Page 6 of Heat Unscripted

I thought about all of it. Geneva slid past and didn’t help.

Tessa’s apartment was in the old town, up a narrow street that climbed away from the water and stopped at a door the color of weathered sage. She opened it before I could knock. She always did. Years of tracking every arrival and departure within earshot, the way most people watch weather.

“You look terrible,” she said.

“Thank you.” I stepped past her and shrugged out of my coat. “I’m told chronic sleep deprivation does wonders for the complexion. Low-grade biological panic too, apparently.”

She shut the door with a soft click. She was smaller than her author photos made her look, fine-boned, dark hair cut close to her jaw, eyes that didn’t miss anything. Her scent reached me before I’d hung the coat. An omega’s scent. No mute, no spray, no apology.

I’d read her books for years. Narrated every word she’d written. And until a few months ago I hadn’t known she was one of us.

The tea was already out on the low table by the window. A proper service, porcelain cups, a pot steaming into the gray light. Two chairs angled at each other. A plate of small perfect pastries I knew I wouldn’t touch. She waved me toward the near chair and dropped into the other one without wasting a movement.

“So,” she said, pouring. “The twenty-four-hour stream.”

I took the cup she handed me. The heat of it went into my palms and steadied something I hadn’t noticed was loose. “You heard about that.”

“I hear about everything that involves my narrator.” She set the pot down and lifted her own cup, watching me over the rim. “I also hear about sealed booth configurations. Extended proximity to multiple unbonded alphas. Technical monitoring that says somebody’s planning for a crisis.”

The tea was chamomile. Of course it was. Fifteen years writing omega characters, she knew exactly what scent profile she was sitting across from, and she’d built the room to match. Vanilla off her own skin. Herb-calm in the cup. Nothing in the air that would make a complicated afternoon worse.

I drank. Said nothing.

“Isobel.” Her voice stayed gentle, but there was a current under it that wasn’t warning and wasn’t worry. Something olderthan both. “I’ve been where you are. Not the exact setup, but close. A career built on a voice that doesn’t match the body making it. Suppressants that work until they don’t. That slow, creeping certainty that the wall’s developing cracks.”

“The suppressants are working.” It came out sharper than I meant. A reflex. The same reflex that had kept me upright this long.

She didn’t flinch. She just waited, the way someone waits when they already know silence does the work for them.

I set the cup down. My hands weren’t quite steady, and I noticed it the way I would notice a breeze.

“They’re working,” I said again, quieter. “They’re just working harder than they used to. More often. The dose I took two years ago wouldn’t get me through a standard session now.” I stopped. Swallowed. “The dose I’m on gets me through a standard session. Barely. A sealed booth with three alphas in it…”

“Won’t be a standard session.”

“No.”

She reached over and topped up my cup though I’d barely touched it. A small, practical, anchoring thing, the kind of move that keeps a conversation from coming off the rails. She’d learned that somewhere. Probably the same way I’d learned to slow my breathing in the seconds before a take. Necessity. Repetition. Strategy stacked on strategy to keep a person functional while everything underneath wanted to come apart.

“Do you know what Vocal Heat is?” she asked.

I blinked. “The term, or?—”

“The phenomenon.” She put the pot down. “The actual mechanism. Not the romanticized version from the novels.”

“I know it’s not just a metaphor.” It came slowly. I’d read the studies, the clinical papers, the carefully sanitized write-ups in medical journals that treated omega biology like a problem tobe solved instead of a life to be lived. “The voice changes during heat. Becomes… more.”

“More.” Her mouth curved, though it wasn’t a smile. “That’s one way to put it. The clinical version is that the vocal cords restructure during pre-heat and active heat. The mucosa thickens. The base frequency shifts. The overtones get richer, more layered, more…” She hunted for the word. “It carries further. Nothing to do with technique. Everything to do with the body broadcasting what it needs.”

My stomach turned over, slow.

I knew this. I’d felt it. The way my voice had split open during the session with Cillian, the way the sound that got out of me had been raw and biological and completely, mortifyingly out of my hands. The mate-call. The frequency he’d buried so smoothly in the waveform I’d almost talked myself into believing it never happened.

“It’s not just a change in quality,” she went on. “It’s a change in function. The voice becomes a signal. A call. And it’s almost impossible to filter out, because it isn’t in any one frequency, it’s in how they interact, the way they layer and bend and…” She stopped. Looked at me straight, dark eyes level. “High-end microphones strip every filter off it, Isobel. Every synthetic overlay. Every suppressant-flattened frequency. A studio condenser running through a professional signal chain catches what you actually are, no matter what you’ve done to bury it. That isn’t a design flaw. That’s physics.”

The room went very quiet. Outside, the gray sky leaned on the city like it had weight.

“I’ve been recording for eleven years,” I said. “Every session. Every take. If the mics were catching?—”