Page 59 of Heat Unscripted

“Sloane—”

“Don’t.” She crossed the kitchen in four strides and pulled me into a hug that smelled like amber and fig and a body that had never once been ashamed of itself. Her arms were strong. She held on exactly long enough and not a beat past it.

“I brought supplies.” She pulled back, hands still on my shoulders, dark eyes going over my face like a doctor checking for fractures. “Small box is a new phone. Your old number’s compromised. Cillian’s been filtering, but it’s a sieve by now. New number, encrypted, only your pack and me.”

“And the big one?”

“Legal.” She tapped the lid. “Physical files, because I don’t trust digital for this. My solicitor handled my case when my designation went public. She’s expensive, she’s vicious, and she’s an omega who’s personally sued twelve production companies into settlement.”

The shower cut off upstairs. Bram’s footsteps, measured even on wet tile.

Sloane’s eyes tracked the sound, then came back to me. “How far into the nesting phase?”

The question was clinical. Omega to omega, about biology most alphas only understood in theory.

“I don’t—” I started, and the words came out in the new register. The real one. Low and warm, full in a way it had neverbeen on our old calls. I watched her notice it, the change in my voice, the weight that hadn’t been there before.

“Early stage,” she said, answering herself. She let go of my shoulders and turned to the room. “All right. Everyone in here. I need all three alphas for this.”

Tuck was already against the counter, arms crossed, cedar gone protective at the edges. Sloane glanced at it, nodded once, and let it go. Cillian hadn’t moved from the table, but he’d angled his tablet toward her, ready to take notes.

Bram appeared in the doorway.

His hair was damp. A wrinkled shirt, which I knew had to pain him to put back on, but we hadn’t exactly had a lot of options. There was no vest, no coat, none of the careful armor he usually wore into a room, which said something in and of itself. His scent came in ahead of him, peppercorn, sharp and clean off the shower, threaded through with the honey note that hadn’t left his skin since the library.

His eyes found mine and held. The gray-green was steady. No analytical distance in it anymore. He looked like a man who’d stopped pretending he didn’t feel what he felt.

Then he looked at Sloane and read her in about two seconds flat.

“You’re Sloane Alarie.”

“I’m one of the women who has been lucky enough to have her entire catalog narrated by your omega.” She put out her hand. “Lovely to meet you in person, St.James. You look a lot less composed than your press photo.”

He shook it. The corner of his mouth moved. “That photo was taken before my world rearranged itself.”

“Omegas tend to do that.” She pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down like she was claiming it. “Right. I’m going to talk. You’re going to listen. Some of it’s going to make you uncomfortable, and you’re going to sit in that discomfort,because the woman at the center of this needs you to understand what’s happening to her body before it finishes happening.”

Nobody said anything. Tuck by the counter, Bram in the doorway, Cillian at the table, me standing in the middle of all of them with a blanket around my shoulders and eleven years of hiding still stuck somewhere behind my teeth.

Sloane looked at each of them, then at me. Something in her face went private for a second.

“The nesting phase,” she said, “is not optional.”

She let it sit.

“Most people, most alphas, think heat is the main event. The dramatic bit. The part that sells books and gets three seconds of live airtime in front of millions of people.” She didn’t look at me when she said it. I felt it land anyway. “It isn’t. Heat is the door. The nesting phase is what holds the house up. It’s where the bond stops being chemistry and turns into something that can carry weight.”

Bram shifted. He understood that kind of language, and I watched him reach for it.

“Isobel’s body’s been denied this for eleven years,” Sloane went on. “She’s never nested. Never finished a heat cycle. Right now her system’s trying to do in days what should’ve taken a decade of natural cycles. The fever was phase one, the reset. The vocal cords were phase two. What’s next?—”

She stopped, opened the larger box, and lifted the legal files out. Underneath were smaller packages. Tissue paper, soft fabric, the practical kit of a woman who’d built her own nest once.

“What’s next is the drive to build a den. A physical space soaked in pack scent. Her instinct, and I mean instinct, not a preference, not something she can think her way out of, is going to be to gather things that carry all four of your scents and build a space her nervous system reads as safe. Soft textures. Fabricsthat feel good to her. Some like it dark, some prefer light and airy.”

Tuck straightened. His cedar had gone warm. Not sharp, not territorial. Something underneath that. “Like an actual nest.”

“Like an actual nest,” Sloane said. “And before any of you gets cute about the word, it’s not infantilizing and it’s not decoration. It’s the mechanism. It’s how an omega’s nervous system finishes integrating the bond. Without it, the bond stays on the surface. Chemistry, no foundation. And Isobel’s got three alpha bonds setting at once after a decade of suppression?—”