Her voice.
Her vibration.
Her fuckingfrequency.
My head snaps toward her before I even know I’m moving, my nerves lit like a blown fuse.
Her lips are parted, her throat moving gently as she hums, completely unaware that she just reached inside me and pulled some lever I didn’t know existed.
My pulse slams, my breathing steadies and my vision sharpens.
She did that.
With a hum.
I stalk toward her, slow, determined, my whole body rewiring itself with every step I take. “Zane—” someone tries behind me.
Doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except her.
I cage her against the crates, crowding into her space so she feels every inch of what she just unleashed. Her eyes widen and her breath stutters.
Good.
It’s imperative she should know exactly what she’s playing with. What she’s just unleashed. My voice scrapes out like gravel dragged across metal.
“Do it again.”
She hesitates, and it guts me, terrifies the fuck out of me, because…what if she doesn’t? What if she never does it again? What if this is the only time I ever feel this…peace? This close to heaven?
My wiring has been wrong since I was a kid. Too much noise, too much light, too much emotion and my brain misfires and detonates. Mama used to call it my “storm episodes.” Doctors had uglier names for it.
Sensory-emotive dysregulation. Volatile thresholds. Hyper-reactive responses.
Labels.
None of them helped.
I was the boy who shattered windows when fireworks went off.
The teenager who punched through drywall because a guitar amp squealed too loud.
The man who learned to channel the chaos into a microphone because there was nowhere else safe to put it.
And I’ve spent my whole life ashamed that I can’t always control it. Worried it makes me flawed, broken, unlovable, something to manage, not something to keep.
But she’s here.
She signed a contract.
She’s not going anywhere.
No…she can’t. I won’t fucking allow it.
Her eyes search mine and I want to lower my gaze, don’t want her to see the damaged darkness inside me. Finally, she hums again.
It hits me like a drug. A bolt of sound straight to the spine.
My eyes flutter shut again.
