"Incredible. Standing room only."
"Love that for you. Listen, I've got an update on the Meridian deal."
Phoebe's fingers stopped on the garnet ring. Meridian Records. The contract she'd been circling for three years. The one that would literally put her on a galactic distribution platform, get her music into systems beyond Earth that she couldn't reach independently, and give her the kind of visibility that meant she'd never have to take another corporate gig where executives talked through her bridge.
"Tell me."
"They're close. Like,closeclose. Jared called me this morning."
"And?"
"And they love the Frostfall booking. The optics are great. Human headliner at the biggest alien festival in the sector, cultural bridge stuff, very zeitgeist. But…"
There was always a but.
"They want more ofyou, Phoebe. Not just the performances. The behind-the-scenes, the personal brand content, the accessibility angle. They need to see that you can be, and I'm quoting Jared here, 'warm, relatable, and available.'"
Warm. Relatable. Available. Three words that meantGive us the parts of yourself you've been protecting, and we'll turn them into a product we can sell.
"Available how?"
"Media appearances, socials, fan interaction stuff. The whole package. They want the audience to feel like theyknowyou."
Phoebe's reflection stared back at her. Red lipstick. Perfect braids. Her own personal armor.
"Right."
"I know it's a lot. But this is Meridian, Pheebs. This is the door."
The door. The dream she'd organized her entire adult life around. The one she'd chased for a decade working under David Sterling's thumb, and had cost her Brooklyn accent and most of her savings.
"I'll think about it."
"Don't think too long. Jared said the window's?—"
"I'll think about it, V."
She hung up before the Brooklyn could surface in her throat and set the comm face-down on the vanity. She hummed another scale.
Enough. Second half in four minutes. She checked the lipstick, adjusted a braid, stood up straight. Shoulders back. Chin up. Phoebe Calloway, headliner, opening night of Frostfall, walking out to own the second half of her set. She grabbed her in-ear monitors and headed for the wings.
The backstage corridor was dim, lit by those low amber panels the Mentharians used for everything, and she was moving fast because four minutes was three and a half now and she still needed to check?—
She came around the corner and hit a wall of winter.
Not a wall. A person. The temperature plunged so sharply that goosebumps raced up both arms, the cold pressing through the fabric of her dress like she'd walked into a freezer. A hand came up, large and pale, and stopped a breath away from her bare shoulder.
She looked up.
And up.
Thorne was bigger than she remembered. That was the first coherent thought she managed before the rest of her brain shut down and let her body do the processing. He filled the corridor. Six-and-a-half feet with his shoulders squared and those ice-pale eyes looking down at her with an expression that gave away absolutely nothing. His hair was the same stark white-silver. The stripe patterns on his neck caught the amber light and shimmered like frost on glass. And he smelled, God, he smelled like a January morning. Like the air right before snow, clean and mineral and sharp, with that thread of peppermint underneath that she'd been remembering wrong for ten months. She'd remembered it as faint. It wasn't faint. It was everywhere.
Her body leaned toward the cold instead of away from it. Just an inch.
She'd last seen him in the snow outside her temporary quarters. Last year's closing night. She'd asked him to walk her home. She’d found him at the edge of the empty amphitheater and, for once, dropped the performance before asking. He'd fallen into step beside her without a word. Twenty minutes through vanilla-scented snow and luminescent drifts. She'd talked too much, the way she always did when she was nervous, filling silence with charm. He'd been quiet. And at her door she'd said something she hadn't planned.I think I'd like to come back next year. I hope you'll still be here too. And she’d watched frost bloom across his knuckles in the dark, delicate and involuntary, while his face stayed perfectly, maddeningly still.
I will be here. I am always here.
