Gerri stood at the window and watched the city glitter. Her phone buzzed in her clutch—a text from her industry contact, a comics publicist named Dale who owed her a favor from the tiger shifter situation.
I need you to make sure Lumi Stone’s portfolio crosses Kael Axan’s desk. Organically. If either of them smells a setup, it falls apart.
You’re matchmaking again.
I’m facilitating creative synergy.
The last time you “facilitated” something, a tiger shifter fell in love at a gaming tournament.
And look how that turned out.
She glanced across the room at the spot where Zy and Ellie had been dancing. Champagne toasts and happy endings. You’re welcome.
She tucked her phone away. Reached into her clutch for the last cookie. Bit into it.
Behind her, Ozara and Revka were exchanging numbers. Good. The mothers would do half the work without Gerri lifting another finger. That was the art of matchmaking—set the pieces in motion and let gravity do the rest. People thought Gerri forced connections. She didn’t. She created proximity. She engineeredthe conditions under which two people who needed each other might accidentally discover that fact for themselves.
At least wolves mate for life, she mused, brushing crumbs from her emerald dress. Though she’d managed a tiger or two. *Tigers just eat you.
Wolves were tricky, though. Wolves were loyal to a fault and stubborn past the point of reason. A wolf who’d locked his creativity in a drawer for years wouldn’t open it for a business collaboration. He’d need more than professional proximity. He’d need someone who spoke his creative language so fluently that keeping the drawer locked became more painful than opening it.
And the artist. The woman who’d been burned so badly that she did every piece of her work alone, who ate ramen rather than accept help, who poured every drop of love into fictional characters because fictional characters couldn’t betray you. She wouldn’t open up for a publishing deal. She’d need someone who saw her work—truly saw it, the way she saw her own villains—and didn’t flinch.
Gerri finished her cookie. The last of the crumbs disappeared.
The proudest hearts were the ones that had forgotten they were worth finding. She’d remind them.
She picked up her clutch, smoothed her dress, and walked out of the penthouse into the corridor. The elevator doors opened with a quiet chime. Manhattan waited below—cold, bright, indifferent, and full of people who had no idea Gerri Wilder had already decided their future.
She smiled. Stepped inside. Pressed the Lobby button.
By the time the elevator reached the ground floor, she was already mentally drafting the next move.
ONE
LUMI
The smell of turpentine hit before the coffee did.
Lumi Stone paced the length of her studio with a sable-hair brush clamped between her teeth, her phone wedged against her shoulder, and three hundred copies of Nightbloom Volume 3 stacked on her drafting table with pages forty-seven through sixty-two printed in reverse order. The record player in the corner scratched out Coltrane. Morning light poured through the industrial windows, amber and warm, and turned the chaos of her Bushwick loft into a painting she’d never have time to appreciate because she was on hold with a printing company that had, apparently, never heard of sequential storytelling.
The hold music was Vivaldi. Tinny, warped Vivaldi. She was going to lose her mind.
A vine from the pothos on the windowsill—Moriarty, named for obvious reasons—had crawled across the sill and was inching toward her open ink tray. She grabbed the vine mid-reach without breaking stride. “Moriarty, I swear, if you drown in cadmium red, it’s natural selection.”
The hold music clicked. A human voice. She spat the brush into her free hand.
“No, I understand mistakes happen.” She dragged the pothos vine back toward the sill and tucked it behind the succulent—Hela, who was thriving because Hela always thrived, because some villains were built to survive neglect. “What I don’t understand is how a professional printing company confuses page order in a sequential narrative.”
The voice on the other end offered a rehearsed apology.
“Sequential.” She stopped pacing. Surveyed the stacks of ruined copies. “As in: one thing follows another. It’s literally how stories work. I shouldn’t have to explain narrative structure to a printing company. That’s like explaining water to a fish.”
The voice suggested a reprint timeline of four to six weeks.
“Four to—” She pinched the bridge of her nose. Breathe. She had a convention in twelve days. Twelve days, three hundred useless copies, and the fern on the far end of the windowsill was browning at the tips again. Iago. Dying, as always. On brand.
“Two weeks,” she told the voice. Not a request. “Your mistake, your rush order. Two weeks or I’m switching to the printer in Red Hook who’s been courting me since Volume 1.”
