Page 16 of Heat Unscripted

I swallowed the two pills dry and sat there and waited.

The quiet pressed in. The panels swallowed everything, my breathing, the house ticking as it settled, the traffic my neighbors thought was loud and I stopped hearing years ago. Professional silence. The kind that only exists so a voice can fill it.

My voice had filled it. My real one. And it sounded like a woman I’d never let myself be.

I made myself think about the stream. Twenty-four hours in a sealed booth with three Alphas whose scents had started doing things to my nervous system I couldn’t write off as chemistry on set.

Bram’s peppercorn sharpened the second our fingers brushed over a jar of honey. Tuck’s cedar opened up when he leaned in to fix my stance. Cillian’s sandalwood, steady, the only thing that kept me from coming apart entirely in that green room.

Cillian, who knew. Who’d been cleaning my waveforms for years, burying the frequencies that would’ve outed me, keeping a secret I never asked him to keep.

I thought about the production meeting. The way he’d looked at me across the table, and the thing that passed between us without a word, and how it said more than most people manage in an hour of talking.

He knew what I was. He’d never once used it. That was the whole of it.

The suppressants kicked in. I felt them. The chemistry shoved back into place, the pressure eased off a notch, the honey-and-cream smell of me retreated behind its synthetic wall. My throat loosened. My pulse came down. The voice that had gotten loose crept back to wherever it lives, patient, not caring one bit what I wanted.

I didn’t try to record again.

I just sat in the booth that built my career, inside the silence that had kept my secrets, and let myself feel the weight of what was coming. The stream. The closeness. Three men whose biology had been tracking mine since before any of us had a name for it.

I thought about what Tessa asked me. Does it ever end well?

It ends. Whether it ends well comes down to who’s in the room when the wall finally goes down.

The men who would be in the room with me during the stream ran through my mind. Bram would be there. Exact, controlled, probably with another jar of honey, just like the one he’d given me, the one he’d actually researched for my throat, because the man showed care through logistics and refused to call it anything softer.

Tuck would be in the room. Warm, right up in it, still chewing on the fact that whatever he felt for me had been something deeper the whole time, something his instincts kept trying to flag while the rest of him talked himself out of believing it.

Cillian would be in the room. Calm, watching, his hand near the kill switch the way it had been for years, ready to drop the feed the second I needed him to, holding back a world that would’ve torn me apart if it knew what I was.

The wall was coming down. The certainty of it dropped into my gut and sat there, heavy as a stone. There wasn’t time to rebuild what was already splitting. Twenty-four hours in a sealed booth wasn’t survivable with the defenses I had left, and I knew it. But I had no other choice. There was too much built up around the stream to reschedule. Too many sponsors, too many moving parts, and all of it was relying on me to be there and do my part.

I picked up my phone. Pulled up the calendar. There was the entry I’d made back when this still felt manageable, back when I still bought my own lies. Finale stream. Day one.

I didn’t delete it.

I didn’t reschedule.

I just sat in the silence I’d built and let myself say the true thing, the one I’d been outrunning since the first mate-call slipped out of my throat and went straight into Cillian’s headphones.

The wall was coming down. No maybe about it. The only thing I could wonder was what would be left standing after.

I finished the tea. It had gone cold. I drank it anyway, because tossing it felt wrong and because the taste held me in a present I barely recognized anymore.

Four days.

I knew what was coming.

I knew I’d do it anyway. What other choice did I have?

NINE

Isobel

The corridor outside Booth A smelled like fresh paint and somebody’s panicked sweat.

I stood there with my bag hugged to my chest and watched the crew run their last checks at twice their normal speed. People moved like they could feel the zeros stacking up behind today’s viewer numbers. Somebody had taped a sign to the door.