The Premiere - Cecelia St Clair

The Cairn Conservatory has been called one of the world's finest music institutions for a hundred years.

It has also been called that by the people running the con.

Esme Delatour left at nineteen without explaining herself to anyone. Eight years later, the conservatory's invitation to return as faculty didn't read like an invitation. It read like a sentence with her name already in it. She's back to train the next Voice - a seventeen-year-old girl whose gift is further along than anyone has told her, and whose family has been sitting in the front rows for twenty-three years.

The audiences who fill the performance hall don't know what the applause closes. They leave lighter than they arrived. What's taken isn't money, or memory, or years - it's the shape of what was coming. The futures they were moving toward. Esme has always known this. What she didn't know was the full scope of the damage, or what she was actually retrieved to do.

The men in the building aren't making it simpler.

Leander was faculty when she was a student - a complication that's shifted into a different kind of complication now that she's his colleague and he's asking her to make the same peace he made. Raffael runs the ensemble from the conductor's stand and sees her more clearly than she'd like, without performing concern about what he sees. Declan doesn't belong to this world at all, which is exactly why he can see it clearly, and why the file he's been building for three years is the most dangerous thing in the building.

She came back to train a Voice. The conservatory brought her back to finish what it started.

She's running out of time to decide the difference.

The Premiere is the first book in the House of Futures trilogy - dark academia ritual magic with a why-choose romance, morally compromised characters, and no redemption arcs that come cheap.