Page 50 of Heat Unscripted

His voice was stripped right down. The baritone I knew, smooth, certain, the sound of a man who’d never met a room he couldn’t run, was gone. What was left was bare grain. Wood with the polish taken off.

“I left because I was scared.”

The kitchen went dead quiet. Tuck’s hand, halfway to the kettle, came back down to the counter and stopped. Cillianset his tablet face-down on the table and gave the doorway everything.

Bram’s jaw worked. The tell of a body that needs to do something while the mind chews on something too big to sit still through.

“Not of you,” he said. “Never you. Of wanting something I couldn’t—” He stopped. His hands lifted off his sides and dropped again, the half-gesture of a man who didn’t know what to do with his own body. “I’ve never in my life let myself want like this.”

It cost him to say it. I could see it, the cracks running through everything he held together, years of treating wanting as a thing to manage instead of feel. His hands were shaking again. The same fine tremor from the booth, from the living room, from every moment the truth had gotten too big for the box he’d built for it.

“I build the frame,” he said. “I direct. I control the variables. I have never—” His voice snagged. The baritone split on the in-breath, a sound so wrong coming out of Bram St.James that Tuck flinched. “I have never stood in front of something and not known what to do with my hands.”

He looked down at them. At the shake. The plain evidence of it. All those hours alone with what he actually felt, and he’d come back without a wall left standing.

“You’ve been in my system since before I knew your face.” The words came faster now, none of the careful placement on every sentence he’d ever handed me. “Your voice. For years before the campaign. I listened to you every night and my whole nervous system went quiet, quiet like it never goes for anything, and I called it professional admiration. Because the other option was admitting I was falling in love with a voice I couldn’t touch.”

The room held its breath.

“And then you walked into my production meeting with your mechanical pencil and those huge glasses and your chamomile thermos, and I knew.” His eyes shut. His hands curled into fists, knuckles white. “I knew and I buried it. Years working beside you. Hearing you in my headphones and my speakers and my sleep. And I called it practical. Production quality. Every word I had that wasn’t?—”

He opened his eyes. They were bright.

“It was love.”

The word dropped into the kitchen and sat there.

I put my fork down.

My throat was tender. Still resetting. The cords that had been rebuilt into something new, something richer, something that belonged to the woman I actually was and not the one I’d been playing for eleven years. I hadn’t tested it. Hadn’t really tried to speak since the booth, since the whine tore the last of the control away and left me with whines and silence.

But Bram was standing in my kitchen doorway with his composure in pieces and his hands shaking and the word love hanging in the air, and it needed to be met with something just as true. The text-to-speech app was upstairs on the nightstand. And that flat synthetic voice could not carry what I needed him to hear. Not a chance.

I opened my mouth.

“Bram.”

It wasn’t the voice I’d built over eleven years.

It came out low. Slow. A contralto with warmth banked in the bottom of it. Not broadcasting, not projecting, not performing for millions or for one. Just talking. The sound of cords that had finally been let off the leash, making language with the full sweet weight of an Omega who’d stopped pretending.

It was the voice I’d never let anyone hear.

The most private sound I had. More naked than the whine, more exposing than the mate-call, because those were biology going over my head. This was a choice. Me deciding to speak to him as myself, no filter, no modulation, nothing professional left between my real voice and his ears.

Tuck pulled in a sharp breath. His hand found the counter edge and gripped it. Cillian shut his eyes, just for a second, something close to surrender in it. Years reading this voice off waveforms and frequency plots, and he’d never once heard it whole.

Bram’s pupils blew wide.

The gray-green of him going dark to the edge, the same response as the booth but turned over. Not the violent involuntary thing, instinct catching him off-guard. Slower than that. Willing. A body being handed something it had wanted for years and finally letting itself take it.

“This is what it feels like,” I said.

My voice filled the room. Warm. Right there. Carrying the whole of what I actually was, the chamomile sweetness, the cream and honey under it, the resonance studio mics would have caught and broadcast and that Cillian had spent six years burying to keep me safe.

I wasn’t being kept safe now. I was choosing to be heard.

“To be known,” I said.