Prologue Chapter II
Title: The Silver Voice and the Painted Room
It was the voice that kept her awake.
Not her own. Mira barely spoke then. Not to the other girls, not even to Lady Alia unless spoken to. But his voice—that voice—slipped through the walls in the middle hours of the night, when the music had long faded and even the incense grew thin in the air.
He sang in a language she didn’t understand. But it curled around her bones like seaweed in the tide—low, mournful, and alive.
They called him The Silver Voice.
He was not a noble. Not a customer. He wasn’t even supposed to be there.
But once a week, he arrived at the painted room upstairs—the room with walls frescoed in waves, clouds, and birds with golden eyes. That room wasn’t for pleasure or coin. It was something else. A memory. A promise. A debt.
No girl was ever assigned to that room. It remained locked except on the nights he came.
Mira asked once, foolishly, when she was still young enough to believe her curiosity might be forgiven.
Lady Alia didn’t speak. She only struck Mira across the mouth and whispered, “You hear nothing. You ask nothing.”
But Mira did ask. Inside her mind, she kept asking.
Who was the man whose voice mourned a world no longer here? Why did Alia fear him? And why, when she pressed her hand against the cool door of the painted room late one night, did it feel like someone was waiting on the other side?
Years later, when Mira learned to hide blades in silks and poison in her smile, she would still think about that voice. It came to her in dreams, now and then, like a foghorn in a storm.
And in every man who ever tried to own her, she searched for that tone—the one that didn’t take. The one that grieved.