Page 31 of Heat Unscripted

We reached my street with no trouble. No cameras, no press vans, nobody at the curb. Cillian had brought us in from the north instead of the main road, and the quiet terraced stretch looked exactly like it always did. Warm windows. Someone’s telly going somewhere. A London street in November that had no idea what had just happened to one of the people living on it.

He pulled into my drive, killed the engine, sat a second with his hands still on the wheel before he turned around.

“Inside,” he said. “Now.”

The front door beat me. My keys were in the kit bag and my hands were shaking too hard to find the zip, never mind the lock. Bram took the bag out of my fingers without a word, found the keys at once, opened the door, and stepped back to let me go first.

My house. My scent.

The second I crossed the threshold I felt the switch. Outside to den. The space I’d built for silence, for keeping up a lie that didn’t exist anymore. The acoustic panels in the hall. The soundproofed studio door. The chamomile and cream I could never quite scrub out of the soft furnishings no matter how much Beta Neutral I emptied onto them.

Except now, with no spray, no suppressants holding, nothing chemical between me and the air, the scent just bloomed.

It filled the hall in seconds. Steamed milk and honey, rich and sweet and not sorry at all, pouring off me in waves with nowhere to go but into the walls and the carpet and the coats by the door and the three Alphas standing in my narrow hallway drowning in it.

Tuck inhaled, sharp. His arm tightened on my waist and his cedar surged up to meet me, the two scents braiding together in the closed air like they’d been waiting years for the chance.

Bram put his back against the wall. Both palms flat to it behind him, like solid contact could anchor him against the flood. His pupils had swallowed the gray-green again, and his breathing had gone slow and counted, seconds between each one.

Cillian shut the door. Locked it. Drew the chain. Then he stood with his back to it, tablet loose at his side, and let his sandalwood spread the way it always did.

My house. My scent. Three Alphas in my hallway breathing me in, and not one part of it could be filed under creative chemistry or logistics or the unfortunate acoustics of a sealed booth anymore.

A whine came out of me. Longer than the others. A trill that climbed three notes and then settled low and held.

So this was the truth, then, out in the open air where I could never put it back.

They’d all heard it. Not one of them had been given the chance to answer.

The hallway tipped. Tuck’s arms were there before the floor was.

FIFTEEN

Isobel

The first thing that came back was the smell. My own scent, off the leash for the first time in years, chamomile and cream and steamed milk and honey, thick in my own living room and not buried under anything. It smelled like me. Not like the thing I sprayed over me. Me.

Then the rest of the room came in. The wool of Bram’s coat where it had ended up against my collarbones. The give of the sofa under me, soft and worn and known. The blue glow of Cillian’s tablet on the coffee table, running something I couldn’t read from where I sat.

Three men who were arranged around me like furniture I hadn’t bought.

Tuck on the floor to my left, one arm slung along the cushion near my hip, close but not crowding, his eyes fixed somewhere past my shoulder. Cedar and bourbon.

Bram across from me in the armchair, spine straight, hands folded so neatly in his lap it was its own confession. Old books and peppercorn.

Cillian behind me, against the bookshelf by the door, arms crossed. Watching. He was always watching.

The whines had slowed. They were still there, small, popping out of me on every third or fourth breath, but the panic had gone out of them. My ribs had stopped buzzing. My hands had stopped shaking hard enough that I could hold a phone.

I picked it up.

The text-to-speech app opened. The cursor sat there, blinking, waiting for the words my throat still wouldn’t give me.

I typed slow. One letter at a time. Building a wall one last time, except this one was so they could hear me instead of so they couldn’t reach me.

The flat voice came out of the speaker.

“I need you to hear this. All of it. Not what you saw tonight. Not the two minutes I gave you in the booth. What came before.”