The Secret Score of Valmont
A Dark Academia Novel

About this book:

At the Valmont Conservatory, the pianos are tuned to a frequency that shatters more than glass. Rowan Finch arrives on a late admission, carrying little but a portfolio of memorized concertos and a talent that refuses to stay in its lane. When she discovers a crumbling manuscript hidden in her turret room’s upright—a canon built on prime-numbered intervals and a Latin warning not to wake what sleeps in the dust—she realizes the school’s punishing regimen hides a score no one was meant to play again.

Maestro Julian Thorne doesn’t teach music; he curates it, and his latest sight-reading test is a note-for-note transcription of that same forbidden fragment. To pass is to join the inner circle. To fail is to vanish like the prodigies before her. But Rowan’s rebellion isn’t in the notes she changes—it’s in the questions she asks, and Valmont’s stone walls have ears tuned to every dissonance.

In a conservatory where the radiators rattles in F-sharp and the basement vaults are locked against humidity—and something far older—Rowan must decide whether virtuosity is worth the price of silence. *The Secret Score of Valmont* is a gothic symphony of obsession, mathematics, and the terrible beauty of chords that were never meant to resolve.