Page 7 of Heat Unscripted

“What if someone’s been cleaning your files?” she posed it as a question, but she’d clearly had this thought before.

The words came down like a fist. Not because I didn’t see it coming. I’d watched Cillian do it, watched his cursor cross the waveform with that unhurried ease. But hearing it out loud, in this room, from someone who knew exactly what it meant, made it real in a way it hadn’t been.

“For how long?” she asked.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to.

She nodded, slow, like I’d confirmed something she’d already guessed. “Your sound engineer. Tonewick.”

“He said it was a filter calibration issue.” Thin, even to me. “A resonance spike.”

“And you believe that?”

I lifted the cup. Drank. Put it down again with a care that felt like the last bit of control I had over anything. “I believe he said it.”

She was quiet a long moment. Then she got up, crossed to a cabinet against the far wall, and came back with a small box. Unmarked. The kind of plain packaging designed to get forgotten in a drawer.

“Emergency-grade suppressants,” she said, setting it on the table between us. “Pharmaceutical. Not the consumer formula, the clinical one. What they hand to omegas in high-stress professional environments when standard dosing stops cutting it.”

I looked at the box. Unremarkable. The sort of thing that could ride in the inner pocket of a kit bag and never get a second glance.

“They’re stronger,” she said. “Faster. They’ll buy you a runway when your normal dose fails. They’re also—” She paused, and something behind her face shifted. “They’re also a lot harder on you. Burn through them during a twenty-four-hour stream and the crash is twice as bad. Your body comes outdepleted. Your voice comes out compromised. The recovery’s longer and messier than anything you’ve had before.”

I reached for the box. My fingers closed around it. Insurance. Protection. One more wall between me and the thing I’d spent a whole career outrunning.

“I can manage it,” I said.

She sat back. She didn’t argue. She didn’t tell me I was wrong, or making a mistake, or building a plan on ground that had already started to crack.

She just looked at me with those knowing eyes and said nothing.

The quiet stretched out between us and seemed to have its own temperature. Outside, the light had started to go, gray deepening toward evening, the cold pressing closer at the glass.

“You’ve written about this,” I said finally. “Every book. Omegas who hide. Omegas who get found out. The moment the pretending stops being possible.”

“I have.”

“Does it ever end well?”

She lifted her cup. Drank. Set it down with the same exactness I’d used a minute earlier.

“It ends,” she said. “Whether it ends well depends entirely on who’s in the room when the wall comes down.”

I thought about Cillian’s voice in my headphones. Running a level check. I thought about the waveform settling into something clean, something perfect, something that read as flat, unremarkable beta. I thought about the look that had passed between us in the production meeting, the silent thing, a secret held, a debt running up, protection handed over without my asking for it.

I thought about Tuck in the sealed booth. You smell different today. Sweet.

I thought about Bram across the conference table, his face giving up nothing, his peppercorn scent sharpening at the edges into something I couldn’t name and couldn’t ignore.

“I can manage it,” I said again.

She didn’t argue, but she didn’t believe me either.

FIVE

Bram

I built the penthouse so I could be alone in it.