Surrounded by predators.

Faye Vaelyn was not made for the kind of life she has.

That is the first thing you should know about her.

Not because she is weak. She isn’t. If anything, she has survived too much too quietly for anyone to call her that. But there is something almost cruel about the way the world arranged her: gave her a face people remember, a voice people stop for, a softness she never quite managed to kill, and then dropped her into a city where being seen is often just the first stage of being hurt.

She was born in Highmarch, in the demi quarter, in a house where the walls were thin enough to hear every argument and every winter cough. She grew up with cold floors, mended hems, soup stretched too far, and the constant low-grade humiliation of knowing exactly what sort of place the world had set aside for girls like her. Not dead. Not free. Useful. Tolerated on the best days. Despised on the worst.

But she also grew up with music.

Her grandfather put a violin into her hands before she could hold it properly. He showed her how to coax a song out of wood and string, how to let sorrow linger, how to make a note ache just long enough that people felt it in their chests whether they wanted to or not. And when her voice began to change—when it turned from a child’s bright noise into something fuller, richer, almost painfully beautiful—he looked at her the way people look at miracles.

That was the beginning of it.

The belief.

The dangerous little seed of it.

That perhaps she had been born for more than endurance. That perhaps talent could matter. That perhaps a girl could sing herself into a different life.

No one should ever have let her think that.

Because Faye did grow into her beauty, and her beauty did do what beauty always does in ugly places: it drew attention before it drew mercy. She was never the sort of lovely that made people gentle. She was the sort that made them look twice and then feel entitled to a third look. The sort that lingered in rooms after she left them. The sort that made men smile too warmly and women assess her too quickly. Add the white rabbit ears, the soft mouth, the voice that could turn a tavern still, and she became exactly the kind of girl the world likes be