Chapter 41 – Rex
REX
The hoodie is doing fuck-all.
I've pulled the hood so far forward I can barely see the TV, not that I give a shit about whatever weird trash TV Phoenix and Raf are engrossed in.
It's some kind of island where they make fake scent matches and fuck with everyone's heads, and I hate myself for paying enough attention that I figured out the premise.
At least it's a distraction from the fact I'm in the penthouse without a mask for the first time in front of all three of them. The hood is the only thing keeping me from crawling out of my own skin.
It's been two days since the opera house. Since the entire fucking world got a high-definition look at what's left of my face.
Carmine negotiated a seventy-two-hour media blackout with the major outlets. I don't know how. I don't know what he promised or threatened or sold. But the Internet doesn't give a shit about Carmine's agreements. The Internet never sleeps, and it has opinions.
So many fucking opinions.
The mask is in my room where I can get it if I snap. I could get up right now, walk thirty feet, and put it on, and the pressure in my chest would ease and I could stop wondering when my pack is going to start freaking the fuck out.
But I don't get up.
Only because Bells is pressed against my side with her legs stretched across Phoenix's lap and her phone in one hand and a steaming mug of tea in the other, balanced precariously on her unbound breast where it's threatening to give her some burn scars of her own if Phoenix laughs again and jostles her too much.
She's on my bad side.
The scarred side.
And she's not treating me differently.
That's the thing that's dismantling me brick by fucking brick. Since the hospital, since I carried her out of a burning building and bled all over her and told her I loved her in a cage, she hasn't adjusted her behavior by a single degree.
She even told me to go fuck myself this morning.
Playfully, but… still.
She's acting normal.
I don't know what to do with that. There's nothing normal about me. Somehow, she looks at me and sees whatever the fuck she sees and it doesn't make her avoid me.
So maybe I'm testing it.
Maybe sitting here without the mask, in a hoodie that does nothing, with the scarred side of my face six inches from her line of sight, is a test. A trap I've set for her. For all of them.
Sit with this.
Sit with the full reality of what I look like.
Watch how long it takes before the atmosphere changes, before someone suggests I might be more "comfortable" with the mask on and the careful avoidance of eye contact starts.
I'm sabotaging myself.
I know I'm sabotaging myself, and I don't even need Phoenix to bitch at me and tell me.
Rafael is sitting on the floor between the couch and the coffee table, his back against Bells's hip, his phone in one hand and his laptop balanced on his crossed legs. He's reading Carmine's emails aloud.
"Furthermore, all interview requests must be routed through my office, and under no circumstances should any band member engage with press, social media platforms, or quote-unquote fan accounts that are actually gossip rags wearing a moustache.
End quote." Raf scrolls. "He capitalized 'NO CIRCUMSTANCES' and bolded it in red. He's such a fucking dork."
"He's losing it," Phoenix says from the other end of the couch, absently rubbing his thumb along Bells's ankle where it rests on his thigh.
"Oh, it gets better." Raf pitches his voice up to match the almost manic way Carmine has been speaking lately.
“Phoenix, when a journalist asks if you and the band are 'close,' the correct answer is 'we're bandmates and friends,' not—" He squints.
"—'oh yeah, we're all fucking.' I have a stress rash, Phoenix. A stress rash.’”
"I don't love the implication of that, either," I admit under my breath.
Phoenix almost chokes. "Don't worry, Rex. You're, uh, not my type."
I shoot him a look. "No?" I ask pointedly, wondering if this is how the pack's resident overgrown golden retriever is going to fail my test.
Phoenix shrugs. "I need a guy who can cook and make me laugh at the same time."
My eye narrows.
Raf tilts his head back to flash a bright grin at Phoenix. "Oh yeah?"
Phoenix grins back down at him. "Yeah."
Raf goes back to his phone, still grinning like an idiot. "You guys want to hear the list of headlines Carmine forwarded?"
"No," I say, but not loudly enough to drown out the simultaneous "yes!" from both Phoenix and Bells. I groan and let my head fall back against the couch cushion.
Raf clears his throat and adopts the overly formal diction of a stuffy news anchor. "'Isabel Frost Alive: The Pop Star Who Became a Rock God.' 'Frost and Steele: Inside Vespyr's Explosive Comeback and the Secrets They've Been Hiding.' 'Who Was Stephen Hughes, Really?'"
Bells makes an awkward little sound, which she's been doing lately whenever his name gets dropped. None of us says a word. The investigation is still ongoing, and she obviously won't face any time considering the circumstances.
But I still can't believe she stabbed him in the eye, then the neck, and then he plummeted to his death in a fucking opera house on fire.
My psycho little omega.
Raf clears his throat and keeps scrolling. "'Music Industry Insiders Demand Posthumous Credits for Nash Steele Following Document Leak.'"
Fucking finally.
But for some reason, the only thing I feel is a strange sense of relief. Relief that it's over.
That's it.
There's no surge of justice and triumph.
Just a warm squeeze in my chest.
"'Rex Steele: The Face Behind…'"
He stops talking.
My hand curls into a fist inside the hoodie pocket.
"That one got pulled," Raf adds quickly, glancing up at me. To his credit, he doesn't look away. "The outlets won't show your face uncensored. They're blurring it or cropping it or using the old mask photos instead. So that's good, right?"
Because showing it would be too disturbing for audiences.
Right.
"The Reverie is suing everyone," Raf continues. "Bells, Vespyr, Meridian, some fan account that posted Bells's baby photos." He reads further. "Jake is quoted calling you a… actually, I'm not going to read that."
"Read it," Bells says.
"No."
"Raf."
"He called you a lying manipulative bitch. His words."
Bells's body tenses against my side. She takes a long sip of tea. "Cool," she says flatly. "That's cool. Everything is cool. At least they don't know I'm a fucking omega yet. Can't wait for that to come out."
The media frenzy, from what I've gathered through Raf's increasingly unhinged email readings, is primarily focused on her. Isabel Frost. The vanished pop princess who resurfaced as a leather-clad frontman with a silicone cock in her jeans.
That's the story.
That's the thing the world can't stop clicking on.
My face is everywhere too, but I'm the secondary spectacle.
The mystery guitarist whose mask came off.
Shocking, yes. Viral, absolutely. But the outlets can't show the uncensored photos of my horrifying face without content warnings and blur filters, and blurred photos don't drive engagement the way a missing pop star pretending to be a guy does.
The thing I spent a decade dreading—the exposure, the reveal, the world seeing what's underneath—is happening.
Right now.
In real time.
Millions of people are looking at screenshots of my face and reading articles about my scars and forming opinions about something I can't fucking help while I hunch on a couch in a hoodie with my omega tucked against my side.
And it isn't killing me.
It should be killing me. I've rehearsed this apocalypse a thousand times. Every scenario ended the same way.
Mask comes off, world sees, Rex ceases to exist.
The public horror collapses whatever identity I built on top of the damage, and there's nothing left except the scarred half-dead thing I was at sixteen, hiding in a dark room, waiting for Nash to bring me soup.
But I'm not in a dark room.
I'm here.
Bells shifts against my side, pulling the blanket higher over her legs, and the motion nudges her head against my jaw. The exposed teeth on that side graze her hair and she doesn't move away. Doesn't even pause.
She has to feel it.
Phoenix is still sitting here with Bells's legs in his lap, his hand still resting on her ankle. The two of them are talking with Raf about a reply to Carmine that, from the fragments I can see, contains five too many profanities.
Bells looks up from her phone and her eyes travel over my face. The whole face. The hood casts shadow over the worst of it, but she's close enough to see everything.
"You know," she says casually, like she's commenting on the weather, "you're actually really fucking hot."
I stare at her.
"I'm serious." She takes another sip of tea, unbothered. "You're fucking intense. In an exciting way."
"You're a terrible liar," I manage.
"I'm actually an incredible liar." She stretches her arm out to set her mug on the coffee table and turns to face me fully, tucking her knee under herself.
"I fooled the entire music industry." Her gold eyes hold mine.
Both of mine, the working one and the damaged one.
And they don't waver. "So when I tell you the truth, Rex, you should pay attention. "
The hoodie suddenly feels suffocating.
My throat works.
Nothing comes out.
She gives me a peck on the nose like it's nothing, then settles back against my side, picks up her tea again, and goes back to "helping" with the email to Carmine.
Somehow, despite everything, this is my pack.
My omega.