Allies. Not the unnamed thing they’d been last night with paint on their hands and his mouth on hers. Allies with a shared enemy and an investigation to run.
It was easier this way.
Liar.
EIGHTEEN
LUMI
Her loft that evening was a war room.
Lumi pulled every sketchbook from the last four years off the shelves—twelve of them, each spine dated in her handwriting, each page timestamped in the margins. A habit born from Harlan. Trust nothing. Document everything. The compulsion she’d resented had become a fortress.
She spread them across the work surface in chronological order. Sable’s evolution laid bare—the first rough thumbnail, angular and furious. The refinements. The costume iterations. The expression studies. Pencil to ink to digital, every stage preserved.
She paused.
Yes.
She photographed every page. Uploaded them to a secure folder Keanu had created. Sorted by date, then development stage, then the evolution of each design element. If they wanted to come for her work, they’d have to climb through four years of meticulous documentation to do it.
Her phone buzzed. Not Keanu. Not Mika.
Are you eating?
She looked at the screen. The number she hadn’t saved but recognized from the 3:00 AM text she still hadn’t answered.
She typed back:I’m a grown woman who survived three years of indie publishing.
His reply came in twelve seconds:That wasn’t what I asked.
Lumi stood over the kitchen counter. Leftover Thai from two days ago—the same containers that had colonized the studio windowsill, now migrated home in a takeout bag she’d grabbed without thinking. Cold pad Thai. She ate it standing up, fork in one hand, phone in the other, irritated that the text made her eat when she’d been planning to skip dinner entirely.
Infuriating.
She took another bite.
Completely infuriating.
She didn’t text back. But she ate every bite.
NINETEEN
ZEIR
Nyx’s security office occupied a windowless room on the sublevel of Axan Dark. Blue screen glow. Three monitors. The hum of servers and the coiled stillness of a woman who processed information the way other people breathed—constantly, silently, without visible effort.
Nyx’s fingers moved across the keyboard. The anonymous email’s routing path filled the center monitor—proxy chains, VPN redirects, the digital equivalent of a hall of mirrors.
“Routed through six proxies. Two offshore. Encrypted at three layers.” She didn’t look up. “Competent.”
“Cost?”
“Significant. This isn’t a personal vendetta running on spite. Someone funded the infrastructure.” She pulled up a second screen. “Whoever wants this buried has money behind it.”
“But?”
“The image files.” She pulled up metadata on the second screen. Strings of data—timestamps, software signatures, device identifiers. “Whoever encrypted the email scrubbed the routing clean. But the high-res scans carry their own metadata. Creation date. Software used. And a ghost signature from the scanning device.”
