Page 13 of Heat Unscripted

By the time she called for final questions, my throat was sandpaper and my pulse was running too fast.

“One more from the floor,” she said. “Yes, you. Blue jacket.”

A man stood. Middle-aged, press badge, smiling like he was about to be clever.

“There’s been talk online,” he said, “that the reason you’ve never shown your face is you’re hiding something. Your designation, specifically. Care to comment?”

The room went still.

My stomach dropped clean through the floor. I felt the suppressants strain against the cortisol spike, the whole chemistry of my disguise flinching under a load it wasn’t built for.

“I don’t comment on speculation.” The modulator made it sound bored. “Next question.”

“But surely…”

“Next question.”

The moderator, bless her, jumped in with thanks and closing lines before he could lean on it again. The lights shifted. People started to drift toward the doors. I sat behind my screen and breathed through the thing that had almost gone over a cliff.

Backstage smelled like burned coffee and industrial carpet before I even got the door shut behind me.

That was the first thing. Then the fluorescent light, doing no one any favors. A converted green room, smaller than I’d pictured. I came in with my bag hugged to my chest and my glasses crooked and my whole body running on adrenaline and chemistry and not much else.

They were waiting for me.

Bram stood at the far wall, leather folio under one arm, face giving away nothing. The overhead light caught the silver in his dark hair. Tuck was nearer the door, shoulders eating up more than their share of the cramped room, the scar through his brow pulled tight in something that might’ve been worry, or might’ve just been Tuck.

The scents hit me before I’d taken three steps.

Cedar and toasted bourbon off Tuck, warm and big, filling the room like it had weight. Old books and black peppercorn off Bram, dry and sharp, laying over the top of it. The two of them together did something to the air, and my knees just…

My knees gave out.

I didn’t decide to sway. My body quit holding me up, all of it at once, the suppressants and the willpower and the eleven years of composure folding under the heat and the closeness and the strain of pretending to be something I wasn’t in front of people who’d wanted to rip the mask off.

Two sets of hands caught me at the exact same second.

Tuck’s arm came around my waist from the left, solid, the cedar of him pouring over me like warm water. Bram’s fingers closed on my elbow from the right, steady, no pull to them, his peppercorn going sharp at the edges until something low in my brain sat up and paid attention.

I was wedged between them. Bourbon on one side, old books on the other. And somewhere in all of it my own scent slipped the leash. The chamomile went sweet, the cream warmed, the Beta Neutral overlay I’d sprayed on like armor thinned toward nothing.

“Easy.” Tuck’s voice was a low rumble I felt in my breastbone. “I’ve got you.”

“We’ve got you,” Bram said, and there was something in it I had no room left to take apart, something that wasn’t the controlled baritone he used in production meetings.

I tried to pull back, to rebuild the professional distance that had kept me upright for eleven years. My legs wouldn’t do it. The scents were everywhere, wrapped around me like they meant to be, and my traitor of a body was answering with an enthusiasm I had zero interest in examining.

“Let me…” My voice came out wrong. Too soft. Too warm. The honey I’d kept locked down was leaking through at the edges, and I could hear it.

The door opened.

“Equipment malfunction in Studio C.” Cillian’s voice cut through the fog, cold and necessary. “Everyone needs to clear the area while we run diagnostics. Building safety protocol.”

He stood in the doorway, tablet in hand, face flat as a wall. The production assistant who’d been hovering by the coffee station looked up, startled, and Cillian put the full weight of his dark stare on her.

“That includes support staff,” he said. “Now, please.”

She grabbed her bag and went. Cillian watched her go, waited for the door to click, then turned to the three of us still tangled in the middle of the room.