Page 106 of Heat Unscripted

Four rings. Four frequencies. One thing, caught in metal and worn against four separate pulses, going out quietly into the air of a library that had been listening for generations and would, I figured, keep listening long after we left.

Sloane blew her nose with violence into a handkerchief that looked like it had been monogrammed for occasions exactly like this one, where she planned to cry and deny it later. Tessa blubbered quietly next to her, meanwhile Marguerite’s pen had not stopped.

“For the record,” Marguerite said, her usual precision coming through a throat that sounded distinctly tight, “that was legally irrelevant and personally devastating, and I will be billing for emotional damages.”

I laughed. Honey and salt and the full weight of a voice that belonged to no one except the woman making it and the three people close enough to feel it through their skin.

I was theirs. They were mine. Done.

THIRTY-FIVE

Isobel

The convention center smelled like a thousand people pretending to be strangers.

I caught the first wave of it in the service corridor, the one Cillian had routed us through, past the loading dock and a fire door wedged open with somebody’s equipment case. Industrial cleaner. The sour sweat of event staff running behind schedule. The main hall bled through the walls in pieces. Coffee. Carpet glue. The mixed-up perfume of a few thousand bodies breathing the same air-conditioned air, some sprayed flat, some suppressed, some broadcasting like people who’d driven half a day and bought a weekend pass and weren’t about to waste it being polite.

And under all of it, threaded through the vents, the warm tangle of Omega scent. Not one. Not a handful. Dozens. The thing I’d spent years training my nose to ignore in myself, and here it was, in a concentration I’d only ever met inside a hospital.

The Omega Voice Convention. Third year. First time it had sold out in advance. First time so many of us had been in the same building at once. First time they’d asked a public-facingOmega to give the keynote with nothing between her face and the room.

First time I’d said yes.

Tuck walked point. His cedar went ahead of him down the corridor, warm and territorial, clearing a path. Charcoal blazer that his shoulders were openly arguing with, collar open, because Tuck and top buttons had never once agreed about anything. The scar through his left eyebrow caught the strip lighting as he checked the junction.

“Clear,” he said, in the voice that could be heard through a closed door. A production assistant twenty feet off flinched and dropped her clipboard.

“Subtlety,” Bram said at my left, his peppercorn dry and amused, “has never been Tucker’s strong suit.”

“My strong suit is presence, St.James. You can’t argue with the volume.”

Bram’s mouth went up at one corner. Then a bit further. Lately the smile kept claiming new ground. He wore the vest. Dark blue, pressed flat, the pocket square folded into clean angles by a man who treated fabric the way he treated a script. No folio. He’d left it at home.

I’d watched him do it that morning. He set it on the hall table and his hand hovered over the leather for multiple seconds before he pulled it back. He was walking into something he couldn’t script, and he was doing it without his notes.

A year ago that would have been unthinkable.

Today it cost him mere seconds.

Cillian came last. Quiet. His tablet under one arm. He’d surveyed the hall at dawn, before the crew finished rigging, walked it with a portable analyzer, mapped where the sound carried and where it died. He’d sent me the results before any of us were up. One line under it.

The room will hold your voice at full output. No compression required.

His sandalwood reached me, cool, steady, that faint sage bite that was only ever his. Not pushing out the way Tuck’s cedar did, filling everything. Just there. Behind me. Watching. Nothing got into that corridor before it got past him first.

Three scents woven into mine, the titanium ring warm on my finger, a pack that had learned to move through a crowd without tripping over each other’s instincts. They’d practiced. I knew because Cillian had told me at breakfast, flat, the way he reports everything, that Tuck had called a “formation drill” after our first public outing ended with all three of them trying to hold a restaurant door for me at the same time and clipping each other in the frame.

The corridor ended at double doors. Green room behind them. Stage behind that. And behind the stage, two thousand people, a livestream feeding another expected three hundred thousand, and the flat certainty that every single one of them would know what I was the second I opened my mouth.

Tuck held the door. Bram’s hand found the small of my back, brief, light, pressed once through the silk and gone. Cillian’s hand landed on my shoulder as I crossed through. His thumb found the spot at my nape where the gland sits and stroked it once, the same pressure he used on a fader.

I’m here.He didn’t say it. He didn’t have to.

I stepped through.

The green room was a controlled disaster.

Six couches. Three clothing racks. A catering table already gutted by people who understood that free sandwiches at a convention wait for no one. And the scents. God, the scents. Twenty-something biologies stacked over coffee and hairspray and the jangle of people about to walk onstage.