Chapter 12
TWELVE
Isobel
Hour fifteen.
The booth smelled like three Alphas and the last of my own lie.
Cedar and bourbon on my right, peppercorn across the table, and under all of it the flat synthetic nothing of the Beta Neutral I’d been spraying in double doses since hour twelve.
The neutral was losing. I could smell myself starting to come through it, faint and sweet, like something warming in a pan.
The monologue had been waiting for me since two in the morning.
I’d written it at my desk with cold chamomile going scummy in the mug and the clinical-grade suppressants sitting in their unmarked box like a dare.
The Rogue’s last confession. The moment she stopped performing and let the Knight see what she’d carried alone the whole campaign.
I knew, even typing it, that the words were mine before they were hers.
Bram set the scene. His voice had gone rougher over the hours, not tired, just looser, like he’d stopped holding something in place.
“The watchtower’s empty,” he said. “The pack sleeps below. Only the Rogue’s still awake, at the window, with the moonlight coming in. She’s been carrying a weight a long time. Tonight, for reasons she can’t name, it’s too heavy to hold alone.”
My stomach was tight and getting tighter.
The cooling had been cut at hour twelve and the air had been climbing since, sealed and thick, the suppressants burning through faster than I could do the math on.
Cillian had stepped in again and again all night, each correction another nail in the coffin, and the gaps between them shrinking.
He’d stopped looking at me. Not avoiding. Concentrating. Both hands on the board, eyes on his waveforms, leaned forward like a man running out of room.
Tuck sat close enough that our shoulders almost touched. He hadn’t moved away since the campfire scene. The cedar of him had gone deep and dark, not the warm wide note I knew. That darker note an Alpha gets when the instinct’s near the surface and only will is keeping it down.
I looked at my script.
The words were there. I’d written them. I knew them.
I opened my mouth.
“She turns from the window.” It came out steady. Clean. Professional. Across the booth Cillian’s fader moved a hair, catching something, burying it, buying me time I didn’t have.
“She turns from the window,” I said again, finding the rhythm, “and she thinks about everything she’s never said. Not because she didn’t have the words. She always had words. Too many of them, arranged to deflect and distract and keep every living thing at a safe, manageable distance.”
The chat was moving. I couldn’t read it. I could see the velocity on Cillian’s second monitor, reactions scrolling faster than anyone could read.
“She’s never said ‘I’m tired’. But she is and not the kind that means sleep. The kind that means the performance has gone on so long she’s forgotten if there’s anything under it. She doesn't know if the mask comes off anymore. If she still has a face under the face she shows everyone.”
My throat went hot. Not the clean ache of a long performance. Something chemical, something behind my vocal cords where the suppressants were fighting and losing. I felt the thinning. Felt the thing I’d held all night start to give along its seams.
Bram’s pen had stopped. He was looking at me across the table, dark and steady, none of his usual analyst’s distance on his face.
The peppercorn of him had gone sharp, with an edge I’d only caught once before.
In his penthouse. When our fingers touched over a jar of honey and his pupils went wide whether he wanted it or not.
I kept going. The words made me.
“She’s never said, ‘I’m not what you think I am,’ because to say it would mean admitting that everything she built, the reputation, the distance, the whole careful life designed to look good from outside and stay hollow inside, wasn’t strength. It was fear.”
My voice cracked.
Not the pretty crack of a character hitting her limit, not something I could call craft later. This came out raw and I didn’t choose it, splitting clean through the middle of the word fear and showing what was under it, which wasn’t the Rogue’s voice at all.
Wasn’t any character’s voice.
Was mine.
It started low, under my diaphragm, a vibration that skipped my throat entirely and sat in my chest before it found a way out. The same thing that had gotten loose once in my home studio and gone straight into Cillian’s headphones.
The mate-call.
The thing under language and under technique and under every suppressant I’d ever swallowed. Except this time it didn’t stop.
It built.
The whine climbed and then dropped, down past my contralto into a range I didn’t know I had, low and thick and full of overtones that layered and folded over each other and called.
Honey and steamed milk. Sweet and shameless and broadcasting at full power from a body that had been muzzled eleven years and had just, finally, gotten out.
I couldn’t stop it.
My hands hit the desk. My eyes went wide. The word on my tongue dissolved into the sound like ink in water, gone, beyond me. It was made out of nothing but need, the cellular, bone-deep call of a body denied its one frequency for over a decade and done being denied.
The scent went with it.
The Beta Neutral just evaporated. One second it was there, flat and synthetic and nothing, and the next it was gone like it had never existed, and the booth flooded.
Steamed milk. Honey. Real. The smell of an Omega cresting into the first wave of a heat that had been building for weeks, packed down by suppressants and proximity and the work of holding my face together while three Alpha scents took my walls apart one by one.
Millions of people heard me.
Every one of them heard me before anyone in the room could move.
The sound went out live. Through the cleanest mic chain in the business, broadcast at full fidelity to every device on the stream. Unfiltered. Unedited. Nothing to mistake it for.
For three full seconds, the world heard what I actually am.
Then everything happened at once.
Tuck moved first.
His chair hit the floor behind him. I barely heard it over the blood in my ears. He was up and toward me before the sound had finished its second beat, not thinking, not deciding, just moving, like a body answering a signal it had waited years for.
The cedar and bourbon of him broke open into something I’d never smelled, darker, wilder, the claiming note from the axe-throwing place times ten, filling the sealed room like a hand pressing on my chest. A growl tore out of him, low and answering, his bass meeting my whine and locking to it like two halves of one thing.
His hands found my shoulders. Both of them.
Urgent, not gentle. Whatever ran his manners had been overridden by whatever recognized me and wouldn’t let one more second pass without touching me.
His eyes were blown black, just a ring of amber left, and his face was nothing I’d seen on him.
No charm. No easy grin. No distance he’d kept all this time.
“There you are,” he said, rough, barely a voice at all. “There you fucking are.”
Bram didn’t move.
He went still. Completely, totally still.
The pen frozen mid-word in his right hand.
The dice scattered across his folio were forgotten.
His left hand flat on the table, fingers spread like he was holding himself down by force.
The silver in his dark hair caught the light and he could’ve been carved out of something, a man stopped dead between two things that couldn’t both be true.
His instincts hit. I could see them land.
The peppercorn detonated into something sharp and fierce and possessive, so strong it cut through even my own sweetness, a knife through warm butter.
His nostrils flared. His jaw set. His pupils blew the way Tuck’s had, and the analysis just drained out of his face and left something older, something that didn’t know what a production schedule was and didn’t care.
But he didn’t move.
Every muscle in him locked against getting up, crossing the room, putting himself between me and the world that was hearing my secret in real time. The professional jammed up against the animal, his neat frameworks slamming into a thing with no framework, no category, no tidy box to put it in.
His hands were shaking.
Cillian saw the “On Air” light.
I knew because I watched him do it. The half-second where his eyes left the waveform, cut left to the red indicator over the booth door, and registered what it meant. What had just gone out. What millions of people had just heard.
He moved.
Not like Tuck. Not the explosive surge of an Alpha answering a call.
Cillian moved like a man running a protocol.
Fast, exact, every motion already decided, rehearsed so many times he didn’t have to think.
His left hand found the manual override, the kill switch he’d had within reach all night, the one he’d set there before the first word of the broadcast, the one he’d been ready to throw since the day he wired it in.
His fingers closed on it.
His right hand was already going for the second panel, the broadcast relay, the network feed, the whole chain that ran from this booth to millions of ears.
The red light held. Three seconds where my whine, Tuck’s growl, the whole scent of an Omega coming apart and two Alphas answering went out raw and unfiltered to the world.
Cillian pulled the switch.