Chapter 9
NINE
Isobel
The corridor outside Booth A smelled like fresh paint and somebody’s panicked sweat.
I stood there with my bag hugged to my chest and watched the crew run their last checks at twice their normal speed. People moved like they could feel the zeros stacking up behind today’s viewer numbers. Somebody had taped a sign to the door.
SHADOWS OF THE STREAM FINALE – DO NOT ENTER DURING LIVE brOADCAST.
The letters slanted. Whoever wrote it had been shaking.
So was I.
The clinical suppressants I’d swallowed at six that morning sat low and heavy in me, a wall against a thing that had been climbing for weeks. I’d doubled the dose. I’d heard Tessa’s voice the whole way over here, telling me the crash would hit twice as hard.
I shoved it down.
Twenty-four hours. I just had to hold for twenty-four hours, and then I could fall apart somewhere there weren’t cameras, microphones, and three Alpha scents that had spent the last month picking the lock on eleven years of work.
The “On Air” light over the door was dark. Not for much longer.
“Gretan.”
I turned. Cillian stood at the far end of the hall, tablet in hand, his thin frame backlit by the blue wash of the engineering bay. The piercings up his ear caught the overheads. The soundwave tattoos on his forearms shifted when he waved me over, one small motion, nothing wasted.
I walked toward him. The hallway felt longer than it was.
“Mic check in ten,” he said when I got there.
Same tenor he always used, calm, no rush, the voice of a man reading a manual aloud.
But his eyes held something the voice didn’t.
Something that had been parked there since the first night he cleaned my waveforms and said not one word about what he’d buried.
“Cill.” My stomach pulled tight. “If something goes wrong in there.”
“I kill the feed,” he said. “One touch. You won’t even have to look at me.”
My throat closed. “Okay.”
“Say it back.”
“You kill the feed.”
He nodded once, like I’d passed something, and turned back to his station.
The bay behind him was all screens and tidy cables, monitors running waveform read-outs and biometric lines and the chat window that was about to fill with five million voices.
He dropped into his chair like a man who’d built these systems with his own hands, and his fingers found the faders without him looking down.
I watched him nudge a frequency, set a noise gate. The machinery that would carry my voice to the world and, if I let it, strip off everything I was hiding underneath.
Except it wouldn’t. Because he’d be sitting right there, watching for any frequency that didn’t belong in a clean broadcast, ready to bury it before anyone heard.
He’d been doing that for years.
I turned away before he could see my face do something grateful, and I pushed through the door into Booth A.
The sealed room closed over me. Foam on every wall, eating every sound but my own pulse.
The table was set for four. Scripts in neat stacks, a dice bag at each seat, water bottles and throat lozenges and the little jar of herbal honey Bram had handed me, almost gone now.
The mics stood there silver and patient, waiting to catch whatever came out of our mouths and hand it to a bigger audience than any of us had touched.
Tuck was already in his chair.
He took up more than his share of the table, the way he always did, shoulders too broad for the seat.
His undercut was freshly buzzed, his beard trimmed with a care he didn’t usually bother with.
The scar through his left eyebrow caught the light when he looked up at me, and his face was doing a careful nothing that told me exactly how much the nothing cost.
Cedar and toasted bourbon reached me before I’d cleared three steps into the room.
I stopped. Breathed. Let the suppressants do their job and hold down the thing in me that wanted to answer that warm, familiar smell.
“Iz.” Low rumble, aimed at the space between us and not the mics. “You good?”
“As good as I’m getting.”
His jaw ticked once, tight and involuntary. The same raw thing that had passed between us at the axe-throwing place, when his nose found my hair and his body figured out what eleven years of chemistry had been covering. He didn’t say it. He cracked his knuckles instead, one hand, then the other.
“Your stance was solid,” he said. “Before. At the range.”
A laugh got out of me before I could stop it. “My aim was garbage.”
“We’ll fix the aim.” The corner of his mouth went up, not quite a smile. “After.”
After. He let the word sit there. It carried everything that could happen in the next twenty-four hours, everything that could break loose.
The door opened again.
Bram came in the way he came into every room, his own gravity walking three steps ahead of him, rearranging the air before the rest of him cleared the frame.
Dark blue vest over a white shirt, silver-shot hair swept back like he’d measured it.
The leather folio under his arm held a full day of story, every beat marked in that small even hand of his.
His scent came in with him. Old books and black peppercorn, dry, sharp, sliding in over the cedar Tuck had already laid down across the room.
My stomach dropped clean through the floor.
I grabbed the edge of the table. Let the chemicals work. Breathed through the second where my whole body wanted to lean two directions at once, toward both of them, to climb into that doubled warmth and let every professional inch between us melt off.
Bram found me across the room. His face gave away nothing, same as always. But his eyes had changed since the night in his penthouse, since the honey and the brush of his fingers and the way his peppercorn had gone knife-edged when we touched.
He set the folio down. Straightened his vest. Held my eyes one beat past anything the job required.
“The structure’s locked,” he said. “We run the act transitions on schedule. First eight hours are open play. Audience, donations, setting the stakes. Hours eight through sixteen, the campaign climaxes.” His voice dropped into the low thing he used at the table, the GM register.
“The last stretch is where we bring it home.”
“No improvising in the final act,” I said, throwing his own line back at him from the production meetings.
“No improvising.” A pause. “Unless.”
“Unless it serves the story.”
His mouth tipped, barely. “You’ve been listening.”
“I always listen.” It came out steadier than I felt. “It’s the job.”
Tuck made a sound that was nearly a laugh, low and warm, and the room loosened a notch. The thing in the air shifted into something I knew. Getting ready. The strung-tight quiet of people about to walk into the thing they’d been building for months.
The door opened one last time.
Cillian didn’t announce anything. He was just there in the frame, tablet under one arm, crossing to the engineering rig built into the far corner.
Sandalwood and sage cut through the two Alphas already warming the room, cooler, steadier, the only smell in here that settled my pulse instead of spiking it.
He didn’t look at me. He sat, started his pre-show diagnostics. But his fingers stopped over one control, the manual override that could drop the live feed with a single press, and I watched him glance at the switch, then back at his screens.
The message landed without a word. He’d cut it the second I needed him to.
I nodded, even though he wasn’t watching. Some things don’t need eye contact.
“Five minutes to air.” The voice crackled through the booth intercom. “Final positions, please.”
I sat. The mic stood in front of me, silver and patient and not interested in mercy.
My headphones came down over my ears and the world shrank to this sealed box, three men whose scents were filling the air I had to breathe, and the script that carried twenty-four hours of character work and exposed nerves and at least a dozen moments built to peel me open if I wasn’t careful.
So I had no choice but to be very, very careful.
Bram opened the folio with a soft rasp of paper. His fountain pen appeared in his hand, the same one from every meeting, and he uncapped it the way some people chamber a round.
“The campaign opens at hour zero,” he said, and his voice had already slid into the narration texture, smooth, certain, somehow standing right next to you in the dark.
“The Rogue stands at the threshold of something she can’t name.
Behind her, the world she’s always known.
Before her.” His eyes lifted to mine across the table and my breath caught on the way down.
“Before her, everything she’s been afraid to want. ”
The “On Air” light flickered.
Dark to red.
Somewhere past these walls, five million people pulled in a breath.
Bram gave me a nod. Brief. Professional. Underneath it, warmer, the rare thing of being seen by a man who knew exactly what it cost to walk into the light.
Tuck caught my eye and winked. Pure Tuck, easy and sure, years of warmth folded into it, the on-air chemistry that had never been only on-air. His cedar had started to bloom in the rising heat of the booth, wrapping around me like it knew the way.
Cillian adjusted my gain without looking up. His fingers moved over the board with the focus of a man who’d done it ten thousand times, watching the frequencies that would carry my voice to the world.
He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. His eyes did it for him. I’m here. I’m watching. The second you need me, I move.
I took a breath and pulled it deep. Found the Rogue where I’d left her, poised, cool, her whole life built on a performance of not needing anyone.
The campaign began.
“The Rogue regards the bridge before her.” Bram’s voice filled the booth, filled my headphones, filled the hollow place under my collarbones where the thing had been rising for weeks.
“Old stone, worn smooth by centuries of feet, leading toward a dark she can’t see into and a future she can’t predict.
She has always preferred roads she could map first. This one gives her nothing. ”
I leaned into the mic. Let the character settle over me like a second skin.
“She steps forward anyway,” I said, and it came out rich and steady, the gravel contralto that had paid for my whole life. “Because standing still was never a real option. Because the pack behind her is watching. Because.”
I paused. Let the quiet stretch, the way Bram had taught me.
“Because some bridges only show up once you’re ready to burn the ones behind you.”
The chat window on Cillian’s monitor went off like a flare. Hearts and exclamation points, five million people answering at once to a moment they’d waited months to hear.
The “On Air” light held red.
The suppressants held.
Twenty-four hours. Three Alphas in a sealed box, their biology tracking mine since before any of us had a name for what we were building.
I just had to hold.