Page 28 of Heat Unscripted

“Yes.”

“The mate-call. Tucker’s response.” Not a question. He was confirming, building the set. “Millions of people.”

“Yes.” It was all I could say.

His jaw tightened. The pen turned again. His eyes went from me to Isobel, shaking against Tuck’s chest with the whine coming out of her in pieces, and something in his face moved. Not soft. Bram doesn’t go soft. But the stillness changed quality, from a man bracing against instinct to a man landing somewhere he hadn’t planned to.

“She’s an Omega,” he said. Flat. Like the words were so obvious it was absurd to say them out loud, except they had to exist in the air or they’d stay theoretical.

“She is.”

“She has always been an Omega.”

“Yes.”

“The Beta Neutral?—”

“Synthetic. Eleven years. Consumer grade, with clinical doses during high-stress sessions.” I gave him the numbers because numbers are what Bram needs when the floor goes out. “Her voice carries Omega harmonics under stress and on emotional peaks. I’ve been filtering them out of her recordings since year one.”

His hand lifted off the table, hovered, came back down. The pen finally stilled.

“You knew.”

“I knew.”

He took it. I watched it go in. Not anger. Not betrayal. Something quieter and worse for him, because I could see him going back through every interaction he’d ever experiencedbetween the three of us. Every production meeting where I’d put myself between him and her without naming it. Every session where my monitoring ran heavier than the audio needed. Every call I’d made for her cover over the cleaner mix, and wrapped in language that sounded like engineering.

I let him have the quiet. He builds in it.

From across the booth, Tuck’s voice came, raw, barely the warm low end I’d spent years mixing into recordings.

“She’s cold.”

He was right. Her shaking wasn’t all nerves. The suppressant crash was metabolic, her system burning reserves and dumping core temperature to compensate. The booth had been climbing for hours and now it was wrong for a body in freefall.

Bram stood. The chair scraped back. His hands went to his coat and he stripped it off in one clean motion, a navy wool-cashmere thing lined in silk that I happen to know cost more than most people’s rent, because he treats clothing the way he treats a script. Worth doing properly.

He crossed to where Tuck cradled her. Three strides. His scent went ahead of him, peppercorn still sharp but reined in now, the possessive edge turned toward something that read, from the outside, like purpose.

He didn’t speak. He unfolded the coat and settled it around her shoulders, the silk lining dropping against her skin, the weight of it covering the tremors. His hands arranged the fabric the way he arranges script margins. Every fold placed on purpose.

His fingers brushed the curve of her neck above the collar. He pulled them back. Immediately. Like the contact had burned. He stepped away. One full pace, then another, putting distance between himself and the woman whose scent was rewriting every chemical assumption his body had ever filed. Hishands found each other behind his back and locked, knuckles whitening, holding himself off her by force.

He wasn’t going to touch her. The coat was as close as he’d let himself get.

I watched the analytical front rebuild itself across his face, piece by piece, a wall going back up with shaking hands. But under it, if you knew where to look, and I’d spent years learning, something had moved. His careful filing system had taken on a new entry, and the entry was big enough to shove everything else aside.

He didn’t say the word that went with it. He felt it and refused to say it, because Bram had never in his life accepted a truth he couldn’t verify from a second source, and his own biology, loud as it was screaming right now, didn’t count as a reliable witness.

I turned back to the board. The readouts confirmed what I already had. Her heart rate was stabilizing. Temperature dropping, not dangerously. The whine was breaking into shorter, quieter intervals. The crash was running normally, or as normally as a decade of suppressant debt can run when it all comes due at once.

The title card held on every monitor.

Outside the locked doors I could hear the team. Muffled voices, the contained kind of panic that meant phones were ringing and messages were landing and somebody, somewhere, was watching the trend numbers climb.

None of it was coming in here. Not yet.

I checked the lock one more time. Solid. Then I sat back down, nudged the ambient temperature up two degrees to offset the crash, and let my scent keep doing what it’s done for years. Fill the gaps. Hold the room from tipping past the point where instinct eats everything that makes these people more than their biology.