Mika.
How was today?
She studied the screen. Typed.
He growled at Kevin for touching my shoulder.
Mika:Like a WHAT?
Like a wolf. A really big, really possessive wolf. Kevin sprinted, Mika. A six-foot-two man in a Hawaiian shirt.
Lu. This man stocked your workspace with your exact paper brand and now he’s growling at men who touch you. That’s a pattern.
The pattern is alarming.
The pattern is alarming AND other things and you know it.
She shoved the phone in her bag. The taxi turned onto her block. Bushwick in late October—the trees thinning, the light going gray and gold, a neighborhood that ran on coffee and ambition.
Her loft was quiet.
She put on Portishead and tried to work. Color corrections. Her hands moved on autopilot while her mind circled Chelsea Market.
The heat of his hand. The way his fingers had dragged when he let go—deliberate, unmistakable.
She’d told him about her father.
That was the part that unsettled her most. Not the elbow catch. Not the growl. The fact that she’d sat at a table in a crowded food hall and told Zeir Axan about her dad. About Harlan. About the wound that lived under every professional decision she made. She didn’t tell people about her dad. Mika. Keanu. Her mother. That was the list—and she’d handed it to Zeir Axan over tacos.
His face when she spoke. The deeper quiet—not polite, not waiting for her to finish. Listening like her words were the only sound in a crowded room.
You told a man you’ve known for weeks the thing you don’t tell anyone. And instead of exposed, you were—heard. Seen. That’s either the best sign or the worst sign and you don’t know which yet.
She set down the correction pen. Reached for the sketchbook.
FIFTEEN
ZEIR
Three weeks had turned the studio into a second home neither of them acknowledged.
Takeout containers colonized the windowsill—Thai from Tuesday, Korean from Wednesday, the remains of a pizza neither remembered ordering. Coffee cups in various stages of abandonment. A blanket she’d dragged from the supply closet at some point during week two, now permanently draped over the back of her stool. His Henley sleeves pushed past his elbows. Her boots kicked off under the work surface, bare feet tucked beneath her on the stool, toenails painted the same crimson she used for Sable’s blood effects.
You noticed her toenail polish. You are the CEO of a publishing empire and you noted the color of her toenails. Kael would have a field day.
Ten o’clock. The building breathed around them. Everyone gone. The cleaning crew would come at midnight. Two hours of uninterrupted dark and quiet and the dangerous intimacy of shared focus.
They were building the scene where their villain breaks.
Not a defeat. Not a betrayal. The harder thing—a man who has constructed an empire of absolute power encountering theone person who sees through the walls. A woman who doesn’t attack the fortress. She sits down outside of it and says two words: You’re tired.
Lumi hunched over the panel, brush moving in small, precise strokes across the villain’s face. The south-facing windows threw Manhattan’s light across the work surface in cold blue strips. Her hair was piled on top of her head, held in place by two paintbrushes and what appeared to be a chopstick from the Thai container. A streak of raw sienna crossed her left cheekbone where she’d pushed her hair back with a wet hand.
She’d been at this expression for forty minutes. Adjusting. Erasing. Building it back up.
“If this villain doesn’t have a breakthrough by midnight, I’m giving him a redemption arc out of spite.”
He looked up from the layout he was adjusting before she painted the panel.
