Page 70 of Heat Unscripted

One voice. Mine. All of it.

I tested it in the bathroom mirror that morning. Barefoot on cold tile, hair wet, glasses fogged, talking to my own reflection the way I’d never talked to anyone, including myself.

“My name is Isobel Gretan.”

The same five words that I had used in that recording, the one that was my truth. They filled the small tiled space and came back off the walls richer than even the recording had caught them, and the recording had caught everything. Warm. Full. The honey audible down low, the cream in the middle, the overtones that marked it as Omega and couldn’t be faked. A sound I couldn’t hide anymore. Not ever again.

I didn’t want to hide it.

The thought came in with the morning light through the frosted glass, and not one ounce of the terror I’d have bet money on came with it. I didn’t want to rebuild the Beta Neutral disguise. Didn’t want to reach for the over-the-countersuppressants or the clinical pills or any of the chemical scaffolding that had kept me standing for years while it quietly crushed everything underneath.

I wanted to record again. Not another truth file, the working kind. Books. Sessions. Contracts with my own name on the credits. I wanted to sit in front of the silver mic for a living and let whatever came out be exactly what it was. And I wanted them in the room. Tuck’s cedar warming it, Bram’s peppercorn sharpening it, Cillian’s sandalwood holding it down. Not because I needed protecting. Because they were part of the sound now, and the room felt wrong without them in it.

I wanted a career as myself. As Isobel. As an Omega who’d built one on fiction and was finally ready to find out what she could build on the truth.

As I came downstairs I saw the cream envelope sitting on the kitchen counter where Bram had left it that morning. Expensive paper, embossed letterhead, the law firm’s name pressed into the corner. Nobody had touched it. Nobody had moved it. It just sat there in the late light like it owned the granite and had all the time in the world.

I walked past it to get to the kettle.

I knew what was inside. Bram had walked me through it the night before, clipped and furious. Cillian had photographed every page and filed it in his encrypted system. Tuck had read it once, set it down, and gone for a walk that put a hole through the soles of his boots.

Breach of contract. Audience deception. An injunction against the intellectual property I’d spent my whole career making.

The demands were waiting. All of us knew it.

I still wasn’t ready though, so I waited for the kettle to boil and looked around the kitchen. My house had changed and I had barely even noticed.

Tuck had taken the kitchen by force. The room I’d used for years to brew chamomile and bury my biology now smelled like cedar and toast and a man who said I love you by feeding people. He’d reorganized my spice rack without asking, which I planned to have words with him about. He’d fixed the drip in the tap I’d been ignoring for a year. And he’d draped a flannel shirt over the back of my usual chair with a casualness so studied it was basically wearing a disguise of its own.

Bram had taken over the sitting room, though he was almost never still long enough to leave a mark on it. His folio sat on the side table next to a stack of annotated briefs. His fountain pen rested in the gap between the cushions where he’d worked half the night before. The peppercorn had soaked into the armchair he liked, the one by the window with the good reading light, and the sheer organized severity of him had turned my comfortable, slightly messy living room into something closer to a command post.

Cillian lived in the wiring. His chargers took up three outlets. His portable speaker had been sitting on the hall shelf playing the grounding frequency that had become so woven into the house’s background noise that I’d stopped hearing it and started feeling it instead, a low steady presence in the walls. His sandalwood marked the door frames and the hallway outside my bedroom and the spot at the kitchen table where he sat watching systems I couldn’t see.

And over all of it, my own scent, chamomile and honey, unmasked now, in the curtains and the couch throws and the acoustic foam in the studio. Every soft surface in the house had drunk in the frequency I’d been smothering for years, until walking through my own hallway felt like walking through a room tuned to me.

In a way the whole house had become a nest, not just the bedroom. The four of us had built it without one conversationabout building it. No production meeting, no spec sheet, none of Bram’s precise handwriting mapping it out. Just living in the same space and letting the scents do the thing they were built to do.

The kettle clicked off, and the kitchen came back into focus around me. Tuck had come back in and was standing at the stovetop, stirring something that smelled like garlic and wine. Bram had appeared at the table with his legal pad, pen moving, building a strategy thorough enough to survive cross-examination. Cillian was suddenly on the floor by the radiator with his tablet.

They all looked up when I turned, sensing that I was more present than I had been a moment ago. Three sets of eyes. Three scents shifting toward me at once.

I looked at the envelope on the counter. Cream-colored. Heavy stock. Patient.

“Not tonight,” I said. My voice filled the kitchen, the honey audible down low and the full Omega weight on it. It settled into the room the way it settled into everything now.

Tuck set the wooden spoon down on the counter. “Not tonight,” he said, and his bass dropped under mine to meet it. He’d wait as long as I needed and not one second longer than I asked.

Bram’s pen stopped. He looked at the envelope, then at me, and I watched his gray-green eyes run the numbers. The response window. The cost of stalling. Whatever they came up with, his body had already decided.

“Not tonight,” he said.

Cillian didn’t look up from the tablet. His fingers kept their steady rhythm across the screen. The silver ring in his ear caught the light as he tipped his head my way, acknowledging me without making a show of it.

“Dinner first,” he said.

I sat down at the table. Tuck brought the pan over and served straight onto plates he’d warmed in the oven, because somewhere along the line he’d found where I kept the good dishes and decided feeding his pack required real crockery. Bram set his legal pad aside, not done with it, but willing to pause his work for food. Cillian got up off the floor and took the chair next to mine, his body drifting toward me in a way that gave me butterflies in my stomach.

We ate. The food was good. Tuck cooked the way he did everything, on instinct, warm and generous, like food was a kind of armor he could hand out. Bram commented on the seasoning like he was taking a formula apart. Cillian ate without a word, half his attention on the plate and half on me.