Page 21 of Heat Unscripted

I’m not okay. I’m ACTUALLY not okay.

Chemistry: INSANE. How are they doing this live???

I felt a spike at the top of hour seven. Small. The kind of thing that, without Cillian, would’ve slipped past a casual ear but litup clear on a waveform. The Rogue was mid-monologue, a quiet piece about carrying a secret long enough that it turns load-bearing. About how the lies you tell to survive can become the walls, until pulling them down means pulling the floor out from under you.

I’d written those words. I’d written them over cold chamomile tea with eleven years of synthetic spray ghosting on my skin, and I’d told myself they were fiction.

My voice wavered. Not out loud, not for the millions, but in the frequencies only Cillian could see. A bloom of warmth in the low registers. The truth crouched behind the words, getting out.

His fingers moved. The filter caught. The frequency folded back into nothing.

He did it four more times. Each one a fraction of a second, invisible, inaudible, clean. Biology cut out of the performance and stitched shut again, over and over, with the steadiness of someone who’d been doing it for years.

Years.

The word sat in my stomach as I gave the Rogue’s eighth-hour close, the scene where she stands watch alone at the edge of camp while the Knight sleeps, looking out at a darkness she can’t map and choosing to stay anyway.

“The Rogue listens to him breathe,” I said, low and steady and perfectly professional. “She’s survived alone for a long time. She’s good at it. Efficient. The kind of surviving that looks like strength from the outside and feels like nothing from the inside.”

Tuck’s chair creaked as he shifted. His eyes were on me, not his script. I could feel his attention like a hand pressed flat between my shoulder blades.

“She stays,” I said. “Not because she has to. She stays because his breathing sounds like something she forgot she was missing.”

The booth went very quiet. Even the equipment hum seemed to pull back, and those last words just hung there in the sealed air.

Bram’s pen had stopped.

On Cillian’s monitor the chat was a landslide of broken hearts and capital letters, an audience that had been hit somewhere real and couldn’t form a sentence about it.

The donation counter read two hundred and forty-seven thousand pounds.

“End of act one,” Bram said, and there was something in his voice I hadn’t heard yet. Not the GM’s authority, not the producer’s clipped logistics. Something quieter that sounded like recognition. “We’ll take a break. Stay hydrated.”

The “On Air” light dimmed to amber. Break mode.

I pulled my headphones off and pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. My throat ached the way it always did after a long stretch of work, but it was a clean ache. A good one. The suppressants were still holding. Still braced against the tide that wanted up.

Eight hours down. Sixteen to go.

From the engineering station, Cillian’s voice reached me, low, pitched for me alone.

“Levels are clean.” A pause. The Cillian pause that meant more was coming. “You’re extraordinary tonight.”

I lowered my hands and looked at him. He was half-turned in his chair, the tablet against his thigh, his dark eyes steady behind the faint blue wash off his monitors.

I opened my mouth to say thank you. To say you’re the reason. To say something about the four interventions and the years that came before them and the debt I’d never be able to pay back.

What came out was, “Sixteen more hours.”

He nodded. His fingers found the manual override switch and rested there. Light. Ready. Patient.

“Sixteen more hours,” he agreed. “I’m not going anywhere.”

ELEVEN

Isobel

The break ended too soon. I’d barely swallowed half a bottle of water and rolled the knots out of my shoulders before the “On Air” light went red again and millions of peoples’ attention swung back to us.