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Gone.

All of it.

And I’m standing here trying to force two goddamn words through a throat that won’t give me anything while the woman I was about to use them on watches the whole-fucking-thing happen.

My gaze jerks back to Echo.

Her expression has changed. The guarded look is still there, but something else has pushed through it as her eyes drop to my hand wrapped around my throat.

I fucking hate that she saw that.

I hate that the first thing she gets from me is some broken scrape of sound. I hate even more that I can’t open my mouth and make a joke out of it, that I can’t throw something filthy at her and watch that stubborn mouth fire something back.

My fingers tighten against my neck.

The words are still there—every fucking one of them.

But I can’t make anyone hear them.

Nobody around me says a fucking word about it.

Sentinel’s jaw tightens beside me before he looks away. Scar suddenly finds something across the lot worth watching, and Raze keeps his attention on Echo like he never saw me fighting with my own throat.

They saw what Malgrave did to me. They’ve already watched me forget more than once today, opening my mouth before the rest of me remembers there’s no fucking voice coming with it.

So they give me the only thing they can.

They leave it the fuck alone.

Echo doesn’t.

Her eyes stay on me, dropping briefly to the hand still wrapped around my throat before coming back to my face. There’s no smirk waiting there. No pity either, thank fuck. But something changes in the way she looks at me.

Her fingers loosen at her sides, and the hard set of her mouth eases slightly as her gaze searches mine like she’s trying to figure out what the fuck happened to me.

It’s not pity.

I know pity. I’ve caught enough of it from my brothers since Malgrave took my voice, no matter how hard they’ve tried to hide the shit.

This isn’t that.

Echo looks at me like she fucking gets it, and something about that slips under my skin faster than pity ever could.

She can’t know what happened tonight. She wasn’t here when Malgrave wrapped his hand around my throat and ripped every sound I had out by the fucking roots. She didn’t watch my hellhound fight to hold onto his roar or hear the last broken piece of my voice die before it ever made it out of my mouth.

But she knows something.

I see it in the way her eyes drop to my throat and stay there for half a second too long, the hard line of her mouth tightening before she catches herself and locks that shit back down. It isn’t sympathy staring back at me. It’s something sharper, something that tells me she knows exactly what it feels like to have someone else decide what you’re allowed to do with your own fucking voice.

Whatever taught her that happened long before Coil dragged her through our gates.

And now I want to know who the fuck did it. The thought pisses me off immediately.

I don’t know this woman. I don’t know where she came from, why she followed my roar into our territory, or whether the knife tucked into her boot has ended up inside anyone who didn’t deserve it. I should be watching her for a threat, figuring out whether Coil just dragged trouble through our gates, paying attention to every fucking thing except the way she keeps looking at me.

But that stare is starting to crawl under my skin.

Mostly because she’s seeing shit I haven’t given her permission to see.