Double-height ceiling. Polished concrete floors. And the walls—original comic art under museum-quality lighting. Not prints. Originals. Pages she’d studied in published form, dissected for technique, traced for influence—and here they were, framed and preserved with the reverence of a gallery that understood what it held. The curation was exquisite. Whoever arranged this had an eye that rivaled the best gallery directors she’d grown up watching her mother consult for.
Oh God, is that an original Tanaka ink wash? Don’t touch it. Don’t you dare touch it. Put your hand down.
Her hand was six inches from the glass. She retracted it with the guilty speed of a child caught reaching for the museum exhibit.
“Lumi Stone?”
She turned. The man approaching was younger than she’d expected—late twenties, sharp suit, easy grin, the kind of face that made people trust him before he’d said a word. He carried two coffees and the charged energy of someone who was about to enjoy this more than he let on.
“Kael Axan. Head of marketing and professional sibling.” He offered one of the coffees. “Fair warning—my brother’s studio looks like a hurricane hit a comic book museum. He’ll critique your work before he says hello. And he’ll be right about at least half of it, which is the annoying part.”
She liked him immediately. That was inconvenient, because she’d planned to dislike everyone in this building on principle.
“Does he know I’m here?”
“He’s been rearranging your pages since seven this morning. So.” Kael pressed the elevator button. “Yes.”
EIGHT
LUMI
The third-floor studio was everything Kael promised and worse.
Cavernous. Exposed ductwork running across a high ceiling. Concrete floors. Original comic art covering every available wall—pages she recognized, pages she didn’t, all of them arranged with an eye for composition that bordered on obsessive. Shelves of rare first-edition graphic novels lined one wall, spines organized with a librarian’s care. A couch in the corner that had clearly been slept on more than once. And dominating the center of the room, a massive antique drafting table positioned to catch the afternoon light through industrial windows.
Her Nightbloom pages were spread across it.
He stood behind the table with her work under his hands, and Lumi registered him the way she deconstructed any subject—in pieces, because the whole of him was too much to process at once.
Height first. He was tall in a way that reorganized the room around him, broad through the shoulders with the dense build of a man whose body was a statement whether he intended it ornot. Dark hair, kept short but slightly unruly at the temples. A black Henley rolled to the forearms. And his hands?—
Ink on his knuckles. Smudges of pigment she recognized by color.
She’d noticed that at the panel two years ago. From across a crowded room, she’d clocked his hands before his face, and the ink stains that mirrored the paint on her own. Production contact would do that—a publisher who spent his days correcting proofs and handling inks alongside his colorists would carry it. But the quality of the staining was wrong for that. Too deep in the creases, the kind that came from a grip held for hours. She’d told herself it was professional observation. She’d been lying.
He looked up. Their eyes met across twenty feet of concrete floor and three volumes of her life’s work.
Sharp jaw. Amber eyes that assessed her with an intensity that was either deeply flattering or mildly threatening—she couldn’t tell which, and the ambiguity made her stomach tighten in a way she refused to catalog. He didn’t smile. Didn’t offer a greeting. Didn’t perform any of the social rituals that normal humans used to signal non-hostility.
He looks like one of his own villains.
Her body responded as though that were a compliment. It was. She hated that it was.
“This page is dishonest.”
No hello. No handshake. He held up a Nightbloom page—Volume 2, the scene where Sable burned her own throne to keep it from falling to her enemies—and dropped the accusation into the room like a grenade.
“Hello to you too.” Lumi set her portfolio on the nearest flat surface. “I’m Lumi. I believe we have a meeting?”
“You defaulted to anger when the moment called for grief.” He laid the page flat, his finger tracing the panel where Sable’sexpression twisted mid-destruction. “Sable isn’t angry here. She’s heartbroken. But you drew rage because rage is easier. Grief requires you to stay in the wound. You flinched.”
The accuracy hit like a slap.
Not because he was wrong. Because he was right—and he was the person whose work had taught her how to build that scene. Having him call her emotionally dishonest on a page rooted in what she’d learned studying his characters was like having a secret mentor reject her homework. The irony was exquisite. The sting was worse.
“I default to anger in most situations.” She crossed the room. Stopped at the drafting table. Close enough now to see the grain of the antique wood, the red editorial pen beside her pages, the Shadowfang Chronicles framed on the wall behind him. “It’s a personality trait, not a flaw.”
“In a person, perhaps. In a character, it’s a shortcut.”
