Chapter 1: El Despertar de la Cortesana

I closed my eyes and embraced the silence. Darkness wrapped around me as I lay stretched out on the bed in my empty apartment. The dining table, buried under a mountain of unpaid bills, was the only witness to my days dragging by. In my mind, one image persisted with a cruel clarity: her face twisting into a grimace of disappointment. I had braced myself for rejection, or so I believed. But I wasn't ready for that look. Not from her. Not after everything. I had wanted to bolt from the café, dissolve into the noise, simply vanish. It wasn't only her refusal — I had been out of work for three months, and every failed interview was another nail in the coffin of my self-worth. I felt like a disappointment to everyone, including myself. And in that surrender, I let myself be carried toward a light. A warm, bright light, like a whisper rising from the center of my chest. There, kept like a sealed reliquary, something pulsed. A secret. A desire. A dream I had barely dared to name. When I opened my eyes, I was no longer in my room. I was on my knees before a woman of unearthly beauty. A priestess wrapped in pale silks, with golden eyes that did not merely look at me — they saw me. Saw everything. "My name is Drusila, priestess of Venus," she said, her voice like velvet and ancient power. "I see your pain, little Claudio… but I also see your true self." She leaned over me and brushed my forehead with a finger scented with myrrh and incense. I felt the warmth of her touch as though it could pass through my flesh and reach the soul I had kept hidden for so long. "Let your body…