Page 89 of Heat Unscripted

I set the filing down.

Bram was still on the phone, his baritone back in its professional register, the voice of a man running a campaign. A real one.

“The release is confirmed with all three outlets,” he said. “The redactions protect Okafor’s personal information. We’re not targeting an individual, we’re establishing a pattern of corporate conduct. Collinsworth issues her statement alongside the cross-complaint at?—”

He glanced at me. The pen stopped. Something moved behind his eyes, quick and private, a man running a legal offensive and checking whether the woman it was built to protect had eaten.

I lifted my mug at him. He went back to the call.

Tuck’s statement hit late in the afternoon. No publicist. No production company. Just his own account, filmed on his phone, him sitting on my front steps with the cold pinking his cheeks and the scar through his eyebrow catching the pale light.

I watched it on Cillian’s tablet in the hallway. Cedar drifted in under the front door where Tuck had sat working up the nerve to hit record.

He didn’t perform. That was the thing that landed it. Torin Tucker, who’d built a career on charm and a bass voice that could fill a stadium, sat on cold stone in a flannel that smelled like both of us and set all of it down.

“I’m not going to talk about the legal situation,” he said. His voice was rough. “The solicitors are handling that, and they’re better at it than I am. I want to talk about something else.”

He rubbed his jaw, that self-conscious tic the public version of him never had.

“It was years ago now that I sat down next to a woman in a recording studio and felt something I couldn’t name. Not attraction. Rather, not just attraction. Something that said pay attention, this person matters in a way you don’t get yet. And I spent all those years telling myself it was professional chemistry.”

He looked into the lens.

“It was recognition. My body knew what my head wouldn’t let me see. And I’m not the only one.” He leaned forward. “Isobel Gretan is the best voice in this industry. She’s also an Omega. Those two facts were never in conflict. The industry made them into one because it was easier to build ceilings than make room for talent that didn’t fit the standard markers.”

He paused, jaw working.

“If you’ve been watching this and thinking someone should do something, you’re right. You should. The company that built a surveillance program to catch someone’s biology wants you to stay quiet. They want this to be about three seconds of audio and not the eight months they spent embedding a watcher in her crew, then six weeks using his access to build a case. Don’t let them pick the story.”

His hand went to his chin, then away.

“I’m not asking you to boycott. I’m not asking you to rage. I’m asking you to look at the Omega creators in your communities, the ones hiding, the ones performing, the ones who’ve been told their biology and their talent can’t live in the same body, and make it safer for them to stop masking themselves, stop muting themselves. Because what they’re carrying…” His voice dropped. “What they’re carrying shouldn’t be carried alone.”

The video ended. By evening it had four million views.

Cillian tracked the numbers from the floor, his dashboard scrolling with a momentum it had found on its own. #FacelessSiren from the booth incident had picked up a fewfriends. One of which was #OmegasUnmuted, which Tuck had sparked.

The audio people were the loudest. Engineers and producers with the vocabulary to understand exactly what Cillian had been doing all these years and exactly how hard it was. The fragments scrolling across his screen weren’t sentimental. They were technical.

Do you understand what filtering Omega harmonics from a live mix takes? In real time? No artifacts? For six years?

He built a custom gate keyed to her specific vocal signature. That’s not engineering. That’s bespoke instrument design.

How many hundreds or thousands of interventions and nobody heard one? Not the audience. Not the performer. Cleanest work I’ve ever seen documented.

Cillian read none of it. His attention stayed on the media dashboard, tracking the log story through the major outlets. His sandalwood and sage was steady. Professional. The smell of a man doing what he’d always done, working from behind the scenes, invisible and necessary.

But his jaw was tight.

I sat down beside him on the floor. Our shoulders touched. The sandalwood shifted, a fraction warmer, the involuntary thing his body did near mine even when his head was somewhere else.

“You’re trending,” I said.

“Irrelevant.”

“Disagree.”

His fingers stopped on the tablet. One beat. Then went again.