“Why?” A harsh demand. “You were fine before.”

“Before?” She laughed, the sound fractured but holding a humor he’d taught her to feel. “Before, I was opening my door to an alpha bear and having conversations with him when I should’ve called security.” Instead, part of her had waited for that heavy knock. “A truly Silent individual wouldn’t have interacted with you as I did, wouldn’t have thought about you when you didn’t show up for a few weeks.”

“I was trying to play hard to get,” Valentin said, turning his head to bite at her fingers, as bad-tempered as the grizzlies he’d maligned. “You’re telling me your Silence was breaking down before you made the conscious decision to try a life without Silence?”

She nodded. “The Honeycomb changed everything.” The empaths had created the network to keep the PsyNet alive, keep Psy from going insane. But— “It’s a product of naked emotion.”

“Can you cut yourself loose?”

“Yes.” Silver had already considered how it could be done. “I’d risk madness, but that could be managed by short bursts of contact with the Honeycomb—only I think it’s too late.” The fractures in that brick wall could no longer be repaired.

She had tried already in an effort to disprove her dark theory, only to have all her attempts fail. “Taking into account all I know of audio telepathy,” she told this bear who was a gift she’d never expected, “the disintegration of my audio shields appears to be a genetic inevitability.”

“Your research could be wrong.”

Silver had never wanted to be wrong so much in her life. “Even before Silence fell, my shields were starting to crack under the weight of the avalanche of sound my mind is built to hear.”

To hear, not to survive.

“I just didn’t see the cracks until the sound levels reached a critical point.” There was no other explanation for the depth of the damage to her shields—it hadn’t happened over weeks or even months. “The Honeycomb accelerated the effect, but only by a matter of weeks. My shields were always going to fail.”

Valentin pushed off her, got off the bed. He strode around the room, proud in his nakedness. When he slammed his hands against the wall, it was with a cascade of curses that turned the air blue.

His fury was an untamed, beautiful thing. Like him.

Eyes wild, his hair whipping around his face, he strode to her, hauled her up onto her knees on the bed.

• • •

CLASPING Silver’s head in his hands, the moonlight of her hair tumbling over his big rough hands, Valentin roared at her. She didn’t flinch, not Silver Fucking Mercant. His mate. His tough, proud mate.

Who would die if they didn’t figure out a way to shut off the increasing scream in her head.

“There must be a way.”

Silver closed her hands over his wrists. “I’ve thought of everything.”

Valentin wasn’t used to thinking about the brain in such ways, but he wasn’t stupid. He could learn new things. And maybe an outsider could see options Silver couldn’t. She was brilliant, but she’d been raised in a certain way, taught certain things. “If you don’t feel, if your brain literally can’t feel, could you rebuild your shielding?”

Silver’s eyes grew darker in thought. “If I actually didn’t feel, there would be no need for the shielding. Audio telepathy is tightly linked to emotion, remember? That’s why it continued to exist in Silence—we always had the capacity for emotion, even if we trained ourselves not to respond to it.”

Valentin squeezed his eyes shut, his bear trying to make sense of a wholly unfamiliar world. Think, Valentin. He snapped open his eyes. “Is it possible to physically stop your brain from processing emotion?” He hated that he was talking about maiming her, but damn it, if it would keep her alive, he’d consider anything.

“If that were possible,” Silver said with no hint of anger, her tone gentle in a way he’d never heard from her, “the Psy Council would’ve done it long ago.”

The Psy Council.

A chip to force Silence on the biological level.

Valentin’s heart thundered.

“The scientist who mated with a leopard in Lucas Hunter’s pack.” A woman with startling blue-gray eyes against skin of deepest brown, her hair a wild mass of near-black curls. “She did that public broadcast.” An act of rebellion that had further pushed Silence closer to collapse. “She talked about the Council wanting to use a chip to make people Silent.”

Silver sat up straighter on her knees, the sadness fading from her face to be replaced by acute concentration. “Ashaya Aleine?” Her tone was better now, more his smart, strong Starlichka.

“Yes, her. Have you ever talked to her about your audio telepathy?”

“No, but my grandmother was able to get access to data about the chip. It wasn’t designed to fix an error in the brain—it was designed to suffocate normal emotion and create a hive mind.”

Valentin could see her struggling to find a way to explain.

“It’s . . . like a sphere designed to perfectly encompass a flower. A construction of exquisitely precise detail,” she said at last. “But if the flower is shaped differently, if it has longer petals or is misshapen, the sphere will no longer be able to enclose it without damage. It might cut petals in half or crush a critical part.”

“Tell me you didn’t just call yourself misshapen.” Fury had him glaring at her.

Silver raised an eyebrow, every inch the queen. “I am perfectly shaped, Alpha Nikolaev.”

Grinning, he kissed the life out of her, tumbling her back into the bed so he was braced over her. “That’s my Starlight.”

Frost in her expression, but she touched him with possessive hands, pushing his hair back from his face in a way that made his bear smug. “I have no problem with who I am,” she said. “I am made up of all parts of me, and they are all critical to Silver Fucking Mercant.”

His bear adored her. The man loved her beyond bearing.

“I was simply attempting to explain why a chip designed for ninety-nine percent of minds may not function on the one percent who don’t fit the mold of what is considered normal.”

Valentin got what she was saying, but he also understood another critical factor. “Mercants are all about secrets, right?”

“That’s a fair enough estimation.” Her tone was slightly suspicious.

It made his grin widen—bear mates often got that tone in their voices. “So I know, moyo solnyshko, that you’ve never considered asking Dr. Aleine if she could modify her original chip to work on your brain.” He saw from her face that he’d hit the bull’s-eye. “Doing that would’ve exposed a Mercant vulnerability, and Mercants don’t expose anything if they can help it.”

“Again, for a bear alpha who disavows an interest in politics, you have an acute grasp of it.”

He bit at her jaw. “Stop being mean.”

She laughed. Starlight actually laughed. It was short and cut off almost at once, her hand at her mouth. But he’d heard, and it was the most beautiful sound in the universe. “Do that again,” he whispered.

Eyes wide, she said, “Did I laugh?”

“You’re a goddess when you laugh.” Hell, she was stunning no matter what, but when she laughed he felt as if he could conquer the world.