him the diary first. Then she grabbed his wrist and let him pull her onto the roof, just as the workshop below became an inferno.

They lay there, gasping, the heat licking at the edges of the skylight. Sirens wailed in the distance. Someone had seen the smoke.

“He gave Victor the violin,” Damien said, his voice hollow. “Brandt had it in the workshop. I saw it before the fire started.”

Solana’s stomach dropped. The Firebird. Gone.

But she still had the diary.

She opened it, her hands shaking. The pages were warm, the edges singed, but the circled sentence was still legible: *The Firebird guards a second gift. Only the true heir can unlock it.*

She turned the page.

And there, written in the same elegant script, was a passage she hadn’t seen in Brandt’s apartment:

*The fingerboard hides the map. A Stradivarius, lost for eighty years, waiting for the one who can read the music of the wood. I hid it there because I knew Victor would never think to look inside the instrument itself. He only ever wanted to own it. He never understood what it could do.*

*A Stradivarius.*

Solana’s breath caught. The Firebird wasn’t the prize. It was the key.

“Damien,” she whispered. “Your mother hid a map inside the violin. A map to a lost Stradivarius.”

He stared at her, the firelight flickering across his face. “That’s what she meant by ‘second gift.’ She wasn’t talking about something else in the diary. She was talking about the violin itself.”

“And Victor has it now.”

The sirens grew louder. Red and blue lights painted the street below. They needed to move.

Damien’s phone buzzed.

He pulled it out, his expression shifting from exhausted to wary. “It’s a text. From an unknown number.”

He read it aloud:

*I know what the diary says. Meet me at the Musikverein at midnight. Come alone. —A. Finch.*

Solana looked at the burning workshop, at the diary in her hands, at the man beside her who had just lost his inheritance and gained a purpose.

“Do we trust him?” she asked.

Damien’s jaw tightened. “We don’t have a choice.”

Below, the first fire truck arrived. They slipped across the rooftops, the diary warm against Solana’s chest, the clock ticking toward midnight, and the Stradivarius waiting somewhere in the darkness, still unfound.