Chapter 26
TWENTY-SIX
Rowan
For the next forty-eight hours, time dissolved.
The cabin became a pressurized vessel, a closed loop of biology and heavy breathing where the only clock was the rising and falling tide of Juno’s heat.
It wasn't linear. It moved in jagged, feverish spikes that demanded everything from us, skin, sweat, hands, weight, followed by sudden, lucid patches where the air would clear just enough to breathe.
I learned the rhythm of it. I learned that Mateo was the bedrock, his endurance infinite, taking the brunt of Juno’s frantic physical need with a stoic, terrifying gentleness.
I learned that Stephen was the architect of sensation, knowing exactly when to push and when to hold back to keep Juno from shattering.
And I learned that I wasn't just observing.
Typical Beta protocol during a heat is to bring water and stay out of the pheromonal crossfire.
But Juno wouldn't let me leave the circle.
Even at the peak of a wave, when his eyes were rolled back and he was slick with sweat and desire, his hand would search for mine.
If I stepped away, he whined, a broken, high-pitched sound that bypassed my logic centers and hit me straight in the chest.
So I stayed. I learned to use my hands. I learned that my cooler skin temperature was a balm when he was burning up. I learned that despite being a Beta, I could anchor him just by breathing against his neck.
But the most terrifying part wasn't the sex. It was the work.
Juno insisted on it.
During the lucid valleys, when the fever broke and he lay exhausted on the tangled sheets, he didn't sleep. He demanded the laptop.
"The King interview," he rasped, shivering under three wool blankets, his eyes ringed with dark bruises but bright with manic focus. "The clip is circulating. I need the sentiment analysis on the rebuttal."
"Juno, rest," Mateo growled, handing him a protein shake instead of the computer.
"I can rest when I'm dead or when Vance is bankrupt," Juno snapped, his voice weak but his will ironclad. "Give me the screen, Mateo. If I stop tracking the narrative, the narrative starts tracking me."
He wouldn't back down. So, we worked.
The bed, which I hadn't even realized the cottage had at first, became a war room. Stephen sat at the foot, drafting motions on his tablet. Mateo stood guard by the door, scrolling through security feeds. I sat propped against the headboard, Juno’s head in my lap, reading aloud the rising engagement metrics on the Anchor Protocol while I stroked his damp hair.
We operated in a fugue state of intimacy and strategy. One minute, Stephen was helping Juno drink water while I wiped his face; the next, we were debating the legal framing of a class-action lawsuit.
My anger was still there. It sat in my gut, a hard, cold stone. I was furious that they had lied to me, furious that they had managed my reality. But as the hours bled into days, the texture of the anger changed.
I watched Juno fight. I watched him battle a biology he had spent seven years suppressing, his body punishing him for everything he tried to deny, only to drag himself back to the surface to fight a war on two fronts.
He was fighting Vance’s machine, and he was fighting a world that would look at him, sweating, needy, weeping with pleasure in the arms of his Alphas, and say he was too unstable to run a consultancy.
He had been fighting this alone for much too long.
By the second afternoon, during a particularly long lucid stretch, the silence in the room felt heavy. The rain had stopped, leaving the woods outside dripping and grey.
Juno was sitting up, wrapped in a duvet, sipping tea I’d made him. He looked fragile, the ethereal facade stripped away to reveal the exhausted man beneath.
"The consultancy," he said quietly, staring into his mug. "It wasn't an ambition. It was a buyout."
I looked up from my laptop. "What do you mean?"
"The contract I signed when I was twenty-two," he said.
His voice was steady, stripped of the charm he usually weaponized.
"It was with a boutique agency. Standard exclusivity.
But the fine print? It gave them power of attorney over my medical decisions if I was deemed 'incapacitated' by my designation. "
I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the drafty cabin. I knew that clause. I had deleted it from a dozen drafts in my career.
"They defined 'incapacitated' broadly," Stephen added from the corner, his voice devoid of emotion. "Anything from a heat cycle to a depressive episode."
"I spent three years inside that contract," Juno continued. "I worked eighteen-hour days. I built careers for mediocrities. And every month, I took blockers that cost more than my rent because if I missed a day, if I showed a single symptom, they legally owned my body."
He took a sip of tea.
"I didn't leave. I bought my way out. I saved every penny, I stole data, I leveraged secrets I learned in green rooms, and I slapped a check on the desk that was big enough to make them sign a release."
He looked at me. His amber eyes were clear.
"That’s what forced compliance looks like, Rowan. It doesn't look like chains. It looks like a bank transfer you can't afford. It looks like swallowing a pill that makes your hands shake so you can keep your power of attorney."
I listened, and I recognized the grammar of it. I had spent fifteen years reading the language of exploitation, finding the loopholes, the trapdoors. But hearing Juno describe the cage from the inside... it was different. It wasn't data. It was a verdict.
"The Anchor Protocol isn't just a legal document," Juno said. "It’s the key to making sure no one else has to buy their own freedom."
I looked at the screen in front of me. The anonymous messages were still pouring in. Thousands of them. People trapped in the same invisible architecture that had almost crushed Juno.
My anger finally broke. It didn't disappear; it transmuted. It stopped being a shield for my own ego and became fuel.
The Anchor Protocol wasn't about me. It wasn't about vindicating my competence. It was about burning down the prison.
"We need to escalate," I said.
Juno tilted his head. "Proposal?"
"The Protocol is gaining traction," I said, pointing to the screen. "But venues are hesitant. They're scared of Vance’s legal team. We need to make it safer for them to adopt it than to ignore it."
"We make it open-source," Juno said, nodding slowly. "Release the full legal framework. Not just the manifesto. The contract language."
"And we certify it," I added, my mind racing. "We create a 'Safe Harbor' certification. Any venue that adopts the Protocol gets the seal. We market the seal to the fans. We tell the audiences: If you don't see this seal, the artist you love is unsafe."
"Weaponizing the fanbase," Stephen mused, a small, dangerous smile touching his lips. "It bypasses the legal department entirely."
"But to make it stick," Juno said, sitting up straighter, the duvet falling from his shoulders, "we need to prove that the Protocol works. We need a test case. Someone high-profile who admits to using it."
"We don't have a client willing to risk it," Mateo pointed out.
"We have me," Juno said.
The room went dead silent.
"Juno," Stephen warned.
"I’m going public," Juno stated. He looked at me, then at the Alphas. "Not as the consultant. As the Omega. I’m going to release my own medical records. Seven years of suppression. The buyout contract. The data."
"You'll be destroyed," Stephen said, standing up. "The industry will eat you alive. They’ll say you’re hysterical, unstable—"
"They’ll try," Juno cut in. "But I have the data. And more importantly, I wrote the strategy that just took down Mitchell King on live television. Let them argue that biology determines competence." He gestured to the laptop. "The work is the argument."
He looked at me. "Rowan? Can we sell it?"
I looked at him. He was bruised, exhausted, and still smelled faintly of burnt sugar and distress. But his eyes were blazing. He wasn't hiding anymore.
I found myself grinning. It was a feral, sharp thing.
"We don't just sell it," I said. "We make it the only product on the shelf."
Before we could plan any further the heat spiked again and we became a mass of writhing bodies on the bed. Time slipped away once more.
The second night was quieter. The storm inside Juno had finally ebbed into a deep, comatose sleep.
Mateo had carried him back to the bedroom hours ago after we'd mistakenly thought he had a lull in the waves of his heat. He was buried under a pile of blankets that were drenched with the scent of sex. He was chemically exhausted but stable, which was the important part.
I sat in the main room of the cabin. The fire in the woodstove had burned down to embers, casting a dull, orange glow over the dusty floorboards.
I held my phone to my ear. The volume was turned down low as I played the voice note I'd downloaded just after the interview with King. I'd known Zia and Riot Theory would have something to say about the situation, they always did, even if I wasn't their manager anymore.
"Hey, Rowan. It's Zia. I saw the interview.
I know you're probably in a bunker somewhere—" a pause, the sound of a guitar strumming in the background "—but I just wanted to say.
.. you were right. About the riders. About everything.
We're getting the tattoo. The whole band.
'Anchor.' On the wrist. Just thought you should know. You aren't swimming alone."
I lowered the phone. I didn't cry. I didn't think I had any hydration left for tears. But something in my chest, some tight, calcified knot that had been there since the stadium, finally loosened.
I put the phone face-down on the table.
Stephen and Mateo were sitting across from me. They had been watching me listen, respecting the silence, but their eyes were heavy with a question they hadn't asked.
"How long?" I asked.
Stephen looked up from his glass of whiskey. "How long for what?"
"How long have you known?" I gestured to the closed bedroom door. "That you were in love with him."
Stephen didn't flinch. He didn't look at Mateo. He swirled the amber liquid in his glass.
"Six years. Six months," Stephen said. Precision. Always precision.
Mateo just nodded. A slow, heavy movement in the shadows.
"Why haven't you ever said anything?" I asked. "I watched you these last two days. You aren't colleagues. You're... you're gravity to his orbit. Why haven't you made it clear what he means to you?"
"Because he was building this new life for himself," Mateo rumbled. "He needed to be the rebel continuously. He needed to be the the one in control."
"If we had claimed him," Stephen added softly, "if we had made the three of us an official Pack... he would have felt protected, yes. But he would have felt managed. He needed to prove he could survive on his own terms before he could accept safety. We loved him enough to let him be lonely."
The tenderness of it struck me. It was a patient, agonizing kind of love. It was the kind of love that waited in the dark for years, just in case.
"So what changed?" I asked.
Mateo looked at me. His gaze was steady, dark, and terrifyingly direct. "You," he said.
I blinked. "Me?"
"You broke the equilibrium," Stephen explained. He set his glass down. "You came into the house with your spreadsheets and your hole punch, and you looked at the chaos we live in, and you tried to label it, literally in some instances. You forced us to define the terms."
"It's complicated," Mateo grunted before taking a sip of his drink. "Bringing a fourth into a dynamic that was already unspoken... it’s tricky."
"Tricky…" I murmured as I considered their words.
They both looked at me.
"I love him," I said.
It came out plain. Flat. Like reading a clause in a contract. I didn't know I was going to say it until the words were in the air, and then I knew they were true.
"And," I continued, looking Stephen in the eye, then turning to Mateo. "I love you. Both of you."
Stephen went very still. Mateo’s free hand clenched on the arm of his chair.
"I don't know the structure for it," I admitted, rubbing my temples. "I don't know if I'm the manager, or the partner, or just the person who reminds you to eat. I don't know how a Beta fits into a Pack of three high-functioning, trauma-bonded Alphas and their Omega. But I know I love you."
I looked at them.
"I decided," I said. "And I rarely change my mind once I've signed off on a decision."
The silence stretched. It wasn't the heavy silence of the car ride. It was the silence of a room where the air pressure had finally equalized.
"We don't have a map for this," Stephen said quietly. He glanced at Mateo before looking back at me. "None of us have been in this kind of relationship before. There is no precedent."
"I write the precedents," I reminded him.
Mateo leaned forward. The firelight caught the scar on his brow. He looked at me with a hunger that had evolved into something permanent.
"We destroy Vance first," Mateo said.
"Yes," I agreed.
"And then," Stephen said, picking up his glass, "we figure out the rider."
"Agreed."
I picked up my water glass.
We clinked. It wasn't a celebration. It was a ratification.
We sat there in the orange glow, listening to the wind in the trees and the quiet breathing of the Omega in the next room, and for the first time in my life, I didn't need to know exactly what happened next. I just knew who I was doing it with.