She reached into her folio. The movement was smooth, practiced.
"I have the actuarial tables here," she continued, sliding a document across the glass table. "Comparing the insurance premiums of tours versus independent productions using the Anchor Protocol. We save the industry twelve percent annually on liability coverage."
King blinked. He looked at the paper, then back at her. He didn't know how to interview a spreadsheet.
"She’s suffocating him with logic," Stephen murmured beside me, a dark satisfaction in his voice. "He’s trying to play chess, and she’s reading him the rulebook for backgammon."
"She’s winning," Mateo rumbled, though his muscles remained coiled tight.
I didn't say anything. I was watching King’s face. He was losing the narrative, and men like Mitchell King didn't lose gracefully. They escalated.
Then, it happened.
King paused. He touched his earpiece, his eyes darting to the left, off-camera. His expression shifted. The frustration vanished, replaced by something uglier. Something smug.
The air in the studio changed. I felt it, a drop in pressure, the ozone scent of a trap springing shut.
"I want to give you the opportunity to respond," King said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial hush, "to something that has just been released simultaneously to every major outlet."
Rowan frowned, just a micro-crease between her brows. "Respond to what?"
"To your... history," King said.
The massive LED screen behind them flickered. The graphics of theKing Reportvanished, replaced by a video.
I went cold.
It was Rowan. It was a close-up, intimate, shot in low light, like a confession recorded in a bedroom. She was wearing a t-shirt I didn't recognize, her hair loose and messy. She looked younger. Softer.
And she was crying.
"I can't keep doing it,"the Rowan on the screen whispered. The voice was perfect. Results-grade audio synthesis. The cadence, the specific way she clipped her consonants, it was indistinguishable from the woman sitting in the chair."I'm tired of the blockers. I'm tired of pretending I don't feel the cycles."
The studio audience gasped. A collective, horrified intake of breath.
On screen, 'Rowan' looked into the lens, wiping a tear."I presented as Beta to get the job. I lied on the medical forms. If they knew I was an Omega... if they knew I was passing... I'd lose everything. But this fight isn't about paperwork for me. It's about my biology. It's about what I'm hiding."
The video cut to black.
The silence that followed wasn't heavy; it was a vacuum. It sucked the oxygen out of the room.
Mitchell King sat back, watching Rowan’s face with the look of a man who just laid a royal flush.
"Would you like to respond?" King asked softly.
Backstage, I felt the blood drain from my face. My hands, resting on the equipment case, went numb.
It was a lie. A flawless, high-definition, deepfake lie. But it was a lie designed to decapitate her credibility instantly. If she was an Omega passing as a Beta, everything she had argued, every point about objective management, about being outside the biological hierarchy, was fraudulent. It painted her not as an advocate, but as a liar protecting her own secret.
And the specific horror of it...
Vance had weaponized the exact thingIwas.
An Omega passing as a Beta. A manipulator of narratives. He had taken my reality, my deepest, most dangerous secret, and pasted it onto Rowan’s face to destroy her.
"They built it," Stephen whispered, typing furiously on his phone. "Meridian. The data surge yesterday. This was the asset."
"It’s fake," Mateo growled, taking a step toward the stage entrance. "I’m pulling her. Now."
