Page 34 of Heat Unscripted

I wasn’t going to shove that part of myself down. Not tonight. Not ever again.

SIXTEEN

Isobel

The whine faded out of me and the room held its breath.

The smell was the first thing I noticed, now that the sound had stopped. Cedar and bourbon. Old books and peppercorn. Sandalwood under all of it, low and steady. Three scents that had been circling mine for years, and they weren’t circling anymore. They were just here, in my living room, settled into the air like they’d stopped asking whether they were allowed to stay.

I reached for my phone. My fingers were still shaking. The suppressant crash was working through me in waves, and my hands didn’t want to cooperate, but the words came anyway. They came clearer than anything I had said in a long time.

I typed it out and let the app speak for me.

“I want this.”

Three words. Flat, robotic, none of the warmth my body was throwing off in waves of steamed milk and honey. But they landed. I watched them land. Tuck’s breath caught. Bram’s hands went still on the arms of the chair. Cillian shifted against the bookshelf, half an inch forward, like the words had a gravity he couldn’t quite hold against.

I typed again.

“I want you. All three. Not one. Not a choice between. All of it.”

Tuck’s hand moved on the cushion. His fingers found the edge of Bram’s coat, which had slid to my knee when I drew my legs up beneath me, and he held the fabric, not me. Not touching me. Touching what covered me.

The distinction was on purpose. It was tender, and my stomach knotted up at it, and that had nothing to do with biology.

I wasn’t done.

“But I need you to hear something.”

I let the cursor blink. I let the silence sit there and do its work, and what came back was attention, all three of them waiting. Genuinely waiting. None of them deciding for me. None of them treated the match like a verdict already handed down.

I typed.

“Eleven years. I spent eleven years being something I wasn’t because someone else decided what I was allowed to be. I won’t do that again. Not for an industry. Not for an audience.”

My thumb hovered. The next part was harder. The next part was the line in the sand, the one that decided whether I could survive this or whether it ate me the way the suppressants had. Slowly. Invisibly. Until there was nothing left of the person underneath.

“Not for a pack bond.”

The room went very still.

Not the cold kind. Not the silence of people hearing something they hated. It felt more like three men bracing themselves and then choosing to leave the words alone, to let them stand there instead of rushing in to smooth them over.

I kept typing.

“I am not a thing to be claimed. Not a problem to manage. Not a frequency to tune or a variable to solve. If this is whatwe are, if the biology’s right and the bond’s real, then it’s a partnership. Equal. Deliberate. Chosen every single day, not once in a sealed booth when none of us could think straight.”

The synthetic voice read it all in the same dead, mechanical tone, stripping out everything I meant. Didn’t matter. It hit anyway. I could see it crossing the room, the attention shifting, going from listening to something heavier. Taking it in. Holding it.

“I choose this. I choose you. But I choose it as myself. Not as someone’s Omega. As Isobel.”

I set the phone down.

The screen dimmed.

The quiet after wasn’t empty. It was thick with scent and breath and the weight of a moment where the next thing said either holds or splits.

Tuck moved first. Just his hand. It slid off the coat and onto the cushion beside my hip, palm up. Open. An offering, plain as that.