Page 58 of Heat Unscripted

The peppercorn and the honey had become one thing. Not layered. Not mixing. Just one. A single scent that filled the library and soaked into the books on every shelf and turned this room, which had always been the quietest place in my house, into something else.

“I never imagined,” he said eventually. The baritone was coming back, rougher, worn, but his again. “That it would feel like this.”

“Like what?”

A pause. The Bram pause that meant the words were being chosen with care.

“Like being known,” he said. “Completely. With no option to retreat.”

I smiled against his chest. Let the voice hum something without words, more vibration than language, more feeling than meaning. The sound of an omega in her alpha’s arms, warm and done in and broadcasting nothing to the world except the plain truth of what she was.

“Welcome home,” I said.

His arms tightened.

He stayed.

TWENTY-TWO

Isobel

The doorbell rang mid-afternoon.

I was still in the library, wrapped in a throw blanket. My hair was loose, my glasses crooked, and the smell of someone who’d been thoroughly loved was still on my skin like a second scent. Bram had gone to shower. The water ran upstairs and the old pipes complained the way they always did, and through the cracked door I could see Cillian at the table with his tablet, tracking whatever the outside world had done while we’d been busy ignoring our phones.

Tuck got to the door first. I heard the floorboards creak under him, then a pause, the kind a man takes when he’s deciding whether something on the step is a threat. Then the chain slid back.

The voice reached me before the visitor did.

“For the love of God, tell me you have coffee that isn’t instant.”

Female. Sharp. The kind of cadence that treated vowels as optional. And under the briskness, a scent rolled down the hallway, warm amber and dried fig, rich and not the least bitsorry about it, broadcasting omega with a confidence that made my own new biology feel like it was still learning to walk.

Sloane Alarie filled the doorframe the way she filled a page. Completely. She was taller than she’d looked on our video calls, broad through the shoulders, her dark hair cropped close to her skull. Leather jacket that had clearly seen a few countries. Boots that could double as weapons. She had a box under each arm, one small, one large, both unmarked.

Tuck stood with his hand still on the door, caught somewhere between welcome and the territorial twitch of an alpha whose pack house had been breached two days into a bond. His cedar scent went sharp at the edges, then he caught it and pushed it back down.

“Sloane.”

“Tucker.” She looked him up and down. “You look like you haven’t slept in days, and you smell like you’ve been?—”

“Coffee’s in the kitchen,” Tuck cut in. The tips of his ears went red.

She grinned, feral and warm at once, and stepped past him like she’d been walking through alpha-crowded rooms her whole life. She tracked straight down the hall to the kitchen, where Cillian sat.

He looked up from his tablet. “Alarie.”

“Tonewick. Your encrypted messages are a work of art. Your font choice is unconscionable.”

“It’s monospace. It’s functional.”

“It’s Courier New. We’ll discuss it later.” She set both boxes on the counter and turned toward the doorway.

Where I stood a little out of breath at just having yanked on leggings and a blouse so I wasn’t naked in front of a guest. I still had the blanket around my shoulders because the scent of it was too comforting for me to abandon just yet. I was barefooton cold tile, glasses crooked, my face probably still flushed from everything that had happened in this house.

Sloane’s expression changed. Not softer. Just focused, like she’d walked this exact ground and knew where every loose stone was.

“There she is.” Her voice dropped a register, still warm, still brisk, but with something underneath it. “The woman who broke the internet with a whine and a pair of overworked vocal cords.”