Page 49 of Heat Unscripted

My throat ached. Not the clean professional soreness of a long session. Deeper than that. The muscle-ache of something that had been taking itself apart and putting itself back together while I slept.

I swallowed. Tested it. Tender, but it worked. It was there in a way it hadn’t been since the booth, since the whine ripped through me and took every word I had.

Voices came through the bedroom door. Tuck’s bass. Cillian’s even tenor under it. And under both of them, running through the house like a wire in the walls, the steady tone from Cillian’s speaker. I couldn’t have said what it was. Only that my body already trusted it.

I sat up slowly. The room tipped, then held. My glasses were on the nightstand. I put them on and the room came clear.

The water glass beside the bed was full and fresh. Someone had swapped it while I slept. The curtains had been fixed, pulled tight on the street side, loosened on the garden side so the light came in without showing the room to anyone standing on the pavement.

Cillian. All of it. The care that had been around me for years, invisible until now, when I finally knew where to look.

I pulled the coat tighter and stood.

My legs held. Weak, uncertain after too long flat, but they held. I crossed the room barefoot, opened the door, and almost stepped into the hall, before I remembered that the coat was the only thing I had on. Quickly I ducked back into my bedroom and grabbed some leggings and a blouse. Nothing fancy, just what I could reach and slip on.

When I stepped back out into the hall I saw the speaker leaned against the wall. The tone shifted a quarter-step as I passed, automatic, following me through the space. Tracking me the way it always had. The way he always had.

Downstairs, the kitchen light was on.

I went down one step at a time, hand on the banister, the coat clutched around me. The smells in the house had settled into something I was starting to know. Cedar in every soft surface Tuck had touched. Peppercorn on the counters where Bram had stood and worked. Sandalwood balancing them out.

And under all of it, the chamomile and honey of me. Out in the open now. The note four people were learning to play around.

Tuck was in the kitchen. He turned the second my feet hit the tile, fast, like he’d been listening for it through the ceiling the whole time.

“Hey.” Low. Careful. The voice you use on someone coming out of a long sickness, when you don’t know yet how much sound they can take.

I lifted a hand. A small wave. Not ready to try the voice. Not yet.

Cillian came in from the sitting room, tablet in hand. His dark eyes moved over me, taking everything in. Posture. Skin. How fast I was breathing. The way my scent was changing as the last of the fever burned off and something steadier came up under it.

“Temperature’s stable,” he said. Not a question. “You should eat.”

I nodded.

Tuck was already moving. He pulled a plate from the oven, where it had been warming, the one Bram had made hours ago. He did it without thinking, easy, domestic, and it caught me somewhere soft I wasn’t guarding.

I sat at the table. The plate came down in front of me. Eggs, toast, laid out with care. Not the one that had been abandoned on my nightstand the day before, that had vanished at some point. I could tell that these were fresh, with Bram’s hand all over it. I ate slowly.

The front door opened.

The peppercorn hit me first.

Sharp. Layered. Carrying something that hadn’t been in it when I last saw him, a note I couldn’t name yet, sitting under all that control he’d been running his whole life. It smelled like adecision made. Like he’d finally stopped running from the thing that scared him and turned around to face it.

He came to the kitchen doorway and stopped.

He’d gone back out in the night for the rest of his files. Another mostly sleepless night, and I could see it on him. Not a mess, Bram didn’t do messy, not even trying. Something quieter than that. Same shirt as yesterday, creased past the point of careless. Hair pushed back by hands, not styled. The shadows under his eyes belonged to a night of working, not sleeping.

The legal packet was in his hand. Cream envelope, heavy stock, the margins covered in his neat blue handwriting. Case references. The shorthand of a man who’d taken a threat and turned it into a plan somewhere between midnight and now.

His gray-green eyes found me at the table. Wrapped in his coat, hair wrecked, glasses crooked on my nose. The Faceless Siren, broken down to her parts. No performance. No mask. Just a woman eating eggs at her own kitchen table with three men arranged around her like the room had a new center of gravity.

Tuck and Cillian went still. Not the frozen-stiff of the booth. The practiced kind. Two men who’d already figured out when to hold the space and when to step back from it.

Bram set the packet on the counter. Slow. He didn’t open it. Didn’t bring up what was in it. Didn’t lead with strategy or logistics, the things he used to keep the world at arm’s length.

“I left,” he said.