Page 33 of Heat Unscripted

He looked at the fist on his chest like it belonged to somebody else.

“I’m not angry at you, Iz.” It came out rough and fast. “I’m wrecked you had to do any of it. And I’m…” He stopped. Swallowed. “I’m furious at me. For not trusting what I already knew. For letting you carry it by yourself when some stupid, stubborn part of me was trying to tell me the whole time.”

A whine got out of me, higher than the others, three notes that wound together and landed somewhere soft between us and said the thing my throat still wouldn’t.

Bram hadn’t said a word.

He sat across from me with his hands folded and his back straight, holding himself up like something built to take a load, the kind that snaps before it bends. His face was the one thing I couldn’t read, the same flat analytical look he wore in contract meetings, where feeling was interference and nothing else. But his scent had been climbing since we walked in, the peppercorn going sharper and darker than I’d ever caught it, past protective into something with an edge on it.

The quiet stretched. Long enough that Tuck glanced at him, then at Cillian, then back, waiting for a response that wasn’t coming.

When Bram finally talked, it wasn’t the smooth baritone I knew. It was low and tight and shaking.

“Eleven years.”

Two words. He didn’t look at me. He was looking at his own hands, at the fine tremor in his fingers that wouldn’t quit no matter how tight he laced them.

“Eleven years of an industry that…” He stopped. His thumbs had started moving against each other, the pen-rotation thing, his hands needing a job while the rest of him chewed through something too big to swallow. “An industry that told an eighteen-year-old girl, the most extraordinary voice I have ever…”

He stopped again. His jaw locked. His throat moved.

“I am not angry at you.” It came through his teeth, each word laid down by someone who’d weighed every other option and hated all of them. “I’m angry at the system. The one that built a world where your gift needed a lie to exist in it. Where the most wanted narrator of a generation had to pick between her biology and her career like that was a fair thing to ask anyone.”

His hands came up off his lap. Held out, palms forward, fingers spread. Showing me the shake he couldn’t stop.

“I build frameworks,” he said, and his voice cracked clean across the word, something I’d never once heard out of Bram St.James. “Systems. Structures. Logic for every variable I’ve ever run into. I have never…”

He shut his eyes. The peppercorn surged, hot and furious, not at me, never at me, at something bigger and harder to point at.

“I have never run into a variable I wanted to destroy,” he said. “Not manage. Not work around. Tear down. The wholething that made you do this, I want it gone. Razed to the ground and built back from scratch by people who would never…” His voice quit on him.

Bram St.James, who’d carried a twenty-four-hour broadcast without one wobble, sat in my armchair with his hands shaking and his face cracked open and said nothing else.

The quiet after wasn’t empty. It was full. Three men’s, no, three alpha’s scents and not one of them pretending to be anything now. Cedar and bourbon, warm and already turned toward me. Old books and peppercorn, sharp and dark and barely held. Sandalwood and sage, steady, holding the floor.

And under all of it, through it, in every bit of air in the room I’d built for hiding, my own. Chamomile and cream and steamed milk and honey. Out. Loud. Meeting theirs in the shared air and doing something that wasn’t an accident and wasn’t professional and couldn’t get talked away with logistics and filter math.

It was Cillian who said it out loud.

He stood. Crossed to the middle of the room and put himself between the three of us, his eyes going from Tuck to Bram to me, reading the air the way he read a waveform.

“The scent profiles,” he said. Quiet. Flat. The voice of a man who’d checked the numbers three times and didn’t need to check them again. “The harmonic responses. The instinct patterns.” He looked at me. “It’s a full biological match. All three vectors. Not one. All three.”

My stomach dropped clean through the floor.

“It’s not just care,” he said. “Not protection, not proximity bonding, not creative chemistry or any of the words we’ve been using to dodge it.”

He let the room finish the sentence. Three Alpha scents curling in toward the Omega one at the center of them, easy, like they’d been waiting.

“It’s claiming,” Cillian said. “All three bonds.”

Tuck’s breath went out of him in a rush, his eyes closing, his whole body easing down into it. Not shock. Relief. The thing his gut had been yelling at him for years while he held it at arm’s length and called it nothing.

Bram’s shaking hands lowered to the arms of the chair. His fingers wrapped the leather like a man grabbing a rope, knuckles bloodless, his face stripped all the way down. He was looking at something that wouldn’t fit in any framework he owned, and starting, just at the edges, to let it be true anyway.

Cillian let it sit. He didn’t wait for an answer, didn’t ask for one. He crossed back to the bookshelf by the door and set his shoulders against it, back on his post, watching the way he always watched. He’d said what the numbers said. Whatever came next was mine to say.

A whine came up out of my chest. Long and slow, climbing three notes, filling the room with heat. The sound of an Omega in a room full of matched scents, finally, after all this time, stopping being afraid of what that meant.