Chapter 29 – Rex
REX
Tonight's performance is in a fucking opera house.
Because of course it is. Carmine hasn't stopped running his mouth about things like beauty and the beasts—as if there's anything remotely beastly about Raf and Phoenix, unless a golden retriever counts as a beast—and gothic romance.
Every single ticket sold out in under four minutes.
Carmine told me that an hour ago like it was supposed to make me feel better. Like knowing thousands of people are packed into seats specifically to watch my mask get ripped off my face would calm me down.
Knock knock knock.
"It's me," Phoenix says through the dressing room door. "And Raf. And food."
I don't respond.
The door opens anyway.
Phoenix fills the doorframe. Gray henley, black jeans, his blond mane pulled back in a low knot that's already coming undone.
His mask—masquerade-style and crow-like, with the outer resin feathers shimmering with gold, silver, and crimson paint to call back to his name—is on the side of his head.
He's carrying a tray of snacks and drinks.
Behind him, Raf ducks in with a garment bag.
"Forty-five minutes," Phoenix says, setting the shakes on the folding table. "House is full. Carmine's doing a final walkthrough with the lighting crew."
"Stage manager wants to run comms check in twenty," Raf adds, hanging the garment bag on the rack.
He unzips it to reveal my stage outfit. Black shirt with a high collar, black pants, black jacket with silver hardware.
All of it selected by Carmine's stylist, all of it designed to make the unmasking moment as visually dramatic as possible.
Black body, white skull.
Gothic romance.
Phantom of the fucking Opera.
I want to throw up.
"You eat yet?" Phoenix asks.
"No."
He sets a shake in front of me without comment. The dragonfruit one. My preferred flavor, which he knows because he commented on it once as if it was a surprise I would like a "cute fruit" and I got pissed, and he remembered.
Now the psychotic pink color reminds me of Bells, and I hate that the similarity makes me like it more.
"Thanks," I mutter, because knotting Bells broke my brain and I haven't been able to muster up half the usual bitterness and anger since.
Every ounce of rage has been redirected to the shithead that dropped roses off at the studio. There hasn't been anything since, and none of us has brought it up around Bells because she obviously doesn't want to talk about it, or she would.
Raf drops into the other folding chair, kicks his feet up on the table, and starts rolling a pick across his knuckles. He's already in stage clothes with his black button-down open at the collar, sleeves rolled past his forearms to display the kraken tattoo writhing on his bronze skin.
He and Phoenix kick off their usual lovers' quarrel as they get dressed and I get up to grab my garment bag. I slip behind a curtain and take extra time putting on my stage clothes to give myself a few extra minutes of silence.
I'm fucking stressed.
Then I come out and Bells is there and nothing fucking matters anymore.
I've lost my goddamn mind.
She's in stage clothes already. Tight white jeans, white t-shirt under an unzipped even whiter leather jacket, blood red combat boots. The rabbit mask is pushed up on her forehead like sunglasses, her white hair swept back from it. She trimmed it for the show.
She looks at me.
I look at her.
Phoenix and Raf might as well be furniture.
She crosses the room like she owns it. Which she does, basically. Owns the room, owns the stage, owns the three alphas in it whether we signed up for that or not.
"Scoot," she says.
I don't scoot. There's nowhere to scoot to. I'm in a folding chair in a concrete box.
She drops into my lap anyway, swings her legs over the arm of the chair, hooks one arm around my neck, and settles her weight against my chest like this is a thing we do.
Like this is normal.
My entire body goes rigid.
"Bells—"
"Shh." She presses her face into the curve of my neck, her forehead warm against the edge of my jaw below the mask. "Recharging."
"You're not a fucking phone."
"Boop." She taps my chest with one finger. "Plugged in. Charging. Do not disturb."
Phoenix is grinning so wide I can count his teeth.
I shoot him a look that should flay the skin off his bones.
He keeps grinning.
Raf leans back in his chair, the front legs lifting off the concrete, his dark eyes tracking between Bells and me with the lazy satisfaction of a man watching a nature documentary.
"Adorable," he says.
"Fuck off," I growl.
Bells laughs and her fingers curl into the collar of my shirt.
She's warm.
She's always warm, and she weighs nothing, and her hair smells so good I refuse to let myself think about why. Refuse to let myself think about what she was going to tell me on that rooftop in the fog.
I slip my arm around her and she makes a satisfied little sound against my throat.
I hold her a little tighter.
"Remember the last time we played this venue?" Raf asks suddenly. "When Nash forgot his bass strap and used a fucking bathrobe belt?"
Phoenix laughs. "It tore off during the third song."
"His guitar dropped three feet mid-riff and he just…" Raf mimes catching something one-handed. "Snagged it. Didn't even miss a note."
"He missed a note," I say.
Both of them look at me.
I don't talk about Nash.
Not like this. Not casually. Not in the same sentence as laughter. Nash lives in a grave I visit alone and in notebooks I keep locked away and in the dark fucking space behind my ribs where everything good went to die.
But Bells is warm in my lap and Phoenix is looking at me with those stupid earnest blue eyes. And Raf is waiting, his pick frozen between two fingers.
"He missed the F sharp," I mutter. "Came in on the G instead. Covered it with a slide."
"Classic Nash," Phoenix says softly.
"Classic Nash," Raf echoes.
The silence that follows isn't heavy.
For once.
It's just... there. The three of us sitting with the ghost of the person who connected us, and for the first time in a long time, his presence doesn't feel like a knife in my chest.
It feels like an open hand.
Bells shifts on my lap. Her arm tightens around my neck.
She didn't know Nash, and she never will. But she's carrying the weight of his songs, and she carries it well enough that sometimes, when I'm having her run through all the songs she knows to figure out just how much of Nash was ripped off by her shithead "manager," I forget to be furious.
Phoenix breaks the quiet by pushing off the wall and snagging a meal replacement shake from the tray. He cracks it open, takes a swig, makes a face.
"How do you drink these?" he asks, reading the label. "This tastes like a box of chalk had sex with a mango."
"Don't drink my food."
"I'm taste-testing. For quality control." He holds the bottle out to me. "Speaking of which. You should eat something before we go on."
My jaw tightens.
Bells lifts her head from my neck. Her honey-gold eyes find mine, close enough that I can see the darker amber flecks near her pupils.
"Drink," she says.
"I'm fine."
"Rex." Her voice drops. "Thirty minutes until stage. You need fuel."
"I'll drink one after the show."
She takes the shake from Phoenix's outstretched hand, cracks open a new one from the tray—dragonfruit, either because she pays attention or because it's pink—and holds it up in front of my face.
I stare at it.
Then at her.
And back at the shake.
"Turn around," I tell Phoenix and Raf.
Phoenix opens his mouth.
"Turn around."
They turn, bitching the entire time.
Bells stays where she is. On my lap, arm around my neck, those honey eyes steady and patient and completely devoid of anything that looks like pity.
"You too," I growl.
"Nope."
"Bells—"
"I'm not watching. I'm looking at the ceiling. It's… uh… beautiful." She tilts her chin up and stares at the exposed pipes overhead and the spiderwebs all over them. "Wow. Fascinating ductwork. Is that copper? Could be copper."
I look up for some reason. "It's rust."
"It's copper."
I want to hate her.
I want to hate her so fucking much, and I can't, and that's the worst part.
I take the shake.
I tilt my head to the left, bringing the bottle to the working corner of my mouth. The first swallow is fine. The second dribbles slightly, a thin line of pink liquid tracking down the ruined right side of my jaw.
I swipe it away with the back of my hand and a low growl.
Bells is studying the ceiling. "Are you sure it's just rust?"
I roll my eyes and drink half the bottle in careful, angled sips. It takes longer than it should. Longer than it would for anyone with a normal fucking face. But my stomach stops clenching and the dizziness I didn't realize I had slowly recedes.
I set the bottle down.
"Done," I mutter.
"Was the ductwork copper or rusted?" Raf asks the door.
"Rusted," Bells confirms, almost sadly.
"Damn."
Phoenix turns back around first. His eyes drop to the half-empty shake on the table, then back to me. He doesn't say anything, but he looks pleased, which is more annoying than if he just ran his mouth about how I'm making progress again.
Bells's hand finds my jaw.
She turns my face toward hers. Those gold eyes, up close, are relentless.
"Do you want to practice the pull one more time?" she asks.
My whole body locks up.
The prosthetic skull is already applied. I put it on an hour ago, alone, in this room, with extra adhesive and my hands shaking so badly it took three attempts to get the adhesive strip aligned by feel alone because I still can't look in a fucking mirror.
The performance mask sits over it now, three magnets engaged, ready for the moment when Bells reaches up in front of countless people and cameras and—
"Rex?"
I realize I haven't answered.
Because I can't.
The words are trapped between my lungs and my throat, buried under the crushing weight of what's about to happen. Every time I think about the pull—the click-click-click, the mask leaving my face, the lights and the eyes and the—
"No," I manage.
Bells searches my face for a beat.
Whatever she finds there, she doesn't push.
"Okay," she says simply. "Then we don't."
She shifts on my lap, resettling, and presses a kiss to the exposed side of my jaw. Quick and light and gone before I can react to it and it still puts me into a stupor.
"We've got this," she says. Not to me specifically. To the room.
"Damn right we do," Raf says, standing up and cracking his neck. He slaps his hands together once—sharp, loud, percussive—and the energy in the room shifts. Goes taut. Goes live.
Phoenix rolls his shoulders. Twists his wrists. The warm, patient ray of sunshine disappears and the alpha drummer takes over.
The bass thrum of the crowd is already bleeding through the walls. Thousands of voices creating a low, formless roar that vibrates through the concrete and up through the soles of my boots.
Bells slides off my lap and lands on her feet.
She pulls the rabbit mask down over her face.
Her spine straightens. Her chin lifts. Her shoulders roll back and suddenly she's three inches taller and radiating the kind of energy that makes people stop talking and start staring.
Bells becomes Bells.
I stand, my hand checking the mask automatically.
Raf grabs his bass from the case by the door and slots the strap over his head in one fluid motion and Phoenix spins his drumsticks.
I pick up my guitar from the stand and sling the strap over my shoulder. The weight of it is the only constant in a life that's been ripped apart and reassembled so many times I've lost count.
Something feels off.
Maybe it's stage nerves.
Maybe it's nothing.
But I find myself glancing back at Bells because that's apparently what I do now.
I look at Bells. Not my guitar.
What the fuck.
She grins at me. "Let's fucking do this."
The stage door opens and the sound hits us like a wall.