Page 64 of Heat Unscripted

Twenty-three. The carelessness of a kid who didn’t really understand the machine he was a part of.

I wrote all of it down. Every timestamp, every file match, every metadata thread tying his device to the liaison’s credentials to the network’s filing. The pad filled with the small handwriting my solicitor would have to turn into claims. Cross-references to the filing’s exact language about booth conditions. Each legal assertion linked back to an access log entry. A counter-argument built out of the same data they’d used to come at her.

This part I know how to do. Take raw information and build it into something that holds weight. Something with the edges to cut.

Not for me. For her.

The movement upstairs kept going through the night, on its own clock, nothing to do with normal sleep. Tuck’s voice reached me twice through the ceiling, low and short both times. Checking in. Not getting in the way.

Past midnight he came down.

He moved through the dark hallway the way a big man moves through a small house at night, every step set down soft, the floorboards taking him without a sound. The cedar got tothe kitchen about three seconds before he did. Warm, deep, the territorial edge gone out of it. His instincts had settled. The nest over his head was being built by the one person they all pointed at.

He looked at us. Cillian at the counter, me on the floor, laptops and legal pads and cold tea between us. Something moved over his face.

“Find something?” His voice came out low. The hour, the woman upstairs, the quiet we’d held for hours, all of it in how quiet he kept it.

“Jamie Okafor.” I said it flat. “Junior PA. Eight months on the crew. Loyalty clause in his contract requiring him to report on key creative personnel.”

Tuck went still.

Not booth-still. The kind of still where a body’s already found the threat and started running the angles. The scar through his eyebrow showed white against the flush climbing his neck. His hands curled into fists at his sides.

He held them there.

“Jamie,” Tuck said. Flat. “Jamie who sets up the script binders. Jamie who runs the coffee order. Jamie who—” His jaw locked. The cedar sharpened. “Jamie who fixed Isobel’s mic stand at the third rehearsal because the height was off. She thanked him.”

“Yes.”

“Eight months.”

“Yes.”

His fists tightened. The knuckles went white, the tendons in his forearms standing up like cables, and what was on his face, even in the blue light off Cillian’s monitors, was plain. A whole career spent putting his body between people and harm, and here was a threat his body couldn’t touch.

“Where is he now?” Level. Careful. Each word set down with the kind of control that told me exactly how much it was costing.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “He’s not the target. The network is. Okafor’s a contracted instrument. The clause made the watching a condition of the job. He may not have understood the whole scope of what he was feeding them.”

“He understood enough to open files at three in the morning.”

“Which is why the evidence matters more than the fight.”

Tuck looked at me. His eyes were dark, not blown-pupil alpha, just a man holding something heavy and deciding where to put it down.

“She doesn’t know yet,” he said.

“No.”

“When?”

I looked at the legal pad in my lap. At the pages of it. The counter-strategy that would protect her career, her catalog, every syllable she’d ever recorded. The work that had gone on getting built down here while she built her den upstairs and her body finished the thing eleven years of suppression had refused it.

“When the nest’s finished,” I said. “When her system’s stable. Not before.”

Cillian nodded from the counter. Tuck’s fists loosened. Not all the way. But enough. The cedar settled back to something warmer.

“Okay.” He pulled out the chair that had become his, the one whose back carried his scent like a flag planted in it, and sat. His frame folded into it like a man settling in for the long part. “Then I’m here. Show me what you’ve got.”