Page 62 of Heat Unscripted

“What do you need, Iz?” he asked.

I looked at them. Three men in my kitchen with their scents wound through every surface, all of them oriented toward me. The legal files on the table. The card. The soft fabrics from Sloane’s box. The gray wool blanket that had arrived by courier, exactly inside Cillian’s hour. The coat in my lap, still holding the peppercorn of the man who’d wrapped it around me when I was shaking.

I stood up.

“Shirts,” I said. The word carried in the real voice, the one that had waited so long to talk. I was done performing smallness. “Pillowcases. The flannel. The coat.” I looked at Cillian. “Whatever you were wearing when you sat outside my door.”

A beat.

“I’m building the nest.”

TWENTY-THREE

Bram

The kitchen smelled like all four of us by the time Cillian found the first piece. Cedar in the tea towels. Sandalwood soaked into the kitchen he had barely left in three days. My own peppercorn on the counters where I’d stood and cooked and put out fires while the woman upstairs rebuilt her body from the inside. And under all of it, chamomile and honey, gone into the walls now, the baseline of the whole house.

Sloane had left hours ago. Cillian sat cross-legged on the floor tile, laptop on one knee, three browser windows throwing blue light across the sound-wave ink on his forearms. He had surrendered the table to legal files, so he was on the floor.

“The liaison opened the shared drive fourteen times in six weeks,” he said. He didn’t look up. His voice was flat, the way it got when he was reading me numbers and didn’t want me arguing with the numbers. “First time was two days after they put him on the project. He pulled the full technical rider, the booth schematics, and the biometric monitoring protocols.”

I had Sloane’s solicitor’s email already drafted on my own screen, waiting on the one attachment that would make it worth sending.

“Fourteen’s too many,” I said. “A liaison does an initial review and a couple of milestone checks. Three. Four if he’s thorough.”

“It’s worse than too many.” His fingers moved. A spreadsheet opened, color-coded, timestamps running down the left in his own shorthand. “Seven of the fourteen happened between midnight and four in the morning. Network office hours stop at six. Whoever pulled these was doing it where the standard logs don’t look.”

“The overnight stuff won’t hit the weekly audit,” I said. “Automated monitoring only flags business-hours anomalies.”

“Which is why he picked those hours.” He turned the laptop toward me. Every access point mapped, every file named, duration down to the second. “Fifty-three minutes on the biometric spec alone. That document lays out exactly which vitals I track and how the data feeds the audio chain.”

I read it. Red for the technical rider, blue for the schematics, green for what he’d labeled BIO-MON specs. The thing about the pattern was how careful it was. Nobody doing oversight takes notes like that. That’s somebody building a case.

“This isn’t the liaison.”

Cillian’s eyes came up. The silver in his ears caught the light.

“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”

Someone had borrowed the liaison’s login.

He found the second machine later that night. Same credential, different IP. The liaison ran a network-issued laptop with a hardware signature you could set your watch by. This second device was personal. Cheap. The kind of thing a production assistant carries in a backpack between sets.

“Jamie Okafor,” Cillian said.

The name landed wrong in my stomach. Not a strategy. Not a faceless corporate hand. A kid with a lanyard, who’d stood inrooms where Isobel drank her tea and held together the fiction that was keeping her employed and, some days, alive.

I knew the face. Young, eager, one of the junior PAs who moved equipment and handed out scripts. Eight months on the crew. Long enough to learn the routine. Long enough to stop being someone anyone looked at.

But the network had only made him liaison six weeks ago. Six weeks with credentials, access to the shared drive, and a reason to turn everything he already knew into a report.

“His contract,” I said. “Pull it.”

He already had it open. Standard PA agreement, boilerplate, nothing wrong with any of it except one clause buried in the supplementary terms that I’d have skimmed right past on a normal read. A loyalty provision. Paragraph 14(c), subsection iii. The Assistant agrees to provide the Network with any information relevant to the commercial viability or reputational risk of the Production, including but not limited to matters pertaining to the health, conduct, or personal circumstances of key creative personnel.

Broad enough to cover anything. Narrow enough that reporting on her biology wasn’t just allowed. It was the job.

“He didn’t pick this,” Cillian said. Flat again, just laying out the variable. “It was baked into his employment terms. They hired him to watch.”