When My Husband Threw Me onto the Ice and Ordered the Orchestra to Play, the Conductor Suddenly Lost Color

Ryan threw me onto the ice and ordered the orchestra to play, as if my fall had been part of a scene written in advance.

My left glove scraped loudly against the ice. The cold immediately pierced my palm, but getting up was difficult not only because of the pain. I saw something beneath the transparent ice.

Under the first invitation was a woman’s name. Beneath it was Ryan’s full name, in the groom’s field.

I turned my head slightly and saw another one. Then a third. Then a fourth.

Different dates. Different handwriting. Different women.

The same man.

Ryan passed beside me without extending a hand. He raised only two fingers toward the conductor.

“Continue.”

The strings sounded again, although the melody had acquired a strange crack. The woman playing the violin missed one note and immediately looked down.

“Get up, Brooke,” Ryan told me.

At last he extended his hand to me. But I did not take it.

I remained on one knee and crawled toward the nearest invitation. Delicate lines of ice stretched across the paper trapped beneath the ice. Up close, everything was clearly visible.

Ryan’s name was on every invitation.

One had a crease folded over the woman’s name. The corner of another had darkened, as if someone had held it in their hand for a long time. The dates were scattered across the years.

“They are old decorations,” Ryan said.

His answer was too quick.

“Decorations with your name?” I asked.

His jaw tightened.

“For private performances people do a thousand stupid things. You have no idea what you are looking at.”

The conductor raised his baton, but did not bring it down. His fingers were trembling.

I saw fear in his eyes.

“Where are all these women?” I asked.

“They left,” Ryan said.

“All of them?”

He gave no answer.

But the conductor said quietly:

“I remember this name.”

Ryan turned so quickly that his skate cut a white crescent into the ice.

“What are you saying?”

The conductor pointed not at me, but at the invitation trapped beneath the ice.

“We played for this woman too. Several years ago. The same hall. The same music. The same man.”

My stomach sank as if I had been struck again.

“She disappeared three days after that performance,” he continued.

Ryan raised his voice.

“You are here to play!”

The conductor placed the baton on the floor and came toward me. For the first time, determination appeared on his face.

“Brooke,” he told me, “this was not the first time he did not let us stop playing because of a fallen woman.”

Ryan was already sliding toward us.

I tried to get up. The small silver bell attached to the lace of my right shoe—the only thing left to me from my grandmother—touched the ice and rang.

That sound brought back my childhood. And at that same moment I realized that Ryan was going to prepare my disappearance too, like music prepared in advance.

The conductor grabbed the gate’s lock, but before he opened it, Ryan reached us and said quietly:

“Brooke, if you go through this door now, you will never find out who the first invitation belonged to…”

His hand reached toward the folder…

The conductor opened the gate and extended a hand to me from outside.

“Do not listen,” he told me. “If he locks this gate, he will lose both of us.”

Ryan stopped several steps away.

“Be careful, Elias.”

The conductor swallowed his fear.

“I should have been careful first.”

Then he told me something Ryan clearly had not expected. The first woman whose name I had knelt beside had tried to escape before the performance ended. Ryan did not stop the music. The woman was sliding across the ice toward the gate, while the orchestra played.

The same melody. The same command. The same closed hall.

The invitations trapped below no longer seemed like decorations to me. They were a line.

Ryan moved toward us.

I got up and ran toward the gate. Elias opened the lock, then locked the door behind me before Ryan could manage it.

We went out into the corridor. I was having trouble breathing, but Elias put a small voice recorder into my wrist.

“I found this inside,” he told me quietly. “If anything happens to me, it will be given to the police.”

There was only one file on the recorder.

Its title repeated the date indicated on the first invitation…

I squeezed the recorder in my hand so hard that the plastic edge dug into my skin.

“Let us listen here,” I told Elias.

In the rear corridor of the hall, at fifteen minutes past ten in the evening, I leaned against the wall. There was an old wooden bench there, whose varnish had swollen from the cold and damp. Elias locked the door.

I recognized Ryan’s voice from the very first second.

“Do not stop the music.”

Then a woman’s breathing was heard. She was crying.

“Ryan, open the door for me. Please, I want to go home.”

Another man’s voice intervened. Calm, businesslike.

“The money has already been transferred. Her accounts will be closed tomorrow.”

I looked at Elias.

“What is this?”

He lowered his eyes.

“There was the same scheme behind every invitation. Ryan promised women marriage, obtained powers of attorney from them, then sold their property and arranged their disappearances. Those who resisted, he brought to this hall. The performance was the last warning for them.”

A woman screamed in the recorder. Then the sound of a heavy object falling was heard, and the music sounded louder.

“No,” I breathed.

Elias took my hands.

“I knew something was happening. The first time I thought the woman had simply left. The second time too. By the third I understood, but Ryan threatened my child.”

Footsteps sounded in the doorway.

Ryan entered. He still had that calm smile on his face that he often wore at home when he told me I was excessively jealous.

“Brooke, you understood all this very badly.”

“Where are all the women?”

“You are the first one who asks the question.”

Elias raised the phone.

“The recording has already been sent.”

Ryan’s smile disappeared.

“To whom?”

“To Investigator Mari,” I told him. “And to my lawyer.”

Ryan turned toward the door, but the sound of a siren came from outside.

The police had arrived. But before the officers entered the hall, Ryan’s phone rang.

He looked at the screen and paled for the first time.

The ringing was fading, but a woman’s voice could be heard clearly from the other side:

“Ryan, I am alive. And your lawyer does not know that there is a second layer beneath every invitation…”

Ryan dropped the phone from his hand.

Elias leaned toward me.

“If they find the second layer, it will become clear who his last victim was…”

At that moment the ice cracked near the far wall of the hall, and the corner of a second, hidden document appeared from below…