Sonata for a Liar

The night the Mute One rang, the Winter Fellow of a Vienna conservatory fell thirty-one meters into the snow.
Two violinists are left to fight for his empty chair. Both of them are lying about that night.

• Rivals to lovers: two violinists, one empty chair
• Forced proximity: one music stand by day, one locked practice cell by night
• A secret society and three candlelit night auditions
• Both of them are lying, and both of them know it
• He falls first
• Grieving outsider heroine, haunted heir hero
• A protective hero who holds on when it matters
• Adults only: Master's students, 26 and 27
• A death in the snow, solved on the page
• A violin with a stolen past (Vienna, 1938)
• A tender hero in a cruel institution
• Guaranteed happily ever after

DELIA

I'm twenty-six, a first-year Master's student at the Blasius, a fiddler from West Virginia on a full scholarship, and I have perfect pitch. I can hear a string go flat through a closed case. I can hear a man lie.

Tobias Ebner was the best violinist in the building. He was also my brother, and nobody here was ever supposed to know. At 1:09 a.m. he called me. I was asleep. By morning there was a silver sheet on the snow under the bell tower, a hand showing from under it, and the police were calling it a fall. His violin was missing too: the Black Stainer, the lion-headed fiddle this conservatory hands to its Winter Fellow every February, and has since the winter of 1939. Nobody here says where it was before that.

So I lied to them too. He coached me, I said.

Valentin Mahr was standing under the arch with no coat on and his trousers wet to the knee. He told me to go home. He said I wasn't family.

He goes a quarter-tone sharp when he lies. He went sharp on home.

Now our professor has put me on his music stand, turning his pages. And a black envelope sealed with two crossed candles has locked us in the same stone practice cell, from eleven at night until five in the morning, while someone behind a brass grille in the wall listens. Three night auditions. One candle. When it goes out, you keep playing.

I'm going to sit in my brother's chair every night and play at Valentin Mahr until he goes sharp on the truth.

VALENTIN

I told the police I had been at home from midnight. It was the first lie I told about that night, and it came out in the voice I use for ordering coffee.

Tobias had been my friend for three years. At nineteen I had frozen in the middle of a concerto on the stage of the Musikverein and walked off with my violin still under my chin. He was the one who dragged me back to it.

I did not know about the sister. I thought she had been his lover. I had disliked her from her first studio class, the way one dislikes someone who is better than one expected. Then she played the Chaconne in the dark, in a crypt full of bones, and did not slow down, and I stopped disliking her.

She thought I had killed him. I had not. It was the one true thing I was able to give her that winter, and she could hear that there was more.

Twenty-seven days until the chair was filled. One candle. Two liars. And the Candles were listening.

A Gothic Dark Academia Rivals-to-Lovers Romance. The Blasius Nocturnes, Book One. Each book follows a new couple. The death in the snow is solved in full in this book; the Candles keep their other secrets for the next one. Steamy and open-door: explicit, fully consensual scenes between adults, with limits and a safe word agreed on the page. 18+.