Page 23 of Heat Unscripted

“Proximity stress,” she’d said. “Performance stress. Any time your body decides the stakes are high, you’ll burn through your reserves faster than baseline.”

This was high stakes. Millions of people listening to every breath, every pause, every frequency Cillian tracked like a man with two fingers on a wrist.

“She drinks,” I said. “Not because she’s thirsty. Because it’s easier than answering.”

Bram’s pen stopped.

The booth went silent. Two beats. Three. Long enough that the chat would be asking whether the feed had frozen, whether the scene had actually cracked one of us open.

Then Bram spoke, and his voice had dropped somewhere I hadn’t heard it go. Lower. Rougher. Down under the words, into the part of a sound you feel instead of hear.

“There are old magics in this world,” he said, and the flavor text I’d written years ago came back like something out of a dream. “Magics older than language. Magics that remember what it was to be intoxicating before there was anyone left to intoxicate.”

My pulse spiked.

I felt it go, the sudden climb, blood loud in my ears, my body answering that low note like it had a temperature and a weight, lodged behind my ribs and pushing out.

On Cillian’s biometric monitor the line would be moving. Heart rate up. Skin temp up. Breathing sliding from controlled to something that wasn’t. A spike on the graph he watched the way a doctor reads a strip, quiet and thorough and without one ounce of feeling about it.

I didn’t look at him. I wouldn’t let myself.

“The Rogue feels it,” I said, steadier than my heart was. A small win. “The magic in the stones under her. The magic in the fire that’s going out. The magic in the man beside her, who’s offering her something she doesn’t know how to take.”

The booth was too warm. The air too thick. Cedar and bourbon on my right, old books and peppercorn across the table, and under all of it the cooler thread of sandalwood and sage off Cillian’s station.

The suppressants were burning faster.

I could feel them straining now, the dam working, the thinning that had been manageable an hour ago edging toward something I wasn’t sure of.

“The Knight watches her drink,” Tuck said, and he leaned in as he said it, killing another inch between us. “And he thinks, I’ve stood in front of armies. I’ve held a line against odds that should’ve buried me. None of it ever felt like this.”

His scent hit me like a fist.

Cedar. Burnt bourbon. Warm and immediate and asking for nothing, a hand offered in a hallway with no demand behind it. My body answered before my head could get in front of it. A rush of heat that had nothing to do with the room. Something low going soft, involuntary, biological.

My fingers locked on my pen.

The Rogue had a line ready. Something deflecting, armored, the kind that shoves a person back while quietly praying they don’t go. I’d written it with cold tea and the ghost-drag of eleven years of synthetic scent spray, and I’d thought I understood what I was putting down.

I opened my mouth to say it.

“She wants to say something clever.” The words came out, but not the ones I’d written. Close. The shape was right. The Rogue had just taken them somewhere more open than I’d planned. “Something that’ll make him laugh and give her a way out. She’s got a thousand of those. She’s used them her whole life.”

A pause.

“She doesn’t say any of them.”

The booth went very still.

Bram’s pen had stopped. His eyes were on me across the table, and the look had shifted off the GM’s working attention onto something that was only his. The peppercorn of his scentsharpened, past the logistics-stress edge I’d learned to read into something warmer. Something that wanted.

From the engineering station I heard Cillian’s fingers move on the board.

One adjustment. Then another. Small corrections, nothing any listener would notice, things only he understood.

He was filtering something. No, not something. He was filtering me. The biological warmth trying to leak into my high registers, the sweetness the character couldn’t account for on her own, he was catching it, burying it, covering me the way he’d been covering me for years.

“The Knight doesn’t push,” Tuck said. His voice had gone very quiet. Not performed quiet. The real thing, close and bare. “He just sits with her. In the quiet. In the dark. Holding the space for whatever she’s carrying that she can’t put down yet.”