Juno flinched. He looked up, his amber eyes glassy and dilated, fighting a losing war against his own biology.
"I needed you to trust the mind," Juno rasped, his hands gripping his shins until the knuckles were white. "If I told you... if you knew what I was from the start... you would have seen the biology first. You would have lowered your voice. You would have tried to protect me."
"I protect everyone," I said, my voice flat. But the anger was there, a cold, hard knot in my chest.
"You protectvictims," Juno corrected, a flash of his old defiance cutting through the haze. "You protect the vulnerable. I couldn't be vulnerable, Rowan. Not to you. I needed you tochoose the strategist. I needed to know the choice was real before the heat made it mandatory."
The bitterness in his voice was old. It was years of scar tissue. He was terrified that my respect was conditional on his designation, that if I knew he was an Omega, I would inevitably view him as less capable, less stable, lessreal.
I wanted to deny it. I wanted to stand there in my drenched silk dress and tell him that I was better than the industry, that I didn't see designations.
But I couldn't. Not honestly. I had built protections for people like Juno, but I had always stoodapartfrom them. I was the Beta manager; they were the biological variables to be managed. If I had known, would I have let him lead the media strategy? Or would I have put him in a safe room and handled it myself?
The uncertainty burned.
"Seven years," Stephen said from the door. He hadn't moved. He was still watching the perimeter, but his attention was entirely on the sofa. "He bought his way out of a contract that would have killed him seven years ago. Liquidated everything. We built the consultancy around him so he would never be exposed again."
"We are the wall," Mateo added, his voice low.
I looked at them. The lawyer and the bodyguard. They hadn't lied to me to hurt me. They had lied to keep him alive.
But there was something else. A jagged piece of irony that was currently bleeding out on the floor.
"Vance," I said.
The name hung in the damp air.
"He tried to kill me with a deepfake," I said, staring at Juno. "He put my face on a video and made me confess to being a passing Omega. He thought that was the worst thing he couldaccuse me of. He thought that was the lie that would destroy me."
Juno stopped shaking for a second. He looked at me, terror and shame warring in his face.
"He used a fake designation to try and erase me," I said, my voice trembling now. "And you stood in the wings and watched it happen. You stood there, carrying the real designation, watching him weaponize your existence against me."
I took a step closer. The scent was overpowering, but I forced myself to breathe it in.
"You couldn't warn me," I said. "You couldn't defend me. You had to stand there and watch me dismantle the specific weapon he was using, knowing that the weapon wasyou."
The horror of it landed in the room. Vance had unknowingly tried to hang me for Juno’s crime, and Juno had been forced to witness it in silence.
Juno’s skin flushed, a dark, burning red traveling up his neck. The heat slammed into him, his breath hitching into a sob he tried to swallow.
Mateo moved, his instincts screaming to comfort, to cover.
"Stop," I ordered.
Mateo froze.
I looked at Juno. He was fraying. The intelligence in his eyes was drowning in a sea of hormones and adrenaline.
"What do you need?" I asked.
Juno looked at me, confused. "Rowan..."
"I am a manager," I said, locking down the panic "I manage assets in distress. Tell me what you need."
"I..." He gasped, dragging a hand down his face. "I expected you to scream."
"I'm screaming on the inside," I assured him. "It’s very loud. But we are currently in a black site cabin with no heat and you look like you're about to shatter. So. What do you need?"
