Page 66 of Heat Unscripted

I sat up. The blanket slid to my waist. My stomach gave a small, settled turn, not nerves, something steadier, and I knew before I’d finished the thought what I wanted.

I wanted to record.

Not the Rogue. Not Charlotte fromAlpha’s Oath. Not any of the eight hundred-odd people I’d been. Just me, talking, into a microphone, with the four of them in the room while I did it. The ones who’d held space for this version of me before she existed.

The door opened before I could get there. Of course it did. Cillian was standing there though the imprint of him was still in the carpet he’d been sitting on. His tablet was in one hand. The silver in his ears caught the hall light.

“You’re up,” he said.

“I want to use the studio.”

He looked at me for a full second. Read the way I was standing, squared up instead of half-turned the way I used to stand when I was about to ask for something. Read the scent too, probably. It had stopped doing the urgent thing and gone quiet and continuous over the past few days.

“Now?” he said.

“Now.”

His eyes went past me to the nest through the gap in the door, the days of fabric and warmth and four scents layered into it.

“I’ll get the others,” he said.

The studio smelled like me.

Not the chamomile and the chemical fog of Beta Neutral. The real thing, honey and cream and warm, soaked into foam over the past few days of not masking. It had got into the padding and the wiring and the grain of the desk.

The microphone stood on its stand in the middle of the room. My stomach didn’t drop looking at it. That surprised me more than anything.

They came in quietly. Tuck first, ducking under the doorframe, careful with the small space in a way he hadn’t been a week ago. He took the stool in the corner without being told, forearms on his thighs. The cedar warmed the room straight off.

Bram next, vest back on, hair still less tidy than he liked it. He set his back against the panel by the door and clasped his hands in front of him, not behind, not locked down. He looked at me, and I made myself hold the look instead of glancing off it.

I opened my mouth and spoke. No script, no character, no instrument. I spoke like you breathe when somebody finally tells you it’s safe to stop holding it.

Tuck had his hand pressed flat on his own knee, holding himself in the chair by force while everything in him wanted to cross the room. His eyes were bright. The cedar went warm and steady.

Bram had unclasped his hands. They hung open at his sides. His jaw worked, that small compulsive thing he did when something landed too big to take in at once. The peppercorn had gone dark and sweet.

“I spent eleven years scared that if you heard my real voice, you’d hear something wrong.” My voice didn’t waver. It had stopped wavering days ago. “I was wrong. The voice was never the problem.”

I let the room go quiet a second. Cillian’s hands had gone still on the board, not because he’d stopped working but becausethere was nothing to do. Nothing to filter, nothing to fix. The file was just holding what I gave it.

“I’m going to keep talking,” I said. “For as long as I’ve got something to say. And I’d like to do it without hiding.”

The red light held.

I talked the way I talked inside my own head at two in the morning, before the suppressants and the professional face had to go back on. I talked about the first agent and the first lie. About what it costs to pick a career over a body, and how that choice stacks up year on year until the lie is load-bearing and the body’s the inconvenient part.

I talked about the booth. The whine. The millions of people who’d heard three seconds of the real me. I told them the strange part, which was that the thing I felt most clearly wasn’t shame. It was relief. The wrung-out, violent relief of putting down something I’d been gripping too long.

Cillian didn’t move from the board. He made one adjustment in the first ten minutes, the room a touch warm, and nudged it a fraction, pure reflex. Then he put his hands in his lap and listened.

He listened the way he always did. All the way. The kind of attention most people never get from anybody.

At some point he turned the second monitor toward me so I could see the waveform while I spoke. I got it straight away. He was handing me back my own sound, showing me what I looked like with the smallness gone. The display bloomed with each sentence.

I’d spent eleven years hiding that.

The file was forty-seven minutes long when I stopped.