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I turn, cupping her face in both hands, and hold her gaze the way I held Thessaly’s, except this time nothing is threatening in it. Just steady. Just here. My thumb brushes along her cheekbone, and I watch some of the terror in her eyes ease back, just enough for her to breathe.
I can’t tell her nobody is taking her voice.
But I can make damn sure she feels it anyway.
Chapter Sixteen
ECHO
The clubhouse erupts the second we’re back inside, people shouting over each other, boots hammering the halls, someone barking about the seawater before it ruins the fucking floors. I’ve been here three days, and apparently supernatural attack or not, nobody wants to explain to Raze why the clubhouse will smell like low tide for the next six months.
I yank off my soaked jacket outside Carnage’s door and listen to the chaos die down behind the wood. For the first time since Thessaly’s voice tore through that yard, the pressure in my chest finally lets up.
Carnage follows me inside without a word, which isn’t unusual for him, except tonight the silence carries weight instead of habit. He drags a towel from somewhere and hands it to me, his knuckles brushing mine, and something in that small contact steadies me more than it should.
I drop onto the edge of his bed because my knees are done holding me up. He sinks into the chair across from me, his elbows on his thighs, his eyes fixed on my face like he already knows what’s coming, and he’s giving me the whole damn room to spit it out.
So I do.
“The Conclave doesn’t see voices as something you’re born with,” I tell him, twisting the damp towel between my fingers because my hands need something to hold onto that isn’t him. “They see them as inventory. A resource to allocate. From the second a siren’s pitch tests above a certain register, she stops belonging to herself.”
Carnage’s expression hardens, his eyes staying on mine while his jaw slowly locks.
“Yeah.” A humorless little laugh slips out of me. “Fucked up, right?”
His gaze drops to the towel I’m slowly strangling before coming back to my face, and somehow that makes it harder to pretend this doesn’t still get to me.
“They earmarked me before I could walk. Before I even knew what my own voice could do.” My fingers twist tighter around the damp fabric. “There were meetings about me, Carnage. Committees. People sitting around tables deciding what I’d eventually be used for.”
His jaw flexes again, but he stays quiet and lets me get there in my own time.
“My mother thought it was something to be proud of.” The words come out quieter than I mean them to. “She used to call me their crown jewel.”
Carnage reaches for his phone, his thumbs moving across the screen before he turns it toward me.
Did she know?
I stare at the words longer than I should. “About what they were going to do to me?”
He nods, and fuck, that one still hurts no matter how many years I’ve had to make peace with it.
“I don’t know.” My attention drops back to the towel. “For a long time, I told myself she didn’t. That maybe when they took me that night, she thought it was another test or ceremony or whatever bullshit they fed everyone.” My throat tightens. “But she knew what the Conclave was. She knew what they did with valuable voices.”
Carnage types again, the movements sharper this time.
She let them take you!
I swallow around the knot climbing into my throat. “Yeah.”
His hand closes around the phone hard enough that the case creaks beneath his fingers.
“Careful. I’m pretty sure Raze isn’t buying you another one.”
His eyes lift slowly to mine, and the look he gives me makes it pretty fucking clear jokes aren’t getting me out of this one.
I let out a breath and stare at my hands. “I already told you how I got out.”
Something tightens across his face, and I know he remembers. The blood, the cutting, me running before they could finish whatever the hell they’d started.
