Chapter 8
EIGHT
Isobel
The house smelled like chamomile and old foam, and underneath both, like nothing at all.
That was the point. Eleven years of padded walls and acoustic panels, all of it built to strip a room down to one voice. Mine. Today the bare quiet of it sat on my skin wrong, like a held breath I couldn’t make myself let out.
Vocal rest. Doctor’s orders. The doctor had looked at the swelling and the strain and told me to shut up for a day, which was funny, because she had no idea what she was actually treating.
She saw fatigue. She didn’t see suppressants burning off faster than the chemistry promised, or the pressure building behind every swallow, or the way my own throat had started to feel like a borrowed thing.
I made tea anyway. Chamomile, because somebody up there has a sense of humor. I breathed the steam in and waited for it to settle the thing that hadn’t settled since the press conference.
Since the green room. Bram’s coat over my shoulders. Tuck’s arm at my waist. Cillian standing there too calm, holding the whole room together while I almost came apart.
Four days until the stream.
My stomach turned over slowly, the way it did before I admitted I was scared.
I carried the tea to the booth and stood in the doorway. The mic waited on its stand, silver and patient, not judging me, because microphones never do. The monitors glowed. The panels drank every sound in the room. Years of quiet desperation, soundproofed.
I’d promised the fans an update. Nothing big. A check-in before the finale, a little reassurance that the Faceless Siren was ready for the biggest performance of her life. I’d written the script weeks ago, before seeing Tessa, before the axe-throwing place, before anything cracked.
Hi everyone. Just dropping in to say how excited I am for the finale. Your support has meant everything and I can’t wait to finish the Rogue’s story with all of you watching.
Simple. Professional. I’d recorded a hundred of these.
I sat down. The booth closed around me, padded and safe and completely indifferent to whatever was happening under my skin. I nudged the mic. Checked the levels. Took a breath that was supposed to steady me and didn’t do a damn thing.
I didn’t flip the mute.
That was the first mistake, the automatic one.
My thumb finds that switch before I open my mouth, every time, every session, the way you lock a door without thinking.
But I was tired. Tired, distracted, still carrying the ghost of three Alpha scents that had wrapped around me in a green room and wouldn’t fully clear out.
I opened my mouth.
“Hi everyone.” The voice that came out was exactly mine. That was the problem.
Rich. Low. Warm in a way I’d spent years scrubbing out of every file, sitting down in the bottom of my range and blooming there, spreading, alive, wanting to be heard.
“Just wanted to drop in—”
I stopped. My hand hit the desk and pressed down hard, like solid wood could hold me onto a reality that was sliding sideways under me.
The waveform told on me. I watched it stack on the monitor, the overtones that had no business being there, the layered frequencies, the unmistakable signature of an Omega broadcasting through studio gear with nothing left to hide behind.
I hit delete.
The file vanished. The waveform went flat. Gone, like I’d never spoken, like I hadn’t just listened to my own voice sell out everything I’d built.
But I’d heard it. And I couldn’t un-hear a thing like that.
My stomach knotted and stayed knotted. The suppressants were failing. Not a green-room collapse, nothing that loud. Just a slow leak, the way a dam goes when the water’s been climbing too long behind it.
Tessa had warned me. She’d pressed the emergency pills into my hand and told me the crash would be worse, and she’d watched me with those knowing eyes and said nothing when I swore I had it under control.
I reached into the inner pocket of my kit bag.
The box was where I’d left it since I’d visited her.
Unmarked. Plain. I opened it and my fingers shook, just a little.
The clinical-grade tablets looked exactly like my regular dose.
Small. White. Innocent. Enough chemistry in that box to hold back the ocean if you took enough of it.
I needed to know they worked before I risked the stream.
I took one dose.
Tessa’s voice was flat and patient in my head. If you burn through them during the stream, the crash hits twice as hard.
I swallowed the two pills dry and sat there and waited.
The quiet pressed in. The panels swallowed everything, my breathing, the house ticking as it settled, the traffic my neighbors thought was loud and I stopped hearing years ago. Professional silence. The kind that only exists so a voice can fill it.
My voice had filled it. My real one. And it sounded like a woman I’d never let myself be.
I made myself think about the stream. Twenty-four hours in a sealed booth with three Alphas whose scents had started doing things to my nervous system I couldn’t write off as chemistry on set.
Bram’s peppercorn sharpened the second our fingers brushed over a jar of honey. Tuck’s cedar opened up when he leaned in to fix my stance. Cillian’s sandalwood, steady, the only thing that kept me from coming apart entirely in that green room.
Cillian, who knew. Who’d been cleaning my waveforms for years, burying the frequencies that would’ve outed me, keeping a secret I never asked him to keep.
I thought about the production meeting. The way he’d looked at me across the table, and the thing that passed between us without a word, and how it said more than most people manage in an hour of talking.
He knew what I was. He’d never once used it. That was the whole of it.
The suppressants kicked in. I felt them.
The chemistry shoved back into place, the pressure eased off a notch, the honey-and-cream smell of me retreated behind its synthetic wall.
My throat loosened. My pulse came down. The voice that had gotten loose crept back to wherever it lives, patient, not caring one bit what I wanted.
I didn’t try to record again.
I just sat in the booth that built my career, inside the silence that had kept my secrets, and let myself feel the weight of what was coming. The stream. The closeness. Three men whose biology had been tracking mine since before any of us had a name for it.
I thought about what Tessa asked me. Does it ever end well?
It ends. Whether it ends well comes down to who’s in the room when the wall finally goes down.
The men who would be in the room with me during the stream ran through my mind.
Bram would be there. Exact, controlled, probably with another jar of honey, just like the one he’d given me, the one he’d actually researched for my throat, because the man showed care through logistics and refused to call it anything softer.
Tuck would be in the room. Warm, right up in it, still chewing on the fact that whatever he felt for me had been something deeper the whole time, something his instincts kept trying to flag while the rest of him talked himself out of believing it.
Cillian would be in the room. Calm, watching, his hand near the kill switch the way it had been for years, ready to drop the feed the second I needed him to, holding back a world that would’ve torn me apart if it knew what I was.
The wall was coming down. The certainty of it dropped into my gut and sat there, heavy as a stone.
There wasn’t time to rebuild what was already splitting.
Twenty-four hours in a sealed booth wasn’t survivable with the defenses I had left, and I knew it.
But I had no other choice. There was too much built up around the stream to reschedule.
Too many sponsors, too many moving parts, and all of it was relying on me to be there and do my part.
I picked up my phone. Pulled up the calendar. There was the entry I’d made back when this still felt manageable, back when I still bought my own lies. Finale stream. Day one.
I didn’t delete it.
I didn’t reschedule.
I just sat in the silence I’d built and let myself say the true thing, the one I’d been outrunning since the first mate-call slipped out of my throat and went straight into Cillian’s headphones.
The wall was coming down. No maybe about it. The only thing I could wonder was what would be left standing after.
I finished the tea. It had gone cold. I drank it anyway, because tossing it felt wrong and because the taste held me in a present I barely recognized anymore.
Four days.
I knew what was coming.
I knew I’d do it anyway. What other choice did I have?