Page 12 of Heat Unscripted

None of them held.

I’d known. Some part of me had always known.

The pull I’d felt for years, my attention tracking her across a room without my say-so, the flat certainty that being in a space with Isobel Gretan was just different from being in a space with anyone else, I’d called it chemistry, respect, anything but the real name, because the real name meant my gut had been right the whole time and I’d spent years calling myself a liar to keep ignoring it.

Omega. She was an Omega. And every cell I had had been trying to tell me that since the day we met.

I stopped on a bridge over the canal and watched the water go. A narrowboat slid under me, painted up in cheerful blue and yellow, some dog barking at nothing off the deck. Normal life. Normal afternoon. A normal world that had not a single thing to do with the fact that my biology had been running a whole second track under my conscious mind for the better part of a decade.

My phone buzzed. Cillian.

She’s okay. Home safe. Talk tomorrow.

I looked at it for a long time.

I typed,How long have you known?Then deleted it. Typed it again. Deleted it again.

Some questions you don’t send by text.

I pocketed the phone and kept walking. The sun went down. The temperature dropped. I didn’t clock either one.

Tomorrow we’d be back in the booth. Tomorrow I’d be sitting fourteen inches from Isobel Gretan, breathing the same sealed air, acting like everything was the way it had always been.

Nothing was ever going to be the same again.

SEVEN

Isobel

The whole press conference was a lie, and I was the part of it people had paid to see.

I sat behind a Japanese paper screen, backlit so the room got nothing but my outline. My voice ran through a modulator that scraped the warmth out and handed back something flat and genderless. Ten years of myth, and it came down to this. A shadow and a doctored signal. They couldn’t see the sweat sliding down my temple, or my hands clamped around my own knees under the table, my grip hard enough to bruise.

Two hundred seats, every one filled. Standing room along the walls. Another hundred thousand on the livestream feed. The Shadows of the Stream finale had pulled in the kind of press that made network executives cry happy tears and made performers get ulcers. I was managing both at once, on the inside, while I breathed in slow counts and pretended to be calm.

“The Faceless Siren has narrated over two hundred audiobooks,” the moderator said. She had the polished enthusiasm of someone paid by the soundbite. “Three Audie Awards. The voice of the entire series. And now she’s the creative force behind the most anticipated charity livestream in tabletophistory. And yet…” She let it hang. The room leaned in. “No one has ever seen her face.”

Phones went up. A rustle ran through the seats like wind through paper.

“So our first question’s from the floor.” She pointed at a young woman in the third row, mic already in her hand. “Go ahead.”

“Hi. Huge fan.” The woman’s voice shook with it. “My question is, with the finale coming, and this being such a massive public thing, are you finally gonna do a face reveal?”

The room came apart. Cheers, whistles, a chant building in the back. Show your face. Show your face. It rolled up against ten years of careful nothing and broke.

I leaned into the mic. The modulator caught me and turned me smooth and mechanical, every drop of honey gone.

“I appreciate the enthusiasm,” I said, and the room dropped quiet to hear me. “But the Faceless Siren exists because the voice is the story. What I look like has nothing to do with what I sound like. The mystery’s a creative choice. I’d like to keep it.”

Groans. The chant picked up again. Somebody at the back shouted something about cowardice, and the moderator’s face did a graceful job of not hearing it.

“But surely,” the woman in the third row pushed, “for something this big, for fans who’ve backed you for years…”

“My fans have backed my work.” There was an edge under it now that even the modulator couldn’t sand off. “That’s what I owe them. The best I can give them. The work.”

The moderator slid in and aimed us at the next question, and I let my shoulders come down half an inch. The suppressants I’d taken that morning were still holding. But the room was warm, and the crowd was close, and somewhere between the nerves and the effort my body had started doing math I didn’t want to check.

The questions kept coming. Safe ones. The finale, the charity, the creative process, what it was like to build a character across a multi-year campaign. I answered every one through the screen and the modulator, performing a woman with no body attached to her voice.