Page 93 of Heat Unscripted

She had a face. And tonight, for the first time, the world was going to see it.

“Thirty seconds,” Cillian said. Then, quieter, pitched for the room and not the broadcast, in the low flat intensity that was his version of a love letter: “The signal’s clean. You’re extraordinary. And I’m not going anywhere.”

Tuck’s hand found my ankle. Squeezed once.

Bram’s pen clicked shut. Into the breast pocket. The weapon holstered. He said nothing. He didn’t have to. The peppercorn said it for him, warm and steady, carrying the dark sweetness I’d learned to read asI’m here, I’m not managing this, I trust you all the way.

“Ten seconds.”

I faced the lens.

“Five.”

My hands rested on the desk. Steady.

“Three.”

I breathed.

“We’re live.”

The red light held. Steady. Patient. And the woman the world had never seen looked into it and opened her mouth.

“Hello.”

One word. My real voice, the low one that carries honey and warmth and the full weight of an Omega who’s stopped hiding, moved through the mic, through Cillian’s clean chain, through the servers of a company with no interest in controlling a single thing I said, and into the ears of millions of people.

The number sat in the corner of Cillian’s second screen, climbing in real time. I couldn’t see it from my chair, but I could see the chat moving on the third monitor, a waterfall of text scrolling too fast to read a word of. Hearts. Exclamation points. The pure noise of millions of people reacting all at once to a face they’d been inventing in their heads for ten years.

I let them look.

Not performing stillness this time. Just sitting. In a studio that smelled like my pack. In a flannel that carried every scent I loved. Hair down, glasses catching the light, nothing left to hide and nowhere left to hide it.

“My name is Isobel Gretan,” I said. “Some of you know my voice. None of you have seen my face. I’d like to fix that tonight.”

The chat went off. Cillian’s dashboard stuttered as the engagement numbers hit whatever ceiling the platform had been built for, and the scroll velocity tripled. I didn’t read it. I didn’t need to.

“I’m going to talk to you for a little while,” I said. “Not as a character. Not as the Rogue, not as Charlotte, not as any of the hundreds of other characters I’ve pretended to be over the past decade. As myself. As the woman behind every voice you’ve ever heard from me, who has spent eleven years terrified you’d hear her actual one.”

I paused. Let it settle. The rhythm Bram had spent years teaching me to trust, the silence between beats that hands the audience room to land before the next thing arrives.

Out of frame, the peppercorn shifted. Warmer. Something I read as approval. The director noticed a beat played right.

“Eleven years ago,” I said, “I was eighteen, with a voice that could do things most voices can’t. My first agent listened to me, and then she told me two things. The first was that the voice was extraordinary. The second was that my biology would stop me from ever using it.”

The camera held my face. The freckles. The green of my eyes behind lenses throwing small warm flares. The auburn hair that had spent a decade jammed into buns with mechanical pencils and was, for the first time in public, just being hair.

“I am an Omega. I have always been an Omega. Every recording I’ve made, every character I’ve voiced, every moment of my career you’ve experienced as a listener, an Omega bodymade it. The same body the industry told me would be a liability if anyone found out.”

I let it land. The chat was one solid wall of motion, no message readable, just the weight of ten million people taking in the same fact at the same second.

“For eleven years I took suppressants. Every day. I wore synthetic scent blockers. I trained my voice to flatten out the natural tones that mark an Omega. I built a fake version of myself, a Beta, professional, controlled, and I performed her every single day. In every room I walked into. In every booth I recorded in. Behind every screen that existed for one reason, so you would never see the face of the person hiding from you.”

A whine wound through my chest. Brief. The private frequency, the one that lives between people instead of out into a room. It surfaced in the low end of my voice like color rising in water when the light hits right, there for a second, then folded back into the rest.

At my left, Tuck’s hand tightened on my ankle. Not pulling. Steadying. The cedar surged warm through the contact, holding me to the plain fact of his body while my voice carried something I couldn’t take back out into the world.

“During a livestream that so many of you were watching, my body did what a body does when you suppress it for a decade. It stopped cooperating. The sound that came out of me, the whine, the signal that told every person in that room and every viewer on that feed exactly what I am, that wasn’t a performance. It wasn’t a stunt. It was the most honest sound I have ever made, and it scared me more than anything in my professional life.”