Page 38 of The Beautiful Ones

Every conversation behind me had stopped. My mother stood beside Octavia's chair with one hand pressed to her breast. Lucien stared at me openly. Warren's face had gone slack with disbelief.

I touched my throat again.

The voice had been mine. I had felt it leave me, yet it belonged to a self I had never met.

“Cécile,” Mother whispered.

Adrian did not look surprised.

“Again,” he said.

I played the passage once more. The first word came more easily. A second phrase followed it, then a third, each one rising without struggle. My shoulders loosened. My chin lifted. The cruel pauses that governed my speech found no purchase in the melody.

For those few measures, I did not have to force my way into the world.

The world opened and received me.

When the final note faded, no one moved.

Then Mother hurried toward me.

“Do it again,” she demanded. Wonder and calculation had already begun struggling across her face. “Cécile, sing the entire passage.”

The old fear returned at the command. My throat tightened.

Adrian stepped between us—not enough to cause offense, only enough to interrupt her path.

“She has given us what she wished to give,” he said.

Mother stared at him.

No one had ever told her that something belonging to me could be withheld from her.

I should have been embarrassed by the attention. Instead, exhilaration moved through me so fiercely that I could scarcely remain seated. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to run into the garden. I wanted to seize Elin's hands and show her what had been waiting inside me all these years.

Adrian turned back to me.

His expression had softened, though the stillness in his eyes remained unfathomable.

“There you are,” he said.

The words entered me more deeply than praise.

The doorway behind him darkened.

Elin stood there, one hand gripping the frame.

Her face was colorless. Damp strands of pale hair clung to her temples, but she was trembling as though she had walked in from a Swedish winter. A dark wet mark spread across the front of her dress where the copper pitcher must have spilled.

I rose so quickly that the bench scraped the floor.

“E-Elin?”

She crossed the room without looking at anyone except Adrian. When she reached me, her fingers closed around my wrist.

They were painfully cold.

“Come with me,” she whispered.