Page 60 of Heat Unscripted

“So it has to be thorough,” Cillian finished. His eyes were on his tablet but he was all the way in the room. “It has to account for all three of us.”

Sloane pointed at him. “That one gets it.”

Cillian was already typing. “There’s a weighted blanket at my flat,” he said, without looking up. “Gray wool. Calibrated. It’ll be here inside the hour.”

Nobody asked why he had one. He didn’t explain.

“What do you need from us?” Bram’s voice was quiet. None of the professional register in it. Just a man who’d admitted he didn’t know enough and wanted to.

It took me a second to realize that he was looking at me. I didn’t get a chance to respond though.

“Everything that smells like you.” She didn’t hesitate. “Shirts. Pillowcases. Whatever you’ve slept in. St.James, that coat you wrapped around her in the booth, keep it close, she’ll want it. Tonewick, whatever you’ve been wearing for the monitoring sessions. Tucker, the flannel she’s swimming in is a good start. She’ll arrange it herself. Don’t help unless she asks. Don’t move what she builds. And for God’s sake, don’t clean anything until the phase is done.”

A beat.

“How long?” Tuck asked.

“Three days. Five at the outside. She’ll know when it’s finished.” Her eyes came to me. “You’ll feel it. The moment the nest’s right. Like something settling into place.”

I pulled the blanket tighter. The word nest sat low and heavy and exactly the right shape, filling a hole I hadn’t known was there.

Sloane drew a manila folder out of the legal box and set it on the table. The amber and fig in her scent sharpened, the consultant taking over from the omega.

“Now,” she said. “The part that isn’t biology.”

She flipped the folder open. Printed emails. Timestamps highlighted in yellow. A chain of messages that ran across the last weeks of production.

“The legal action against Isobel was filed ninety-seven minutes after the stream went dark.”

The kitchen went still.

“Ninety-seven minutes.” She tapped the page. “Breach of contract, injunctive relief provisions, a targeted claim against the Shadows IP. Drafted, reviewed, signed, and submitted in the time it took Cillian to drive her home.”

Cillian’s fingers stopped on the tablet. His eyes came up.

“That’s not reactive,” Sloane said. “Reactive takes days. Reactive is frantic late-night calls to your lawyers and documents with typos in them. This was ready. The filing was templated. The claims were pre-built. The only thing missing was the timestamp. They just needed something to happen so they could fill in the blank.”

Bram pulled out a chair and sat. Slow, controlled, even while I could see his mind picking up speed. His hand found the folder and slid it toward him.

“Someone gave them advance notice.” Not a question.

“Someone gave them the playbook.” Sloane’s jaw went tight. “The filing references specific booth conditions. The sealedconfiguration. The reduced cooling. The proximity variables. It calls the biometric monitoring evidence that the production knew there could be a ‘biological incident’ and failed to prevent it. That language doesn’t come from network lawyers watching a livestream. It comes from someone with the technical rider in their hands.”

The technical rider. Cillian’s document. The specs he’d built for the booth, sealed doors, controlled airflow, biometric monitoring, the manual override. Everything he’d designed to keep me safe through twenty-four hours of live broadcast.

Turned inside out and used as a weapon.

My stomach dropped.

“The crew,” I said. My voice came out steady. The new register held where the old one would’ve cracked. “Somebody on the production crew.”

Sloane nodded. “Somebody with access before the stream started. Somebody watching close enough to know what the monitoring was actually for. Somebody who understood the sealed booth wasn’t just acoustics. It was containment.”

Cillian’s face didn’t change. The calm he wore like skin held. But his scent shifted, the sandalwood and sage that had been steadying the room since I came down the stairs, an edge sliding into it. The edge that showed up when he found a signal in the noise that didn’t belong.

“I built that rider with restricted access,” he said. Flat. Exact. “Distribution list was five people. Bram. Isobel. The production coordinator. The facilities manager.” He paused. “And the network liaison.”

“The network liaison who got assigned to the stream six weeks ago,” Sloane said. “Replacing the original liaison who’d been on the project since the start.”