Page 2 of Heat Unscripted

My stomach dropped through the floor. I lunged for the talkback switch with a thousand half-formed apologies and cover stories already crowding my throat, fighting to get out first.

Cillian got there before my finger landed.

“Hold on, Gretan. Running a level check.” The same calm he always had, that steady tenor dropped like a cool stone into the churn of my panic, sinking slowly, taking nothing down with it.

I froze, hand hanging over the controls, not touching anything. A new window opened on the main monitor, code scrolling too fast to read. The waveform from my last take came up on the display, jagged and pulsing and damning, everything I’d just done laid out in plain ugly data. His cursor moved across the screen, unhurried, and highlighted a narrow band buried deep in the lower register, a sliver of the spectrum so precise I hadn’t known you could even pull it out on its own.

A few keystrokes, economical. A quiet drag of the mouse. The frequency dropped out of the playback, and not a hard cut that would leave a scar in the waveform either, something cleaner than that. He buried it. Folded the sound back into the baseline of the recording with a new filter, smoothed it over with a quiet practiced confidence that left no trace. The waveform settled into a flat, unremarkable Beta read.

“Okay.” His voice came back, not a single thing shifted in it. Just a tech reading off a routine note. “Got a small resonance spike around 2kHz. Filter was out of calibration. All set. Go from the top of the line when you’re ready.”

A resonance spike. A filter out of calibration. He handed me the lie with such clean technical confidence that my frantic, lurching heart grabbed it with both hands. An equipment issue. A calibration error. That made sense. That made complete, bearable sense. It had to make sense, because the alternative was not something I would face in this booth, on this night, with this much still riding on it.

I took a shaky breath and let the relief roll over me, slow and dizzy, leaving me hollowed out and grateful and stupidly close to tears. “Right. Thanks.”

He was a perfectionist. He was always tinkering, always finding and fixing things I didn’t even know were broken before they could do any damage. That was just what he did. It was who he was. Cillian Tonewick, my sound architect, quietly solved problems I hadn’t asked him to solve, the way he always had, until I’d stopped questioning it a long time ago.

His steady presence settled around me like a worn-in sweater, barely holding the frayed edges of my unraveling life together.

“From the top, then.” Quieter than a whisper, and not really for Cillian. More for the trembling thing crouched inside me.

I needed this take to go right. If it didn’t, he might stop believing in the filter. He might start to wonder whether I was an Omega after all.

TWO

Cillian

Fourteen hours after I buried a mate-call in a waveform, the conference room smelled like fresh printer ink and people who'd already decided how the meeting would go. I'd mapped the acoustics before anyone pulled out a chair.

I set up at the back table, same as always. Laptop open, two monitors angled, the portable spectrum analyzer running a quiet baseline sweep beside my coffee. A habit. Some people doodle in meetings. I measure rooms. This one had a reverb tail off the far wall, a low hum bleeding down from the HVAC duct above the projector, and a ceiling that would wreck any live audio if someone got the bright idea to record in here. I noted all of it and said nothing.

The rest of them filtered in.

Bram first. Always Bram first. He treats being on time like a stance you can take against people. He set his leather folio at the head of the table, uncapped a fountain pen, and read his printed agenda without sitting or looking up. His scent reached me a second later, old books and black peppercorn, dry and exact. He’d memorized the agenda days ago. The paper copy was for show.

“Tonewick.” A nod, brief.

“St. James.”

He sat, and the room reorganized around him. He wasn’t big. He wasn’t loud. He just took up space so completely that everyone else turned into furniture.

The production coordinator came next, then two network reps whose names I’d already filed under temporary, then the logistics manager, who always smelled faintly of nerves and thermal paper. They took their seats, squared their folders, and poured water from the jug in the middle of the table. Bram let them settle, checked his watch once, and opened his mouth?—

The door blew open.

Tuck didn’t just enter a room, he arrived in it, talking before he was over the threshold, his voice carrying ahead of the rest of him. Cedar and toasted bourbon rolled in first, like the smell had already grabbed a seat.

“I know, I know—” He dropped into the nearest chair, which groaned at him. He was already digging a battered notebook out of his jacket, a pen jammed through the wire spine at an angle that threatened someone’s eye. “Traffic was a war crime. Somebody was moving a piano. On a flatbed. Down Kensington High Street.”

“The meeting began at nine,” Bram said, flat, eyes still on his agenda.

“And it’s nine-oh-four, so technically I’m only?—”

“Sit down, Tucker.”

Tuck sat, grinning, not sorry in any way, shape, or form. He caught my eye across the table and gave me a quick lift of his scarred brow, the look that says Bram is just weather, same as bad rain. I gave him nothing back. He was used to that. We had been multiple years in when he stopped reading my silence as a problem, and I’ve never told him how much I appreciate it.

The door opened a second time, soft enough that I think I was the only one who caught it. Isobel came in.