Page 32 of Heat Unscripted

Tuck’s head turned. Bram’s folded hands shifted in his lap. Cillian didn’t move at all, which somehow felt louder.

I kept typing.

“I presented as Omega at eighteen. My first agent told me Omega narrators don’t get long-form contracts. She said the voice was perfect, the biology was a liability. So I got rid of the biology.”

The robot voice took everything out of it. No rage. No grief. Just the words, naked, with none of the eighteen-year-old underneath them who’d been told her voice was worth exactly as much as her willingness to pretend she was someone else.

“Consumer suppressants for four years. Then pharmaceutical, when those quit working. Then clinical, when pharmaceutical quit covering the bad days. Beta Neutral on top, every ninety minutes in a session, every two hours out in public. Eleven years and not one heat ever finished.”

My stomach pitched. The boiler ticked in the hall and I could hear it, that’s how quiet they’d gone.

“I built a career on a voice that doesn’t exist without the body it comes from. And I spent eleven years punishing the body for being what it is.”

I set the phone down. The screen went dark.

Nobody said anything. The quiet had weight to it, padded, the kind I’d paid to build into my booth. Except this was three people taking in something that moved every line on the map, and none of them knew where to step next.

I waited for the anger.

I’d run the scene for years. The betrayal landing in their faces. The cold thing that happens when people find out they’ve been lied to by someone they let close. I always ended it the same way. Me, alone, the door shut.

Cillian spoke first. “I know.” He said it the way you set something down that you’ve been carrying in both hands for a long time. Careful. Like it might mark the table.

He pushed off the bookshelf and crossed to the armchair across from Bram, lowering into it slowly. His forearms came down on his knees, the sound-wave tattoos catching the lamp, and his eyes found mine with nothing in them I’d braced for. No surprise. No discovery.

I stared at him.

“Session four,” he said. “Year one. The first session I ever ran for you.Iron Meridian. The reunion bit, where she crosses the threshold she thought she’d never see again. You said the word safe and your harmonics jumped into a structure that doesn’t show up in Beta vocal physiology. The overtones were wrong. Too rich. Too layered. Too…” His fingers moved against each other, the ghost of working a board. “Alive.”

“I pulled that frequency the same night,” he went on, and his voice stayed level, every word set down like it weighed something. “Isolated it, flagged the signature, built a filter template keyed to your specific pattern. After that I ran everysession through a second pass before it went out. Every file. Every take. Every time your suppressants got thin and it bled through.”

He stopped. His jaw worked once. Just once.

“Four hundred and twelve times,” he said. “Over six years. I logged all of them. Date, timestamp, session, the band, how long the bleed lasted, severity one to five. It’s encrypted on a drive in my apartment. Nobody’s ever seen it. Nobody ever will.”

The whine that came out of me was small and broke in the middle, and it sounded, even to me, like a hinge giving.

“I waited,” Cillian said, and his voice dropped, lower, closer in. “I watched you handle it. Watched you calibrate and compensate and build yourself into something the world would take. And every time I scrubbed a frequency I told myself the same thing. She’ll come to me when she’s ready. When it gets too heavy to carry by herself.”

He didn’t look away from me.

“You never did. So I just kept cleaning.”

I reached for the phone again. My hands were shaking, but it was a different shake now. Not fear. The kind that comes after a long hold, when the muscle finally lets go and you remember you’d been bracing.

“You knew for years and you never…”

“Never,” he said, before the robot voice got to the end of it. “It wasn’t mine to say.”

Tuck made a sound. Low, in the gut, dragged up from under his diaphragm. Not a growl, not a word, just everything he’d been sitting on coming out at once. His fist had closed on the cushion, knuckles white, and when he lifted his head the look on his face was one I’d never gotten from Torin Tucker in all the years of shared mics and production meetings and the weird closeness of making things with someone.

He was hurt.

“Years.” That huge voice of his came out cracked, the warmth scraped off it down to the grain. “Years of sitting next to you. Breathing the same sealed-up air. Feeling something every time you opened your mouth, every time you laughed, every time you walked in a room and my whole body just…” He pressed a fist flat to his chest. “And I talked myself out of it. Every damn time.”

His jaw flexed. The scar through his eyebrow caught the light.

“Professional chemistry,” he said, and the words came out bitter, worn down from saying them to himself too many times. “That’s what I called it. Respect. Two performers who work well together. I had a dozen names for it and not one of them was true, because true would’ve meant my gut was right and I was the liar.”