Page 18 of Heat Unscripted

A laugh got out of me before I could stop it. “My aim was garbage.”

“We’ll fix the aim.” The corner of his mouth went up, not quite a smile. “After.”

After. He let the word sit there. It carried everything that could happen in the next twenty-four hours, everything that could break loose.

The door opened again.

Bram came in the way he came into every room, his own gravity walking three steps ahead of him, rearranging the air before the rest of him cleared the frame. Dark blue vest over a white shirt, silver-shot hair swept back like he’d measured it. The leather folio under his arm held a full day of story, every beat marked in that small even hand of his.

His scent came in with him. Old books and black peppercorn, dry, sharp, sliding in over the cedar Tuck had already laid down across the room.

My stomach dropped clean through the floor.

I grabbed the edge of the table. Let the chemicals work. Breathed through the second where my whole body wanted to lean two directions at once, toward both of them, to climb into that doubled warmth and let every professional inch between us melt off.

Bram found me across the room. His face gave away nothing, same as always. But his eyes had changed since the night in his penthouse, since the honey and the brush of his fingers and the way his peppercorn had gone knife-edged when we touched.

He set the folio down. Straightened his vest. Held my eyes one beat past anything the job required.

“The structure’s locked,” he said. “We run the act transitions on schedule. First eight hours are open play. Audience, donations, setting the stakes. Hours eight through sixteen, thecampaign climaxes.” His voice dropped into the low thing he used at the table, the GM register. “The last stretch is where we bring it home.”

“No improvising in the final act,” I said, throwing his own line back at him from the production meetings.

“No improvising.” A pause. “Unless.”

“Unless it serves the story.”

His mouth tipped, barely. “You’ve been listening.”

“I always listen.” It came out steadier than I felt. “It’s the job.”

Tuck made a sound that was nearly a laugh, low and warm, and the room loosened a notch. The thing in the air shifted into something I knew. Getting ready. The strung-tight quiet of people about to walk into the thing they’d been building for months.

The door opened one last time.

Cillian didn’t announce anything. He was just there in the frame, tablet under one arm, crossing to the engineering rig built into the far corner. Sandalwood and sage cut through the two Alphas already warming the room, cooler, steadier, the only smell in here that settled my pulse instead of spiking it.

He didn’t look at me. He sat, started his pre-show diagnostics. But his fingers stopped over one control, the manual override that could drop the live feed with a single press, and I watched him glance at the switch, then back at his screens.

The message landed without a word. He’d cut it the second I needed him to.

I nodded, even though he wasn’t watching. Some things don’t need eye contact.

“Five minutes to air.” The voice crackled through the booth intercom. “Final positions, please.”

I sat. The mic stood in front of me, silver and patient and not interested in mercy. My headphones came down over my earsand the world shrank to this sealed box, three men whose scents were filling the air I had to breathe, and the script that carried twenty-four hours of character work and exposed nerves and at least a dozen moments built to peel me open if I wasn’t careful.

So I had no choice but to be very, very careful.

Bram opened the folio with a soft rasp of paper. His fountain pen appeared in his hand, the same one from every meeting, and he uncapped it the way some people chamber a round.

“The campaign opens at hour zero,” he said, and his voice had already slid into the narration texture, smooth, certain, somehow standing right next to you in the dark. “The Rogue stands at the threshold of something she can’t name. Behind her, the world she’s always known. Before her.” His eyes lifted to mine across the table and my breath caught on the way down. “Before her, everything she’s been afraid to want.”

The “On Air” light flickered.

Dark to red.

Somewhere past these walls, five million people pulled in a breath.