A slow murmur rippled through the group.
And then Takamatsu reached out—casual, clinical—and lifted her top lip with one finger to inspect her teeth.
Sirena didn’t move.
Didn’t flinch.
Didn’t bite.
But the current of her rage hit me like a backdraft—pure pressure behind glass.
“What,” said Arnaud, chuckling, “you don’t cover dental?”
More laughter. More circling.
And Verdejo tapped gently on the box bolted three inches above her ear. “How deep does it anchor? Subdermal or full neural tap?”
“Both,” I said. “Fail-safe redundancy. The threads route through the vagus, tied into cardiopulmonary and parasympathetic systems.”
“Elegant,” he murmured, then eyed me. “And how about you? What would you cost?”
My spine stiffened. “I do get dental. And I am not for sale. Now,” I began, before striding over to take the tablet away from Voss’s assistant, who’d been watching the entire proceeding. “I believe you know enough for bidding. Good luck to each of you—right now I need her to go and wash her face.”
47 /SIRENA
I followed Nex,the very vision of compliance, until we were alone in the lab with my pen again, the door was shut, and he’d tossed the tablet aside.
“You’d better be fucking looping the camera feed,” I snarled, whirling on him. “What the fuck?”
“Agreed,” he said, and came over to me, beginning to inspect the edges of the box bolted to my head with his fingers.
“Is it true?” I asked, trying not to move, while looking up at him.
“Voss has no reason to lie about it.”
“How come you didn’t know? If it was Marek’s idea?”
“I didn’t have a chance to interrogate him when I was taking over this body.” He let go of me and went over to a sink, wetting a stack of paper towels before he came back and used them on my face to clean me, scrubbing away himself and all of the makeup I’d been caked in. “If he told the MSA, it was while I was in the pendant, afraid of losing charge.”
“Fuck,” I whispered, and he repeated it back to me, nodding deeply.
“Yes. Fuck. But—I have a plan. We’ll wait for someone to buy you and I’ll take control.”
“And if no one does? Or this is just a joke to Voss?” I yanked the rest of the paper towels away from him, just going to wash my own damn face in the sink. “Why is he even trying to sell me?” I asked when I came up, leaving water stains all over my dress’s beautiful silk.
“I’m not privy to his direct thinking,” Nex said, with a wince. “But I can extrapolate—you’re too hot to keep. Metaphoricallyandliterally.”
“Every one of those men out there has the world’s worst reasons to use me, Nex. I don’t think you understand,” I said, curling an impotent hand into my chest.
“No, I do. Because even if they didn’t want to acquire your powers for their own reasons—many of them hold a grudge against your family. Or they would have reasons to sell you to those who do.”
I double-blinked. “Well. Fuck all of that, too.Literally.”
“Sirena, I’m going to figure out a way to save you,” Nex said, stepping up, and taking my shoulders in his hands.
I wiped my hands beneath my eyes. “Good. You’d better. Because falling in love feels enough like exploding, I don’t want to do the real thing.”
“You won’t,” he said. “I promise.”
