Page 103 of Heat Unscripted

The room held that. The old books took it in the way they take in everything, all the way, no judgment.

Bram picked up a ring. His hands had stopped shaking. He studied it the way he studies a script revision, turning it, reading how it was built. The strip ran through its colors under his eyes.

“Three years,” he said, quiet. “You’ve been building toward this.”

“Six,” Cillian said. “The rings were year three. Year one was the first frequency filter.”

Bram set the ring down. He looked at Cillian across the table with a face I’d seen once before, in the sitting room the morning after the booth, when Tuck told him Cillian had been protecting me for years and Bram realized exactly how much he’d missed.

It was the look of a man whose whole picture of the world had just taken on new information and was quietly rearranging every conclusion he’d ever drawn from it.

“You built it before any of us knew there was music,” Bram said.

“I heard the music first,” he said. “Year one. Session four. The word safe.” He looked at me, eyes dead straight. “I just didn’t know the rest of the orchestra existed yet.”

The ceremony, if you could call it that, had no script.

Sloane had offered to write one. I’d said no. Bram had offered to structure it. I’d said no to that too, which got me a silence that, by Bram’s standards, was a standing ovation for my judgment.

We stood in a loose circle by the table. The rings on their velvet. The hellebores stark white in their vase. Cillian’s track running under everything, making the warmth he’d promised.

Tuck went first. Tuck always moved first.

“I had a speech,” he said, his voice filling the room the way it filled every room, all the way, no holding back. “Wrote it on thetrain. Three paragraphs. Good stuff. Emotional, well-structured. Bram would’ve given it a seven.”

“Six,” Bram murmured.

“Point is, I had one. And I’m not using it.” His hands went to his pockets, came out, and clasped in front of him. “Because what I want to say isn’t structured. It’s just… I spent years sitting next to someone and not reaching for her. Telling myself the pull was professional. That the way my blood moved every time you laughed was respect. That I could track your breathing through a sealed booth because I’m observant.”

His eyes found mine. Bright. Already filling with tears.

“I wasn’t observant. I was in love. I just didn’t have the guts to let myself know it.” He swallowed. The scar caught the lamplight. “So this ring, whatever it is, whatever it does, it’s not me promising to start something. It’s me saying I was yours before I met you. That my body knew. That those years weren’t wasted, they were just the longest warm-up in history.”

His voice cracked on the last word. Clean. The sound of something coming loose instead of breaking.

“And I’m going to be really good at this,” he said. “Eventually. Once I stop crying at everything.”

Sloane made a strangled sound from her chair. She pressed her fingers to her mouth and stared at the ceiling, refusing to let her mascara admit what was happening. Tessa sniffled, tears streaming down her face.

Cillian went next. The order had sorted itself out, Tuck first, Cillian second, Bram last. Weeks of being in each other’s space had set it, a pack that had stopped needing to negotiate its own shape.

He didn’t step forward. Didn’t shift his weight. Didn’t do any of the things people do before they say something big. He just spoke from where he stood, his voice low and steady, the one he saves for the things that matter most. Quiet, and heavy anyway.

“I’m not a person who uses words for this.”

A pause. His fingers moved against each other, the ghost of reaching for controls.

“I use frequencies. Signal processing. Sound. The way I loved you was by taking things out of your recordings. Hiding you. Protecting a voice I knew was extraordinary by making sure no one else ever heard it. I told myself that was enough. That the engineering was the saying-it in the only language I speak.”

The tattoos on his forearms caught the light as his hands went still.

“It wasn’t enough. It was necessary, and I’d do it again, every filter, every scrub. But it wasn’t enough, because I was loving you from behind a board and you didn’t know I was doing it. The love was real. The silence around it wasn’t.”

His eyes found mine. Straight on. Years of watching behind them, and now a choice to be watched back.

“This ring means I stop engineering from the shadows. Standing in a room, in front of witnesses, saying the thing out loud instead of burying it in a waveform.” His voice dropped, lowest and most private it gets. “Isobel. I’ve been listening to you for six years. I’d like to spend the rest of my life listening and being heard back.”

His hand went to his ear. The silver ring, the one that catches every light in every room, the glint I’d been tracking for years without knowing I was tracking it. He turned it under his fingertip. A small adjustment. An engineer’s reflex.