Page 14 of Heat Unscripted

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.

He stepped inside, shut the door, and set himself against the frame with his arms crossed, the sandalwood and sage of him spreading through the room and leveling it out.

Bram and Tuck were still holding me. Their scents had started to change. The protective sharpness was rising up through the warmth, and the claiming notes I’d caught off Tuck at the axe range were surfacing in both of them now, answering me before I’d even asked.

I made myself breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The suppressants hadn’t failed, not all the way, but they were burning off faster than they should, eaten alive by the conference and the closeness and the plain fact that I was standing between two unbonded Alphas whose scents had been doing complicated things to me for longer than I’d admit.

“I’m fine,” I said, and it came out steadier than I’d earned. “Just… give me a minute.”

Neither of them let go. Neither of them moved.

Cillian held the doorway like a post, his dark eyes moving between us the same way they moved across a mixing board. Logging everything. Reacting to none of it.

Slowly, my pulse came down. The honey pulled back. The chamomile settled under the chemical layer again. I found my feet and straightened up until I was holding my own weight.

Tuck’s arm came off my waist. His fingers dragged across my back on the way, a touch that wanted to look accidental and wasn’t, leaving a line of warmth behind.

Bram let go of my elbow as carefully as he’d taken it, loosening by degrees until we weren’t touching at all. But he didn’t step back. Neither of them did.

“The press conference ran long,” Bram said, his voice back to its usual flat calm. “And the temperature in that room was inadequately controlled. I’ve already spoken to the venue about their HVAC maintenance schedule.”

Of course he had. He’d taken my near collapse and turned it into a logistics problem, something a better plan and a sharp word to the right person could fix. I felt a laugh trying to climb up my throat.

“Sure,” I said. “The HVAC. That’s definitely what that was.”

His eyes came to mine, and there was something in them that wasn’t the usual cool competence. Something warmer. Something that remembered the jar of honey, the brush of hisfingers, the way he’d called all of it practical when we’d both known it wasn’t.

“You should rest before the tech run tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll have the car brought around.”

“I can get myself home.”

“You can,” he said. “You shouldn’t have to.”

Tuck shifted beside me, a wall of cedar. “I’ll ride along. Make sure she actually gets to her door instead of stopping at the studio to review notes for six hours.”

“That was one time,” I said.

“It was four times, Iz. I’ve got the receipts.”

Cillian pushed off the doorframe. The tablet was still in his hands, his thumb moving across it in that small steady way that meant he was working even when he looked like he was just standing there.

“Car’s already on the way,” he said. “I flagged it when the conference ran long. Figured you’d need pulling out.”

I looked at him. The silver piercings catching the fluorescent light, the sound-wave tattoos on his forearms, the calm dark eyes that had been on me for years. Watching. Covering me. Never once asking for credit.

“Thank you,” I said. It wasn’t enough. It was never going to be enough. It was what I had.

He nodded once. Short. Then he opened the door and stepped out into the corridor, clearing the path the same way he’d cleared the room. Quiet. Done. No noise about it.

Bram and Tuck walked me out, one on each side. Their scents had mostly dropped back to baseline, the claiming notes pulled in, the protective edges smoothed. But I could still feel them sitting just under the surface, ready to come up the second the walls dropped again and everything I’d been hiding stopped fitting behind my teeth.

Six days until the stream.

Twenty-four hours in a sealed booth with three Alphas whose biology had apparently been tracking mine longer than any of us wanted to say out loud.

The car was waiting at the curb. I slid into the back without looking at either of them, and I didn’t say a word the whole way home.

EIGHT