Page 8 of Stream Heat
"Nothing solid. It's bad right now. You sure you can't just–"
"Don’t," I cut in, refusing to let her finish. "Don’t tell me to embrace anything. You know what happens to Omega streamers."
Silence.
She sighed. "Have you seen what people are saying online?"
No. I’d been dodging it for a reason.
"It's bad, Kara. They made a hashtag for it, #StreamHeat. It’s trending on every platform. There's clips everywhere."
After we hung up I scrolled social media, expecting a car crash and getting the whole highway. The hashtag was everywhere, blowing up my feed, already a million tweets deep. There, on loop, the precise second it happened to me. Thesecond my face went slack with heat, pupils blown, cheeks flushed, voice going high and breathless as I leaned into Reid’s voice like I was addicted.
Someone had clipped the audio, because of course they had, isolating every shaky inhale and whimper, then cut it with Reid asking if I was okay. Reposted, memed, dissected. My brand, my privacy, my dignity, all out in the open for strangers to paw through.
I couldn’t look anymore. I closed the app. The phone rang; Victoria Smith, the closest thing I had to a handler, or maybe a warden.
"What the fuck were you thinking?" she went in the moment I answered, every word accompanied by the sound of my career going up in flames. "Eight years I kept you clean, and you blow it on one stream? Because you couldn't keep your suppressant schedule on a calendar?"
"Marcus got arrested," I said, flat and dull as roadkill. "I had no backup."
"I don’t want excuses. I want answers. Sponsors are already dropping you. HeatHands Gaming? Gone. TechStream? Backing out. ValdesGames is even demanding refunds. Do you have any idea what kind of disaster this is for us?"
Each name hurt worse than the last. The ones that paid my rent, bankrolled my tournaments, built the platform I’d killed myself to reach. Gone.
"We can fix it," I tried, but my voice cracked like it knew I was lying. "I just need more suppressants. I can claim it was a reaction, a Beta medical thing–"
"It’s too late," Victoria bit back. "The entire internet thinks you’re an Omega fraud. They're not wrong. You lied–"
"On your instructions," I reminded her, not that it would matter.
"Nobody forced you, Kara. You wanted this. I gave you the map. You followed it willingly."
She wasn’t wrong, not really. I'd done it to myself, knowing exactly what it would cost if I ever slipped. In a world that treated Omegas like jokes, or like walking cautionary tales, I'd chosen to blend in. Hide the parts of me that would get me tossed in the trash.
"What now?" I managed.
"We talk in an hour. Until then, get your shit together. Find some suppressants, or something that passes for it. We need you lucid, not moaning into your phone."
She hung up without goodbye. I sat there, phone in hand, heart scraping the bottom of my chest, and started crawling the forums: black market, overseas, even the dumb Reddit threads that were mostly scams. Anything, anything to get the pressure out of my veins.
After almost an hour, I lucked onto a sketchy Eastern European site shipping "pharmaceutical-grade suppressants" overnight. The price was insane, but the reviews looked semi-real, and what was I going to do, negotiate? I paid for rush delivery, blew nearly every cent I had, and waited for the tracking number like my life depended on it.
The next call was my platform partner manager. Just what I needed. Another person to yell at me like I chose this.
"Kara, about last night–"
"It was a medical incident," I said before he could accuse me of anything. "Get legal if you want, but that’s all it was."
"Thing is, there are terms about explicit Omega content on stream. The footage–"
"It wasn’t explicit," I snapped. "It was involuntary. I didn't plan it!"
"Our team says it’s a TOS violation. 'Sexually explicit Omega presentation.' You know the rules."
Of course I knew the rules. There were always rules, and they were never written for people like me. No one cared if I was drugging myself into Beta compliance just to avoid being deleted from the leaderboard. They only cared if I slipped up.
"So what now?"
