Phantom's Protege: A Score to Settle

San Francisco's Golden Gate Opera House was built for applause, not murder.When celebrated composer Daniel Laurent is killed during rehearsal by a falling counterweight, Detective Carlos "e;CJ"e; Marquez sees the truth in the damaged rigging at once. This was no accident. Someone inside the opera house knew the building, the timing, and the machinery well enough to turn the stage into a weapon.Adrian Yu saw something else.A violinist, Daniel's protégé, and the man most shaken by his death, Adrian insists there was a figure watching from the fly gallery moments before the fatal drop. A man in an old-fashioned tailcoat. A phantom tied to a decades-old theatre legend, a missing costume, and a death that still haunts the building's private boxes and shadowed corridors.CJ trusts evidence. Adrian trusts music, memory, and the things the opera house refuses to let die. As the clues lead from a coded score to hidden archives, sabotaged systems, and a gala that may become the killer's next stage, the two men are forced into a partnership neither expected.The closer they come to the truth, the harder it becomes to separate danger from desire. And inside a theatre where every echo has a history, the dead may be the only witnesses brave enough to speak.The Phantom's Protégé is an atmospheric MM romantic suspense mystery with police procedural tension, ghostly theatrical secrets, and a slow-burn queer romance forged in the shadows of a murder investigation.