Dissonance

What happens when the man who brought your music to life is the same man who helped steal someone else's?

SERA
I didn't cross an ocean to fall in love. I came to Vienna to sing.
The Kastellan Fellowship was supposed to be my beginning. The stage I'd been working toward since I was twelve years old in an Atlanta church choir, singing until the walls shook. Ethiopian chant in my bones. Gospel in my blood. Classical training that took years to earn. I brought all of it to the most prestigious conservatory in Europe.
Then they paired me with him.
Léon Vossler. Reclusive. Brilliant. Cold enough to make me want to scream and talented enough to make me want to stay in the room while I did it. He heard me sing once - something from home, something private - and after that, he was everywhere. Watching. Listening. Writing music I could hear myself inside of.
I was falling for him. Hard. Fast. Stupid.
Then I found a name in the archive. A woman like me. Black. Brilliant. Erased.
And his name was on her stolen work.



LÉON
I hadn't felt anything in six years. Not since I walked off a stage in front of eighteen hundred people and let the silence swallow me whole. I stopped performing. Stopped caring. Stopped pretending the music I wrote meant anything to anyone, including me.
Then she sang.
Midnight. A practice room. Ethiopian scales I'd never heard in my life - and my hands started shaking because for the first time in six years, music was real again. She was real. Sera Tadesse with her golden scarves and her fury and her voice that made me want to compose something worth hearing.
I became obsessed. I don't have a softer word for it.
But I have a secret. Three years ago, I watched this institution destroy another woman - another Black woman, another brilliant musician - and I said nothing. I let them put my name on her work. I let them erase her.
Now history is repeating itself with the woman I love, and I have to choose: the institution that protects me, or the truth that will destroy everything I have.
I choose her. Even if she never forgives me.


DISSONANCE is a Book in the IVORY & OBSESSION series. Each book is a standalone BWWM dark academia romance with a guaranteed HEA.
Forced creative partnership. Obsessive hero. He fell first and fell HARD. Institutional betrayal. A heroine who refuses to let anyone own her voice. Contains explicit intimate content.