Page 38 of Heat Clickbait
"No," I admitted, surprising myself with how liberating the honesty felt. "But I'm tired of being sure. Sure got me three years of hiding behind suppressants that made me feel like a ghost in my own body. Sure got me a brand built on not needing exactlywhat I needed most. Sure is just fear dressed up as wisdom, and I'm done with it."
Ghost's fingers were already flying across his tablet, setting up the stream infrastructure with the focused intensity he brought to everything technical. The man might barely speak, but he could make technology sing. Within minutes, he had three cameras positioned at different angles, audio levels balanced to account for our different speaking volumes, and a multi-platform stream ready to go live across Twitch, YouTube, and Instagram simultaneously.
"What do we say?" Milo asked, wringing his hands in a way that made me want to reach over and still them.
"Whatever feels true." I finished my French toast, let the sugar and cinnamon ground me in the moment. "We don't need talking points or media training. We just need to be us."
"'Us' is five disaster Alphas and one chaos Omega who scent-matched in public and then hid in a nest for three days," Nova pointed out, but there was something almost fond in his exasperation.
"Exactly." I grinned, feeling something settle in my chest that might have been courage or might have been reckless abandon. "That's the story. Not the fairy tale where everything is perfect, not the cautionary tale where everything goes wrong. Just six people figuring it out as we go."
I looked around the kitchen, at these men who'd become mine without being mine, who'd protected me from myself while respecting my autonomy, who were willing to follow me into whatever came next even though we all knew it was going to be messy and complicated and probably painful.
"Ready?" Ghost asked, finger hovering over the go-live button on his tablet.
"No," we all said in unison, then laughed at the synchronization that felt like magic.
"Perfect," I said, feeling the truth of it in my bones. "Let's do it anyway."
The cameras went live, and within seconds, the viewer count started climbing with a speed that made my heart race. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands. The internet had been waiting with bated breath, and now we were going to give them what they wanted.
Reality.
Messy, complicated, biological, chosen, imperfect, beautiful reality.
"Hi," I said to the camera, feeling all five Alphas arrange themselves around me, not possessively but supportively, a protective circle that felt like coming home. "We need to talk."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Callie
The viewer count hit 50,000 before I'd even finished saying "We need to talk," the numbers climbing in real-time like some kind of digital fever dream. I watched the counter tick upward, 52K, 55K, 58K, while my heart hammered against my ribs hard enough that I was sure Nova could feel it through his chest where I was leaning back against him.
Comments flooded the chat so fast the screen became a blur of colors and emojis, questions and accusations, hearts and pitchforks in equal measure. The notification sounds were like digital rainfall, pinging and chiming in an endless cascade that Ghost had to manually mute before it drove us all insane. He'd set up filters to catch the worst of it, the slurs, the death threats, the particularly graphic speculation about our sex life, but even the sanitized stream of consciousness was overwhelming.
FINALLY THE TRUTH
sellout omega
THIS IS EVERYTHING
fake fake fake
callie please be happy
BIOLOGY ISN'T DESTINY
I've been waiting for this since the convention clip
mama we made it to the drama
"So," I said, settling back more firmly against Nova's chest because if we were doing this, we were doing it honestly. No pretense of professional distance, no carefully calculated camera angles to hide the possessive way his hand rested on my hip. The familiar weight of him behind me was grounding, his scent of aged whiskey and leather-bound books mixing with the vanilla-tinged anxiety rolling off me in waves. "Let's address the obvious. Yes, we scent-matched. Yes, I went into heat. Yes, we spent three days in a nest together. No, we're not fully bonded."
The chat exploded like a digital bomb had gone off. Numbers flashed across Ghost's monitoring screen, heart rate spikes in real-time engagement, comment velocity hitting the red zone, clips being made and shared faster than the algorithm could track them. His filters probably prevented the stream from crashing entirely under the sheer volume of simultaneous users losing their collective minds.
THE NEST ADMISSION
three days holy shit
