Six times, Shizuka Satomi had created brilliance. Six times, she had taken an aspiring musician, trained them, formed them, and created a star.

Even more incredible, while most teachers seemed to cultivate a characteristic sound or style, Satomi’s students were at turns icy, devastating, blinding, delicate, frenetic, breathtakingly sensual …

Her success, her touch, the effortless, almost inevitable way she pulled genius after genius from thin air, was uncanny, almost supernatural.

Little wonder, then, that people began to call her the Queen of Hell.

However, it had been over a decade since she had taken on a new student.

Why?

Some believed she was the victim of a shattered heart. Before his death, Satomi’s last student, Yifeng Brian Zheng, had been seen with her in Annecy, laughing over hot chocolate and mille-feuille. The dashing young violinist had thanked her from every stage he played; and in a television interview, he claimed it was only after studying with Shizuka Satomi that he understood the true meaning of love.

Perhaps they’d been more than teacher and student?

Others surmised that the reason was more mundane, that she might have simply retired. The Queen of Hell had taught Yifeng Zheng, who had followed Kiana Choi, who had followed Sabrina Eisen. And so on and so on.

Even if she found another, what would be left to accomplish?

Whatever the reason, with each passing year, more people assumed that the Queen of Hell had no intention of ever teaching again.

Idiots.

For ten years, Shizuka Satomi had been searching. From Lausanne, Salzburg, Sydney, most recently Tokyo, she had listened, searched prospect after prospect.

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Not that they didn’t try. Not that musicians had not traveled to her, offered her everything they had, all they could imagine.

As if all they could imagine could be close to enough.

Others around her, including Tremon Philippe himself, had suggested she was being too selective, perhaps even arbitrary. Surely over the past ten years, she had found musicians who might be appropriate.

Of course she had.

Her previous six students had been an almost uninterrupted string of genius. All had been perfectly appropriate. Yet, with each one, Shizuka became more and more aware that something was wrong. No. Something was missing. As she watched each of them shine and fall, sparkle and burn, Shizuka became more and more obsessed with a music playing just beyond hearing—maddeningly familiar, yet always beyond her grasp.

Until finally, in Tokyo, she heard it.

Through the din of thirteen million people, and vending machines, ramen joints, Internet cafés, electric trains, and cherry blossoms for each of them twice over, she heard it—coming not from within that city, but from far across the sea.

Coming from, of all places, home.

Shizuka swerved past a very slow Lexus, then accelerated onto Huntington Drive.