Page 73 of Heat Unscripted

I uncapped it. Set the nib on the signature line on the last page.

The ink was blue. Dark. Bram’s shade, rich enough to read clean on white paper.

My hand didn’t shake.

Eleven years of survival held it steady. The same instinct that had taught me to suppress my scent, modulate my voice, build a fake version of myself the world would take. The muscle memory of making myself smaller. Of choosing the hide over the show. Of eating the cost so nobody else had to.

I could do this. One more name on one more page, trading the truth for safety. I’d been practicing the motion for years. My hand knew this surrender.

The network wanted a stunt. Fine. Give them the story they needed, the neat fiction that turned everything real into something performed. Sign away the catalog and the truth and the three seconds of biological honesty that had changed everything, and the people I loved would be out of the radius. Bram’s career intact. Cillian’s contracts clean. Tuck’s future un-sued.

They’d be furious. They’d call it betrayal, call it self-destruction, call it everything except what it was. The last reflex of someone who’d been making herself small to protect other people since she was eighteen and didn’t know how to stop.

The nib touched the paper.

One point of contact. Blue on white. The start of the line that would become a name that would undo everything we’d built in this kitchen, in this house, in the days of den and warmth and four people learning to trust each other.

I held it there. One dot. No motion.

The range hood hummed.

From the sofa, Tuck’s breathing shifted, the half-awake adjustment of something that tracked its pack even asleep. From upstairs, the faint creak of a floorboard. Cillian, awake or dreaming, his body pointed at the door even in rest.

I kept the pen on the paper and I breathed.

The honey and chamomile of my scent, unmuted, unmasked, the whole truth of a woman who’d stopped hiding, filled the dark kitchen with its warmth. And underneath it, threaded through every surface, soaked into the walls. Cedar and peppercorn and sandalwood. Three scents that had gotten into me so deep that getting them back out would take more than a signature.

It would take becoming someone I wasn’t anymore.

I lifted the pen.

Set it down beside the binder. Capped it the careful way Bram would have, because it was his and it deserved that.

The signature line stayed blank.

I didn’t sign.

But I didn’t close the binder either. I left it open to the page with the ink mark on it. One blue dot, small and perfect, the start of a thing that never became what it meant to be.

I sat in the dark kitchen and I looked at it.

In the morning I’d have to tell them I almost did.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Isobel

Morning found me before I was ready for it.

The light came through the kitchen window at the angle that turned everything gold. The granite counter. The crumbs Tuck hadn’t swept. The legal binder, still open on the table to the page where a single blue dot marked the place I’d almost disappeared.

I hadn’t moved.

The pen sat capped beside the binder. The range hood light was pointless now, the dawn doing what the bulb had done all night. My tea had gone cold, then past cold, the chamomile bag a pale ghost at the bottom of the cup. My body ached the way it does after too long braced around something heavy that isn’t physical.

I smelled Tuck before I heard him.

Cedar reached me first, warm and loose and carrying sleep in it. Then the creak of the sofa springs letting go of his weight. He’d slept there. His footsteps were careful, heavy but soft-placed, a man who knew the floorboards’ complaints by name and stepped around the worst of them.