Page 84 of Heat Unscripted

“I need you to understand what that means, Iz. Every frequency, every marker, every nuance I’ve spent six years scrubbing out of your files. All of it gets captured. All of it stays audible. Anyone who plays it back hears what you are. You sure you want to do this?”

Isobel’s hand sat flat on the desk. Her fingers weren’t shaking, which was the first thing I checked. Her hair was loose tonight, no pencil through it, no bun, just the auburn waves down past her shoulders. Her glasses sat straight for once. I almost said something about it.

She had on one of my flannels, cuffs rolled, swallowing her the way her sweaters always had. Except the shirt didn’t just smell like cedar and bourbon anymore. It smelled like cedar and bourbon and chamomile and honey and cream, all of it worked so deep into the cotton the flannel had basically become part of the nest. She was wearing it like armor.

“I understand, and I think I need to do this,” she said.

Her voice was incredible, even more so now.

I’d been hearing it for years across tables, through headphones, in booths built to catch every sound a throat could make. I’d heard the professional contralto, the one that turned warrior queens into real women and read other people’s love stories like she meant them. I’d heard the mate-call, the raw thing that tore through the broadcast and blew my whole life open. I’d heard the whines and the scraps of Omega sounds her body made when words quit on her.

I hadn’t heard this.

This was the professional version of her voice that had come back after the fever. It carried honey without trying to be sweet, held warmth without spending it on anybody. The contralto was all still there, the range, the control, the instrument she’d built. But it sat inside something bigger now, something low and full that no amount of training puts in a person. A body finishing the job the chemistry had stalled for years.

My stomach dropped, then knotted, then quit pretending it knew what to do. The sound filled the closet of a room and I felt it land somewhere under my ribs, in a spot that had been hollow a long time and wasn’t anymore.

Bram’s breath caught in the corner. Quiet. Nobody would’ve noticed it who hadn’t spent years learning his scent and the way his chest moved. The peppercorn pulsed once, warm, and settled.

Cillian’s hands didn’t go anywhere near the board. His eyes stayed on the waveform, where the display had bloomed wide off two words. Colors I didn’t have the vocabulary for, rich and stacked and alive.

He looked at it the way you’d look at something nobody had named yet.

“Whenever you’re ready,” he said.

The red light came on.

She didn’t start with words.

She sat in front of the mic in the quiet, and the quiet wasn’t empty. It was a woman settling into herself, feeling for the edges, making sure the voice had survived everything that had been done to it.

I counted the seconds. Then she breathed in deep. I heard it in the room’s hum, the air filling her up under my flannel, air that carried all four of us and would carry her voice back out with it.

She spoke.

“My name is Isobel Gretan.”

It dropped into the room like a stone into still water. Low. No projection, no performance stance, none of the professional reach toward an audience of millions. Just a woman in a room telling a microphone who she was. This wasn’t like the first time, that was just for us. This was something different. Something that she wanted to send out into the world. This was her taking back what was rightfully hers.

“I’ve been called the Faceless Siren for years now. I’ve narrated two hundred and forty-three audiobooks. I’ve voiced eight hundred and sixteen characters. I’ve won awards and broken records and built a career that, by any outside measure, is extraordinary.”

A beat. Two.

“And I did all of it while hiding the most basic thing about myself.”

I pushed my back harder into the door frame. The cedar in my scent was doing something I couldn’t shut off, swelling out, filling the doorway with a warmth I hadn’t signed off on. The broadcast of an alpha whose pack was safe and whose Omega was finally talking, whose only job tonight was to hold the line and let the sound pass through him.

“I’m an Omega,” she said.

Three words. The mic took them and the waveform bloomed with everything that had been buried, the overtones, the layering, the biological signature no beta throat makes and no spray hides from gear like this. I couldn’t read the data the way Cillian could. But I could see the shape of it on the screen. Rich. Complicated. Alive.

“I presented at eighteen. My first agent told me Omega narrators don’t get long-form contracts. She said my voice was extraordinary but my designation would cap how the industry would use it. She gave me a choice. Hide, or take a ceiling that would keep me off every project I’d wanted since I was twelve.”

The flannel moved at her collarbones when she breathed. I could smell it from the door, the cedar and chamomile the shirt had pulled off her skin, coming back out in the warm sealed air. My scent on her. Her scent mixed with mine. The whole fact of us soaked into a shirt I’d thrown in a bag without thinking.

“I chose to hide.”

Her voice didn’t crack. The contralto held, steady and warm, carrying the words without buckling. But something low in it shifted, deepened, the honey thickening, and not for show. From the weight of finally saying out loud the thing that had shaped every breath she’d taken since she was eighteen.