Chapter 39 – Phoenix
PHOENIX
The heart monitor keeps a steady count.
Seventy-two beats per minute. Seventy-three. Seventy-one. I've been watching the green line trace its peaks and valleys for so long the rhythm has synced with my own pulse, my own breathing, the slow blink of my eyes in the fluorescent wash of the ICU.
Bells is small in the hospital bed.
That's the thing that keeps gutting me. On stage she's fifty feet tall and made of lightning. In Rex's hoodie on the couch, she's compact but dense with presence, a gravity well that pulls every person in the room into her orbit whether they consent to it or not.
Here, under a thin hospital blanket with an oxygen cannula in her nose and IV lines running from both arms, she looks like what she actually is.
Bruised jaw, split lip, raw red welts circling both wrists from zip ties. The leather collar is gone—the nurses removed it—and the crescent scar on her throat is exposed for the first time.
It's angry. Inflamed. The tissue is swollen and hot to the touch, the edges raised and weeping clear fluid where the incomplete bond tore itself apart when Stephen died.
The doctors don't know what to make of it. They've never seen a failed mark sever like this. They're treating it like a burn, which feels both wrong and right.
Her white hair fans across the pillow, singed at the ends. Soot in the roots. A smudge of dried blood on her temple that the nurses missed.
Her chest rises and falls and I count each time.
I haven't moved from this chair in four hours.
Rex is in surgery.
A team of surgeons is digging a bullet out of him while I sit here counting Bells's heartbeats, because if I stop counting, I'm going to think about Rex on that table too, and I'm going to come apart in a way this hospital is not equipped to handle.
They told me because Rex made me his emergency contact. He must have done it recently.
It was Nash, before.
I press my palms into my eye sockets until I see sparks.
The door opens.
Raf slips in. His bronze skin is ashen with exhaustion. Even the kraken tattoo on his forearm looks tired, somehow.
"How is she?" he asks, his voice scraped to nothing.
"Stable. But the mark is..." I gesture vaguely at Bells's throat. "They're monitoring it. They want to keep her at least forty-eight hours."
He nods and drags a hand down his face.
"How'd it go with the cops?"
"Told them everything." He drops into the chair beside mine, close enough that our arms brush together.
"Mostly everything. Stephen Hughes kidnapped our lead singer, held her in a cage in a fucking opera house, had armed private security, and when we attempted a rescue, the pyrotechnic equipment in the theater ignited during the altercation. "
"The pyrotechnic equipment… ignited."
"During the altercation. Yes."
"Raf."
"She didn't start a fire, Phoenix. A fire started. There's a difference. And it's a difference the investigators are going to confirm when they find the flash pot crate right where a bunch of armed goons were firing guns in a room full of century-old fabric and exposed accelerants."
I look at him.
He looks at me.
"The cops bought it?"
"The cops are dealing with a dead kidnapper, a burned-down historical landmark, and a cluster of surviving private security guards with various broken bones who are all currently lawyering up and pointing fingers at each other.
They don't give a shit about the fire's origin right now, although that’ll be a problem, too, I’m sure. They care about the body."
Stephen's body.
Raf leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees, staring at the tile floor between his feet.
"Rex?" he asks without looking up.
"Still in surgery."
His jaw works. He nods once.
The heart monitor keeps beeping.
The door opens again.
Carmine steps into the room looking like he's aged a decade. His usually immaculate suit is wrinkled. His tie is gone. His eyes are bloodshot and he’s holding his phone in a clenched grip like he’s been fielding calls for hours and would rather throw the device into the ocean than answer one more.
He takes in the scene. Bells in the bed. Me in the chair. Raf beside me.
"She's stable?" he asks.
"Stable," I confirm.
He exhales and runs his hand through his hair, leaving it standing at odd angles.
"Okay. Good. That's..." He trails off, then regroups.
"The opera house fire is national news. Every outlet in the country is running it.
The footage from the concert—the unmasking, the pyrotechnic malfunction, the blackout, the chaos—it's everywhere. "
My stomach drops.
"The video cuts out during the blackout, obviously, but the unmasking moment.
.." Carmine's voice is the careful, professional tone of a man who’s spent well over a decade managing disasters and who is currently standing inside the biggest one he's ever faced.
"Rex's face is all over the internet. Again.
This time it's live video, not a surgical photo.
The prosthetic clearly tore off with the mask. There's no spinning this as a stunt."
I already knew that. I watched it happen from behind the drum kit. Watched the mask come away wrong. Watched thousands of faces register what they were seeing.
Watched Bells kiss him anyway.
"That's not all," Carmine says.
His tone makes the hair on my arms stand up.
"Someone in this hospital already recognized Bells.
" He gestures at the bed. "Without the binder, without.
.." He makes a vague motion that encompasses everything Bells uses to pass as male.
A gesture she would find hilarious if she were awake, which depresses me even more.
“A nurse. She recognized Bells as Isabel Frost."
I feel like I’m going to be fucking sick.
"How," Raf says flatly.
"I don't know the specifics. What I know is that it's out. This kind of information doesn't stay contained. I'm already getting calls from journalists asking to confirm whether Vespyr's lead singer is former pop star Isabel Frost. I've been saying no comment, but that buys us hours, not days."
My hands curl around the armrests of the chair.
"I need to get ahead of this," Carmine continues. "I need a strategy, a statement, and a—"
"Not tonight," I say.
Carmine stops.
"Not tonight," I repeat. My voice is steady even though nothing else about me is.
"Our guitarist is in surgery with a bullet near his spine. Our singer is unconscious with a severed bond mark and smoke in her lungs. Our bassist just finished dealing with the police for an hour. I’m next.
Whatever you need to get ahead of, you get ahead of it without us until the sun comes up. "
Carmine opens his mouth to argue, but he closes it when he looks at Bells in the bed. At the scar on her throat and the bruise blooming along her jaw and the oxygen cannula and the IV lines and the heart monitor tracing its steady green peaks.
"Okay," he says quietly. "I'll handle the media tonight. But Phoenix… tomorrow I need you all at the table, even if it’s only on a call. All of you. This isn't going away."
"Tomorrow," I agree.
He nods. Looks at Raf, who hasn't moved from his hunched position, staring at the floor. Looks at me.
"For what it's worth," Carmine says from the doorway, "what you did tonight—going in after her—that was..." He stops. Clears his throat. "I'll be in the waiting room if you need me."
He closes the door behind him.
Silence.
Just the monitor and the distant sounds of the hospital's HVAC system. That and my own deep, worn out breathing.
Raf shifts in his chair, his dark eyes on the bed and our omega sleeping beneath the blankets.
"Isabel Frost," he murmurs.
"Yeah."
"Our Bells is Isabel fucking Frost."
"Apparently."
He shakes his head slowly.
I understand. The girl who disappeared from the spotlight years ago. The pop star who vanished. I remember the tabloid coverage, vaguely. My sister followed it more closely than I did. Theories about breakdowns and rehab and witness protection.
None of them close to the truth.
None of them imagining she'd resurface as a white-haired boy in leather pants fronting a masked rock band.
Bells makes a small sound in her sleep. Her fingers twitch against the blanket.
I reach over and take her hand.
Her fingers are cold, and I wrap my hand around hers to warm her. Her ring fingernail is broken. Stephen's dried blood is still under the others because the nurses focused on the bigger issues first and didn't get to her scraped-up hands.
I hold on.
Raf pushes out of his chair. "I'll get coffee."
"You don't have to—"
He's already gone.
I sit with Bells's hand in mine and listen to the monitor and don't think about Rex on the operating table. Don't think about nerve damage or the words the surgeon didn't say but that hung in the air between all the words he did.
Don't think about Nash.
Don't think about how I already lost one person I loved and I can't—
The monitor beeps.
I breathe again.
Raf comes back with two paper cups of coffee that smell scorched even from here. He hands me one and I take a sip and it's the worst thing I've ever put in my mouth, including the time I accidentally drank fucking bong water.
"This is disgusting," I tell him.
"Yep." He drinks his without flinching because Raf has never met a terrible experience he couldn't power through on sheer stubbornness.
He pulls his chair closer to mine. Close enough that the armrests click together. Then he sits down and his shoulder presses against my shoulder and his knee presses against my knee, and he doesn't say anything about it.
Neither do I.
His head drops against my shoulder, heavy and warm, his dark hair tickling my throat.
I shift my arm and get it around the back of his chair. My hand settles on his far shoulder and I pull him in tighter, his temple against the curve of my neck, his coffee balanced on his thigh.
His breathing slows.
Mine too.
Bells's hand is still in my other hand. Her fingers have warmed up, at least. The monitor beeps its steady count and the oxygen hisses away.
And somewhere in this hospital, Rex is either going to survive and walk again or he's not, and I can't do a single fucking thing about any of it except sit here and hold the people I can reach.