Page 30 of Heat Unscripted

Cillian picked his tablet up off the engineering station and turned it so we could see. The building’s lobby camera. A crowd pressed up against the glass doors, phones already raised, and behind them a white van easing into frame with a satellite rig folded flat on its roof.

My stomach dropped, and it wasn’t the crash this time. It was arithmetic. One locked door. One corridor. A building full of phones. And my scent, eleven years of silence pouring off me with nowhere to go but the air return over my head, telling every dynamic on this floor exactly what was sitting in this booth.

“She can’t stay here.” Bram’s voice came back on like a machine rebooting, flat and fast, the analyst grabbing the first problem he could actually solve. He was already moving, his pen off the table and into his vest pocket. “The booth’s going outthrough the vents. Every minute we sit here, the story writes itself without her.”

“Then we move.” Tuck shifted his grip and brought me up with him, slow, letting my legs decide whether they’d take the weight. They did. Barely. He kept his arm where it was anyway. “Can you walk, Iz?”

I typed. The robot voice said, “Ask me in the car.”

Something crossed his face, relief maybe, that I was still in here somewhere.

Cillian was already typing. “Car’s in the reserved bay. Service corridor, then the car park. Nobody talks to anyone we pass. I’ll handle it.” He looked at each of us once, the way he checked levels before a take. Then he slid the bolt back and opened the door.

The corridor was a gauntlet.

Cillian led. Tablet in hand, voice low and flat as production staff rounded corners with panic on their faces and questions I couldn’t hear. “Technical malfunction,” he told one. “Cooling system failure, caused a cascade,” he told another. “Medical review, just a precaution,” he told a third, all of it with the ease of a man who’d been writing cover stories in his head for years.

Bram took my right. His coat still on my shoulders, his hand hovering at the small of my back without landing. His scent had pulled tight and controlled, the possessive edge leashed by raw will, and his face had gone back to its usual analytical nothing. But I could see under it. The way his eyes tracked every assistant we passed. Every phone that lifted toward us.

Tuck had my left. His whole arm around my waist. None of the will-he-won’t-he from before. Full contact, solid. He’d decided something and he wasn’t taking questions. His cedar broadcast out so hard the production coordinator took a full step back when she met us at the end of the hall.

I walked between them making sounds that weren’t words. Small whines on every breath, the Omega version of a distress flare, except by degrees it was turning into something else. Something closer to pack than to help.

The car park was underground. Cool concrete, the sharp clean smell of machine oil, a blessed gap in all that organic scent. My legs had stopped being reliable, the crash eating my reserves faster than my body could replace them, and at the bottom of the ramp Tuck just picked me up.

No question. His arm went under my knees and behind my back and I was off the ground before the professional part of my brain could file a complaint, tucked against his chest where his heart had gone steady. A whine came out of me, softer, lower. Something that sounded like thank you.

“Car’s here.” Cillian had a black SUV waiting in the reserved bay. He opened the rear door and stepped back, his eyes sweeping the car park like he’d been running threat assessments all night. He had been.

Tuck set me in the back seat with more care than I’d ever seen him give anything. Ten years of his own stunts, treating his body like a blunt object, and he was handling me like I’d shatter if he breathed wrong.

Bram slid in on my other side, drew the seatbelt across me, clicked it home with a care that was completely unnecessary and completely him.

“Phones,” Cillian said from the driver’s seat, holding his hand back between the seats, palm up. “All of them. Now.”

Tuck handed his over without a word. Bram hesitated, the math running plain on his face, the need to stay reachable fighting whatever Cillian was about to say, then pulled his from his vest and set it in Cillian’s palm.

Cillian dropped both in the glove box. Then he took out his own, typed something fast, sent it, and laid it on top. The compartment clicked shut.

“It’s trending,” he said. Flat. Factual. The voice of a man handing over numbers he wished he didn’t have. “The hashtag went up within seconds of the transmission. It’s already everywhere. Seven million concurrent, plus reshares, plus the audio clip already getting ripped and?—”

“Don’t.” Tuck’s voice came rough and fast. His arm had found its way around my shoulders, his cedar pumping out something hot and protective. “Not now. Not in front of her.”

Cillian found my eyes in the rearview. Checking. Reading me off years of knowing exactly what my breathing meant when it shifted like this. No instruments needed.

I met his eyes and nodded. Once. Small.

Drive. I mentally willed him.

He drove.

Tuck drove like a civilian. Cillian did not.

The SUV moved through London smoother than it had any right to at this hour. Lane changes made like a man who understood a car the way he understood frequencies, no hesitation, no second-guessing. He took streets I didn’t know, doubling through side roads and cutting through residential blocks like he’d already mapped six ways from the studio to my house and picked the one least likely to hit press. He probably had.

I shook in the back. The coat hung off my shoulders like an anchor and Tuck’s arm was the only thing keeping me off the leather. My voice had quit language entirely. Nothing but whines now, small and helpless, on every breath. The Faceless Siren, the whole careful build of her, gone. Dissolved. And in her place something raw that had never once been let out in public.

Bram sat rigid beside me. Not touching, hands folded in his lap like he was holding himself together by geometry alone, but there. His peppercorn had dropped lower, settling through the car. Every so often his eyes came to me. Checked. Went back to the road.