Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
Bram
It came up through the floorboards before I had a name for it.
Not words. Not the ordinary noise of a house waking up.
A low, steady thing that skipped my ears entirely and landed somewhere under my ribs.
Tuck’s rumble, deep and continuous. And under it, threaded through, the whine rising out of Isobel’s chest, soft and insistent.
They were bonding.
My stomach flip-flopped. Just once, slow, like something rolling off a shelf, and I stood there in her kitchen with a spatula in one hand and a plate of eggs going cold and let it.
Two people I cared about were upstairs behind a closed door doing the thing you can’t undo.
Something I’d agreed to. I’d taken her hand last night.
I’d let the scents merge and felt how right it was.
And now I was just below them, getting another cup of coffee.
The peppercorn in my scent went sharp. I shut it down. Pushed it back behind the control I’d spent my whole life building, because that, at least, still worked.
Cillian looked up from his tablet.
His eyes went over me the way they went over a levels meter, taking the read.
My shoulders. My scent. Whatever my body was telling the room without my permission.
He didn’t say anything. He looked, and then he went back to the screen, and the quiet between us didn’t judge me and didn’t let me off either.
My phone lay face-down on the counter. Ninety-three missed calls.
The network’s legal team. The production company’s crisis people.
My own solicitor, who never rings unless something is properly, structurally wrong.
I’d worked through the voicemails in the small hours while Isobel slept upstairs with Tuck’s arm under her shoulders.
Each message more urgent than the last. Each one certain that a call back would fix whatever this was.
Nothing here got fixed by a call back.
“I need to make some more calls,” I said.
Cillian nodded. “I’ve sorted the legal voicemails in my notes. I’ll send you the order.”
“Thank you.” I’d already listened to a couple of messages, but I didn’t want to have to go through all of them, especially if Cillian already had.
I picked up the phone and walked out. I didn’t look at the ceiling. I didn’t think about the sounds still moving through the house, warm and certain, the way I wasn’t.
I made the calls from the sitting room with the door shut, in the voice that had never once failed me.
The network wanted a statement. The production company wanted a timeline.
My solicitor wanted to know whether the “biological event,” his phrase, careful and clinical, had happened inside the scope of a contract, because liability was a real concern and he needed to understand the exposure.
I told each of them a statement was coming. The timeline was being developed. The exposure was being assessed and managed by the relevant parties.
Managed. Assessed. Relevant. I picked each word for what it could hold up, not for what was true.
The truth was upstairs. The truth smelled like steamed milk and honey and made a sound I could feel in my soul, which wasn’t something I’d ever considered possible before.
When the calls were done, I sat.
The room was quiet the way other people’s houses are quiet.
Not the engineered hush of my penthouse, every surface tuned, every interference designed out.
This was lived-in. Paperbacks crammed two-deep on the shelves.
A throw folded over the arm of the sofa in a color that matched nothing.
And under all of it, in the curtains and the carpet and the walls, the faint ghost of chamomile.
Years of her, soaked into the soft furnishings despite the Beta Neutral spray that was meant to stop exactly that.
The spray had never properly worked. I understood that now. The warmth I’d caught in my own flat, under the chemical layer, when our fingers crossed over a jar of honey. That had been her. Leaking through the cracks in a performance she’d been running for a decade.
I’d brushed it off.
Practical, I’d called it. Production quality.
I’d stood in that careful room and told myself the sharpening of my own scent was a fault.
That my pupils blowing wide against my will was a glitch and not recognition.
That I didn’t feel what I felt, because what I felt didn’t fit anything I’d built, so it couldn’t be real.
It was real.
My hands sat flat on my knees, steady. They’d stopped shaking somewhere in the middle of the calls, when the professional setting came back online hard enough to override everything underneath.
I could still function. Make decisions, run a crisis, build a plan.
That part was intact. It had always been intact.
What wasn’t intact was anything below it.
I thought about the booth. The whine coming up out of her, and the floor of the world sliding open along a seam I hadn’t known was there.
My scent of peppercorn going off. Every instinct I had lunging toward her hard enough to lift me out of the chair, and not lifting me out of the chair only because I’d locked every muscle against it.
I thought about the coat. Putting it round her shoulders. My fingers crossing the curve of her neck and the burn that came after.
Not pain.
Recognition.
The certainty, right down in the cells, that this skin was meant to be under my hands, landing at the exact moment I realized I had no idea what to do with that. No framework. No protocol. No plan that told me how to steady a person without managing her.
I thought about last night. Her hand in mine. The scents merging. The agreement.
Partnership. Not possession. Chosen every day.
I’d said it out loud. I knew I’d need to learn the difference in practice, and like I told them, I knew I would get it wrong.
I was getting it wrong now. I could feel it. The calls, the breakfast, the tidy little productivity that kept me moving in any direction that wasn’t toward her. Cillian had noticed it. Tuck noticed it the second he came down. Isobel, if she was awake enough to read a room, would notice it too.
And over my head, the sound of two people who weren’t afraid of what they felt kept coming through the ceiling.
I stood up.
My coat was upstairs, round her. My vest hung off the back of a kitchen chair.
I was standing in a stranger’s sitting room in my shirtsleeves, untucked, creased, nowhere near the version of myself I put in front of people.
I looked, I suspected, like I hadn’t slept.
Which was accurate. The hours at the kitchen table with Cillian, going through legal exposure and crisis lines while her scent came down the stairs like something poured, hadn’t been rest.
I needed to leave.
The thought arrived cleanly, the way a conclusion arrived when I’d actually done the work.
I wasn’t functioning in a way that helped anyone.
My being here wasn’t moving her recovery forward.
The thing I couldn’t do, go up those stairs and cross the gap the way Tuck had crossed it, all his feeling laid out flat with no hedge on it, wasn’t something I could solve by standing in her front room making phone calls.
I needed room. Not from her, not from what I’d agreed to. From the pressure of being this close to something I hadn’t learned to hold yet without either crushing it or getting crushed.
I went back into the kitchen. Cillian was still at the table, tablet in hand, the morning light catching the silver in his ear and the sound-wave ink down his forearms.
He looked up. Read me. Said nothing.
“I need a few hours,” I said.
His face didn’t move. The dark eyes just held mine, taking whatever my scent and my posture were putting out, filing it with the same quiet care he gave everything.
“Okay,” he said.
“I’m not—” I stopped. Started again. The sentence I’d been building, I’m not leaving, felt both true and not enough. “I’m not going far.”
“Okay,” he said again. And then, after a beat, picking the words the way he picked where to set a mic, “She’ll understand.”
I didn’t ask how he knew. I didn’t ask whether Tuck would understand. I picked up my phone, patted my pockets for the wallet that was in the coat that was round Isobel, found nothing, and stood there with no way to buy so much as a coffee.
Cillian reached into his jacket without looking up. Pulled out a card. Set it on the table between us.
“Pay me back whenever,” he said.
I took it. The taking cost me something I couldn’t name. Not pride exactly. More the discomfort of needing something from someone in a situation I hadn’t planned.
“Thank you.”
“Text when you’re ready to come back. I’ll let them know.”
I went to the front door and put on my shoes, the polished oxfords that looked ridiculous without the rest of it, without the coat and the vest and all the careful presentation that told people who I was.
I stood in her hallway with her scent going into my shirt and Tuck’s rumble still carrying faintly through the house, and I let myself say it, just for a second. I was afraid.
Not of her. Not of the bond. Not of the match Cillian had confirmed with the flat certainty of verified data.
Of wanting something I couldn’t control.
I’d built a whole life around control. Frameworks, hierarchies, every variable managed.
I ran campaigns like a man who’d mapped every outcome in advance.
I ran production meetings without one second of improvisation.
I’d set up my flat for solitude, for focus, for the quiet of a head that worked best when nothing got in.
What I felt for Isobel Gretan got in everywhere.
It didn’t sit inside a hierarchy. It didn’t answer to management. It wasn’t a variable I could map or a beat I could script or a transition I could rehearse until it ran clean.