"Someone in this hospital already recognized Bells." He gestures at the bed. "Without the binder, without..." He makes a vague motion that encompasses everything Bells uses to pass as male. A gesture she would find hilarious if she were awake, which depresses me even more. “A nurse. She recognized Bells as Isabel Frost."
I feel like I’m going to be fucking sick.
"How," Raf says flatly.
"I don't know the specifics. What I know is that it's out. This kind of information doesn't stay contained. I'm already getting calls from journalists asking to confirm whether Vespyr's lead singer is former pop star Isabel Frost. I've been saying no comment, but that buys us hours, not days."
My hands curl around the armrests of the chair.
"I need to get ahead of this," Carmine continues. "I need a strategy, a statement, and a?—"
"Not tonight," I say.
Carmine stops.
"Not tonight," I repeat. My voice is steady even though nothing else about me is. "Our guitarist is in surgery with a bullet near his spine. Our singer is unconscious with a severed bond mark and smoke in her lungs. Our bassist just finished dealing with the police for an hour. I’m next. Whatever you need to get ahead of, you get ahead of it without us until the sun comes up."
Carmine opens his mouth to argue, but he closes it when he looks at Bells in the bed. At the scar on her throat and the bruise blooming along her jaw and the oxygen cannula and the IV lines and the heart monitor tracing its steady green peaks.
"Okay," he says quietly. "I'll handle the media tonight. But Phoenix… tomorrow I need you all at the table, even if it’s only on a call. All of you. This isn't going away."
"Tomorrow," I agree.
He nods. Looks at Raf, who hasn't moved from his hunched position, staring at the floor. Looks at me.
"For what it's worth," Carmine says from the doorway, "what you did tonight—going in after her—that was..." He stops. Clears his throat. "I'll be in the waiting room if you need me."
He closes the door behind him.
Silence.
Just the monitor and the distant sounds of the hospital's HVAC system. That and my own deep, worn out breathing.
Raf shifts in his chair, his dark eyes on the bed and our omega sleeping beneath the blankets.
"Isabel Frost," he murmurs.
"Yeah."
"Our Bells is Isabel fucking Frost."
"Apparently."
He shakes his head slowly.
I understand. The girl who disappeared from the spotlight years ago. The pop star who vanished. I remember the tabloid coverage, vaguely. My sister followed it more closely than I did. Theories about breakdowns and rehab and witness protection.
None of them close to the truth.
None of them imagining she'd resurface as a white-haired boy in leather pants fronting a masked rock band.
Bells makes a small sound in her sleep. Her fingers twitch against the blanket.
I reach over and take her hand.
Her fingers are cold, and I wrap my hand around hers to warm her. Her ring fingernail is broken. Stephen's dried blood is still under the others because the nurses focused on the bigger issues first and didn't get to her scraped-up hands.
I hold on.