Page 26 of Heat Unscripted

The sound went out live. Through the cleanest mic chain in the business, broadcast at full fidelity to every device on the stream. Unfiltered. Unedited. Nothing to mistake it for.

For three full seconds, the world heard what I actually am.

Then everything happened at once.

Tuck moved first.

His chair hit the floor behind him. I barely heard it over the blood in my ears. He was up and toward me before the sound had finished its second beat, not thinking, not deciding, just moving, like a body answering a signal it had waited years for.

The cedar and bourbon of him broke open into something I’d never smelled, darker, wilder, the claiming note from the axe-throwing place times ten, filling the sealed room like a hand pressing on my chest. A growl tore out of him, low and answering, his bass meeting my whine and locking to it like two halves of one thing.

His hands found my shoulders. Both of them. Urgent, not gentle. Whatever ran his manners had been overridden by whatever recognized me and wouldn’t let one more second pass without touching me. His eyes were blown black, just a ring of amber left, and his face was nothing I’d seen on him. No charm. No easy grin. No distance he’d kept all this time.

“There you are,” he said, rough, barely a voice at all. “There you fucking are.”

Bram didn’t move.

He went still. Completely, totally still.

The pen frozen mid-word in his right hand. The dice scattered across his folio were forgotten. His left hand flat on the table, fingers spread like he was holding himself down by force. The silver in his dark hair caught the light and he could’ve been carved out of something, a man stopped dead between two things that couldn’t both be true.

His instincts hit. I could see them land. The peppercorn detonated into something sharp and fierce and possessive, so strong it cut through even my own sweetness, a knife through warm butter. His nostrils flared. His jaw set. His pupils blew the way Tuck’s had, and the analysis just drained out of his face and left something older, something that didn’t know what a production schedule was and didn’t care.

But he didn’t move.

Every muscle in him locked against getting up, crossing the room, putting himself between me and the world that was hearing my secret in real time. The professional jammed up against the animal, his neat frameworks slamming into a thing with no framework, no category, no tidy box to put it in.

His hands were shaking.

Cillian saw the “On Air” light.

I knew because I watched him do it. The half-second where his eyes left the waveform, cut left to the red indicator over the booth door, and registered what it meant. What had just gone out. What millions of people had just heard.

He moved.

Not like Tuck. Not the explosive surge of an Alpha answering a call. Cillian moved like a man running a protocol. Fast, exact, every motion already decided, rehearsed so many times he didn’t have to think. His left hand found the manual override, the kill switch he’d had within reach all night, the one he’d set there before the first word of the broadcast, the one he’d been ready to throw since the day he wired it in.

His fingers closed on it.

His right hand was already going for the second panel, the broadcast relay, the network feed, the whole chain that ran from this booth to millions of ears.

The red light held. Three seconds where my whine, Tuck’s growl, the whole scent of an Omega coming apart and two Alphas answering went out raw and unfiltered to the world.

Cillian pulled the switch.

THIRTEEN

Cillian

The red light died and the title card replaced the live feed on every monitor in the bay.

Shadows of the Stream: Please Stand By.

Black background, silver text. I’d built it at three in the morning on a Tuesday, eighteen months back, because I’d watched this thing build in slow increments for years and I knew I’d need a card that said technical difficulty without admitting a thing.

I didn’t look at the monitors. I looked at the booth.

Tuck had Isobel by both shoulders. His growl hadn’t stopped. I felt it through the floor and the furniture before I’d actually heard it, the Alpha sound that skipped my ears and went straight to the back of the skull.