Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
Juno
I stood in the wings, obscured by the heavy velvet curtain and the frantic, silent ballet of the cameramen.
Beside me, Stephen was staring at the monitor feed with the intensity of a sniper waiting for windage, while Mateo was scanning the rafters like he expected a SWAT team to rappel down at any moment.
But I was watching Rowan.
She was sitting in the center of the kill box, bathed in the harsh, unforgiving glare of the studio lights, and she wasn't bleeding. She wasn't even sweating.
Mitchell King, a man who had made a career out of skinning politicians live on air, looked frustrated. He leaned forward in his chair, his signature predatory hunch, trying to find a jagged edge to grab onto.
"Ms. Quill," King pressed, his voice dripping with that faux-concern that usually preceded a character assassination.
"You talk about 'industry standards' and 'contractual friction,' but let’s look at the human cost. You almost destroyed a tour.
You put thousands of crew members' jobs at risk because of a philosophical disagreement. Doesn't that weigh on you? Personally?"
He wanted tears. He wanted the 'hysterical woman' clip.
Rowan adjusted the cuff of her silk blazer. She looked bored.
"It wasn't a philosophical disagreement, Mitchell," she said, her voice cool and clear, cutting through the studio tension.
"It was a liability assessment. If a rigger goes up without a safety harness, we stop the show.
If an artist goes on stage with a contract that mandates biological damage, we stop the show.
The cost of a cancelled gig is insurable. The cost of a human life is not."
She reached into her folio. The movement was smooth, practiced.
"I have the actuarial tables here," she continued, sliding a document across the glass table. "Comparing the insurance premiums of tours versus independent productions using the Anchor Protocol. We save the industry twelve percent annually on liability coverage."
King blinked. He looked at the paper, then back at her. He didn't know how to interview a spreadsheet.
"She’s suffocating him with logic," Stephen murmured beside me, a dark satisfaction in his voice. "He’s trying to play chess, and she’s reading him the rulebook for backgammon."
"She’s winning," Mateo rumbled, though his muscles remained coiled tight.
I didn't say anything. I was watching King’s face. He was losing the narrative, and men like Mitchell King didn't lose gracefully. They escalated.
Then, it happened.
King paused. He touched his earpiece, his eyes darting to the left, off-camera. His expression shifted. The frustration vanished, replaced by something uglier. Something smug.
The air in the studio changed. I felt it, a drop in pressure, the ozone scent of a trap springing shut.
"I want to give you the opportunity to respond," King said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial hush, "to something that has just been released simultaneously to every major outlet."
Rowan frowned, just a micro-crease between her brows. "Respond to what?"
"To your... history," King said.
The massive LED screen behind them flickered. The graphics of the King Report vanished, replaced by a video.
I went cold.
It was Rowan. It was a close-up, intimate, shot in low light, like a confession recorded in a bedroom. She was wearing a t-shirt I didn't recognize, her hair loose and messy. She looked younger. Softer.
And she was crying.
"I can't keep doing it," the Rowan on the screen whispered.
The voice was perfect. Results-grade audio synthesis.
The cadence, the specific way she clipped her consonants, it was indistinguishable from the woman sitting in the chair.
"I'm tired of the blockers. I'm tired of pretending I don't feel the cycles. "
The studio audience gasped. A collective, horrified intake of breath.
On screen, 'Rowan' looked into the lens, wiping a tear.
"I presented as Beta to get the job. I lied on the medical forms. If they knew I was an Omega.
.. if they knew I was passing... I'd lose everything.
But this fight isn't about paperwork for me.
It's about my biology. It's about what I'm hiding. "
The video cut to black.
The silence that followed wasn't heavy; it was a vacuum. It sucked the oxygen out of the room.
Mitchell King sat back, watching Rowan’s face with the look of a man who just laid a royal flush.
"Would you like to respond?" King asked softly.
Backstage, I felt the blood drain from my face. My hands, resting on the equipment case, went numb.
It was a lie. A flawless, high-definition, deepfake lie.
But it was a lie designed to decapitate her credibility instantly.
If she was an Omega passing as a Beta, everything she had argued, every point about objective management, about being outside the biological hierarchy, was fraudulent.
It painted her not as an advocate, but as a liar protecting her own secret.
And the specific horror of it...
Vance had weaponized the exact thing I was.
An Omega passing as a Beta. A manipulator of narratives. He had taken my reality, my deepest, most dangerous secret, and pasted it onto Rowan’s face to destroy her.
"They built it," Stephen whispered, typing furiously on his phone. "Meridian. The data surge yesterday. This was the asset."
"It’s fake," Mateo growled, taking a step toward the stage entrance. "I’m pulling her. Now."
"Wait," I grabbed his arm. My grip was weak. "Look at her."
Rowan hadn't moved.
She was staring at the blank screen where her digital doppelganger had just confessed to a biological fraud. Her face was unreadable. She didn't look shocked. She didn't look devastated.
She looked... disappointed.
Slowly, deliberately, Rowan opened her folder.
She didn't look at King. She looked at the camera. The red light. The unblinking eye broadcasting this moment to millions of people who were currently deciding if she was a hero or a fraud.
She picked up a document. It wasn't the Anchor Protocol. It was a thick, bound file with a government seal.
"That video," Rowan said. Her voice didn't tremble. It was colder than the air conditioning. "Is a remarkable piece of engineering. The voice synthesis is nearly perfect. They even got the asymmetry of my left eyebrow correct."
She tabled the document.
"This is my original designation certificate," she said. "Registered in Surrey. Designation: Beta."
She tabled a second document.
"This is a biometric verification, timestamped, Geneva Standard compliant, certified by a third-party medical examiner. Designation: Beta."
The audience murmured. King shifted in his seat, his smile faltering.
"And this," Rowan said, pulling out a sheaf of papers covered in complex code strings, the data Juno had intercepted, the receipts Stephen had compiled. "Is the forensic analysis of that video file."
She slid it across the desk. It hit King’s water glass with a tink.
"My team intercepted the render packet from Meridian Creative seventeen hours ago," she said, her eyes drilling into King. "We traced the upload signature. It routes directly to a media holding company retained by Julian Vance for 'reputation management.'"
She leaned forward.
"He didn't just try to destroy my reputation, Mitchell. He committed fraud. On live television. Using a generated image to impersonate a private citizen."
A beat. She let the weight of it settle.
"I’m Beta," she said clearly. "I have always been Beta. I'm not hiding anything I simply don't have a heat cycle. What I do have is paperwork."
She looked straight down the barrel of the camera.
"And if Julian Vance needed to fabricate my designation to defeat my argument... if he had to invent a biology for me because he couldn't attack my logic... then my argument has already won."
The studio erupted.
Not in boos. In chaos. Voices escalated, people stood up, phones flashed. King was shouting at his producer in his earpiece, actively ignoring the woman who had just dismantled his ambush.
It was a victory. A total, absolute victory.
But backstage, I couldn't breathe.
I was frozen, staring at the monitor. The image of the fake Rowan, the Omega Rowan, was burned into my retinas.
I lied on the medical forms. If they knew I was passing... I'd lose everything.
Those weren't her words. They were mine. They were the words I whispered to myself every time I signed a contract, every time I took a suppressant, every time I walked into a room and manipulated the energy.
Vance had tried to destroy her by accusing her of being me.
The irony was a physical blow. It twisted in my gut, sharp and toxic. I had sent her out there to be the face of the truth, while I hid in the shadows carrying the exact lie he was using to hang her.
I couldn't protect her from this. I couldn't warn her. I just stood here and watched her act as the shield for a secret she didn't even know I was keeping.
Crack.
The sound may have been in my mind, but the sensation was visceral. The chemical wall I kept built around my biology, the high-grade suppressants I popped like candy, finally gave way. The stress of the last week and the specific, mirror-image horror of this moment was too much.
The scent hit the wings like an explosion.
Burnt sugar. Scorched earth. A wave of distress so potent, so sweet and terrifying, that a cameraman ten feet away stumbled and looked around, confused.
It wasn't a leak. It was a dam failure.
My knees buckled.
"Juno?"
Mateo turned. His eyes went wide. He smelled it instantly, the panic, the biology, the truth bleeding out into the air.
"Juno," Stephen hissed, turning from the monitors, his face paling as the scent hit him.
I grabbed Mateo’s arm. My fingers dug into the fabric of his suit, desperate, clawing. I was shaking. I was going to be sick.
"We need to leave," I choked out, the words tearing through a throat that felt like it was closing up. "Now."
"Mateo, get him to the car," Stephen ordered, his voice low and urgent, stepping between me and the stage crew to block their line of sight. "Ventilation is cycling. If that scent hits the stage..."
If it hit the stage, Rowan would smell it. King would smell it. The cameras would pick up the confusion.
And they would know. They would know there was an Omega in the building. A distressed, passing Omega. One every Alpha would want to find.
"Move," Mateo growled.
He didn't wait. He scooped me up, wrapping his massive arm around my waist, partially shielding me with his jacket.
He moved with terrifying speed for a man his size, heading for the loading dock exit, away from the lights, away from the victory, away from the woman I had just watched dismantle a lie that was actually my truth.
I squeezed my eyes shut, burying my face in Mateo’s shoulder, the smell of burnt sugar choking me, drowning out everything else.
I'm sorry, Rowan. I'm so sorry.