Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
Isobel
The world came back in pieces, and the first piece was smell.
All of them at once. Cedar and sandalwood and that sharp peppercorn edge, layered so thick the air felt wet with it. I breathed in and nearly choked.
Then came texture. Bram’s coat on my shoulders, silk-lined, still warm from his body, heavy as a hand that wouldn’t lift.
Then sound. A low rumble against my left ear, Tuck’s chest, his heart going thick and steady under my cheek.
I couldn’t speak.
Not wouldn’t.
Couldn’t.
My throat had closed around the whine like a fist, and the only thing that came out instead were these small broken sounds on every breath. The purest Omega sound I’d ever made. No control over it, no mask on it, just my body in free fall after eleven years of chemical scaffolding finally gave way.
I hated it. I hated that it sounded like relief.
Awareness came back in steps. The booth. The dead “On Air” light. Cillian’s monitors frozen on the title card. The locked doors, and beyond them the muffled noise of an entire broadcast grinding to a stop because my biology had finally won a war it had been losing politely for a decade.
I pushed against Tuck’s chest. Weak, uncoordinated, the hands of someone running a fever. He loosened his grip right away but didn’t let go. His palms slid down to my upper arms, holding me up instead of holding me in, and when I looked at his face it was wrecked.
A whine slipped out of me, bright and high. Tuck’s pupils blew wide before he caught himself and started breathing through his mouth.
I needed to tell them. Not the whole story, my throat and my hands didn’t have the whole story in them yet. The one fact that mattered. Before another minute passed with Tuck’s hands on me and none of them knowing what they were holding.
My phone was in the kit bag. The kit bag was on the table.
I pointed. The arm was heavy and the gesture came out clumsy, but Cillian was already moving. He had the bag in his hand before I finished the motion, set it on the table beside me, and stepped back. He didn’t reach in for me. He let me find it myself.
I dragged the zip open with shaking fingers and got the phone out. The text-to-speech app was three swipes in, the one I used on vocal rest days. It turned typed words into a flat robot voice that held none of me and all of my meaning.
I typed.
The synthetic voice filled the booth.
“I have been on suppressants for eleven years. The Beta Neutral spray is synthetic. My designation is Omega. It has always been Omega. Everything you thought you knew about my biology, I built it. To survive an industry that would never have let me build what I’ve built if it knew what I was. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”
The words dropped into the sealed air and just sat there. No taking them back.
Tuck’s hands tightened on my arms. Not hard. A reflex, his body answering a thing it had already worked out for itself. Bram stood three steps off, hands still locked behind his back, his face gone blank in the way it did when everything was running behind it and nothing was coming out the front.
Nobody spoke. The silence stretched one second, two, three, filling up with whatever was about to come out of them.
Tuck pulled a breath. “Iz—”
The knocking cut him off.
Three knocks on the outer door, flat and even, the knock of someone sent by someone else.
Then the intercom clicked, and a voice came through it, young and scared and trying not to sound either.
“Sorry. Um. Management needs this door open. Security’s talking about pulling the master override.
I’m supposed to wait here until it opens. ”
Nobody moved. The booth held its breath with the rest of us.
Cillian picked his tablet up off the engineering station and turned it so we could see. The building’s lobby camera. A crowd pressed up against the glass doors, phones already raised, and behind them a white van easing into frame with a satellite rig folded flat on its roof.
My stomach dropped, and it wasn’t the crash this time.
It was arithmetic. One locked door. One corridor.
A building full of phones. And my scent, eleven years of silence pouring off me with nowhere to go but the air return over my head, telling every dynamic on this floor exactly what was sitting in this booth.
“She can’t stay here.” Bram’s voice came back on like a machine rebooting, flat and fast, the analyst grabbing the first problem he could actually solve.
He was already moving, his pen off the table and into his vest pocket.
“The booth’s going out through the vents.
Every minute we sit here, the story writes itself without her. ”
“Then we move.” Tuck shifted his grip and brought me up with him, slow, letting my legs decide whether they’d take the weight. They did. Barely. He kept his arm where it was anyway. “Can you walk, Iz?”
I typed. The robot voice said, “Ask me in the car.”
Something crossed his face, relief maybe, that I was still in here somewhere.
Cillian was already typing. “Car’s in the reserved bay. Service corridor, then the car park. Nobody talks to anyone we pass. I’ll handle it.” He looked at each of us once, the way he checked levels before a take. Then he slid the bolt back and opened the door.
The corridor was a gauntlet.
Cillian led. Tablet in hand, voice low and flat as production staff rounded corners with panic on their faces and questions I couldn’t hear.
“Technical malfunction,” he told one. “Cooling system failure, caused a cascade,” he told another.
“Medical review, just a precaution,” he told a third, all of it with the ease of a man who’d been writing cover stories in his head for years.
Bram took my right. His coat still on my shoulders, his hand hovering at the small of my back without landing.
His scent had pulled tight and controlled, the possessive edge leashed by raw will, and his face had gone back to its usual analytical nothing.
But I could see under it. The way his eyes tracked every assistant we passed. Every phone that lifted toward us.
Tuck had my left. His whole arm around my waist. None of the will-he-won’t-he from before. Full contact, solid. He’d decided something and he wasn’t taking questions. His cedar broadcast out so hard the production coordinator took a full step back when she met us at the end of the hall.
I walked between them making sounds that weren’t words. Small whines on every breath, the Omega version of a distress flare, except by degrees it was turning into something else. Something closer to pack than to help.
The car park was underground. Cool concrete, the sharp clean smell of machine oil, a blessed gap in all that organic scent. My legs had stopped being reliable, the crash eating my reserves faster than my body could replace them, and at the bottom of the ramp Tuck just picked me up.
No question. His arm went under my knees and behind my back and I was off the ground before the professional part of my brain could file a complaint, tucked against his chest where his heart had gone steady. A whine came out of me, softer, lower. Something that sounded like thank you.
“Car’s here.” Cillian had a black SUV waiting in the reserved bay. He opened the rear door and stepped back, his eyes sweeping the car park like he’d been running threat assessments all night. He had been.
Tuck set me in the back seat with more care than I’d ever seen him give anything. Ten years of his own stunts, treating his body like a blunt object, and he was handling me like I’d shatter if he breathed wrong.
Bram slid in on my other side, drew the seatbelt across me, clicked it home with a care that was completely unnecessary and completely him.
“Phones,” Cillian said from the driver’s seat, holding his hand back between the seats, palm up. “All of them. Now.”
Tuck handed his over without a word. Bram hesitated, the math running plain on his face, the need to stay reachable fighting whatever Cillian was about to say, then pulled his from his vest and set it in Cillian’s palm.
Cillian dropped both in the glove box. Then he took out his own, typed something fast, sent it, and laid it on top. The compartment clicked shut.
“It’s trending,” he said. Flat. Factual. The voice of a man handing over numbers he wished he didn’t have. “The hashtag went up within seconds of the transmission. It’s already everywhere. Seven million concurrent, plus reshares, plus the audio clip already getting ripped and—”
“Don’t.” Tuck’s voice came rough and fast. His arm had found its way around my shoulders, his cedar pumping out something hot and protective. “Not now. Not in front of her.”
Cillian found my eyes in the rearview. Checking. Reading me off years of knowing exactly what my breathing meant when it shifted like this. No instruments needed.
I met his eyes and nodded. Once. Small.
Drive. I mentally willed him.
He drove.
Tuck drove like a civilian. Cillian did not.
The SUV moved through London smoother than it had any right to at this hour.
Lane changes made like a man who understood a car the way he understood frequencies, no hesitation, no second-guessing.
He took streets I didn’t know, doubling through side roads and cutting through residential blocks like he’d already mapped six ways from the studio to my house and picked the one least likely to hit press. He probably had.
I shook in the back. The coat hung off my shoulders like an anchor and Tuck’s arm was the only thing keeping me off the leather.
My voice had quit language entirely. Nothing but whines now, small and helpless, on every breath.
The Faceless Siren, the whole careful build of her, gone.
Dissolved. And in her place something raw that had never once been let out in public.
Bram sat rigid beside me. Not touching, hands folded in his lap like he was holding himself together by geometry alone, but there. His peppercorn had dropped lower, settling through the car. Every so often his eyes came to me. Checked. Went back to the road.
We reached my street with no trouble. No cameras, no press vans, nobody at the curb.
Cillian had brought us in from the north instead of the main road, and the quiet terraced stretch looked exactly like it always did.
Warm windows. Someone’s telly going somewhere.
A London street in November that had no idea what had just happened to one of the people living on it.
He pulled into my drive, killed the engine, sat a second with his hands still on the wheel before he turned around.
“Inside,” he said. “Now.”
The front door beat me. My keys were in the kit bag and my hands were shaking too hard to find the zip, never mind the lock. Bram took the bag out of my fingers without a word, found the keys at once, opened the door, and stepped back to let me go first.
My house. My scent.
The second I crossed the threshold I felt the switch.
Outside to den. The space I’d built for silence, for keeping up a lie that didn’t exist anymore.
The acoustic panels in the hall. The soundproofed studio door.
The chamomile and cream I could never quite scrub out of the soft furnishings no matter how much Beta Neutral I emptied onto them.
Except now, with no spray, no suppressants holding, nothing chemical between me and the air, the scent just bloomed.
It filled the hall in seconds. Steamed milk and honey, rich and sweet and not sorry at all, pouring off me in waves with nowhere to go but into the walls and the carpet and the coats by the door and the three Alphas standing in my narrow hallway drowning in it.
Tuck inhaled, sharp. His arm tightened on my waist and his cedar surged up to meet me, the two scents braiding together in the closed air like they’d been waiting years for the chance.
Bram put his back against the wall. Both palms flat to it behind him, like solid contact could anchor him against the flood. His pupils had swallowed the gray-green again, and his breathing had gone slow and counted, seconds between each one.
Cillian shut the door. Locked it. Drew the chain. Then he stood with his back to it, tablet loose at his side, and let his sandalwood spread the way it always did.
My house. My scent. Three Alphas in my hallway breathing me in, and not one part of it could be filed under creative chemistry or logistics or the unfortunate acoustics of a sealed booth anymore.
A whine came out of me. Longer than the others. A trill that climbed three notes and then settled low and held.
So this was the truth, then, out in the open air where I could never put it back.
They’d all heard it. Not one of them had been given the chance to answer.
The hallway tipped. Tuck’s arms were there before the floor was.