Page 48 of Heat Unscripted

It smelled like surrender. Not to us. Not to the bond. To himself.

His footsteps hit the stairs and started up.

Neither of us moved.

When he came up onto the landing he was holding an envelope. Cream stock. Heavy. His handwriting already in the margins, annotations, references, the shorthand of a man who’d kept working the problem while walking away from it.

He stopped. Looked at us, two men on the floor outside a closed door, a speaker playing something he couldn’t hear, a quiet house that had turned into something none of us planned.

His eyes went to the legal envelope open on my tablet, the photos I’d taken. Then to the one in his hand. Same firm. Same letterhead.

“It arrived while I was out,” he said. His voice was rough, the baritone stripped down to the grain. “They served my office too. When I called in, I had the desk print the scan.”

“I’ve got it,” I said. “Photographed and sorted.”

A pause. His eyes moved to Isobel’s door, to the quiet behind it, to the stillness that meant she was resting between waves.

“How is she?”

“Stable. Another wave of withdrawal. Resolution by morning.”

His jaw worked. The envelope crumpled a little at the corner where his grip tightened.

“The network,” he said. “Breach of contract. Audience deception. Injunctive relief against the IP.” Each term clipped, like a man who’d read a hundred of these and found this one personally offensive. “It’s targeted. It’s vicious. And it landed?—”

“This afternoon. I’ve been sitting on it.”

“You didn’t call me.”

“You needed the time.”

Something moved behind his face. Not anger. Closer to thanks, wrapped in the discomfort of being read well enough that someone could hold the space for him without being asked.

Tuck stood, brushed off his jeans, put out a hand. I took it and let him pull me up.

The three of us stood in the hall outside her door. Cedar and peppercorn and sandalwood in the narrow space, settling into the same arrangement they’d found in the booth, in the car, in the living room. Not fighting. Falling into place.

“We deal with this together,” Bram said. His grip on the envelope had gone still. Steady. But his eyes, when they met mine, had none of the usual distance in them. “After she’s through. We deal with it as a pack.”

The word sat there. First time Bram had said it without a qualifier. Without a framework. Without the careful intellectual distance he kept between himself and anything that smelled like instinct.

I nodded.

Behind the door, Isobel shifted. A murmur. Then a whine, soft and layered, winding through the wood toward us. An Omega ringed by her Alphas’ scents, answering them even asleep.

My speaker adjusted the tone on its own, a quarter-tone shift to take in the three new signatures filling the hall, three Alpha scents folding into the thing I’d built for her, making it fuller.

I picked up the speaker, set it back against the door, and let it do what it had always done. Hold the space. Keep her steady. Leave room for the rest of them to find their place.

TWENTY

Isobel

The withdrawal fever broke at dawn.

I knew because the light had changed. Blue-gray to gold at the curtain’s edge, and my body, which had spent days burning off years of chemical debt in hard waves, finally stopped fighting and lay still.

I lay still with it. Sheets twisted around my legs. Bram’s coat wrapped around me once more, the silk lining damp against my skin, his peppercorn scent worked so far into the fabric that it felt like being held by someone who wasn’t even in the room. My own scent filled the space, honey and milk, thick. It didn’t scare me now. It was just what I smelled like. What I’d always smelled like, under everything.