Page 72 of Heat Unscripted

I watched them.

I watched Tuck grip the counter and steady his voice and chase the angle that would reach the most people fastest. I watched Cillian’s fingers go down the pages, pulling out the useful parts the same way he used to pull Omega frequencies out of my recordings. I watched Bram’s pen build the counter-structure in the margins like he’d finally found something worth the framework.

They were protecting me.

They were so good at it.

And I sat there in Tuck’s flannel holding a mug of cold chamomile knowing none of it was going to be enough.

I read the binder at three in the morning when I couldn’t sleep.

The house was dark. Tuck had gone down on the sofa with his laptop on his chest, the fan statement half-written on the screen, all heart, all care, a thing that would move people and do exactly nothing against what the network had lined up. Bram had taken his phone and his legal pad into the sitting room, and the last of him I’d caught was the low murmur of his voice on a call with Sloane’s solicitor, the peppercorn coming through two closed doors.

Cillian was the last one up. I’d heard him at the table long after the others went down, fingers going on the tablet in that even rhythm, the steady attention of someone who’d guarded me from the edges for years and was doing it from the middle now with the exact same focus. He’d kissed my forehead on his way up, quick, the sandalwood warm against my skin for one unhurried second, and told me to sleep.

I hadn’t slept.

I sat in the kitchen with the binder open under the range hood light, the only light left in the house, and I read every word.

I read it the way an omega reads things after eleven years in this industry. With the part of me that knew, all the way down, what power looks like when it stops bothering to seem reasonable.

The catalog transfer was bad. Every recording I’d made under the Shadows banner, every session, every take, every hour I’d put into characters that had grown into who I was, signed over to people who’d spent eight months watching me through a hired operative. My voice, handed off. The work cut away from the body that made it. The split the industry had wanted from the start.

The statement was worse.

The language was careful. Lawyered to the bone, every phrase picked for deniability and damage in the same breath. Ms.Gretan acknowledges that the biological event during the Shadows of the Stream finale was a pre-coordinated element of the broadcast strategy, designed in collaboration with the production team to generate audience engagement. Pre-coordinated. In collaboration. Words that took the most involuntary, uncontrollable, desperately true thing my body had ever done and called it a stunt.

And not just mine.

In collaboration with the production team. Bram’s direction. Cillian’s engineering. Tuck’s response. The legal language folded all of it into the lie. It made Tuck’s growl a performance. Bram’s frozen stillness a directorial choice. Cillian’s hand on the kill switch a planned beat.

If I signed, I wouldn’t just erase my truth. I’d erase theirs.

I sat with the binder open to that page for a long time. The range hood hummed over me, a low note Cillian would’ve named and logged and probably already had. The house breathedaround me. Tuck’s slow deep pulls from the sofa. The far creak of Bram shifting into whatever position had finally let him rest. The specific quiet that meant Cillian was asleep but would surface at the first wrong sound.

I thought about what Sloane had said. Build the den. Let your pack hold the line while your body finishes what it started.

My body had finished. The den was built. The scents had merged. The voice was back, fuller, carrying the whole truth of what I was.

And the pack was holding the line. Tuck with his charm and his community. Bram with his strategy and his fury. Cillian with his evidence. Three men pouring everything they had into the job of keeping me safe.

Three men whose careers were now inside the blast radius.

The injunction didn’t only target my projects. The perpetual-litigation clause was written wide enough to catch any production involving personnel associated with the disputed broadcast event. Bram’s campaign. Cillian’s engineering contracts. Tuck’s performance work. The network’s people hadn’t just built a weapon aimed at me. They’d built one aimed at everyone standing close. Wide enough that helping me would cost more than any sane professional would pay.

Sane.

The word sat in my stomach like a swallowed stone.

Bram was rational. Bram, whose whole life ran on frameworks and the careful handling of every variable. Bram would see it. Eventually. Not now, not while the fury was fresh and the bond was new and the peppercorn was still broadcasting protect loud enough to drown out the part of him that did the math. But later. When the fees piled up and the injunctions multiplied and the price of standing next to me stopped being a feeling in a scent gland and started being a number on a page.

Cillian was practical. Cillian, who’d spent six years deciding things for me because he saw what was needed and did it. Cillian would understand. He’d run the exposure, run the variables, trace the outcomes with the same forensic care he gave everything. And the numbers would tell him what I already knew. That the fight could be won, but the cost was enormous, and it would land hardest on the people who could least carry it.

Tuck was loyal. Tuck, whose gut had been screaming the truth for years. Tuck would fight. Would keep fighting long after the math turned against him, long after the balance went red and the letters kept coming, because Tuck didn’t run variables. He ran on instinct and love and the flat certainty that the people he cared about were worth any price.

And that was exactly why I couldn’t let him.

The pen was in my hand before I’d decided to pick it up. Bram’s fountain pen, left on the table by his legal pad, the weight of it familiar from a hundred times I’d watched him use it to build frameworks and annotate strategies, quietly sure the right words in the right order could turn back anything.