She's seen the photo. She has to have seen it or she wouldn't be here.
But she...stays.
The silence stretches between us, filled with rain and the distant rumble of thunder. My fingers are still resting on the guitar strings, still not making sound. Her hands are folded in her lap, pale and trembling slightly from the cold.
I shrug out of my soaked coat and throw it over her shoulders. She pulls it around her smaller frame and scoots closer to me for warmth.
Another inch and she'd be pressed against me.
Minutes pass. Maybe more. Time does that slippery bullshit thing again, stretching and contracting until I can't tell if we've been sitting here for twenty minutes or two hours.
At some point, I realize I've stopped waiting for her to leave.
CHAPTER 11
BELLS
Rex's jacket is heavy on my shoulders, soaking wet and probably making things worse instead of better, but I pull it tighter anyway because it smells like him. Sterling silver and leather and smoke, even through the rain. Even through everything.
Tell him.
The thought surfaces, immediately insistent.Tell him why you're really here. Tell him you're his scent match. Tell him biology led you to this cemetery like a fucking homing missile, that you felt the pull in your chest the moment you stepped out of Phoenix's car and just started walking.
But I can't.
Because telling him that means telling him I'm an omega. Means revealing the one secret worse than being a fucking girl. And more than that—more than the practical reasons, more than the self-preservation—I don'twanthim to think I'm here because of my biology.
I want him to know I chose this.
Because I did.
So I keep quiet about the scent match bullshit and just... stay.
"Stephen sent me an ultimatum."
Rex's voice is rough and hollow. He's not looking at me, just staring straight ahead at the rows of headstones stretching into the distance.
"Before the pictures dropped," he continues. "Said if I didn't send you back to him, he'd release them."
My stomach drops. "Rex…"
"Doesn't matter now." He gives a bitter, exhausted laugh. "The worst already happened. The whole fucking world saw my face." His jaw tightens beneath the mask. "Stephen's leverage is gone. The blackmail doesn't matter anymore."
I process this slowly. Stephen had photos from Rex's surgery. Photos he threatened to release. Photos hedidrelease, apparently, because Rex wouldn't hand me over.
Rex chose to let his worst nightmare happen rather than give me back to Stephen.
Why?
"Your blackmail's worthless now too," he says. "You know that, right?"
I go still.
"I'm not—" He stops, jaw working beneath the mask. "I'm not saying it like that. I'm just..." He exhales, slow and ragged. "I don't know what we are anymore. I had something on you. You had something on me. That was the deal. That was why any ofthis…" He gestures between us. "But now you've got nothing, and I've still got your secret, and I don't..."
He trails off.
The rain fills the silence.