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Something that repeats instead of choosing what it wants to say.

They probably thought they were being clever.

When I ran at sixteen, I left everything else behind. The room they had kept me in, the lessons, the rules, and every carefully laid-out piece of the life they’d already decided I was going to live.

I could have left Echo behind too.

Instead, I stole it.

Took the name they had given me and carried it straight out the fucking door because if I couldn’t have one that was mine from the beginning, I could damn well make this one mean something they never intended.

Freedom.

A choice.

All mine.

Twelve years later, the Conclave still wants its siren back. They want the voice they spent years shaping into something useful, and they want the woman attached to it dragged home right along with it.

Too-fucking-bad.

Echo belongs to me now.

So does my voice.

And if they want either one back, they’re going to have to catch me first.

Alone.

Unclaimed.

Untraceable, most nights.

I rent a room above a bar on the eastern edge of Kings’ territory. A narrow space that smells like old timber and other people’s cigarettes pressed into the walls, and I’ve learned to treat every sunrise as a small victory. Sirens aren’t built for solitude—our physiology wants a chorus, a pod, the layered harmony of voices that catch each other before they fall. I taught myself to survive without one. I taught myself that a chorus is just a larger cage with prettier singing coming out of it, and I would rather go hoarse alone than open my throat for the Conclave’s politics ever again.

The knife stops halfway through the apple when a vibration catches behind my teeth.

I frown and press my tongue against the back of them, waiting for it to fade.

It doesn’t.

The vibration sinks deeper instead, spreading through my jaw and slipping down into my throat until the soft place where my song lives begins to hum in answer.

My fingers tighten around the knife.

What the fuck?

Another pulse hits, and the blade jumps against the cutting board, so I go completely still.

There’s no sound in the room beyond the refrigerator humming behind me and rain ticking softly against the window, but beneath all of it, down in that other layer only my kind can reach, something is moving.

Something-fucking-huge.

My song rises without permission.

A single note slips from my throat, barely more than a breath, and the glass beside the sink trembles.

I clamp my mouth shut.