He has a very aggressive face, Mika.
You mean he’s hot.
I MEAN HE’S INFURIATING.
Those aren’t mutually exclusive and you know it.
Lumi pressed her forehead against the subway pole. Cold metal. Grounding. She needed grounding because the last hour had unmoored her in ways she was not prepared to examine on public transit.
He was right about the page. The anger-instead-of-grief page. He saw through it in five seconds and he was RIGHT, Mika. Nobody’s ever read my work that closely.
And?
And I think I want to do this.
The project or the man?
THE PROJECT.
Sure, babe.
She pocketed her phone. The train rocked. Manhattan slid away behind her, Chelsea’s golden galleries replaced by the graffitied overpasses and industrial sprawl of the bridge crossing.
ZEIR
He smelledher before the door opened.
Turpentine. Vanilla. Wildflowers. And beneath that—a charged undercurrent his wolf seized on with a focus that bordered on violence. The restlessness that had been plaguing him for a week snapped into a single point of attention so acute, it shortened his breath.
He’d been rearranging her pages for forty minutes. Her pages had rearranged his morning. The weight in Sable’s choices, the isolation carved into every line—his own creative language spoken back to him through a voice that reached places his discipline had sealed off. He’d spread the pages in sequence, then rearranged them by emotional arc, then by technical merit. Kael had found him doing this at seven and said nothing, which was louder than commentary.
Now she was in his building. His wolf tracked her ascent through the floors—not supernaturally, but through heightened senses that registered the elevator’s hum, the lobby door, Kael’s easy laugh in the corridor. Scent intensifying as she neared.
The studio door opened.
He made himself wait a full second before he turned. Control was the foundation. Without it, he was an alpha staring at an artist whose presence in the room was rearranging his priorities before he could stop it.
He turned.
She was shorter than he’d expected. Barely reached his shoulder. Wild dark curls spilling in every direction. Brown skin and expressive eyes that assessed him with an artist’s precision—he could see her studying him, deconstructing, the same way he’d deconstructed her work.
She looked like a woman who had dressed for war and arrived ready to win it.
His wolf locked.
He opened with honesty, because he didn’t know how to open with anything else.
And she hit back.
Not the way editors pushed back—polite, careful, deferential to the man who signed their checks. Not the way critics pushed back—from the outside, working with surface-level observations and academic distance. She pushed back from inside his work. She knew the failures he’d buried, the shortcuts he’d hoped no one would catch.
The recognition sat in his chest like a fist closing around a nerve he’d thought was dead. Professional admiration was familiar—he received it daily. This was different.
She picked up his red pen without asking—reached for it the way artists reached for the nearest tool, instinct overriding propriety—and used it to mark up her own pages while arguing.He watched her correct herself mid-sentence, catch a flaw in her own work that he’d been about to identify, and fix it before he could speak.
The competence was staggering. The arrogance of her competence was worse. He respected it the way he respected a well-built villain: completely, grudgingly, against his own interests.
She stepped closer to point at a panel—near enough that the cadmium smudge on her collarbone, half-hidden by her blazer collar, filled his entire field of focus before his discipline intervened.
