"He called you a lying manipulative bitch. His words."
Bells's body tenses against my side. She takes a long sip of tea. "Cool," she says flatly. "That's cool. Everything is cool. At least they don't know I'm a fucking omega yet. Can't wait forthatto come out."
The media frenzy, from what I've gathered through Raf's increasingly unhinged email readings, is primarily focused on her. Isabel Frost. The vanished pop princess who resurfaced as a leather-clad frontman with a silicone cock in her jeans.
That's the story.
That's the thing the world can't stop clicking on.
My face is everywhere too, but I'm the secondary spectacle. The mystery guitarist whose mask came off. Shocking, yes. Viral, absolutely. But the outlets can't show the uncensored photos of my horrifying face without content warnings and blur filters, and blurred photos don't drive engagement the way a missing pop star pretending to be a guy does.
The thing I spent a decade dreading—the exposure, the reveal, the world seeing what's underneath—is happening.
Right now.
In real time.
Millions of people are looking at screenshots of my face and reading articles about my scars and forming opinions about something I can't fucking help while I hunch on a couch in a hoodie with my omega tucked against my side.
And it isn't killing me.
Itshouldbe killing me. I've rehearsed this apocalypse a thousand times. Every scenario ended the same way.
Mask comes off, world sees, Rex ceases to exist.
The public horror collapses whatever identity I built on top of the damage, and there's nothing left except the scarred half-dead thing I was at sixteen, hiding in a dark room, waiting for Nash to bring me soup.
But I'm not in a dark room.
I'm here.
Bells shifts against my side, pulling the blanket higher over her legs, and the motion nudges her head against my jaw. The exposed teeth on that side graze her hair and she doesn't move away. Doesn't even pause.
She has to feel it.
Phoenix is still sitting here with Bells's legs in his lap, his hand still resting on her ankle. The two of them are talking with Raf about a reply to Carmine that, from the fragments I can see, contains five too many profanities.
Bells looks up from her phone and her eyes travel over my face. The whole face. The hood casts shadow over the worst of it, but she's close enough to see everything.
"You know," she says casually, like she's commenting on the weather, "you're actually really fucking hot."
I stare at her.
"I'm serious." She takes another sip of tea, unbothered. "You're fucking intense. In an exciting way."
"You're a terrible liar," I manage.
"I'm actually anincredibleliar." She stretches her arm out to set her mug on the coffee table and turns to face me fully, tucking her knee under herself. "I fooled the entire music industry." Her gold eyes hold mine. Both of mine, the working one and the damaged one. And they don't waver. "So when I tell you the truth, Rex, you should pay attention."
The hoodie suddenly feels suffocating.
My throat works.
Nothing comes out.
She gives me a peck on the nose like it's nothing, then settles back against my side, picks up her tea again, and goes back to "helping" with the email to Carmine.
Somehow, despite everything, this is my pack.