Page 24 of Heat Unscripted

I looked at my script.

The Rogue’s next line was right there. Something about learning to be alone, about what it costs to let a person in, about a life built with no room in it for warmth.

I’d written those words.

I didn’t say them.

“She leans,” I said instead, and let the Rogue drop into something softer than I’d ever let her get. “Just a little. Not against him. Not yet. Toward him. Close enough to feel the warmth without taking it. Close enough to know it’s there if she decides to reach.”

The donation counter jumped.

Bram drew breath to close the scene, his baritone rising to it, and his attention pressed on me like a thing with heat in it. His scent had moved across the segment, the peppercorn still sharp, layered now with something richer underneath. The low place his voice had found in the flavor text, turned into chemistry.

“The fire dies to ash,” he said. “The dark finishes itself. And somewhere in that dark, two people are sitting closer together than they were a heartbeat ago.”

The chat was a riot.

The donation total had crossed three hundred thousand.

The “On Air” light held red, patient, and millions of people pulled in a breath waiting for what came next.

From the engineering station, Cillian caught my eye.

His face was neutral. Always neutral, that flat calm he carried into everything. But his hand was resting on the manual override, and the set of his shoulders told me what the data was saying. What the filters were catching. How close I’d come to the edge of what he could hide.

You’re holding, his eyes said.But I don’t know for how long.

I checked the clock on the monitor.

Hour twelve and climbing.

Nearly half the broadcast still to go.

The suppressants burned, working harder than they ever had, holding back a tide that wanted up and out. Cillian’s fingers found the fader, ready to go in again. Bram turned a page in his folio, pen up. Tuck’s cedar wrapped around me like it had a plan.

The story kept going.

So did I.

One hour at a time. One beat at a time. One save at a time.

Cillian was watching. Cillian was always watching.

He bought me another hour that night, a run of small adjustments, invisible corrections, the work of a man who knew to the minute how much runway I had left. It was never going to be enough. It was what we had.

TWELVE

Isobel

Hour fifteen.

The booth smelled like three Alphas and the last of my own lie. Cedar and bourbon on my right, peppercorn across the table, and under all of it the flat synthetic nothing of the Beta Neutral I’d been spraying in double doses since hour twelve. The neutral was losing. I could smell myself starting to come through it, faint and sweet, like something warming in a pan.

The monologue had been waiting for me since two in the morning. I’d written it at my desk with cold chamomile going scummy in the mug and the clinical-grade suppressants sitting in their unmarked box like a dare. The Rogue’s last confession. The moment she stopped performing and let the Knight see what she’d carried alone the whole campaign.

I knew, even typing it, that the words were mine before they were hers.

Bram set the scene. His voice had gone rougher over the hours, not tired, just looser, like he’d stopped holding something in place.