Page 14 of Now Their Starlet

He’s holding me tight against him, making sure to keep at least two points of contact with me at all times. Right now, the only part of me that doesn’t feel like it’s going to fall apart is the back of my neck, where his steady hand is pressing and trying to massage away the tension.

It makes me feel even more guilty. Because I know he’s just as affected by losing Andi like this, but here he is, helping me.

“I knew how much hate Gina had in her heart for me,” Edison rasps, breaking the tense silence of the room, running a tired hand through his hair. “But I didn’t think it was bad enough for her to do something like this.”

He looks absolutely distraught. There’s a heaviness to the lines in his face that weren’t present when we visited him only a few days ago. It’s aged him almost a decade.

One of the things that struck me when I saw him and Andi standing side by side was how similar their smiles are. They both have the kind of smiles that completely transform their faces. Some people only smile with their mouths, but the two of them smile with everything they have. They’re bright, toothy grins that travel up their cheeks to their twinkling eyes.

With the amount of botox people in the entertainment industry use, those kinds of full-face smiles are rare.

There aren’t any smiles in sight now, though. Not on his face and probably not on Andi’s either.

All because of one terrible woman’s attempt at maintaining control.

“Why does she hate you so much?” I ask, clearing my throat and trying to steady my trembling voice.

“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” Edison bites out, his tone gruff and frustrated.

Despite his designation, this is the first time I’ve seen any real sign of the dominance I’ve come to expect from alphas. He’s been a remarkably easy-going guy so far. I don’t know whether that’s because of his personality or because the forced chemical unbonding left long-lasting effects on his pheromones.

Probably a combination of both.

“I don’t know, not truly,” Edison says with a sigh, scrubbing a hand down his face. “I don’t think anyone but Gina knows the real answer. But... I have my theories.”

The tense silence in the room fills with heavy anticipation as we wait for him to collect his thoughts. I’m sure revisiting this chapter of his life, one that ended so terribly, is a difficult thing to do.

“Any insight you may have is incredibly invaluable,” Everett says, his jaw clenched.

“Yes.” Edison tries to take a deep, steadying breath, but it hitches at the end, and he lets out a quiet cough. “Gina... has had a difficult life. But she wasn’t always like this. We met at a party almost three decades ago. She was on a first date with another man, a peer of mine—we’d worked on a few projects together. I remember the limousine pulling up and just seeing the outline of her through the tinted windows, bouncing around with this vivacious, uncontainable life.”

The description is so drastically different from the image of the bitter, vindictive woman I’ve had the displeasure of meeting that I don’t know what to do. It almost doesn’t feel real.

“She was twenty-one when we first met. I was nearly twice her age, but there was just something about her that drew me in like a moth to a flame. She’s always been incredibly sharp. Resourceful. Determined. Far more ambitious than anyone else I’ve ever met.”

Now that’s something that fits into the idea of Gina that I have in my head.

“She didn’t come from money, and she was the first person in her family to break into the entertainment industry. When I met Gina, she had been signed to a modeling agency that had a reputation for being a front for matching pretty, young omegas with rich, powerful, ‘eligible’ alphas. She’d been signed since she was sixteen, after she’d gone into preawakening, and as you can imagine, that requires parental consent.”

“That’s... That’s basically human trafficking,” Cameron murmurs, his eyes wide.

“Yes, that’s what the agency was essentially a front for, and has since gotten them shut down. But before suppressants were developed, many services matching omegas with alphas existed outside of the OCN, especially since it was much smaller back then. This agency she was signed to was particularly predatory. They made their models sign long multi-year contracts that were nearly impossible to get out of. There was really only one way for her to break the contract.”

Edison’s hand, covered by the corduroy quarter zip sweater, drifts up to the crook of his neck where his ruined bond mark sits.

“Three months after we’d met, right when her next heat came around, we bonded. This sounds... foolish, in hindsight, but I was deeply in love. At least with the person she showed me. I think...” he lets out a small huff of laughter. “There will always be a part of me that feels that she was the love of my life. But I know now that it was all an illusion.”

His words wash over me and I can’t help but feel bad for him. Even if rushing into a bond like that wasn’t the smartest move, people do that sort of thing all the time. And the beautiful thing about a bond between an alpha and an omega is that it only helps those feelings grow stronger.

And Edison had all of that ripped away.

“I’ve always been the type to be consumed by my work, and at the time, I was... lonely, and she wanted a ticket out of the contract and an opportunity to make a name for herself. I was well into my career when I met her, and she knew how much I cared for her,” Edison continues. “I thought I was saving her. But I quickly discovered that bonded life to Gina was not all I’d hoped it would be.”

His gaze drifts across the space, from the kitchen to the view out the windows, showcasing the downtown LA skyline. But I don’t think he’s really seeing it. He’s definitely not seeing us, that’s for sure.

“It became obvious that the full-of-life, bubbly, animated version of her was not who she was all the time. She’d go through emotional cycles. High highs, but very, very low lows. The three months we spent together before we bonded wasn’t enough time for me to get a full picture of just how deep her mood changes went. I tried to get her help, but no matter how many people she saw, they never stuck.”

“So she showed signs of mental illness even before Andi was born,” Everett murmurs softly.