Page 45 of Heat Unscripted

Breach of contract. Audience deception. Injunctive relief against the Shadows of the Stream IP.

The language was clean and surgical. Not written to win a remedy. Written to do damage, aimed at Isobel’s name, her credibility, the eleven years she’d spent wrecking herself to build the career they were now trying to take apart.

My stomach went tight and flat. I photographed each page with my tablet, filed the originals in the studio drawer for whatever solicitor we would be hiring by the weekend, andstarted sorting the claims by severity and how fast we’d have to answer.

Upstairs, Isobel’s breathing came through the ceiling. Shallow, faster than her baseline. The fever was climbing again, another wave, each one shorter than the last but no easier on a body that had been chemically suppressed for over a decade and was paying that off now in concentrated, brutal installments.

I left the documents where they were and went up.

Her bedroom door was closed. I didn’t open it.

I sat on the floor outside, back against the wall, tablet on one knee, my portable speaker propped against the doorframe. The boards were hard and cold through my jeans. I’d been here on and off, more on than off, since Tuck had gone down to eat.

Through the door I could hear all of it.

Fourteen breaths a minute at rest. Climbing to nineteen at the peaks, dropping to eleven in the troughs between. I knew those numbers the way I knew her vocal range. Years of monitoring had built a map of her that lived nowhere except my memory and an encrypted drive in my apartment.

The pattern was holding. The suppressants had stopped this up for years. A long climb, a short stretch of calm, then another climb. Her body was relearning, for the first time since she started taking suppressants, how to finish something it had been built to do.

She didn’t need an Alpha in that room. She needed the heating set right, water within reach, and someone outside the door who wouldn’t lose his head when her scent turned.

That I could do. That I’d been doing for years. Just closer now, without a console between us.

I opened my audio library and pulled a file I’d built years back, when her recordings first showed sustained vocal stress, the kind that meant the suppressants were starting to fail. It was a low drone tuned to the resting range of her vocal cords, pitchedunder conscious hearing. A grounding tone. Something to steady a voice under strain.

I’d never told her it existed. I’d run it through the monitoring feed during sessions when her stress markers spiked, low enough that she never knew it was there. That was the whole point of it.

I set the speaker against the door and pressed play. The tone went through the wood and into the room.

Her breathing dropped. Fourteen a minute. Thirteen. Twelve.

Settling.

I took the volume down two decibels and let it sit there, present, not pushing. The way I’d always run it. The way I’d loved her, if I was going to be honest about the word.

When the fever crested I heard it before anything, the breath sharpening, going shallow and quick, her temperature pushing past the point where thinking was lost to biology. A sound came through the door, lower than the broken notes from the first night. Closer to a moan, but nothing wanted about it. Discomfort, not desire.

I stood and opened the door just enough to read the room’s temperature.

Too warm.

The heating had been at the same setting since yesterday, fine for the troughs, wrong for the peaks. During a crest an Omega’s core could run two degrees hotter, and the room had to come down to do the cooling her body couldn’t manage on its own. She wasn’t in full blown heat, thankfully, but it was a similar effect.

I crossed the room without sound, the way I move in the bay. Isobel lay in the middle of the bed, curled around a pillow, Bram’s coat still wrapped over her shoulders despite the heat.Her auburn hair was damp at the temples. The skin above the collar was flushed.

I dropped the thermostat three degrees, then cracked the window two inches, enough for cold November air, not enough for a draft to reach the bed. The room would cool inside a few minutes.

Her scent filled the space. Steamed milk and honey, dense and sweet. My body noticed it the way it always had, registered, didn’t move on it. My own sandalwood and sage held steady, spread out, grounded. That part I’d trained.

I checked the water glass on the nightstand. Half empty. I swapped it for a fresh one from the bathroom, tested by touch. Not cold enough to shock her, not warm enough to be useless. Room temperature.

Her breathing was leveling off. The peak was passing. I pulled the duvet down to her waist and left the coat where it was, because it was scent-comfort, not warmth, and taking it would change the wrong thing.

Then I left, closed the door, and sat back down on the floor.

The tone kept running. I dropped the pitch a quarter-tone to match the slide in her breathing, tracking her down from peak to trough the way I’d track a vocal take from the top to the resolve. Reading the numbers. Making corrections. Holding the door.

Tuck found me there late in the afternoon.