She pressed her palm to the brass door. Whispered, Kaelen.
But for the first time in three years, she didn’t whisper Kaelen into the dark.
The door would open only if the desire was true, and only if it hurt. Lira was a diver. Her lungs were forged in the pressure depths below Aethelgard, where she harvested fallen star-shards from the mud. Her hands were scarred, her hair bleached white from the chemical fog. She had no business seeking out the Jewel House. But she had a name on her tongue like a splinter she couldn’t swallow.
She whispered her own.
In the floating city of Aethelgard, where the rich sailed on silks and the poor dived for scrap metal in the cloud-fog below, there was a legend whispered only in the amber-lit backrooms of brothels and gambling dens: the Jewel House of Lust.
At the end of the corridor was a single empty pedestal. And on it, a note: