Page 41 of Heat Unscripted

EIGHTEEN

Bram

It came up through the floorboards before I had a name for it. Not words. Not the ordinary noise of a house waking up. A low, steady thing that skipped my ears entirely and landed somewhere under my ribs. Tuck’s rumble, deep and continuous. And under it, threaded through, the whine rising out of Isobel’s chest, soft and insistent.

They were bonding.

My stomach flip-flopped. Just once, slow, like something rolling off a shelf, and I stood there in her kitchen with a spatula in one hand and a plate of eggs going cold and let it. Two people I cared about were upstairs behind a closed door doing the thing you can’t undo. Something I’d agreed to. I’d taken her hand last night. I’d let the scents merge and felt how right it was. And now I was just below them, getting another cup of coffee.

The peppercorn in my scent went sharp. I shut it down. Pushed it back behind the control I’d spent my whole life building, because that, at least, still worked.

Cillian looked up from his tablet.

His eyes went over me the way they went over a levels meter, taking the read. My shoulders. My scent. Whatever my body wastelling the room without my permission. He didn’t say anything. He looked, and then he went back to the screen, and the quiet between us didn’t judge me and didn’t let me off either.

My phone lay face-down on the counter. Ninety-three missed calls. The network’s legal team. The production company’s crisis people. My own solicitor, who never rings unless something is properly, structurally wrong. I’d worked through the voicemails in the small hours while Isobel slept upstairs with Tuck’s arm under her shoulders. Each message more urgent than the last. Each one certain that a call back would fix whatever this was.

Nothing here got fixed by a call back.

“I need to make some more calls,” I said.

Cillian nodded. “I’ve sorted the legal voicemails in my notes. I’ll send you the order.”

“Thank you.” I’d already listened to a couple of messages, but I didn’t want to have to go through all of them, especially if Cillian already had.

I picked up the phone and walked out. I didn’t look at the ceiling. I didn’t think about the sounds still moving through the house, warm and certain, the way I wasn’t.

I made the calls from the sitting room with the door shut, in the voice that had never once failed me. The network wanted a statement. The production company wanted a timeline. My solicitor wanted to know whether the “biological event,” his phrase, careful and clinical, had happened inside the scope of a contract, because liability was a real concern and he needed to understand the exposure.

I told each of them a statement was coming. The timeline was being developed. The exposure was being assessed and managed by the relevant parties.

Managed. Assessed. Relevant. I picked each word for what it could hold up, not for what was true.

The truth was upstairs. The truth smelled like steamed milk and honey and made a sound I could feel in my soul, which wasn’t something I’d ever considered possible before.

When the calls were done, I sat.

The room was quiet the way other people’s houses are quiet. Not the engineered hush of my penthouse, every surface tuned, every interference designed out. This was lived-in. Paperbacks crammed two-deep on the shelves. A throw folded over the arm of the sofa in a color that matched nothing. And under all of it, in the curtains and the carpet and the walls, the faint ghost of chamomile. Years of her, soaked into the soft furnishings despite the Beta Neutral spray that was meant to stop exactly that.

The spray had never properly worked. I understood that now. The warmth I’d caught in my own flat, under the chemical layer, when our fingers crossed over a jar of honey. That had been her. Leaking through the cracks in a performance she’d been running for a decade.

I’d brushed it off.

Practical, I’d called it. Production quality. I’d stood in that careful room and told myself the sharpening of my own scent was a fault. That my pupils blowing wide against my will was a glitch and not recognition. That I didn’t feel what I felt, because what I felt didn’t fit anything I’d built, so it couldn’t be real.

It was real.

My hands sat flat on my knees, steady. They’d stopped shaking somewhere in the middle of the calls, when the professional setting came back online hard enough to override everything underneath. I could still function. Make decisions, run a crisis, build a plan. That part was intact. It had always been intact.

What wasn’t intact was anything below it.

I thought about the booth. The whine coming up out of her, and the floor of the world sliding open along a seam I hadn’tknown was there. My scent of peppercorn going off. Every instinct I had lunging toward her hard enough to lift me out of the chair, and not lifting me out of the chair only because I’d locked every muscle against it.

I thought about the coat. Putting it round her shoulders. My fingers crossing the curve of her neck and the burn that came after.

Not pain.

Recognition.