Page 36 of Heat Unscripted

I held his eyes. I held them until the analytical distance tried to reassemble and couldn’t, until the raw thing under it gave up hiding, until Bram St.James looked at me with his shaking hands and his cracked composure and his fierce, brilliant head, and saw me looking back with nothing over my face at all.

I put out my other hand.

Four feet between us. Close enough that he could cross it without leaving his chair. Far enough that the move was his. Only his.

He stood. Careful. Controlled. Every muscle running a decision his body wanted to make at a sprint and his mind insisted on making slow. Two measured strides and he stopped at the edge of the sofa.

His hand found mine. Fingertips first, then palm, then the slow close of his grip, like each step needed its own permission. His skin was cool. His pulse slammed against my wrist where our forearms pressed together.

The peppercorn surged. Then it settled. Not sharp now. Not possessive. Something that smelled, impossibly, like relief.

Cillian watched from the bookshelf. His face hadn’t changed, still that calm flat surface, still the stillness of a man who’d held one position so long that staying in it had stopped being a choice and started being a reflex.

I didn’t put out a hand for him. I made a sound instead, small and on purpose, pitched to the note I’d learned meant come here in the language that lived between us. Waveforms and filtered frequencies and four hundred and twelve interventions and the whole slow weight of being seen without ever being exposed.

Cillian pushed off the bookshelf. Two steps put him behind the sofa, behind me, and his hand settled on the nape of my neck with the same light touch he used on his board. Not gripping. Grounding. His fingers rested against the skin under my hair, warm. He’d always been close enough to touch. He’d waited until I asked.

All our points of contact seemed to resonate through me all at once. Tuck’s hand in mine. Bram’s fingers laced through the other. Cillian’s palm at my neck. And the scents weren’t four separate things sharing the air anymore. They were one thing.The way a mix resolves when the last piece finally drops into place. Complete. Whole. No effort left in it.

Nobody spoke.

We’d already agreed. Not in words. Not in flat robotic sentences out of an app, not even in the careful things they’d each said out loud. In the scent. In four signatures choosing, slow, to weave together. To hold. To stay.

Partnership. Not possession. Chosen every day.

I’d say those words back to them every morning if that was what it took. I breathed in, and the room breathed with me, and I held on.

SEVENTEEN

Tuck

I woke up and knew.

Not the careful knowing I’d been doing for years, weighing it, talking myself out of it. The body kind. My right arm was dead from the elbow down, pinned under Isobel’s shoulders, and I didn’t want it back. Her hair was all over me. Her scent filled my whole chest on the next breath, chamomile and cream and warm honey, no spray on it, no suppressant under it, just her.

She was out cold. The good kind of out, the kind a body only does once it’s done crashing and somebody finally lets it rest.

I didn’t move.

Downstairs there were voices. Bram low, Cillian lower, both of them pitched so they wouldn’t carry. I couldn’t make out words. I didn’t have to. That was the sound of two men solving a problem. Whatever those three seconds of broadcast had done to the world, it had shown up at the front door while I was unconscious.

I’d care about that later. I told myself that and almost believed it.

Right now there was just her body warm against mine and her breathing slowing my own down to something I hadn’t felt inyears. The panic that had soaked the living room last night was gone out of her scent. What was left smelled like a place you’d stop running.

She stirred. Made a small sound, softer than the whines from the night before, the sound of somebody coming up out of deep water and finding the air okay.

I turned my head and put my nose in her hair because I could now. Because she’d said yes to all three of us. Because she’d said yes to me.

“Hey,” I said, barely loud enough to count.

She didn’t open her eyes. But her hand came up and pressed flat to my chest, fingers spread. Not pushing me off. Holding on. Checking I was actually there.

Something happened in my chest then, low, not a growl. A rumble I’d never made in my life and knew the meaning of straight away,I’m here.

The voices downstairs changed. Bram’s went clipped, the way a man sounds on a call he doesn’t want to be on. Cillian’s stayed flat, just facts going down a line.

Millions of people had listened to an Omega get outed on a live broadcast last night, and the fallout was happening right now, out there past the walls. Networks. Press. Whatever machine of consequence had cranked up while we slept.