Page 85 of Heat Unscripted

“I started on consumer suppressants. Daily. They dulled the markers that would’ve flagged me on any standard screen. Isprayed Beta Neutral scent masker on a timer, in sessions, in public, everywhere. I taught myself to flatten the overtones that come up naturally in Omega speech. I trained myself out of the frequencies that made my voice mine.”

Bram had taken his pen out of his pocket and held it in his hand, not writing, just holding it, the way another man holds a worry stone, his thumb going back and forth on the cap. The only thing moving in his corner. His face was still. His eyes weren’t.

“For eleven years I performed a version of myself the industry would take. I became the Faceless Siren, not because I cared about being anonymous, but because I couldn’t risk a face getting tied to a designation that would’ve ended everything I’d built.”

She stopped. Not a dramatic pause. The stop of someone who’d been running a long time and was letting herself stand still for a second and look back at the distance.

“The cost wasn’t abstract.”

I watched her hands on the desk. Still steady.

“Eleven years of suppressants wrecked my vocal cords. The exact drugs I needed to keep the lie going chewed up the instrument I was lying to protect. I was destroying my voice to save my career. Every doubled dose, every clinical-grade bump, every emergency pill I dry-swallowed between takes, all of it brought the wall down a little further.”

On the monitor the waveform pulsed with everything she was putting into it. Cillian’s eyes went between the display and her face, tracking both, the way he always does, the data and the person. His hands stayed in his lap. No fix. No filter. The board sat open and caught all of her with the same fidelity that used to make him scrub.

Six years ago that fidelity was the threat. Tonight it was the whole point.

“I want to tell you what it’s like,” she said. “To be the most wanted voice in the world and not be allowed to use your own.”

The honey bloomed. I felt it move through the room, the scent answering what she was saying, broadcasting with the same naked truth the whine had in the booth. But this was a choice. No crash, none of the involuntary cry of a body held under too long. She’d opened on purpose. Decided to let the scent and the voice and the body do the thing they were built for, on a clean file, no apology.

“It’s like wearing someone else’s skin. Like talking through a wall. Like the sound coming out of your mouth is a really good copy of the sound you could make if anyone let you, and the copy’s so good that millions of people fall in love with it, and none of them know. None of them will ever know it’s the echo and not the original.”

A whine wound up through her chest. Low. Quick. Not the mate-call, the private one, the sound that lives between people instead of for a room. It surfaced in the low end of her voice like something seen through water, there for a second before the words took back over.

I swallowed against something thick in my throat.

“On the twenty-third of November, in the fifteenth hour of a twenty-four-hour charity livestream, my body overrode eleven years of chemical suppression and made the sound I’d been hiding since I was eighteen. A mate-call. Unmistakable. Biological. Broadcast live to millions of people through studio-grade gear that caught every frequency my voice had been forbidden to make.”

She lifted her eyes off the desk. Not to the mic. Past it. To me.

One beat. Two. Green eyes huge behind the lenses, holding mine across the little room, a woman who had something to say to the man at the door and was choosing to say it to the recording instead.

“And the people in that booth, the ones who heard me with no wall between us for the first time, they didn’t flinch.”

She looked at Bram. His pen stopped.

“They didn’t pull back.”

She looked at Cillian. His hands tightened in his lap.

“They didn’t walk out.”

Back to the mic. The contralto dropped into its lowest, warmest range, the one that landed in me the first time I heard it, across a table, all those years ago, in a room I can’t even name now.

“They stayed.”

The word filled the studio the way her scent filled the house, no effort, like it had always belonged and was only waiting for someone to say it.

“What happened in that booth wasn’t a marketing stunt. It wasn’t some coordinated lie to pull donations. It was the biological truth of a woman whose body couldn’t hold the fiction her industry demanded anymore, coming out in front of three people whose biology had been recognizing hers for years.”

She was talking straight ahead now. Not to me, not to the men in the room. To the recording. To the file that would carry this out into the world.

“Every Omega who’s hidden their designation to work in an industry that calls biology a liability, I’m talking to you. Every voice that’s been trained out of its own frequency to hit a standard set by people who never had to make that call, I’m talking to you.”

I flattened both palms against the door frame behind me. The cedar surged, warm, filling the threshold, a man whose pack was making the most important sound it would ever make and whose one job, right then, was to stand at the edge and keep the world on the far side of the door until she was done.

“You have the right to be unmuted.”