Chapter 5 – Bells
BELLS
Iwake to the sound of alphas trying to kill each other.
Well. Not actually trying to kill each other.
Probably.
But the snarling coming from the kitchen is the kind of primal, guttural noise that makes my hindbrain pay attention even through three inches of reinforced door and whatever Rex lined these walls with.
I drag myself out of bed, shove my feet into the white bunny slippers Phoenix bought me at the hotel store, and shuffle toward the carnage.
"—was clearly labeled, you absolute fucking animal—"
"It was in a bag, Raf. An unmarked bag. In the back of the fridge. That's abandoned food. That's the law."
"The LAW?! There is no law! It had my NAME on it!"
"Where? Show me where your name was."
"On the receipt! Which was IN the bag!"
"Who reads receipts?"
"LITERATE PEOPLE, PHOENIX."
I round the corner to find Rafael squared up against Phoenix like they're about to throw hands over what appears to be an empty takeout container.
Raf's hair is wild, his tank top riding up on one side.
Phoenix is barefoot with his sweatpants slung low over his padded waist and nothing else, holding his ground with the calm confidence of someone who knows he has at least eighty pounds on his opponent.
An empty sushi container sits on the counter between them like evidence at a crime scene.
"It was stale," Phoenix says mildly.
"Good enough for you to eat all of it! There's nothing else in the fucking fridge!"
They're both bristling, shoulders wide, braced for an actual fight. On anyone else it'd be terrifying. On these two, it's like watching golden retrievers fight over a tennis ball.
"Can you two stop before you start fucking on the kitchen counter?" I say flatly. "Just get more sushi tonight. Hell, for lunch, even."
The blush starts at Rafael's neck and races up to his hairline so fast I'm slightly concerned he might actually be having a medical event.
Phoenix just barks out a booming laugh. "Yeah, Raf."
He's already crossing the kitchen to greet me. He cups my face in his big warm hands, strokes his thumbs over my cheekbones, and stoops to press his lips to mine. I wrap my arms around his thick waist and happily return the kiss.
"Traitor," Rafael mutters at me from behind the counter.
Phoenix releases me and goes back to the coffee maker like nothing happened, but he's grinning from ear to ear.
Rafael is still beet red, aggressively not looking at either of us, pretending to clean the counter with a paper towel that's disintegrating because none of the alphas in this house know what the good brands are.
I open the fridge.
And stare.
To be fair to Raf, it is a graveyard in here. Three takeout containers of indeterminate age and origin. A cardboard container of energy drinks with only one left. A potato. Or maybe it's an old lime.
And snacks.
So many snacks I don't even know where to start.
"When's the last time anyone went grocery shopping?" I ask.
Silence.
"And I mean actual grocery shopping," I clarify. "Not a convenience store run for chips. Which don't belong in the fridge, by the way."
More silence.
Phoenix scratches the back of his neck. "We, uh, order in a lot."
"A lot," Rafael echoes.
I close the fridge. Open the freezer. Two bags of frozen pizza rolls and a bottle of vodka.
"Don't you cook?" I ask Phoenix.
"When I have time," Phoenix says with a nervous laugh. "Been… uh… busy."
He looks at both me and Raf when he says that.
If I thought Raf was turning red before…
I close the freezer. "We're going to the store."
"Right now?" Phoenix perks up like I just suggested a trip to Six Flags.
"Right now. I'm making a list."
I'm already pulling open drawers, looking for paper. I find a pad of Post-its shaped like skulls—Raf's, definitely—and a pen. Okay, so the ink is gel and the exact color of blood, and now I'm noticing it's topped by a tiny rubber bat with floppy wings, but whatever.
"I'll drive," Phoenix volunteers immediately.
Raf leans against the counter, arms crossed. "I'll come too."
Phoenix raises his eyebrows at Raf. "Have you even been to a grocery store? Like, inside one? You know it isn't Hot Topic, right?"
Raf narrows his eyes at Phoenix. "Yes."
Forty minutes later, I'm standing in the entrance of a Trader Joe's, wearing my full disguise plus a baseball cap pulled low and flanked by two alphas in the same disguises they wore to the coffee shop.
A cart is squeaking somewhere and Raf is looking around with his eyes narrowed in concentration like he's never heard that sound in his life.
I'm now very sure this alpha has never seen the inside of a grocery store.
I pull my list from my hoodie pocket.
Three pages of skull-shaped Post-its, front and back, written in my neatest handwriting that's… drippy, and I'm trying to hold out hope that wasn't actual blood in the pen.
Vegetables. Proteins. Grains. Dairy. Spices. Cleaning supplies. Ice cream, which has been squeezed in between cleaning supplies and spices in Phoenix's handwriting. His giant hands are surprisingly capable of writing in teeny-tiny font.
The basics of a functional kitchen that hasn't been fed exclusively through DoorDash.
And I have the fucking butterflies again.
This is stupid. It's grocery shopping. It shouldn't feel like anything.
But it does.
For years, my inner omega has been locked in a box. Sedated, suppressed, shoved down so deep I forgot what she even wanted.
And what she wanted was this.
Not just the nesting and the scent-matching and the sex—although, yeah, those—but the small stuff. The domestic stuff. Making a home. Giving a shit about whether the people around me are eating more than frozen pizza rolls.
Can we cook? No.
Does that stop her from wanting to try? Also no.
I grab a cart.
"Produce first," I announce, steering us left past a display of pumpkin-flavored everything. "We're working clockwise."
"Clockwise?" Raf echoes like I just said we're navigating by the stars.
"It's a system. We need a system or we'll be in here forever."
Phoenix falls into step on my right, hands shoved in his cardigan pockets, fake glasses sliding down his nose. He's scanning the store with the same vigilance he used at the coffee shop, but there's a looseness to his shoulders that wasn't there before.
He's enjoying this.
Raf takes my left flank, pushing the cart with one hand and trying to be cool about it.
In a fucking Trader Joe's.
"Okay." I stop in front of the vegetables. "Ginger, spinach, sweet potatoes, bell peppers, garlic, dill, oregano, onions, broccoli…"
"We don't need broccoli," Raf says.
"We do."
"But do we need need it, or—"
"Rafael." I turn to face him fully. "You had chips in the fridge. Chips. In the refrigerator. Just put the broccoli in the cart. Pick a good one. And then grab a net of garlic that looks fresh. Unless you're an actual vampire."
That'll keep him busy.
When I make my way to the fruits, Phoenix's hand lands on my shoulder. Not hard, but firm. The universal signal for stop moving right now.
"Two o'clock," he murmurs. "Guy in the green jacket. Paparazzi. We don't get them often, but he's a dickhead."
I don't turn. Don't look. Just shift my weight slightly so I can see in my peripheral vision.
Green jacket. Baseball cap. Phone out, but angled weirdly, more toward us than toward the screen. And he's not moving. Just standing at the end of the aisle, pretending to read the back of a box of Cheerios while his eyes flick in our direction.
"Behind me," Phoenix says quietly, already angling his massive frame between me and the guy. "Act normal."
Raf abandons the cart and closes in on my other side, and suddenly I'm sandwiched between two disguised alphas in the cereal aisle of a Trader Joe's, pressed flat between a wall of granola and Phoenix.
"This is far from normal," I mutter, trying to squeeze past him because neither of these alphas know how the fuck to hide.
My elbow catches him in the gut.
The woof of a wheeze that comes out of this giant alpha is indistinguishable from a startled Saint Bernard. A woman with a toddler in her cart turns to stare. Raf's hand flies to his mouth and he chomps down on his own palm, choking on laughter.
I press my face into his chest to muffle the sound of my own cracking up and bite my tongue so hard I taste copper.
The paparazzi guy shifts his weight.
Glances at his phone.
Glances at us.
Then he puts the Cheerios back on the shelf and walks away.
I wait a full thirty seconds before peeking out from behind Phoenix's cardigan.
"Did that actually work?" I whisper.
Phoenix's chest is still shaking with suppressed laughter under my palms. "I think so?"
"Nobody," Raf says, pulling himself together with visible effort, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, "would suspect Vespyr acts like fucking dumbasses in a Trader Joe's. That's our superpower. We're too stupid to be famous."
"Speak for yourself," Phoenix snorts.
"You're the himbo here. Right, Bells?"
I hesitate and bite my lip because honestly, they're both dorks.
I kind of love it.
I somehow extract myself from the alpha sandwich and smooth down my hoodie, trying to look like a normal person who was not just hiding from a photographer.
"Okay." I blow out a breath. "Cart. Clockwise. Let's go."
We recover.
By the time we hit the dairy section, things have settled into something resembling a rhythm.
I read from the list. Phoenix grabs things from high shelves without being asked because he's the tallest of the three of us.
Raf pushes the cart and asks questions about every third item like he's studying for an exam.
"Why do we need two kinds of cheese?"
"Because cheddar and parmesan are different things, Raf."
"They're both cheese."
"And you're both an alpha and wrong."
Phoenix snorts.
Raf flips me off but puts both cheeses in the cart.
We round the corner into the drinks aisle and Phoenix stops dead.
"Holy shit."
I nearly crash the cart into his legs. "What?"
He's staring at the top shelf like he's found the Holy Grail.
I crane my neck. Dark burgundy bottles lined up in a neat row, maybe eight or nine of them, with a label featuring a dragonfruit split open in cross-section.
"Rex lives on these," Phoenix says, already reaching up with both hands. "They're meal replacement shakes. They stopped carrying them at the place near the studio six months ago. He orders them online but they're always running out."
He's pulling bottles off the shelf with sudden urgency, like someone might take them from him.
"All of them?" Raf confirms, grabbing the others.
"All of them."
The two alphas load them carefully into the cart, rearranging the existing groceries to make room.
There's a lump in my throat all of a sudden, and I add the immediate gathering of shakes for Rex to my mental inventory of things I'm learning about these alphas.
Phoenix and Raf are good alphas.
Genuinely good alphas.
And I think Rex might be, too, buried somewhere beneath all the self-loathing and rage.
We check out. Phoenix pays before Raf or I can argue about it. He's already swiped his card by the time Raf pulls out his wallet, and the look Phoenix gives him is so smug that Raf threatens to key his car.
The drive home is loud. Raf rides shotgun and controls the aux cord, which is half fucking glorious, half torture that has Phoenix and me begging him to turn it off. His music taste is an unhinged grab bag.
We haul the bags upstairs. Phoenix and Raf unload while I organize, because left to their own devices, these two would shove canned goods in with the frozen stuff and call it a day.
And I have the evidence for it.
Eggs on the second shelf. Vegetables in the crisper. Cheeses in the dairy drawer—yes, both cheeses, Raf, and Phoenix, did you add four more? Spices lined up on the counter because the cabinet above the stove is full of protein powder. Cleaning supplies under the sink.
Rex's shakes go on the middle shelf of the fridge, front and center, where he can't miss them.
I tear off one of the skull Post-its.
Pause.
Tap the bat-wing pen against my lip.
Then I write.
Found these at TJ's. Phoenix says they're hard to get so don't drink them all at once. — Bells
I stick it to the fridge at Rex's eye level just in case he doesn't go in there. I wouldn't blame him, either, considering the nearly empty state of it before we filled it with proper groceries.
I have to stand on my toes.
Rex eye level is high.
Phoenix watches me from the kitchen island, chin in his hand, expression soft in a way that makes me want to hurl a broccoli at his head so he stops looking at me like that.
"What?" I mutter.
He shakes his head, smiling. "Nothing."
It's not nothing.
But I let him have it.