Page 75 of Heat Unscripted

Then Bram moved.

Not toward me. Into the room. Three strides took him from the threshold to the table, his hand finding the binder’s edge with the certainty of a man who’d built arguments his whole life and had just hit one his logic couldn’t get around.

He looked at the signature page. At the blue dot. At the capped pen I’d set down so carefully.

His hand closed over the binder. Not gently. The grip of a man taking something off the table to get it out of play.

“You were going to disappear.”

It wasn’t the smooth baritone. It wasn’t even the stripped-down version from the kitchen confession, or the library, or the hallway where he’d walked back in with his guard down. This was something I’d never heard from him. Not in the booth, not in the hotel, not in any of the moments where his control had cracked and the raw thing came up underneath.

This was rage.

Not at the network. Not at the industry. Not at the system he’d sworn to take apart with his bare hands and his solicitor’s number.

At me.

“You were going to sit in this kitchen and sign a document that erases every true thing you’ve done since that booth.” His gray-green eyes burned. The peppercorn flared, heat with nothing to do with temperature, a man walking straight into the thing he was most afraid of. “You were going to tell the world the whine was a marketing stunt. That we were a marketing stunt. You were going to gift-wrap the most honest sound you’ve ever made and hand it to the people who spent eight months watching you through a hired spy, and you were going to do it?—”

His voice cracked. Not at the edges. Down the middle.

“—to protect us.”

He let go of the binder. Set both hands flat on the table, mirroring Tuck without having seen him do it, two men landing in the same place by different roads. His arms were rigid. The tremor that had haunted him in the booth, in the library, in every moment his body got ahead of his control, was back, visible in the tendons of his forearms, in the locked set of his jaw.

“I am not angry that you considered it.” Each word came through his teeth, precise even now, careful even furious, pure Bram, unable to stop minding his language even as his language failed. “I am angry that after everything. After the booth. After the den. After you stood in this kitchen and told us you would not be made small. Your instinct was still to reach for the mask.”

The word landed on the granite between us. I felt it hit.

Because he was right.

That was exactly what it had been. Not sacrifice. Not some clear-eyed woman weighing costs in the dark. Reflex. The same muscle that reached for the Beta Neutral spray and the doubled suppressants and the professional contralto, year after year. The deep grooved habit of believing, since I was eighteen, that the safest thing I could do for the people near me was to become less.

His eyes were wet. Not spilling. Held back, the way they’d held in the library, the way they’d held the night he confessed to three years of falling asleep to my voice. The look of a man who’d spent his life managing every variable and had just watched the woman he loved reach for self-destruction in the quiet while he slept one room over.

“I can’t build a thing that protects you from yourself.” It came out raw, the baritone broken down to the bare floor of it, nothing professional left in the sound. “I can fight the network. I can file counter-claims and build strategies and spend every resource I have making sure they never touch your catalogue. But I can’t?—”

He stopped. His hands pressed harder. The tremor got worse.

“I can’t protect you from the part of you that still believes you deserve to disappear.”

The kitchen was very still.

On the counter, the kettle clicked off. The sound was small and mechanical and nowhere near big enough for the room.

Cillian still hadn’t spoken.

He stood against the counter with his arms crossed and his dark eyes on me. Steady, present, that quality of attention I’d learned to read over six years in a booth together. Not the calm neutrality he wore in a crisis. Something more private. Something that looked, if I had it right, like a man who’d been waiting for this exact moment. Not the confession. Not the fury. The thing that came after.

The thing that was coming now.

He uncrossed his arms. Pushed off the counter. Crossed the kitchen in four unhurried steps, the same steady tempo he brought to everything, the rhythm that never changed no matter what the room was doing.

He stopped beside my chair.

His hand came down. Found mine where it rested on the table, beside the binder, beside the capped pen, beside the blue dot that marked the place I’d almost ended us.

His palm covered the back of my hand. Warm. Dry. The calluses from years on boards and faders rough against my skin. He pressed, not hard, just firm. He said things with touch the way he said things with sound. Precise. On purpose. A man who’d been talking to me without words for years and had one more thing to say.