The performance continued.But the lights didn't rise.No curtain call. No applause. Just the echo of something that used to be beautiful, slowly falling apart.
---
Veritas disappeared.No one saw him go. No door creaked open. No footsteps rang down the hall.Only the aftermath remained—the knife, the silence, the crack in everyone's trust.
The troupe searched half-heartedly. But Rouge knew better.
"He won't be found," he said, brushing ash from his lapel."He doesn't want to be."
And he was right.
Veritas melted into the underground of Amorélline like smoke. Into the corners with no clocks. Into the places where debts rot, where names are only whispered, and where a seventeen-year-old boy with eyes too sharp for his age could vanish without leaving a shadow.
---
Lune packed quietly.
He didn't cry—not anymore. Not since the estate.
He folded his scarf, his sheet music, and tucked a worn photo between the pages of his notebook.One of the whole group. When things had been simpler.When he still thought Veritas would never hurt anyone.
When love hadn't been a battlefield.
Chéri found him in the greenroom, suitcase at his side.
"You sure?"
Lune nodded, but didn't speak.
He left through the back door.
Didn't say goodbye.
---
The ballroom-turned-stage at La Marquise was empty that night.The chandeliers dimmed. The velvet seats bare. The ghosts seated quietly in the upper balcony.
Only Mr. Black stood in the spotlight—one hand on the grand piano, the other trembling slightly.
He sat. Breathed in.
And played.
A song from another lifetime.A soft, aching waltz he had once written for her. Before everything.
Before Veritas. Before the lies. Before her voice had turned to silence.
His fingers moved without thinking—muscle memory laced with grief.No audience. No cheers.
Just a man, and a piano, and the hollow ache of too many things left unsaid.
When the final note faded…
he didn't bow.He didn't move.
He just sat there in the stillness,like someone waiting for a ghost to answer back.
---
Outside, the rain had stopped.But inside La Marquise, the walls still dripped with what they had lost.
The curtain never fell.
Because the play had no end.
Only silence.