Chapter 7
SEVEN
Isobel
The whole press conference was a lie, and I was the part of it people had paid to see.
I sat behind a Japanese paper screen, backlit so the room got nothing but my outline.
My voice ran through a modulator that scraped the warmth out and handed back something flat and genderless.
Ten years of myth, and it came down to this.
A shadow and a doctored signal. They couldn’t see the sweat sliding down my temple, or my hands clamped around my own knees under the table, my grip hard enough to bruise.
Two hundred seats, every one filled. Standing room along the walls.
Another hundred thousand on the livestream feed.
The Shadows of the Stream finale had pulled in the kind of press that made network executives cry happy tears and made performers get ulcers.
I was managing both at once, on the inside, while I breathed in slow counts and pretended to be calm.
“The Faceless Siren has narrated over two hundred audiobooks,” the moderator said.
She had the polished enthusiasm of someone paid by the soundbite.
“Three Audie Awards. The voice of the entire series. And now she’s the creative force behind the most anticipated charity livestream in tabletop history.
And yet…” She let it hang. The room leaned in. “No one has ever seen her face.”
Phones went up. A rustle ran through the seats like wind through paper.
“So our first question’s from the floor.” She pointed at a young woman in the third row, mic already in her hand. “Go ahead.”
“Hi. Huge fan.” The woman’s voice shook with it. “My question is, with the finale coming, and this being such a massive public thing, are you finally gonna do a face reveal?”
The room came apart. Cheers, whistles, a chant building in the back. Show your face. Show your face. It rolled up against ten years of careful nothing and broke.
I leaned into the mic. The modulator caught me and turned me smooth and mechanical, every drop of honey gone.
“I appreciate the enthusiasm,” I said, and the room dropped quiet to hear me. “But the Faceless Siren exists because the voice is the story. What I look like has nothing to do with what I sound like. The mystery’s a creative choice. I’d like to keep it.”
Groans. The chant picked up again. Somebody at the back shouted something about cowardice, and the moderator’s face did a graceful job of not hearing it.
“But surely,” the woman in the third row pushed, “for something this big, for fans who’ve backed you for years…”
“My fans have backed my work.” There was an edge under it now that even the modulator couldn’t sand off. “That’s what I owe them. The best I can give them. The work.”
The moderator slid in and aimed us at the next question, and I let my shoulders come down half an inch.
The suppressants I’d taken that morning were still holding.
But the room was warm, and the crowd was close, and somewhere between the nerves and the effort my body had started doing math I didn’t want to check.
The questions kept coming. Safe ones. The finale, the charity, the creative process, what it was like to build a character across a multi-year campaign. I answered every one through the screen and the modulator, performing a woman with no body attached to her voice.
By the time she called for final questions, my throat was sandpaper and my pulse was running too fast.
“One more from the floor,” she said. “Yes, you. Blue jacket.”
A man stood. Middle-aged, press badge, smiling like he was about to be clever.
“There’s been talk online,” he said, “that the reason you’ve never shown your face is you’re hiding something. Your designation, specifically. Care to comment?”
The room went still.
My stomach dropped clean through the floor. I felt the suppressants strain against the cortisol spike, the whole chemistry of my disguise flinching under a load it wasn’t built for.
“I don’t comment on speculation.” The modulator made it sound bored. “Next question.”
“But surely…”
“Next question.”
The moderator, bless her, jumped in with thanks and closing lines before he could lean on it again. The lights shifted. People started to drift toward the doors. I sat behind my screen and breathed through the thing that had almost gone over a cliff.
Backstage smelled like burned coffee and industrial carpet before I even got the door shut behind me.
That was the first thing. Then the fluorescent light, doing no one any favors. A converted green room, smaller than I’d pictured. I came in with my bag hugged to my chest and my glasses crooked and my whole body running on adrenaline and chemistry and not much else.
They were waiting for me.
Bram stood at the far wall, leather folio under one arm, face giving away nothing.
The overhead light caught the silver in his dark hair.
Tuck was nearer the door, shoulders eating up more than their share of the cramped room, the scar through his brow pulled tight in something that might’ve been worry, or might’ve just been Tuck.
The scents hit me before I’d taken three steps.
Cedar and toasted bourbon off Tuck, warm and big, filling the room like it had weight. Old books and black peppercorn off Bram, dry and sharp, laying over the top of it. The two of them together did something to the air, and my knees just…
My knees gave out.
I didn’t decide to sway. My body quit holding me up, all of it at once, the suppressants and the willpower and the eleven years of composure folding under the heat and the closeness and the strain of pretending to be something I wasn’t in front of people who’d wanted to rip the mask off.
Two sets of hands caught me at the exact same second.
Tuck’s arm came around my waist from the left, solid, the cedar of him pouring over me like warm water. Bram’s fingers closed on my elbow from the right, steady, no pull to them, his peppercorn going sharp at the edges until something low in my brain sat up and paid attention.
I was wedged between them. Bourbon on one side, old books on the other. And somewhere in all of it my own scent slipped the leash. The chamomile went sweet, the cream warmed, the Beta Neutral overlay I’d sprayed on like armor thinned toward nothing.
“Easy.” Tuck’s voice was a low rumble I felt in my breastbone. “I’ve got you.”
“We’ve got you,” Bram said, and there was something in it I had no room left to take apart, something that wasn’t the controlled baritone he used in production meetings.
I tried to pull back, to rebuild the professional distance that had kept me upright for eleven years. My legs wouldn’t do it. The scents were everywhere, wrapped around me like they meant to be, and my traitor of a body was answering with an enthusiasm I had zero interest in examining.
“Let me…” My voice came out wrong. Too soft. Too warm. The honey I’d kept locked down was leaking through at the edges, and I could hear it.
The door opened.
“Equipment malfunction in Studio C.” Cillian’s voice cut through the fog, cold and necessary. “Everyone needs to clear the area while we run diagnostics. Building safety protocol.”
He stood in the doorway, tablet in hand, face flat as a wall. The production assistant who’d been hovering by the coffee station looked up, startled, and Cillian put the full weight of his dark stare on her.
“That includes support staff,” he said. “Now, please.”
She grabbed her bag and went. Cillian watched her go, waited for the door to click, then turned to the three of us still tangled in the middle of the room.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.
He stepped inside, shut the door, and set himself against the frame with his arms crossed, the sandalwood and sage of him spreading through the room and leveling it out.
Bram and Tuck were still holding me. Their scents had started to change. The protective sharpness was rising up through the warmth, and the claiming notes I’d caught off Tuck at the axe range were surfacing in both of them now, answering me before I’d even asked.
I made myself breathe. In through the nose.
Out through the mouth. The suppressants hadn’t failed, not all the way, but they were burning off faster than they should, eaten alive by the conference and the closeness and the plain fact that I was standing between two unbonded Alphas whose scents had been doing complicated things to me for longer than I’d admit.
“I’m fine,” I said, and it came out steadier than I’d earned. “Just… give me a minute.”
Neither of them let go. Neither of them moved.
Cillian held the doorway like a post, his dark eyes moving between us the same way they moved across a mixing board. Logging everything. Reacting to none of it.
Slowly, my pulse came down. The honey pulled back. The chamomile settled under the chemical layer again. I found my feet and straightened up until I was holding my own weight.
Tuck’s arm came off my waist. His fingers dragged across my back on the way, a touch that wanted to look accidental and wasn’t, leaving a line of warmth behind.
Bram let go of my elbow as carefully as he’d taken it, loosening by degrees until we weren’t touching at all. But he didn’t step back. Neither of them did.
“The press conference ran long,” Bram said, his voice back to its usual flat calm. “And the temperature in that room was inadequately controlled. I’ve already spoken to the venue about their HVAC maintenance schedule.”
Of course he had. He’d taken my near collapse and turned it into a logistics problem, something a better plan and a sharp word to the right person could fix. I felt a laugh trying to climb up my throat.
“Sure,” I said. “The HVAC. That’s definitely what that was.”
His eyes came to mine, and there was something in them that wasn’t the usual cool competence. Something warmer. Something that remembered the jar of honey, the brush of his fingers, the way he’d called all of it practical when we’d both known it wasn’t.
“You should rest before the tech run tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll have the car brought around.”
“I can get myself home.”
“You can,” he said. “You shouldn’t have to.”
Tuck shifted beside me, a wall of cedar. “I’ll ride along. Make sure she actually gets to her door instead of stopping at the studio to review notes for six hours.”
“That was one time,” I said.
“It was four times, Iz. I’ve got the receipts.”
Cillian pushed off the doorframe. The tablet was still in his hands, his thumb moving across it in that small steady way that meant he was working even when he looked like he was just standing there.
“Car’s already on the way,” he said. “I flagged it when the conference ran long. Figured you’d need pulling out.”
I looked at him. The silver piercings catching the fluorescent light, the sound-wave tattoos on his forearms, the calm dark eyes that had been on me for years. Watching. Covering me. Never once asking for credit.
“Thank you,” I said. It wasn’t enough. It was never going to be enough. It was what I had.
He nodded once. Short. Then he opened the door and stepped out into the corridor, clearing the path the same way he’d cleared the room. Quiet. Done. No noise about it.
Bram and Tuck walked me out, one on each side.
Their scents had mostly dropped back to baseline, the claiming notes pulled in, the protective edges smoothed.
But I could still feel them sitting just under the surface, ready to come up the second the walls dropped again and everything I’d been hiding stopped fitting behind my teeth.
Six days until the stream.
Twenty-four hours in a sealed booth with three Alphas whose biology had apparently been tracking mine longer than any of us wanted to say out loud.
The car was waiting at the curb. I slid into the back without looking at either of them, and I didn’t say a word the whole way home.