Page 29 of Heat Unscripted

Tuck held her. Bram stood off at his distance, his coat doing the holding his arms wouldn’t. And I watched the waveforms flatten toward stable, the way I’d watched them a thousand times before.

This time there was no frequency to bury. No take to clean. The truth was just in the room now, plain and final, and the only thing left to engineer was what came next.

FOURTEEN

Isobel

The world came back in pieces, and the first piece was smell.

All of them at once. Cedar and sandalwood and that sharp peppercorn edge, layered so thick the air felt wet with it. I breathed in and nearly choked.

Then came texture. Bram’s coat on my shoulders, silk-lined, still warm from his body, heavy as a hand that wouldn’t lift.

Then sound. A low rumble against my left ear, Tuck’s chest, his heart going thick and steady under my cheek.

I couldn’t speak.

Not wouldn’t.

Couldn’t.

My throat had closed around the whine like a fist, and the only thing that came out instead were these small broken sounds on every breath. The purest Omega sound I’d ever made. No control over it, no mask on it, just my body in free fall after eleven years of chemical scaffolding finally gave way.

I hated it. I hated that it sounded like relief.

Awareness came back in steps. The booth. The dead “On Air” light. Cillian’s monitors frozen on the title card. The locked doors, and beyond them the muffled noise of an entire broadcastgrinding to a stop because my biology had finally won a war it had been losing politely for a decade.

I pushed against Tuck’s chest. Weak, uncoordinated, the hands of someone running a fever. He loosened his grip right away but didn’t let go. His palms slid down to my upper arms, holding me up instead of holding me in, and when I looked at his face it was wrecked.

A whine slipped out of me, bright and high. Tuck’s pupils blew wide before he caught himself and started breathing through his mouth.

I needed to tell them. Not the whole story, my throat and my hands didn’t have the whole story in them yet. The one fact that mattered. Before another minute passed with Tuck’s hands on me and none of them knowing what they were holding.

My phone was in the kit bag. The kit bag was on the table.

I pointed. The arm was heavy and the gesture came out clumsy, but Cillian was already moving. He had the bag in his hand before I finished the motion, set it on the table beside me, and stepped back. He didn’t reach in for me. He let me find it myself.

I dragged the zip open with shaking fingers and got the phone out. The text-to-speech app was three swipes in, the one I used on vocal rest days. It turned typed words into a flat robot voice that held none of me and all of my meaning.

I typed.

The synthetic voice filled the booth.

“I have been on suppressants for eleven years. The Beta Neutral spray is synthetic. My designation is Omega. It has always been Omega. Everything you thought you knew about my biology, I built it. To survive an industry that would never have let me build what I’ve built if it knew what I was. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”

The words dropped into the sealed air and just sat there. No taking them back.

Tuck’s hands tightened on my arms. Not hard. A reflex, his body answering a thing it had already worked out for itself. Bram stood three steps off, hands still locked behind his back, his face gone blank in the way it did when everything was running behind it and nothing was coming out the front.

Nobody spoke. The silence stretched one second, two, three, filling up with whatever was about to come out of them.

Tuck pulled a breath. “Iz?—”

The knocking cut him off.

Three knocks on the outer door, flat and even, the knock of someone sent by someone else. Then the intercom clicked, and a voice came through it, young and scared and trying not to sound either. “Sorry. Um. Management needs this door open. Security’s talking about pulling the master override. I’m supposed to wait here until it opens.”

Nobody moved. The booth held its breath with the rest of us.