Chapter 1.
"Après l'orage, le soleil renaît"
The first time she looked into a mirror after the spell, she didn't recognize herself. The face staring back was hers—undeniably so—but estranged, as if carved from the ghost of another life.
A dried rose petal crumbled from her hair as she stared at her new reflection—fragile, forgotten, like something pressed between the pages of a story she no longer belonged to.
Gone was the princess who once danced through rose gardens under sun-dappled skies, her laughter as bright as the blossoms in her hair. In her place stood a stranger—ethereal, cold, and unnervingly flawless. Olive eyes stared back at her from a face sculpted to enchant, framed by waves of blood-red hair that shimmered like garnets in low candlelight. Her skin was alabaster kissed with frost; her lips, bruised petals steeped in wine.
Her hair, once a warm cascade of ink-dark curls, and eyes the color of blue iris petals drenched in dew, has long disappeared.
The transformation was formidable but hadn't been painless.
The spell had taken hours. Armanda's mage worked in silence, inscribing glowing sigils in the air and murmuring incantations from a tome bound in human skin. Séraphine had sat frozen the entire time, fists clenched in her lap, blood seeping from the crescent wounds her nails dug into her palms. She hadn't cried. Not when the pain crawled through her bones like molten metal. Not when her face began to shift.
"You are no longer Séraphine D'Arcourt," Armanda had said, voice smooth and metallic as a drawn blade. "You are not a princess. You are no one's daughter. That girl died with the rest of her family."
And so she did.
Séraphine had watched her world burn. She saw her mother weep into soot-streaked hands while the flames devoured their ancestral estate. Her father—bloodied, broken—had been dragged out of the dungeons, screaming her name with his last breath. And Bastien de Vaudreuil, golden-eyed and distant, stood among the rebels, unflinching as she was dragged away.
There had been no mercy in him. Not a flicker.
She remembered the betrayal more vividly than the fire. The boy who once taught her to ride horses, who gifted her an heirloom dagger, her friend—he had become a stranger. One who didn't even blink when her screams tore through the courtyard.
And then the darkness swallowed her whole.
She woke days later in a dim chamber, the transformation already claiming her reflection. The glamour wasn't merely an illusion—it was metamorphosis. Her bones had shifted. Her voice had changed timbre. Even her scent, once lavender and honey, now carried something sharper, like crushed roses and smoke.
The Opera House, Le Voile Doré received her as a mausoleum welcomes the dead.
It stood like a temple of illusions at the heart of Solenne's decadent underworld—a place where sins were dressed in silk and vice wore the face of beauty. By day, it looked almost respectable, its grand façade draped in carved gold cornices and faded cherubs holding broken lyres, a remnant of a time when the building had served as a royal theatre. But when night fell, it transformed.
It was a palace of ghosts and gold-leaf rot, where nobility came to drown in fantasy and courtesans were sculpted like icons to be worshipped, desired, bought. Here, innocence wasn't shed. It was shattered.
To survive, she buried the girl she'd been.
Gas lamps bathed its entrance in amber light, casting long shadows across the cobbled courtyard where velvet carriages lined up like offerings. Inside, it was all velvet and mirrors, smoke and candlelight. The main hall soared like a cathedral, its domed ceiling painted with mythic scenes of tragic heroine.Crystal chandeliers dangled like frozen rain above the crimson rows of velvet seats, each tier shrouded in its own curtain of privacy.
A gilded cage.
She cast aside everything—her name, her laughter, her softness. She learned to sing lullabies in dead languages, to dance like a flame in a storm, to wield a smile like a dagger. She trained until her feet bled, until her voice cracked, until even her dreams bowed to discipline.
There was no kindness within those velvet walls. Only ambition and control.
Armanda was the high priestess of both.
"Again," she would snap, lashing Séraphine with words sharper than any whip as she fumbled a difficult pirouette, blood darkening her slippers. "You will do it again until it looks like breathing."
And she did. Again and again, until her limbs obeyed without thought, until she could cry soundlessly and smile while breaking.
She sang until her voice cracked, throat burning.
At night, memories returned like bruises—her mother's warm hands weaving flowers into her hair, her father guiding her hands on a fencing foil. They always ended in fire.
And sometimes, he was there too.
The devil, the man who took everything from her. In her dreams, his eyes were colder than the moon, watching her as she burned.
Each lesson, each wound, each silent scream refined her further.
She learned how to be seen without revealing anything. How to manipulate silence. How to turn a glance into a promise, a sigh into a command. Armanda taught her how to wear gowns like armor and wield vulnerability like a whip.
"You are not a flower," the woman whispered, fingers lifting Séraphine's chin. "You are a blade hidden in silk. Never forget that."
She didn't.
By the end of her first year, she no longer cried. Not when her slippers filled with blood. Not when her voice turned hoarse. Not even when her dreams dragged her through ashes.
Séraphine D'Arcourt had died in that prison of fire.
What remained was someone else entirely.
***
Le Voile Doré was a place stitched from secrets.
By daylight, it sat like a relic of a dream at the edge of Solenne's oldest boulevard—its façade peeling but proud, its wrought-iron gates shaped like climbing roses frozen mid-bloom. But by night, the palace came alive. Gas lamps flared to life, casting amber halos across the cobbled courtyard where lacquered carriages lined up like a procession of sins waiting to be confessed.
The guests who stepped through its gilt-framed doors were not mere opera-goers. They were collectors of illusion—nobility with rotted morals beneath ivory gloves, merchants fat on bloodied coin, and artists who drank laudanum like wine. Some came masked. Most came hunting. All left changed.
Inside, Le Voile Doré shimmered with faded grandeur. Its walls were upholstered in timeworn velvet, the kind that drank candlelight and whispered rumors back. Above the crimson seats, the ceiling soared like a cathedral, its frescoes depicting mythic tragedies. Crystal chandeliers dripped from the domes like frozen rain, catching every glint of movement and magnifying it into divine spectacle
Tonight, the air quivered with anticipation.
The patrons could sense it—something was about to happen.
Backstage, Armanda moved like a storm cloaked in velvet. Years had weathered her beauty into steel, but her eyes still gleamed with unrelenting hunger. She ran Le Voile Doré with the precision of a maestro and the ruthlessness of a general. She saw everything—each twitch of a dancer's ankle, each breath too shallow, each flirtation blooming too fast.
At the stroke of nine, she stepped before the curtain, draped in ink-black silk and garnet earrings that winked like blood in the footlights.
"My esteemed guests," she said, her voice a low purr. "Tonight, I offer you a gift."
A pause. A ripple of curiosity.
"A rose, freshly bloomed. Our own garden. Unseen. Unheard." Her lips curled. "Until now."
She gestured. The curtain rose.
And there she stood.
Not Séraphine. Not the frightened girl who once wept behind mirrors and dreamed of escape.
She stood centerstage, swathed in a gown of sheer shadow and shimmer—an ethereal creation of midnight blue and silver, as if twilight itself had been stitched to her skin. Threads of starlight crisscrossed her bodice like constellations, and a cape of translucent gauze trailed behind her like a veil of mist.
Her shoulders were bare, dusted with the faintest glimmer of crushed pearl. Her dark curls were pinned up with slivers of moonstone and rose-gold wire, glinting with every breath.
Her makeup was theatrical but refined—lips the color of crushed garnets, cheeks brushed with the soft flush of candlelight, and eyes rimmed in smoky kohl that made her gaze look bottomless.
But it was her stillness that held them.
She didn't fidget. Didn't smile.
She waited—like an omen. Like something summoned.
And then she sang.
L'amour est un oiseau rebelle…
The first notes of Habanera curled into the air like incense, slow and sinuous. Her voice was a contradiction: honey and steel, smoke and silver. It did not beg to be heard. It commanded. Each phrase unfurled with precision, but not coldness—it shimmered with something raw and dangerous, like fire seen through glass.
Que nul ne peut apprivoiser…
The room leaned in. The world beyond the theatre ceased to exist.
She wasn't just performing.
She was devouring them.
By the time she reached the final lines—
Il n'a rien dit mais il me plaît—
The opera house had become a cathedral to her voice, to her body, to her myth.
The silence that followed was reverent. Disbelieving. Then it shattered into thunder.
Applause rained down like coins before an altar. Bravos, whistles, the pounding of hands and hearts.
Backstage, Armanda's lips quirked. She had created something sublime—and something dangerous.
Four years has been worth it.
In the salon, with its velvet chaises and flickering candelabras, she was approached.
He came with the confidence of someone who thought everything in the world could be bought. A nobleman's son, likely. His coat was black silk, his cravat knotted with careless precision. Rings adorned his fingers, and his cologne was expensive and cloying.
"You were…" he said, searching, admiring, possessive. "Transcendent. But tell me—what name belongs to a goddess like you?"
She turned to him slowly.
Her lashes lowered. Her smile—soft, slow, and surgical—bloomed across her lips like blood blooming in milk.
"Rosétta," she said.
And the name, simple and strange, cut through the salon like a spell.
He blinked. And smiled like he'd found treasure.
But she was not a gem to be kept.
She was a thorned rose, sharp and sweet.
The new star of Le Voile Doré.
And already, the world was falling under her spell.