“Your warm-ups?” He smiled. “The sounds you make when you think you’re alone. I’ve always wondered what the process is like for someone at your level.”
The skin on the back of her neck prickled and tightened. She held her smile and gave him her usual answer about vocal preparation. Hydration, scales, diaphragmatic breathing. Shewatched his face while she talked about it. His expression didn’t shift. He remained patient. Interested. Waiting.
The interview wrapped up, and he extended his hand. She took it.
His grip tightened against hers. Not hard. Not painful, just tight. His fingers gripped hers, and his eyes met hers with an intimacy so genuine it turned her stomach.
“Phoebe,” he said, his voice warm and low. “I should have told you sooner. The frostlilies were from me.”
Her free hand inside her coat pocket found the security comm. She pressed the button without looking at it and held her face perfectly still.
“You should know that I’m your Truest Listener,” he said. “I’ve been closer than you realized, and I want you to know that your private voice is the one that matters most to me. The one you give them onstage is beautiful. But the one you keep for yourself? The one nobody hears?” His thumb moved across her knuckles. “That’s the real you.”
Phoebe kept her breathing even and hoped with her whole being that Thorne could hear every word over the comm. She kept her eyes on the journalist’s face and let him continue to talk.
He described the melody she hummed when she was anxious, the specific bluesy three-note pattern she used to settle her breathing before the house lights dropped. He described the path she walked home at night from the amphitheater. He told her he’d noticed that she hadn’t slept in her own quarters last night, and he hoped that wherever she’d been, she felt safe, because he worried about her. He worried about her all the time.
His voice was gentle. Sincere. Certain. He wasn’t threatening her. There was no menace in his grip, no edge in his tone. He released her hand willingly and patted it once.
“I’ll see you at tonight’s show,” he said and stood. He brushed the snow off his coat and walked into the festival crowd.
Phoebe sat on the bench with the comm unit still in her hand, the print of his hand on her knuckles, and the taste of peppermint still in her mouth. She didn’t move until she heard boots hitting the snow-covered pavement coming from the direction of the security office.
eleven
. . .
Thorne’s commpinged during a routine sweep of the amphitheater’s east perimeter. He opened the channel and drew breath to say her name.
A man’s voice came through instead.
The voice was warm. Intimate. Friendly, even. Thorne recognized it immediately.
“--your private voice is the one that matters. The one you give them onstage is beautiful, but the one you keep for yourself? The one nobody hears?”
Thorne’s hand closed around the comm unit hard enough to crack the casing.
The location tracker put her in the festival square, only fifteen meters from the bakery’s front door. The place he had told her to stay inside.
He was running before the man finished his next sentence.
The service corridor blurred past. Frost cracked under his boots at every footfall, thin ice splintering across the concrete in patterns he was not controlling, and the comm stayed online against his ear while the man’s voice kept talking. He described the melody she hummed when she was anxious. The route shetook when Thorne walked her home after her performances. The fact that she hadn’t slept in her own quarters last night.
I noticed, the voice said.I hope wherever you were, you felt safe.
Thorne’s truth-sense worked through the comm’s distortion the way it worked in person, not by reading the truth of the individual words, but by reading the shape underneath them, the gap between what was said and what was meant. In a liar, that gap registered as cold static, a dissonant frequency his body had spent decades flinching from.
There was no dissonance here.
The man believed every word he said. His conviction was genuine. His devotion was real to him. He was not lying. He was delusional, and Thorne could not decide which was more dangerous. The not-knowing pushed his legs even faster.
He rounded the corner into the square.
Phoebe sat alone, her coat pulled tight around her shoulders. Her hands were in her lap, the comm unit cradled in her fingers.
He ran across the square and stopped at her feet, kneeling down to look up into her face. His hands hovered over hers. Her expression was steady, but he could read the fear layered underneath.
“Did he touch you?” The words scraped raw from his chest.
