“You want to talk about shortcuts?” She turned to the Shadowfang pages on the wall. She knew this series the way a surgeon knew anatomy—every panel, every choice, every place where ambition exceeded execution. “Your protagonist hides behind darkness instead of letting readers inside his head. Brooding isn’t character development. It’s a wall dressed up as depth.”
His chin lifted a fraction. The smallest tell—she’d surprised him.
“Your villain in Volume Seven stood in the rain for three pages.” She stepped closer to the framed art, pointing at that spread. “THREE PAGES of standing in rain. That’s not a character arc. That’s a man who doesn’t own an umbrella.”
His lips twitched.
It was the smallest movement—a micro-expression that lasted half a second and vanished behind that carved-granite composure. But she saw it. She’d made the industry’s Dark Lordalmost smile, and the triumph was unreasonable and electric and she needed to stop staring at his mouth immediately.
“The rain was thematic,” he said.
“The rain was lazy. You used atmosphere to avoid doing the interior work. Your villain was standing in a downpour because you didn’t know what he was thinking, so you made it moody instead of specific.” She turned back to him. “Which is ironic, because every other villain in your catalog has the most specific interior logic I’ve ever?—”
She stopped herself. Barely. The sentence had been heading toward a confession she was not prepared to make in his studio on their first meeting.
His eyes narrowed. Not angry. Focused. He’d heard a sentence stop mid-air and he wasn’t going to pretend he hadn’t.
“Every other villain in my catalog has what?”
“Has made your company a fortune.” Smooth pivot. Not smooth enough. She was close now—near enough to see the pigments caught in the creases of his knuckles. The same marks she carried on her own. “I’m making an editorial observation, not writing a fan letter.”
“It sounded like a fan letter.”
“It sounded like professional critique from an artist who knows villain-building.” She tapped his red pen against the wood. She’d picked it up without realizing—a habit, reaching for the nearest drawing tool the way other people reached for a drink. “You started this conversation by calling my work dishonest. I’m returning the favor.”
The argument lasted an hour.
She lost track of time and didn’t care. They tore through Nightbloom and Shadowfang with the ferocity of two fencers who had finally found an equal opponent. He dissected her pacing—fair. She dismantled his emotional avoidance—fairer. He pointed to a panel where Sable’s grief collapsed intospectacle. She pointed to a spread where his villain’s ideology contradicted his earlier motivation. He conceded the point with a curt nod that she found absurdly satisfying.
Their hands moved when they argued. His, controlled and deliberate—cutting through the air to isolate a point. Hers, fast and expressive—painting the argument into the space between them. At one point, she stepped closer to tap a panel on the wall and his nostrils flared—a sharp, involuntary inhale, like he’d caught a scent. His pupils dilated. She was close enough to count the ink smudges on his thumb, close enough that the heat of him registered against her skin like standing near a wall that had been baking in the sun.
He didn’t step back.
She noticed.
When she referenced an obscure Golden Age villain to support a point about moral architecture, the line of his mouth shifted—one corner, barely a degree, there and gone before she could name it. Her stomach flipped. She hated that it flipped. She hated that a single fracture in his control landed harder than other men’s full laughter. She hated that the argument was the most exhilarating creative conversation she’d had in three years and that the man on the other side of it was making her pulse knock against her wrists in a rhythm that had nothing to do with villain theory.
This is professional. This is creative discourse. You are not attracted to a man whose opening line was calling your work dishonest. Your standards are higher than this. Your standards are so much higher than?—
He rolled his sleeves up another inch. Forearms. Ink stains tracing up from his wrists.
Okay. Your standards are exactly this low. Noted.
NINE
LUMI
The subway was crowded and she didn’t see any of it.
She stood with her portfolio clutched against her chest and her phone in her free hand, typing with the urgent incoherence of a woman who needed to process an experience before it ate her alive.
To Mika:He’s infuriating.
Mika, instantaneous:Scale of one to ten?
Fifteen. He told me my best page was emotionally dishonest. While looking at me like I was a problem he intended to solve. With his FACE.
With his face?
