Chapter 36 – Rex
REX
Bells is not dying in a fucking cage.
The thought cuts through the haze of blood loss and pain. The kind of clarity that only comes when everything else has been stripped away and the animal at the core of you gets to speak.
I have to move.
My body disagrees. Every muscle is screaming at me to stay down, to keep my face hidden in Bells's lap where the dark is warm and safe and I don't have to be anything except a collection of broken parts held together by the stubborn refusal to stop breathing.
But Bells is not dying in a fucking cage.
So I move.
Getting upright takes everything I have. The chains bite into my wrists as I lever myself off her lap, the bullet wound in my back pulling and making my vision strobe.
I make it to sitting.
Barely.
The world tilts. Steadies. Tilts again.
I brace my shoulder against the bars and lock my jaw until the dizziness passes, sweat tracking down my temples and mixing with blood. My arms are wrenched behind me, useless, the rigging chains cinched so tight my fingers are going numb.
Bells is watching me.
I feel her eyes on the ruined side of my face. I’m exposed without my mask. Nothing between her gaze and the full catastrophe. The melted cheek, the exposed teeth, the damaged side of my nose, the lidless eye that can't close.
I hate it.
She shifts closer.
"Don't—"
She ignores me and nuzzles into my hair, her nose tracing the line of my scalp the way she did before. Then she drifts lower.
Past my temple.
Past my ear.
To the scarred side.
Her nose brushes the ridge of scar tissue where my cheekbone used to have flesh over it. Her breath is warm against the tight, grafted skin, and my stomach twists so hard I almost double over.
I can’t fucking move.
Maybe because the feral thing driving my body has decided that Bells touching my scars is lower priority than getting her the fuck out of this cage.
Maybe because somewhere underneath the self-loathing and the revulsion, there's a part of me that's been starving for touch for so long, it's too fucking tired to fight anymore.
She presses her lips to the scar.
My whole body shudders.
"Turn around," I rasp.
She pulls back. "What?"
"Your zip ties. Turn around."
She shifts on the stone, presenting her bound wrists, the plastic biting into her reddened skin.
I lean forward.
My teeth find the zip tie.
This is…
Fuck.
This is the most degrading thing I've ever done.
My mouth—the destroyed side, the side with no cheek, the side where you can see the tendons and muscle working and the teeth are permanently exposed—is pressed against her skin.
I can feel her wrist against my jaw. Against the parts of my face that shouldn't touch anything, ever, because they're not a face anymore.
I bite down on the plastic and pull.
Bells shivers enough her teeth chatter. And for some fucking reason, I hope it’s because a monster’s disgusting face is pressed against her smooth, perfect skin, and not because she’s cold.
The plastic resists. I adjust my grip, working the zip tie between my canines, leveraging the one advantage of having a jaw that's more exposed bone than flesh on one side. My teeth can get purchase on things a normal mouth can't.
Snap.
The tie breaks.
Bells yanks her hands free with a gasp, shaking out her wrists, red welts circling both of them. She doesn't waste a second. She's behind me immediately, her fingers working the chains.
"There's a carabiner clip," she mutters. "Industrial grade. Hold still."
I hold still.
Her hands are faster than they should be, considering she was just zip-tied and chloroformed and locked in a cage by a psychopath. The chains loosen link by link, the pressure releasing from my arms and torso in increments that make my head swim with relief.
The last loop drops away and my arms fall to my sides.
Everything is pins and needles. My fingers throb as blood rushes back into them.
Bells is already at the cage door, examining the brass lock.
"This is old," she says. "Really old."
"So?"
She reaches up and pulls a pin from her hair. A bobby pin. She bends it with her teeth, inserts it into the lock, and starts working.
I stare.
"Are you a fucking raccoon?"
She doesn't look up. "Yup. If I hadn't become a singer, I would've totally been a cat burglar." The pin scrapes inside the mechanism. She tilts her head, listening, her tongue poking out between her lips in concentration. "The criminal underworld's loss is the music industry’s gain."
The lock clicks.
She grins over her shoulder.
Something seizes between my ribs. Not a bullet, either, but I let myself pretend my ribs only feel tight all of a sudden because I’m rising to my full height and my muscles and wounds are cramping and pulling.
"Bells."
She pauses, her hand on the cage door, that grin still half-formed on her flushed, blood-smeared face. Her white hair is a disaster. Mascara tracks down both cheeks. There's a bruise blooming along her jaw and her shirt is torn at the collar where someone grabbed her.
She's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
Fuck…
"If we don't get out of this," I say.
Her grin fades.
"I want you to know something too. It's not enough, and I'll spend the rest of my life proving it to you, but… I'm so fucking sorry, Bells. For being a fucking asshole, and a dick, and…"
Her honey-gold eyes hold mine. Both of mine. The good one and the damaged one. She doesn't flinch from either.
I do.
I turn my face slightly, so she can only see the good one.
"I know," she says with a soft smile.
But she's waiting.
She knows there's something else.
The words are lodged in my chest like the bullet in my back. Foreign objects that my body has been trying to reject for weeks, pushing them closer and closer to the surface until the pressure became unbearable.
"I… love you."
The fluorescent light flickers like even it can’t believe what I just gritted out.
Bells stares at me, her lips slightly parted. The wicked smirk and the dark humor she wears as armor are gone.
She’s just staring at me.
I fucking hate being stared at. I'm about to beg her to stop looking when she closes her mouth, swallows, and finds her voice.
"Stop apologizing."
"Bells—"
"You can make it up to me."
She steps forward, close enough I feel the air she displaces in front of me, and reaches up toward the bad side of my face.
I flinch again when her palm cups my jaw and when her thumb brushes against the bare muscle, I screw my eye shut and try to pull away.
But there's nowhere to fucking go.
My back is against the bars.
"Kiss me," she whispers.
“What?” I choke out, not understanding. I feel her breath on the exposed muscle of my cheek, warm and steady.
"Kiss me," she says again, softer.
My stomach heaves.
The destroyed side doesn't work right. The lips are gone on that half. There's no seal, no softness, only the ridge of scar tissue and the permanent exposure of teeth and tendon. When I drink, liquid leaks down my chin. Kissing is—
Kissing is for people with faces.
This is fucking cruel.
Cruel to her.
"Rex." Her thumb strokes across the scar tissue. I feel it as pressure, not sensation. The nerve endings there are dead or scrambled, translating touch into something muted and wrong. Even hers. "Stay with me."
"I can't—" The words grind out of me. "You don't understand what you're asking."
"I'm asking you to kiss me."
"With this?" I gesture angrily at the carnage that used to be the right side of my face. "This isn't… it doesn't work like—"
"I don't care."
"You should."
"Well, I don't. So."
Her palm is still on my jaw. The ruined jaw. The jaw where her fingertips rest against bare bone and the seam of a graft that didn't take.
She's not pulling away.
I want to throw up.
I want to throw up and then die and then throw up again, because the self-hatred is so total and so ancient that it has its own gravitational field, and every good thing that gets close enough gets sucked into the event horizon and crushed.
But her eyes won't let me go.
Gold. Steady and relentless in the way that only Bells is relentless.
The same force that dragged me out of the graveyard, that handcuffed herself to my wrist, that practiced ripping my stunt mask off while impaled on my knot because the woman has never met a problem she couldn’t solve through sheer psychotic determination.
My throat works.
"It's going to feel wrong," I rasp. "On your… against your skin. It won't… there's no—"
"Rex."
"Like kissing a fucking corpse—"
"Rex. Shut up and kiss me.”
She closes her eyes and tilts her face back, puckering her lips slightly in advance, because even now, even in a cage, she has to be fucking cute.
And she waits.
The light strobes.
Dark. Light. Dark. Light.
I lean down.
Slowly. So fucking slow my body has the chance to scream at me to abort with every millimeter of closed distance.
My mouth finds hers.
The left side connects first. That side works. That side is normal. For one half-second it's just a kiss. Simple and warm, and her lips are slightly chapped, and she tastes like blood and salt and that artificial strawberry from her weird fucking energy drinks.
Then the right side makes contact.
The scar tissue drags against the corner of her mouth. The edge of exposed teeth scrapes her lower lip. There's no cushion, no give. She can feel it all, including the hard ridge of damaged tissue and bone pressing against skin that is soft and whole and everything mine isn't.
I feel it all.
Every point of contact where the ruin of my face meets the perfection of hers.
A sound comes out of me that I don't authorize. Low and broken and buried in the space between our mouths. The kind of sound a beast makes when it's caught in a steel trap and has stopped fighting.
She kisses me back.
Not the good side. She presses her lips against the scar tissue deliberately. Against the place where my cheek should be and isn't, against my fucking teeth.
My hands fly up and close around her upper arms, tight enough she makes a little gasping sound, and I force myself to loosen my grip.
Her mouth moves against the scars. A press here, a press there, mapping the damage with her lips the way someone would map a face they were trying to memorize.
Why the fuck would she want to?
How is she not… horrified by this?
By me?
And I can’t fucking pull away. I’m in some state of shock or stupor, frozen in place, unable to do anything but stand there and take it.
I can’t even breathe.
The self-hatred is so loud it's a roar in my ears.
Monster. Monster. What are you doing? She's going to realize what she's kissing and she's going to remember she can’t even tell herself you’re a good person and she’s going to—
Her free hand comes up to pull me closer.
Into the kiss. Into her. Like the scars and the exposed teeth and the missing cheek and the lidless eye are nothing. Like I'm just a man being kissed by a woman who chose him, and the face is irrelevant, and the monster is a fiction I've been telling myself for so long I forgot I was the author.
A growl rips out of my chest.
Can't…
The growl turns into something between a snarl and a stupid fucking anguished groan and I jerk my head sideways, her fingers slipping from my hair, and I'm going to pull away completely, going to put my back to her and grind my face against the bars until the contact memory is scrubbed from my skin—
Instead I bury my face in her neck.
My forehead presses into the curve where her shoulder meets her throat, the collar warm against my brow, and I breathe her in.
Underneath the cologne and suppressants, her spice fills my head, strengthened somehow by the fact half my fucking nose on one side is gone.
And beneath that, the sharp, unmistakable sweetness of omega.
My omega.
My body folds into her. My arms wind around her and my ruined face pushes deeper into her neck, hiding in the one place that doesn't require me to be seen.
Her arms come around me, too.
One hand on the back of my skull. The other flat between my shoulder blades, avoiding the bullet wound with instinctive care.
She holds me.
I let her.
For three seconds, four, five—however long my body needs to stop shaking enough to function—I let this woman hold me in a gilded cage in the basement of a fucking opera house while my blood dries on the stone beneath us and somewhere in this building, Phoenix and Raf are fighting to reach us.
I can sense them somehow, getting closer.
The somehow makes more sense now that I know we’re a pack with a fucking omega.
“Do you really love me?” Bells whispers against my shoulder.
“Yes,” I growl into her throat.
“And here I thought we promised we still hated each other.”
“We do.”
She pulls away just enough to grin up at me. “Why not both?”
And this time, she’s the one who kisses me.
A banging sound somewhere upstairs makes her jolt against me and the kiss breaks off as quickly as it began. My arms tighten automatically around her, shielding her. I can’t stop the growl rumbling in my chest.
Her eyes find mine, and she must see the feral light there because her gaze softens with worry.
“We have to go,” I mutter, forcing myself to release her.
I step forward to wrench the picked lock off the cage door and push. It’s old and rusted, and the hinges shriek. Growling again, I shove it open hard enough that it bounces off the outer frame and swings back.
I catch it.
Kick it wider.
Hold it for her.
She ducks through and I follow, my body protesting every step, the bullet wound pulling and my vision doing that tunneling thing again.
I ignore all of it.
We're out.
Bells scans the wings. Left, right, the dark corridor beyond the stage. Her hand drops to her thigh where the knife was strapped, finds nothing, and her jaw tightens.
"Stephen," I say.
She looks at me.
"When they dragged us back. Did you see him?"
She shakes her head. "No. After you… after the corridor, the guards grabbed me before I could see what happened."
"I had him down."
"I know. I heard."
"He shouldn't have been able to—"
"Rex." She cuts me off. Her voice is flat and certain in a way that makes the hair on my arms stand up. "That fucker is still alive."
I stare at her.
"I know he's alive. I can sense him in here, somewhere.
" She touches the collar at her throat. The scar beneath it.
"I stabbed him in the eye and kneed him in the dick and he got back up and chased me through a basement.
You slammed his face into the floor three times and his guards had to peel him off the stone.
He's a cockroach, Rex." Her gold eyes are hard. "He won't die that easy.”
My lip curls. “Then we burn this place to the fucking ground.”