Chapter Sixty-One: The Unforgivable Sound
The oppressive silence after the call was its own kind of noise. It rang in Amaya's ears, a tinnitus of shame and despair. She had burrowed under the duvet, a child hiding from monsters, but the monsters were inside her head—the siren's call she'd just used, the hollow victory in Richard's shifted tone, the memory of Aris's clinical rejection that had driven her to make the call in the first place.
She didn't hear the door open this time. She felt it. A change in the pressure of the room, a subtle invasion of the dark sanctuary she'd tried to make under the covers.
The duvet was ripped from her body in one swift, violent motion.
She gasped, cold air hitting her skin, and looked up. He stood beside the bed, a column of furious darkness. The hallway light spilled in from the open door behind him, carving his silhouette in stark relief. She couldn't see his expression, but she could feel it—a rage so cold and dense it seemed to freeze the air in her lungs.
"Get up." The command was a lash, stripped of all the controlled neutrality she knew. This wasn't Dr. Rowon. This was pure, untempered Aris.
She was too stunned, too emotionally eviscerated, to move. She just stared up at him, clutching the sheet to her chest, her earlier bravado gone.
He didn't repeat himself. He leaned down, his hands closing around her upper arms, and hauled her upright onto her knees on the mattress. The sheet fell away. She was exposed, kneeling before him in just her underwear, but his gaze wasn't on her body. It was locked on her face, his eyes blazing with a light that had nothing to do with reason.
"What," he bit out, each word sharp as a scalpel, "was that?"
Her mind scrambled. The call. He'd heard. Of course he'd heard. The walls in this sterile fortress were probably paper-thin, or he'd been listening at the door. The violation should have made her furious. Instead, a perverse, exhausted defiance sparked.
"A phone call," she said, her voice surprisingly steady. "With my fiancé. We were finalizing wedding details. Is that a crime now, in your kingdom?"
His fingers tightened on her arms, not enough to bruise, but enough to make his point—she was not going to dismiss this. "I heard your voice." The accusation in his tone was scathing. "That… sound. That performance."
"It wasn't a performance," she shot back, though it had been, and they both knew it. "It was my voice. He's my fiancé. I'm allowed to speak to him. In any tone I choose."
"You are not allowed," he growled, pulling her closer, his face inches from hers, "to use that voice on another man. Not while you are in my bed. Not while you are wearing my scent on your skin." His gaze dropped to her mouth, as if he could still see the shape of the lies, the soft, tempting sounds she'd made for Richard. "You were whispering to him of your future. Of your proper life. After what I told you. After what you know."
The jealousy was not subtle. It was a roaring, undeniable force. It should have thrilled her. It only made her angrier. He had no right.
"What I know?" she echoed, a brittle laugh escaping her. "I know you rejected me. Again. You saw me… you saw how I was, and you covered me up like a piece of furniture and walked away. You don't get to be jealous because I answered a phone call from the man I'm actually going to marry. You don't get to claim me and then put me on a shelf until you decide I'm 'sober' enough for your standards!"
"My standards," he seethed, "are the only thing keeping you from making the single greatest mistake of your life for the second time! That man does not want you. He wants the echo of you. The polite, beautiful echo. And you were giving it to him. Willingly." He shook her, just once, a jarring rattle. "You were seducing him with your surrender."
The accuracy of it was a slap. She stopped struggling, going limp in his grasp, her energy spent. "So what?" she whispered, her defiance crumbling into wretched honesty. "What do you want from me, Aris? You don't want the desperate, drunk mess. He doesn't want the real, complicated person. I'm just… a sound. A function. A body to be managed. At least with him, the management comes with a legally binding contract and social approval. With you… it just comes with more waiting. More tests. More of you watching me fail."
Her words hung in the air, the raw, ugly truth of her despair. For a long moment, he was silent, his furious breathing the only sound. The heat of his anger seemed to transmute into something else, something more dangerous.
His grip on her arms loosened, but he didn't let go. One hand slid up to cup the back of her neck, his fingers tangling in her hair, not gently. He forced her to hold his gaze.
"You are not a sound," he said, his voice a low, gravelly vow that vibrated through her. "You are a wildfire. And I have spent five years building firebreaks, watching the wind, waiting for the conditions to be right. Not to put you out. To let you burn where you belong. With me." His thumb stroked the frantic pulse at the side of her throat. "Thorne would throw water on you until you were cold ash. I will give you the whole forest."
He leaned in, his lips brushing her ear, and her entire body shuddered. "And as for the test…" He pulled back just enough to look into her eyes, his own blazing with a possessive certainty that stole her breath. "You just passed it. The final one."
Confusion swirled with the residual heat. "What?"
"The sound you used on him," he said, his voice dropping to a intimate, brutal whisper. "That beautiful, lying, tempting sound. I have waited seven years to hear you use it for me. To hear you whisper my name in the dark, not his. To hear you sigh for me, beg for me." His gaze dropped to her lips again. "You thought you were binding yourself to him. You were simply showing me what I will have. What has always been mine."
He released her then, so suddenly she swayed on her knees. He straightened, looking down at her, a conqueror surveying his prize. The fury was gone, replaced by that terrifying, absolute calm.
"The wedding," he stated, "will not happen. Thorne's world is already crumbling. By morning, he will have far more pressing concerns than seating charts." He turned and walked toward the door. "Sleep now. The waiting is over."
He paused at the threshold, glancing back. The city light caught the hard planes of his face, the certainty in his eyes. "And the next time you make that sound, Amaya, it will be for me."
He left, closing the door softly behind him.
Amaya sank back onto the mattress, her body trembling, her mind a whirlwind. He wasn't jealous of Richard. He was furious she'd given Richard a preview of what he considered his property. He'd heard her most manipulative, vulnerable performance and had seen it not as a betrayal, but as a blueprint for his own possession.
Thorne's world is already crumbling.
The words were a promise of ruin. A ruin he was orchestrating.
She was caught between a man who would break the world for her and a man for whom she was just another asset to manage. And the terrifying, undeniable truth, humming in her still-aching body, was that she no longer cared about the contract, the approval, or the cage.
The wildfire in her had been named. And it wanted to burn.