Mika was already moving. Phone out. “Call your brother. Right now.”
“If anyone digs into Sable’s influences—” The suffocating parallel crashed over her. Sable carried traces of Zeir’s approach to darkness in her DNA. Lumi knew it. She’d built Sable from what his characters made her understand about darkness and loneliness and the terrible beauty of choosing power over love. Not stolen. Inspired. But Harlan was accusing her of stealing from HIM, and the line between inspired and stolen was exactly the kind of ambiguity that destroyed careers.
She stood. The plantains sat in her stomach like stones.
“I’ve got to talk to Keanu.” She grabbed her jacket. Stopped. Turned back.
“Mika.”
“Yeah.”
“What you said. About letting Harlan take this too.” She swallowed hard. “I heard you.”
“I know you did.”
Lumi left. The Bed-Stuy morning hit her face—cool November air, the neighborhood waking up around her, coffee shops and bodegas and Brooklyn in motion. She called Keanu. First ring. Because Keanu never let it go to a second.
Her phone buzzed again while she talked. Another text. Same six words from a different lifetime—hours ago, a man standing alone in a studio that smelled like her paint.
She hadn’t replied. She didn’t reply now.
But she didn’t delete it either.
SIXTEEN
LUMI
Lumi sat across from her brother’s desk with her phone open to the anonymous email and her hands locked around a coffee she hadn’t touched. Nine forty-five. She’d come straight from Mika’s, still in yesterday’s jeans, her hair still held up by a chopstick she’d forgotten to remove.
Keanu read the fabricated sketches on his screen. The framed photo of Lumi’s first convention appearance watched from his credenza—her at twenty-two, signing Nightbloom Issue One with ink on her chin and a grin that hadn’t learned to be afraid yet.
His face didn’t move. His eyes did. Focused. Unblinking. The brother draining out and the lawyer flooding in.
“These are good.” He scrolled through the high-res scans—Sable’s silhouette, the cape, the mask, all rendered in Harlan’s line work, dated two years before Lumi had put pencil to paper. “Better than what he tried the first time.”
“How much better?”
“Enough to make a judge look twice.” He leaned back. His desk was organized with the ruthlessness of a man who controlled what he could because the world refused tocooperate. “Someone invested in these. A professional forger or a very talented assistant with access to the right tools.”
Lumi’s stomach dropped.
Tessa. Tessa has access to every tool in my studio.
She tucked the thought aside. Not ready to follow it yet.
“Last time—” Keanu’s voice tightened. His voice caught in the space between sentences. “Last time, I told you we had no chance. This time we fight. Every inch.”
He pulled a legal pad from his drawer. Started writing—dates, names, a framework taking shape under his pen with the speed of a man who’d been rehearsing this for years.
“I need everything. Every sketchbook. Every digital file with a timestamp. Every photograph of your studio with Nightbloom pages visible in the background. Every email with a date. We’re building a wall of evidence so high that whoever manufactured this can’t see over it.”
Lumi nodded. She’d been building that wall without knowing it—paranoia from Harlan teaching her to document everything, date everything, photograph her process. The wound becoming the weapon.
“And Keanu.”
He looked up.
“Whatever you find—wherever this leads—I’m not hiding from it.”
