Page 25 of Heat Unscripted

“The watchtower’s empty,” he said. “The pack sleeps below. Only the Rogue’s still awake, at the window, with the moonlightcoming in. She’s been carrying a weight a long time. Tonight, for reasons she can’t name, it’s too heavy to hold alone.”

My stomach was tight and getting tighter. The cooling had been cut at hour twelve and the air had been climbing since, sealed and thick, the suppressants burning through faster than I could do the math on. Cillian had stepped in again and again all night, each correction another nail in the coffin, and the gaps between them shrinking.

He’d stopped looking at me. Not avoiding. Concentrating. Both hands on the board, eyes on his waveforms, leaned forward like a man running out of room.

Tuck sat close enough that our shoulders almost touched. He hadn’t moved away since the campfire scene. The cedar of him had gone deep and dark, not the warm wide note I knew. That darker note an Alpha gets when the instinct’s near the surface and only will is keeping it down.

I looked at my script.

The words were there. I’d written them. I knew them.

I opened my mouth.

“She turns from the window.” It came out steady. Clean. Professional. Across the booth Cillian’s fader moved a hair, catching something, burying it, buying me time I didn’t have.

“She turns from the window,” I said again, finding the rhythm, “and she thinks about everything she’s never said. Not because she didn’t have the words. She always had words. Too many of them, arranged to deflect and distract and keep every living thing at a safe, manageable distance.”

The chat was moving. I couldn’t read it. I could see the velocity on Cillian’s second monitor, reactions scrolling faster than anyone could read.

“She’s never said ‘I’m tired’. But she is and not the kind that means sleep. The kind that means the performance has gone on so long she’s forgotten if there’s anything under it. She doesn'tknow if the mask comes off anymore. If she still has a face under the face she shows everyone.”

My throat went hot. Not the clean ache of a long performance. Something chemical, something behind my vocal cords where the suppressants were fighting and losing. I felt the thinning. Felt the thing I’d held all night start to give along its seams.

Bram’s pen had stopped. He was looking at me across the table, dark and steady, none of his usual analyst’s distance on his face. The peppercorn of him had gone sharp, with an edge I’d only caught once before. In his penthouse. When our fingers touched over a jar of honey and his pupils went wide whether he wanted it or not.

I kept going. The words made me.

“She’s never said, ‘I’m not what you think I am,’ because to say it would mean admitting that everything she built, the reputation, the distance, the whole careful life designed to look good from outside and stay hollow inside, wasn’t strength. It was fear.”

My voice cracked.

Not the pretty crack of a character hitting her limit, not something I could call craft later. This came out raw and I didn’t choose it, splitting clean through the middle of the word fear and showing what was under it, which wasn’t the Rogue’s voice at all.

Wasn’t any character’s voice.

Was mine.

It started low, under my diaphragm, a vibration that skipped my throat entirely and sat in my chest before it found a way out. The same thing that had gotten loose once in my home studio and gone straight into Cillian’s headphones.

The mate-call.

The thing under language and under technique and under every suppressant I’d ever swallowed. Except this time it didn’t stop.

It built.

The whine climbed and then dropped, down past my contralto into a range I didn’t know I had, low and thick and full of overtones that layered and folded over each other and called. Honey and steamed milk. Sweet and shameless and broadcasting at full power from a body that had been muzzled eleven years and had just, finally, gotten out.

I couldn’t stop it.

My hands hit the desk. My eyes went wide. The word on my tongue dissolved into the sound like ink in water, gone, beyond me. It was made out of nothing but need, the cellular, bone-deep call of a body denied its one frequency for over a decade and done being denied.

The scent went with it.

The Beta Neutral just evaporated. One second it was there, flat and synthetic and nothing, and the next it was gone like it had never existed, and the booth flooded. Steamed milk. Honey. Real. The smell of an Omega cresting into the first wave of a heat that had been building for weeks, packed down by suppressants and proximity and the work of holding my face together while three Alpha scents took my walls apart one by one.

Millions of people heard me.

Every one of them heard me before anyone in the room could move.