Page 78 of Heat Unscripted

He turned when I hit the threshold. His dark eyes found mine in the lamplight and stayed. Six years I’d learned to read that look through the neutrality he kept over it like a lens cap. Tonight the cap was off. What was left was just him. Wiry, exact, the sound-wave tattoos down his forearms, the steady hands that had stood between me and people I hadn’t known to be afraid of.

“I moved the blanket,” he said.

I looked at the bed. The nest I’d built out of Bram’s silks and Tuck’s flannels and the gray weighted wool wasn’t wrecked. It was bigger. Cillian had drawn the layers back and opened the whole thing, the single hollow I’d burrowed into spread outacross the full mattress. Room for four bodies where there’d been room for one.

He’d touched my nest.

Sloane had been clear about that. Don’t rearrange what she builds. She’d said it twice, looking right at me, like she knew.

But Cillian had, and the thing that turned over low in my stomach when I looked at it wasn’t anger. It was the same thing I’d felt in the studio the day he swung the monitor around and showed me my own voice on the screen. Not a hand reaching into my space. A mirror. Here. This is what you’ve been making. It was always built to hold more than you.

“You didn’t ask,” I said.

“No.” He didn’t look away. The silver in his ears caught the lamp. “I should have. I made a call. I can put it back,” he said.

I crossed the room and stood close enough that the sandalwood reached me clean, cool and steady with that faint sage edge that was only ever him. His hands stayed at his sides. His eyes stayed on mine.

“Don’t put it back,” I said.

Something moved behind his face. Cillian didn’t crack the way Bram did, all visible fault lines. He just changed, the way the whole room changes when you adjust one thing you can’t see.

I put my hand on his jaw. His skin was warm. The stubble was rougher than I’d expected, fine and dark under the clean angles he usually kept it scraped down to.

“Wait here,” I said.

He leaned into my hand, and the sandalwood opened up around us. He gave me a nod and then I pulled away, going back down stairs.

I found Bram in the sitting room. He looked up from the chair he’d been sitting in all evening. His gray-green eyes were clear in the low light. I held out my hand, palm up.

It was the gesture Tuck had made in the living room. The one I’d offered Bram across four feet of floor and watched him close in two strides. Our bodies had been speaking this language since before any of us had words for what we were.

He stood and took my hand. His grip was careful, the way he was careful with everything, like every touch was a thing worth getting exactly right. But his pulse slammed against the inside of my wrist.

“Come up,” I said.

He came. He didn’t ask where.

Tuck was drying the last plate when I came back down.

He set it in the rack and dried his hands on the towel, slow and thorough, the way he dried everything, because he brought the same whole attention to a sink full of dishes that he brought to a stunt. Then he turned, and his hazel eyes found me in the doorway, and the cedar surged warm and fast, the smell of a body that had been tracking mine through walls all evening.

I didn’t put my hand out.

I crossed the kitchen and walked straight into him. Face against his chest, arms around his waist, fitting against him the way I’d fit that first morning, easy, like two things built to dock.

His arms came around me with no hesitation at all. The cedar wrapped both of us up, and it smelled like every fireplace I’d ever wanted and every doorway I’d been too scared to walk through.

“Upstairs,” I said into his shirt.

His chest hummed. Not a word. Just the low rumble he’d found the morning after the booth and made every day since, the alpha version of a purr, and I felt it travel out of his sternum and into mine.

He followed me up.

The bedroom had all of them in it.

Cillian by the window with the dark behind him, lamplight turning his piercings to little points of light. Bram at the edge ofthe widened nest, one hand resting on a silk square he’d brought into this house himself. Tuck filling the doorway at my back, cedar mixing into what already saturated the room.

And me, under all of it. Chamomile and honey and warm cream, coming up off the nest and my skin and the walls themselves. Three alphas had been circling that scent for years. Tonight it was finally out in the open, in the one room built to hold it.