Page 18 of Bearly Out Loud

Her voice had ruined him in forty-seven seconds.

He’d known it would be a problem. He’d listened to her demo reel enough times to earn Reo’s clinical assessment of a “bear thing, level five.” He had prepared himself the way he prepared for any operation—reviewed the variables, identified the risks, built a strategy for containment.

None of that mattered.

When Nari Wixx stepped into the recording booth and became Yua Voidwalker, his bear didn’t stir. Didn’t pace. Didn’t surge.

It went still.

Absolute, total, bone-deep stillness—the kind a bear produced in the wild only when it had found the thing it was looking for and every ounce of its attention narrowed to a single point. The rest of the world dissolved. The control room, the mixing boards, the production team making notes—gone. There was only the glass and the woman on the other side of it and her voice pouring through the monitors—liquid, layered, inevitable.

She didn’t perform the character. She channeled it. The distinction mattered. Performers reproduced. Channels conducted. Whatever Nari had brought into that booth—whatever private fury and grief had sharpened her delivery into a blade—it wasn’t in the script. It was in her.

She finished. The silence held.

Mine.

The thought arrived without permission—primal, absolute, from the part of his brain that didn’t negotiate. His bear, in the marrow of him, stating a fact the way gravity stated a fact: without argument, without appeal.

He breathed. Released the console. Hoped nobody had noticed the new finger impressions in the steel.

Priya said “acceptable” in the tone that meant magnificent, and Dojin watched Nari’s face through the glass—the flash of recognition, the suppressed smile, the discipline it took her to stay neutral when she knew she’d detonated the room. She was aware of her own power. She wielded it like a scalpel.

His phone buzzed again. He checked it this time.

Reo:Bear thing. Level 10. You forgot to blink for forty seconds. I counted.

Dojin pocketed the phone without replying. Across the control room, Reo sat in his designated chair—the one positioned near the exit with sightlines to every entrance, because Reo didn’t sit anywhere without calculating escape routes—and watched Dojin with the tight, assessing gaze of a man who had seen his alpha face down hostile takeovers and rival sleuths and was now watching him come undone over a voice.

Level ten. The scale only went to ten. The last time Reo had rated him above a seven was when Hana was at her worst.

During the break, he found himself beside her. Not a decision. His body moved toward Nari the way it moved toward heat in winter—automatic, drawn, seeking. She was standing near the doorway, phone in hand, radiating the particularenergy of a woman who had performed brilliantly and was now processing information she hadn’t expected.

He caught her scent for the first time at close range.

Jasmine. Bright citrus underneath. And beneath both, warm skin—the scent of a person who ran hot, who filled rooms, whose presence announced itself before she spoke. His bear’s nostrils flared. The animal cataloged the scent with the obsession of a creature that had found what it intended to remember for the rest of its life.

He’d talked to her about the performance because that was the professional thing to do. Mentioned the gate incantation—a detail that shouldn’t have caught his attention, except his attention was locked on everything she did, and the way she’d shaped those words had been distinctive. Ancient. Not written in any Voidborn document.

She quoted Celestial Ronin.

Reo’s reaction was instant and poorly concealed. The man who could maintain a neutral expression during a knife fight had gone rigid at a fictional quote about gate guardians. Dojin watched his best friend white-knuckle the armrest and blame it on strong hands, which was a lie so transparent, it would have been funny if Dojin hadn’t been dealing with his own crisis of composure six feet away.

We’re going to discuss the chair later. And the Celestial Ronin thing. And whatever it is you’re not telling me.

He walkedher to the lobby.

It was not normal CEO behavior.

Normal CEOs did not personally escort voice actresses to the elevator. Normal CEOs did not track a woman’s perfumethrough a hallway with the focus of a predator following a scent line. Normal CEOs did not notice that she walked with her weight on the balls of her feet—dancer’s training, he guessed—or that her laugh, when the receptionist gushed about Phantom Veil, landed low in her throat like a note from a cello.

Normal CEOs did not fight the overwhelming, biologically driven, deeply mortifying urge to offer a woman they’d met ninety minutes ago a meal.

She should eat. When did she last eat? The cab ride from Tribeca takes fifteen minutes, and she probably didn’t eat before the session because performers don’t eat heavy before booth work, and I should?—

He shut it down. Hard. The bear wanted to feed her. Not metaphor—literal, primal, the urge to put food in front of this woman and watch her eat it, and it had started during her performance and had not relented since.

You are not going to offer this woman a snack. She is a professional. You are a professional. Act like it.