Page 15 of Heat Unscripted

Isobel

The house smelled like chamomile and old foam, and underneath both, like nothing at all.

That was the point. Eleven years of padded walls and acoustic panels, all of it built to strip a room down to one voice. Mine. Today the bare quiet of it sat on my skin wrong, like a held breath I couldn’t make myself let out.

Vocal rest. Doctor’s orders. The doctor had looked at the swelling and the strain and told me to shut up for a day, which was funny, because she had no idea what she was actually treating. She saw fatigue. She didn’t see suppressants burning off faster than the chemistry promised, or the pressure building behind every swallow, or the way my own throat had started to feel like a borrowed thing.

I made tea anyway. Chamomile, because somebody up there has a sense of humor. I breathed the steam in and waited for it to settle the thing that hadn’t settled since the press conference.

Since the green room. Bram’s coat over my shoulders. Tuck’s arm at my waist. Cillian standing there too calm, holding the whole room together while I almost came apart.

Four days until the stream.

My stomach turned over slowly, the way it did before I admitted I was scared.

I carried the tea to the booth and stood in the doorway. The mic waited on its stand, silver and patient, not judging me, because microphones never do. The monitors glowed. The panels drank every sound in the room. Years of quiet desperation, soundproofed.

I’d promised the fans an update. Nothing big. A check-in before the finale, a little reassurance that the Faceless Siren was ready for the biggest performance of her life. I’d written the script weeks ago, before seeing Tessa, before the axe-throwing place, before anything cracked.

Hi everyone. Just dropping in to say how excited I am for the finale. Your support has meant everything and I can’t wait to finish the Rogue’s story with all of you watching.

Simple. Professional. I’d recorded a hundred of these.

I sat down. The booth closed around me, padded and safe and completely indifferent to whatever was happening under my skin. I nudged the mic. Checked the levels. Took a breath that was supposed to steady me and didn’t do a damn thing.

I didn’t flip the mute.

That was the first mistake, the automatic one. My thumb finds that switch before I open my mouth, every time, every session, the way you lock a door without thinking. But I was tired. Tired, distracted, still carrying the ghost of three Alpha scents that had wrapped around me in a green room and wouldn’t fully clear out.

I opened my mouth.

“Hi everyone.” The voice that came out was exactly mine. That was the problem.

Rich. Low. Warm in a way I’d spent years scrubbing out of every file, sitting down in the bottom of my range and blooming there, spreading, alive, wanting to be heard.

“Just wanted to drop in?—”

I stopped. My hand hit the desk and pressed down hard, like solid wood could hold me onto a reality that was sliding sideways under me.

The waveform told on me. I watched it stack on the monitor, the overtones that had no business being there, the layered frequencies, the unmistakable signature of an Omega broadcasting through studio gear with nothing left to hide behind.

I hit delete.

The file vanished. The waveform went flat. Gone, like I’d never spoken, like I hadn’t just listened to my own voice sell out everything I’d built.

But I’d heard it. And I couldn’t un-hear a thing like that.

My stomach knotted and stayed knotted. The suppressants were failing. Not a green-room collapse, nothing that loud. Just a slow leak, the way a dam goes when the water’s been climbing too long behind it.

Tessa had warned me. She’d pressed the emergency pills into my hand and told me the crash would be worse, and she’d watched me with those knowing eyes and said nothing when I swore I had it under control.

I reached into the inner pocket of my kit bag.

The box was where I’d left it since I’d visited her. Unmarked. Plain. I opened it and my fingers shook, just a little. The clinical-grade tablets looked exactly like my regular dose. Small. White. Innocent. Enough chemistry in that box to hold back the ocean if you took enough of it. I needed to know they worked before I risked the stream.

I took one dose.

Tessa’s voice was flat and patient in my head.If you burn through them during the stream, the crash hits twice as hard.