His Voice Alone
Description
Leia Graham thought she escaped the darkness when she left her past behind. College was supposed to be a fresh start-a place to breathe, to forget the boy with blood on his hands and secrets in his silence. But when her stepbrother walks into her dorm, with eyes that never stopped watching her... she realizes the past didn't die. It followed her. Ezra Graham is deaf, brilliant, and adored by everyone-until the doors close. Because beneath the perfect facade is a man who doesn't need sound to dominate a room. A man who has stalked, planned, and manipulated every step to make sure Leia ends up right where he wants her: beneath him, marked, and broken open by the one thing she can't resist. His voice. He speaks only to her. In the dark. In her bed. And the more he whispers, the more she unravels. It's wrong. Taboo. Twisted. He's her stepbrother. But what scares Leia most isn't Ezra's obsession-it's how badly she wants to be his.
Chapter 1
Jul 10, 2025
Leia’s POV
*Three Years Ago*
The window was cold against my forehead, but I didn't move. Because apparently, I'm a masochist who enjoys the sharp bite of glass against skin.
Outside, the driveway sat empty and pristine, like everything else in this house—waiting for someone to come along and mess up the perfect suburban tableau.
The Grahams' house always felt like that. Quiet. Too clean. Like we were all living in some IKEA showroom where actual human emotions weren't allowed to leave fingerprints on the furniture.
Nothing out of place, no warmth either. Just beige walls and matching beige personalities.
Two and a half years I've been here since they adopted me. Long enough to master the art of being the perfect little poster child they ordered from the foster care catalog.
They weren't cruel—I'll give them that much credit. Just... distracted. Like I was background music they occasionally remembered to turn up when company came over.
They wanted good reports, not real conversations. Straight A's, not actual thoughts.
I gave them what they wanted because I'm nothing if not efficient: perfect grades, zero backtalk, polite smiles that never reached my eyes when their book club friends visited to coo over their charitable good deed.
But today? Today felt different, and not in the ‘oh wow, maybe I'll finally feel like I belong somewhere’ kind of way. More like the ‘someone's about to drop a nuclear bomb in my carefully constructed emotional bunker’ variety.
My stomach had been doing gymnastics since morning—not the graceful kind, more like a drunk toddler attempting a backflip. They were bringing someone home.
Someone they'd mentioned in those careful, euphemistic tones that adults use when they're trying to make disaster sound like opportunity.
"Troubled but brilliant," they'd said. From a juvenile program. A boy who needed "the right structure."
Translation: another broken kid they could fix up and frame for the next dinner party conversation.
Look how wonderful we are, taking in not one but TWO damaged children. We're practically saints.
I didn't want anyone new.
Didn't want a brother, especially not another project for the Grahams to perfect. I barely felt like I existed here as it was—sharing space with someone else felt about as appealing as sharing a coffin.
But life has this charming habit of not giving a shit about what I want.
I pulled my sleeves over my hands, a nervous habit I'd never managed to shake. That's when the memory hit me like a freight train with abandonment issues.
Ezra.
The orphanage had been a special kind of hell—gray walls that seemed to absorb hope, food that tasted like cardboard's disappointing cousin, and kids who were always angry because anger was safer than sadness. But Ezra had made it bearable, somehow.
We were just kids then. I was ten, drowning in hand-me-downs and the certainty that nobody would ever want me. He was eleven, deaf and quiet, but he'd look at me like I was more than just another file collecting dust in some social worker's cabinet.
Like I was real, like I mattered.
He never reacted when the other kids mocked him for being different. Never flinched when they made cruel jokes about his hearing. Just watched everything with those dark eyes that seemed to see straight through people's bullshit.
Until that day when I was twelve.
One of the older boys—Jake something, with breath like a garbage disposal and hands that didn't understand the word "no"—cornered me in the hallway. Too close, grabbing at me, trying to kiss me, laughing when I tried to push him off like it was all some hilarious game.
I froze. Because that's what I did back then—turned into a statue and hoped the bad things would just pass me by.
Then Jake's body hit the wall so hard I swear I heard something crack.
Ezra was on him in a flash, all fists and fury and protective rage that came from somewhere deeper than words could reach. The older boy cried—actually cried—while the adults screamed and pulled them apart.
But Ezra kept his eyes on me the whole time, completely unshaken, like he'd just taken out the trash instead of nearly hospitalizing someone.
They dragged him away that same day. No warning, no goodbye, no forwarding address. Just gone, like he'd never existed at all.
That was four years ago. Four years of trying to forget a face that was apparently tattooed on the inside of my eyelids.
Tires crunched on gravel, snapping me back to reality with all the gentleness of a slap. I turned toward the door, already preparing my best "grateful adopted daughter" performance.
The Grahams walked in first, wearing matching smiles that were somehow too wide and too fake at the same time. Behind them, a figure followed—tall, broad shoulders, hood up, hands shoved deep in his pockets like he was trying to disappear into his own clothes.
He didn't look at me. Smart move, honestly.
"Leia, sweetheart," Mrs. Graham chirped in that voice she used when she wanted to sound maternal but just came off condescending. "Come say hello to—"
His hood slipped off and I stopped breathing.
Curly blonde hair, face sharper than I remembered, cheekbones that could cut glass. But the eyes—those same dark eyes that had haunted my dreams and my waking hours for four fucking years.
Ezra.
My heart didn't just stop—it performed an entire death scene worthy of Shakespeare. I knew him instantly, like my soul had been carrying around his missing person poster this entire time.
The years had changed him, made him harder somehow, quieter in a way that suggested he didn't need to speak to get what he wanted. Dangerous quiet.
He looked at me, and I swear the floor just evaporated.
"Leia," Mr. Graham prompted again, probably wondering why his usually well-behaved daughter had suddenly turned into a malfunctioning robot.
I couldn't answer. My mouth had apparently forgotten its primary function.
Ezra didn't speak either. Of course he didn't. He never had to.
"He doesn't talk much, poor thing," Mrs. Graham murmured with that pitying tone she used for broken appliances and wounded birds.
I wanted to scream, because Ezra did speak. Just not to them. Never to people who didn't matter.
He raised his hand slowly, deliberately, and signed: ‘Missed you, firefly.’
My chest caved in completely.
That name. No one had called me that in years. It belonged to another version of me, another life where Ezra was the only person who saw me as something worth protecting.
And now he was here, standing in my sterile suburban prison, calm as ever, with that same storm still flickering behind his eyes.
The boy who once beat someone half to death for touching me.
His Voice Alone
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