Page 69 of Heat Unscripted

His jacket had a zip that didn’t rattle, of course it didn’t, the man dressed in silence. I pushed it off his shoulders and pulled his shirt after it, and then my hands were on skin, lean muscle and warmth, and the sound-wave tattoos ran up his forearms in thin black lines I’d never once been close enough to read.

I traced one from wrist to elbow.

“The session when your Omega voice first slipped out,” he said, very quietly, before I could ask.

Words I’d spoken rendered in ink, in the shape my voice had made the first time it told the truth without my permission. I made a sound at that too. It wasn’t a musical one. His arms came around me before it finished.

“You kept it on your skin,” I said into his neck.

“Where I keep things that matter.” His hand moved down my spine, slowly, and the sage went dark under the sandalwood. “Come here.”

I took his hand instead and pulled him up out of the desk chair, walked him two steps back, and pushed him down into mine. My chair. Worn to my shape, set to my height, the seat where I’d spent eleven years being somebody else. He looked up at me from it and understood immediately, because he always understood. If the truth was going to happen in this room, it was going to happen there.

I climbed into his lap, knees either side of his hips, and the chair took us the way it had taken every session, without comment.

When we finally came together it was slow, his hands guiding my hips, his breath breaking its even count for the first time since I’d met him, and the sound that came out of me was nothing I could have written for any character in any book. Low. Cracked open. Mine.

He caught it with his mouth.

We found the rhythm the way we’d always found it in sessions, him reading me, me trusting him, the pace unhurried because Cillian had never once rushed anything he cared about getting right. The studio held every sound. My breath and his. The chair’s soft complaint. The honey and the sandalwood and the sage winding into one scent with no name yet. And under all of it my voice, running open, no filter, no mask, spilling notes I’d suppressed for eleven years into the foam of a room built to keep secrets.

“There,” he said, low, wrecked, his hands flexing on my hips. “There she is.”

The end built the way a good crescendo builds, inevitable from a long way out. My sounds went past notes into something with no pitch at all, and when the wave finally broke over me the trill came with it, full length, unspooling through the room at a register no equipment of his had ever caught, because I’d never once let it out while anything was recording. His control went half a second later. His breath staggered, his head tipped back against my chair, and the sound that came up out of him was one syllable, my name, with every trace of engineering gone.

I kept that one too.

We stayed there a long time. My face in his neck, his hand moving up and down my spine on a slow four-count that was pure Cillian, soothing something and timing it anyway. The room settled around us. The monitors had gone to sleep. The mic stood dark on its stand three feet away, and the best sounds I had ever made in this studio had gone nowhere near it.

TWENTY-FIVE

Isobel

Cillian had carried me back to bed for a nap after our session in the recording booth and I hadn’t had the energy to object. Waking up in my nest was still a new experience for me, and I couldn’t say that I hated it. I luxuriated in it for a little while as I watched the evening light creep in through the window.

In some ways the nest wasn’t what I’d expected. I’d thought the nesting phase would end like a door closing. Somewhere in my head I’d built a picture of a finish line for if I ever found a pack, step one would be getting the nest assembled, then our scents would merge, eventually my suppressant withdrawal would be done, and the pack would be formed. Biology would be satisfied and I’d be able to go back to normal. Whatever normal was supposed to mean now, for a woman whose entire career had just bottomed out.

None of that had happened the way I expected though and as I finally roused myself from my nap and prepared to go downstairs I paused in the doorway of my bedroom and looked at what I’d made, the word nest still pulled at me. It was mostly done, but I now understood that it would never be finished. There would always be more to add, and things to adjust.

The bed wasn’t a bed anymore. I still slept in it, deeper than I had in years, but I hadn’t built it for sleeping. Bram’s jacket and silk pocket squares ran along the pillows in an order my conscious mind hadn’t picked and my hands had laid down anyway, dead certain.

Tuck’s flannels filled the middle. Two shirts, worn soft, thrown across the mattress in overlapping layers that smelled like cedar and bourbon. I didn’t even know how they’d got here, only that I was happy they were here.

Cillian’s weighted blanket covered all of it. Gray wool sitting over the silks and the flannels and every other blanket I’d dragged out of storage, holding the whole thing flat. It pressed down the way he pressed down on everything, with weight and exactness and that quiet certainty he carried. Where it touched my skin through the layers, my nervous system went still. The same way his grounding frequency evened out my breathing.

And under all of it, soaked into the headboard foam and the carpet and the curtains I’d yanked shut against the November dark, four scents that had chosen each other. Cedar and peppercorn and sandalwood and chamomile, woven so tight you couldn’t pull one note loose without the others.

I stood in the doorway and breathed it in. My body, the body I’d spent years punishing for being exactly what it was, went quiet. Not the held-breath quiet of hiding. Not the rigid chemical quiet of suppressants grinding overtime. The quiet of a thing that had finally gotten where it was going.

I felt different. Not transformed or reborn, none of the breathless language Tessa put in her novels. The biology I’d denied for years had finished what it started in the booth, and what was left over was a body that knew what it was and had stopped arguing.

My scent had changed too. The steamed-milk-and-honey was still there, still warm, still broadcasting Omega in a way noamount of Beta Neutral spray could ever have faked. But the frantic edge had burned off. The desperate pitch of the mate-call, the fevered bloom of a system in crisis, gone. What replaced it was deeper and calmer. A scent that had stopped trying to pull anyone in and just decided to exist.

I could smell them on me. Cedar at my wrists, where Tuck’s hands had held on. Peppercorn at my throat, where Bram had pressed his face. Sandalwood at my nape, where Cillian’s fingers had sat. They weren’t laid over my scent, but mixed with it.

And my voice had come back richer.

Not louder, not wider in range. Richer, the way a recording sounds when you strip the compression off it and let the whole thing breathe. The contralto was still there, still mine, but under it now ran the Omega resonance Cillian had spent years burying in the waveforms, finally just part of the sound instead of a thing to hide.