"Good evening, night owls. This is Venus Ascending, your goddess of the airwaves, broadcasting live from somewhere the corps can't find me. Tonight's theme is hunger. The things we crave in the dark. The desires we're too afraid to name. So lean in close, beautiful people, and let me whisper you to sleep..."
I've listened to her every night for five years.
Her voice is honey and smoke, silk and sin—the kind of voice that slides into your brain and rewires something fundamental. She plays music the corps have banned. Reads poetry that would get you arrested in the upper districts. Tells stories about the old world, before the Collapse, when the sky was blue and people could afford to dream.
I don't know her real name. No one does. She's Venus Ascending, ghost of the Neo-Chicago airwaves, broadcasting on frequencies that shift every night to stay ahead of the censors.
I've been obsessed with her since I was seventeen.
Now I'm twenty-two, and I've finally found her.
The tracking took three years.
Signal analysis, pattern recognition, the slow patient work of triangulating her broadcasts to narrower and narrower areas. I'm good with tech—one of the best in the Undercity, if I'm being honest—and I poured every skill I had into this single obsession.
Her studio is in the basement of an abandoned warehouse in the old industrial district. I find it on a Tuesday night, while her voice crackles through my earpiece and the building looms dark above me.
"There's a listener out there tonight," she's saying. "Someone who's been looking for me. I can feel you, sweetheart. Getting closer every day. I wonder what you'll do when you find me."
She knows.
Somehow, she knows.
I should be scared. A woman who's evaded corp hunters for fifteen years—she could have security systems, traps, weapons. She could disappear before I ever see her face.
Instead, I walk straight toward the building.
I've waited too long to stop now.
The basement is smaller than I imagined.
Banks of audio equipment line the walls, all salvaged and jury-rigged, held together with duct tape and genius. Soft red light glows from a dozen different sources. And there, behind the microphone, headphones around her neck, is Venus Ascending.
She's not what I expected.
Or maybe she's exactly what I expected—the body that matches the voice. She's large, abundantly so, curves spilling over the edges of her chair in ways that make my mouth go dry. Her skin is a warm olive, her hair a wild mane of dark curls streaked with silver, her face round and beautiful and older than I'd imagined. Forty, maybe. Maybe more.
She's wearing a silk robe that barely contains her, and she's watching me with eyes that glitter in the red light.
"Well, well," she says. Her voice is even better in person—richer, deeper, wrapping around me like velvet. "The hunter becomes the hunted."
"I'm not here to hurt you."
"I know." She leans back in her chair, and the robe shifts, revealing the thick column of her throat, the deep shadow of her cleavage. "If you were, you'd be dead already. I have seventeen different security measures in this building. You tripped every single one."
"Then why did you let me in?"
"Because I wanted to see what my most devoted listener looked like." Her smile is slow, knowing. "You've been tracking me for three years, baby. You think I didn't notice? I've been watching you right back."
My pulse hammers. "You know who I am?"
"I know you're twenty-two. I know you work as a tech runner for the Vasquez Syndicate. I know you live alone, don't sleep enough, and have listened to every single one of my broadcasts for the last five years." She tilts her head. "The question is: what do you want?"
I stand there, in the red-lit basement of a pirate radio station, facing the woman whose voice has lived in my head for half a decade.
"You," I say. "I want you."
She laughs. It's warm, rich, absolutely devastating.
"Baby," she says, "I'm forty-two years old. I've got twenty years and a hundred pounds on you. Are you sure you know what you're asking for?"
"I've never been more sure of anything."
Her name is Marisol.
She tells me while we're sitting in her broadcast booth, sharing a bottle of whiskey that's probably older than I am. She tells me how she started pirating signals during the Second Corporate War, when the corps cut off all independent media. How she's been the voice of the underground ever since.
"I'm not glamorous," she says. "I'm not young. I'm not what boys your age are supposed to want."
"You're all I've ever wanted."
"You don't even know me."
"I know your voice." I set down my glass. "I know the way you laugh when you play a song that makes you happy. I know the stories you tell when you think everyone's stopped listening. I know the woman behind the microphone, even if I'm just now seeing her face."
She studies me for a long moment.
"You're serious," she says.
"I've spent three years tracking you. I could have given up a hundred times. I didn't."
"Why?"
"Because when I listen to you, I feel like I'm home." I lean forward, let her see everything in my face—the hunger, the devotion, the years of building this moment in my head. "I don't care how old you are. I don't care what you look like. I've been in love with your voice since I was seventeen, and now that I've seen the rest of you—"
"What?" Her voice is low. Dangerous.
"You're even more beautiful than I imagined."
She kisses me first.
I'm not ashamed to admit it. She stands up from her chair—all of her, God, there's so much of her—and crosses to where I'm sitting and takes my face in her hands and kisses me like she's been waiting for this too.
She tastes like whiskey and secrets.
"This is a terrible idea," she breathes against my mouth.
"I know."
"You're half my age."
"I know."
"I'm old enough to be your—"
I pull her onto my lap.
It takes some maneuvering—she's not small, and I'm not particularly large—but we make it work. Her weight settles against me, warm and soft and heavy in a way that makes something primal ignite in my chest.
"Do you want to stop?" I ask.
She answers by grinding against me.
We don't make it out of the broadcast booth.
I strip her out of that silk robe with shaking hands, revealing more and more of her—heavy breasts with dark nipples, the soft round of her belly, the thick spread of her hips. Every inch of her is gorgeous. Every inch of her is hers, worn with the confidence of a woman who's spent forty-two years learning to love her body.
I worship at the altar.
I kiss my way down her neck, her chest, bury my face between breasts that could suffocate a man if she wanted. She moans—that voice, God, that voice—and fists her hands in my hair.
"You don't know what you're doing to me," she gasps.
"Show me."
She shows me.
She guides my hands where she wants them. Tells me—in that honey-smoke voice—exactly how to touch her. Harder. Slower. Right there, baby, don't stop. I follow every instruction like it's scripture.
When she comes, she sounds exactly like I imagined.
Better.
We fuck on the floor of her studio.
She rides me—thick thighs clamped around my hips, her weight pinning me down, that incredible body moving above me like something out of a dream. I can barely think, barely breathe, overwhelmed by sensation and scent and the reality of her.
"Look at me," she commands.
I look.
She's glowing in the red light, sweat gleaming on her skin, her hair a wild halo around her face. She looks like a goddess. She looks like everything I've ever wanted.
"You're mine now," she says. "You understand that? You tracked me down, you wanted me, you got me—but that means you're mine. No one else."
"Yours," I gasp. "Only yours."
"Say my name."
"Marisol. Marisol—"
She clenches around me, and I shatter.
After, we lie tangled on a pile of blankets she keeps for exactly this purpose.
"How many times has this happened?" I ask, tracing patterns on her skin.
"This?" She laughs. "Never. You're the first one to actually find me."
"Then why were you prepared?"
"Because a girl can dream." She props herself up to look at me, and her eyes are soft in the red light. "I've been doing this for fifteen years. Talking into a microphone every night, knowing people were listening, never knowing who. I used to fantasize about someone caring enough to look for me. To want the woman behind the voice."
"And now?"
"Now I'm terrified." She traces my jaw with one finger. "You're too young. Too beautiful. You could have anyone you wanted."
"I want you."
"You've known me for one night."
"I've known you for five years." I pull her closer. "Every story you've told. Every song you've played. Every night you stayed on the air when it would have been safer to stay quiet. That's who you are, Marisol. And that's who I'm in love with."
She's quiet for a long moment.
Then she leans down and kisses me—soft, slow, like she's finally letting herself believe.
"Stay," she whispers.
"Forever."
"You can't promise that."
"Watch me."
I move into the warehouse that week.
I keep working for the Vasquez Syndicate—they don't ask questions, and the money's good. But every night, I come home to Marisol. To the red-lit studio, the whiskey, the woman whose voice has been the soundtrack of my life.
I learn her routines. The pre-show rituals, the post-broadcast exhaustion, the way she hums while making coffee at 3 AM. I learn what makes her laugh and what makes her cry and exactly what to do to make her scream.
And every night, I listen.
Not through a signal anymore—I'm right there, in the booth, watching her lips move against the microphone while she seduces an entire city with her voice.
"Good evening, night owls. This is Venus Ascending, your goddess of the airwaves. Tonight's theme is devotion. The ones who find us in the dark. The ones who stay."
She looks at me when she says it.
I stay.
"You really love me," she says one night, months later. It's not a question anymore.
"From the first moment I heard you."
"I'm getting older. My body's not going to get any smaller. My hair's going to get greyer. Eventually—"
"Eventually I'll be old too." I pull her closer, press my lips to her silver-streaked hair. "And I'll still be here. Still listening. Still worshipping at this altar."
"You're insane."
"I'm devoted." I tilt her face up, look into eyes that have seen forty-two years of a cruel world and somehow stayed soft. "You spent fifteen years being a voice in the dark, Marisol. A mystery. A fantasy. But you're real. You're here. And you're exactly—exactly—what I want."
She kisses me.
And somewhere in Neo-Chicago, a pirate radio signal crackles to life, and a voice like honey and smoke tells a city of night owls that love is still possible, even in the ruins.
That someone is always listening.
That the right one will find you, eventually.
"Goodnight, beautiful people. This is Venus Ascending, signing off. And to my devoted listener—the one who found me—thank you. For everything. I'll see you when the sun goes down."
I turn off the broadcast.
And I spend the rest of the night showing her exactly what devotion looks like.