Page 17 of Heat Unscripted

SHADOWS OF THE STREAM FINALE – DO NOT ENTER DURING LIVE BROADCAST.

The letters slanted. Whoever wrote it had been shaking.

So was I.

The clinical suppressants I’d swallowed at six that morning sat low and heavy in me, a wall against a thing that had been climbing for weeks. I’d doubled the dose. I’d heard Tessa’s voice the whole way over here, telling me the crash would hit twice as hard.

I shoved it down.

Twenty-four hours. I just had to hold for twenty-four hours, and then I could fall apart somewhere there weren’t cameras, microphones, and three Alpha scents that had spent the last month picking the lock on eleven years of work.

The “On Air” light over the door was dark. Not for much longer.

“Gretan.”

I turned. Cillian stood at the far end of the hall, tablet in hand, his thin frame backlit by the blue wash of the engineering bay. The piercings up his ear caught the overheads. The soundwave tattoos on his forearms shifted when he waved me over, one small motion, nothing wasted.

I walked toward him. The hallway felt longer than it was.

“Mic check in ten,” he said when I got there. Same tenor he always used, calm, no rush, the voice of a man reading a manual aloud. But his eyes held something the voice didn’t. Something that had been parked there since the first night he cleaned my waveforms and said not one word about what he’d buried.

“Cill.” My stomach pulled tight. “If something goes wrong in there.”

“I kill the feed,” he said. “One touch. You won’t even have to look at me.”

My throat closed. “Okay.”

“Say it back.”

“You kill the feed.”

He nodded once, like I’d passed something, and turned back to his station. The bay behind him was all screens and tidy cables, monitors running waveform read-outs and biometric lines and the chat window that was about to fill with five million voices. He dropped into his chair like a man who’d built these systems with his own hands, and his fingers found the faders without him looking down.

I watched him nudge a frequency, set a noise gate. The machinery that would carry my voice to the world and, if I let it, strip off everything I was hiding underneath.

Except it wouldn’t. Because he’d be sitting right there, watching for any frequency that didn’t belong in a clean broadcast, ready to bury it before anyone heard.

He’d been doing that for years.

I turned away before he could see my face do something grateful, and I pushed through the door into Booth A.

The sealed room closed over me. Foam on every wall, eating every sound but my own pulse. The table was set for four. Scripts in neat stacks, a dice bag at each seat, water bottles and throat lozenges and the little jar of herbal honey Bram had handed me, almost gone now. The mics stood there silver and patient, waiting to catch whatever came out of our mouths and hand it to a bigger audience than any of us had touched.

Tuck was already in his chair.

He took up more than his share of the table, the way he always did, shoulders too broad for the seat. His undercut was freshly buzzed, his beard trimmed with a care he didn’t usually bother with. The scar through his left eyebrow caught the light when he looked up at me, and his face was doing a careful nothing that told me exactly how much the nothing cost.

Cedar and toasted bourbon reached me before I’d cleared three steps into the room.

I stopped. Breathed. Let the suppressants do their job and hold down the thing in me that wanted to answer that warm, familiar smell.

“Iz.” Low rumble, aimed at the space between us and not the mics. “You good?”

“As good as I’m getting.”

His jaw ticked once, tight and involuntary. The same raw thing that had passed between us at the axe-throwing place, when his nose found my hair and his body figured out what eleven years of chemistry had been covering. He didn’t say it. He cracked his knuckles instead, one hand, then the other.

“Your stance was solid,” he said. “Before. At the range.”