The audience laughed again, pleased with their own cruelty.
Christine trembled so hard Catherine thought she might collapse.
Catherine stared at the piano. The keys gleamed white beneath stage lights, too clean for hands like hers. She felt the weight of every person in that room staring at her like she was a mistake.
“What song?” Christine whispered, voice cracking.
Catherine didn’t have to think long.
“Mama’s lullaby,” she whispered back.
Christine’s eyes filled again. She nodded.
Catherine sat on the piano bench. It was smooth beneath her, a luxury her body didn’t trust. She placed her hands above the keys.
In the audience, someone yelled, “Hurry up! Let’s see the disaster!”
Catherine drew a deep breath and closed her eyes.
She pictured Mama’s face, tired but smiling. Mama’s fingers guiding theirs. Mama’s voice humming low in a freezing alley, turning fear into something you could hold.
Then Catherine pressed the first key.
But before the note could fully bloom, a plastic bottle flew through the air.
It hit Catherine in the chest.
Water exploded across her already soaked clothes, splashed onto Christine, and sprayed over the piano keys.
The audience erupted in the loudest laughter yet.
“Bullseye!” someone shouted.
Jackson threw his head back laughing. “Oh, this is better than I expected. The street children are getting a bath.”
Madame Esther cackled. “They look like drowned rats.”
Catherine froze, water dripping from her hair, her face, her chin. The impact had hurt. The humiliation hurt more.
She looked down at the wet keys, at the water pooling on the perfect white surface, and something deep inside her snapped, not loudly, but cleanly, like a string breaking.
“I’m sorry, Mama,” she whispered, so quiet no one heard. “I tried.”
Then a voice cut through the theater like lightning.
“What is going on here?”
Silence slammed into the room.
Heads turned.
A man strode down the center aisle, tall and broad-shouldered, wearing a gray suit tailored into authority. His hair was dark, silver at the temples, his face carved with power and fury.
Whispers spread like wildfire.
“Lucas Williams…”
“The owner…”
Catherine didn’t know him, but she could feel the entire room’s fear shifting toward respect.
Lucas Williams climbed the steps onto the stage with three decisive strides. The workers backed away. Jackson’s smugness evaporated into a polite mask.
“Mr. Williams,” Jackson began smoothly. “I can explain. These children—”
“Be quiet,” Lucas said, voice low and dangerous.
Jackson shut his mouth as if the words had been physically pushed back inside.
Lucas’s eyes swept across the stage. Across the bottle. Across the wet piano keys. Across Catherine and Christine, shaking in soaked clothes.
His expression changed.
Anger shifted into something else, something like shock, like recognition trying to fight its way to the surface.
He stared at the girls’ faces, at their black hair, their deep brown eyes.
Then, without hesitation, Lucas took off his expensive suit jacket and draped it around both girls.
The fabric was warm. Heavy. Real. It wrapped them like shelter.
Catherine’s breath caught because kindness felt unfamiliar, like a language she’d almost forgotten.
Lucas knelt so he was level with them. “What are your names?” he asked gently.
Catherine’s throat tightened. No one had asked that in a way that sounded like it mattered.
Christine whispered, “I’m Christine. This is Catherine.”
Lucas repeated softly, “Christine and Catherine.”
His eyes searched their faces as if looking for a missing piece of himself.
“How old are you?”
“Ten,” Catherine managed. “We’re twins.”
“And your parents?” Lucas asked, voice careful. “Where do you live?”
The hardest question in the world.
Catherine swallowed. “We don’t have parents anymore,” she said. “We… we don’t live anywhere.”
Lucas’s jaw tightened, grief flaring behind his eyes. “What was your mother’s name?”
Catherine hesitated, then said it anyway, because it was the one truth she had left.
“Helen Harper.”
Lucas went still.
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