The `Starlight Serenade` studio was a hive of chaotic energy. Ambitious singers with perfect hair warmed up their voices in corners, while production assistants with headsets and clipboards rushed past, their faces tight with stress. Lyra clutched her guitar case, feeling utterly invisible. A ghost in a land of glittering hopefuls.
She had spent three years in the gilded cage of Caspian Hawthorne’s world, a silent hostess at galas, a beautiful accessory on his arm. This raw, hungry ambition felt like a foreign language.
A young woman with bright pink hair pointed her toward a registration table. “Name?” the man behind the desk asked without looking up.
“Lyra…” She hesitated. The name Hawthorne felt like a lead weight in her mouth, a brand that would invite a circus of questions she couldn’t answer. It was his name, not hers. Not anymore.
“Just Lyra,” she said, her voice quiet but firm.
The man finally looked up, a flicker of curiosity in his eyes. “Just Lyra? Okay, mystery woman. You’re up in five.”
It was a small act, shedding his name. But it felt like the first real breath she had taken in years.
When her name was called, she walked into a small, dark studio, facing three producers seated behind a long table. The silence was absolute.
“Whenever you’re ready, Lyra,” one of them said, his tone gentle.
She sat on the offered stool, positioning her guitar. She didn’t play one of the polished songs she’d written for other artists. Instead, she chose something new, something she had written in the sterile silence of the Hawthorne mansion, a ballad about building a home in a heart that was never meant to be hers.
Her voice, rusty from disuse, cracked on the first note. Her fingers fumbled a chord. But then the pain took over. She closed her eyes and sang of love and betrayal, of devotion poured into a vessel that could never hold it. She channeled three years of quiet heartbreak into three minutes of music.
When the last note faded, she kept her eyes shut, her chest aching. The silence stretched.
She had failed.
She opened her eyes to see the three producers staring at her. The woman in the middle had tears tracing a path through her makeup. The man who had spoken was leaning forward, his expression one of rapt attention.
“That song,” he said, his voice husky. “Who wrote it?”
“I did,” Lyra whispered.
He nodded slowly, sharing a look with his colleagues. “Your voice needs work. Your technique is rough. But that… what we just heard… was truth.”
He leaned back, a decisive look on his face. “You’re in. Welcome to the show.”
As she turned to leave, he called after her. “And Lyra? Don’t change a thing. The country needs to hear that.”
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