“You are diluting his focus. From what they want his focus to be. That’s not the same as being a problem. That’s being a threat to people who benefit from his misery. Are you a threat, baby?”
“Apparently.”
“Good.” Ozara’s humor returned. “The best women are.”
After they hung up, Lumi sat in the lamp-lit stillness of her loft. The rain tapped its rhythm against the glass. She picked up her private sketchbook from under the cushion—the one with the drawings she’d been pretending she wasn’t making. Zeir’s fingers wrapped around the handle. The concentration on his face when the lines started flowing. The way his shoulders had dropped—not in defeat but in surrender. Permission. A man remembering who he was.
She drew the moment. The space between them charged with everything the page could hold.
She didn’t hide the sketchbook when she finished. Left it open on the couch. Let the drawing breathe.
I am falling.
She picked up her phone. Typed a text to Mika:I’m in trouble.
Mika’s reply came in four seconds:Scale of one to ten?
Twelve. He paints, Mika. He PAINTS. And it’s gorgeous and I watched his hands shake and I wanted to wrap mine around them and I’m a disaster.
You’re not a disaster. You’re a woman with functioning eyes and taste. What kind of painting?
Clean. Precise. Controlled but alive. Like blueprints that breathe.
You’re gone.
Lumi dropped the phone on the couch. Gazed at the crack in the plaster above the window.
Gone.
The pothos vine reached another tendril toward the ink tray.
“Moriarty,” she told the plant, “if you drown in cadmium red, it’s natural selection.”
The plant, as always, did not respond.
TWENTY-ONE
LUMI
The crash came at eleven forty-seven that night.
She knew the time because she’d checked the clock three seconds earlier, debating whether to push through the final panel or surrender to the couch. Half-finished Nightbloom pages pinned to corkboard. Ink bottles in their precise lineup. The particular quiet of a Bushwick night and a woman working past midnight.
Then the window exploded inward.
Not cracked. Obliterated. Rain and cold air poured through the gap, and Lumi was off the stool before the first shard hit hardwood—adrenaline flooding her system, her limbs making decisions her brain hadn’t caught up to.
Three figures. Through the ruined frame. The first two were human—average builds, dark clothes, trained efficiency. The third was massive. Scarred across his face and neck, built like a wrecking ball, radiating a wrongness she registered in her gut before her vision finished taking him in. Not human. She didn’t know what he was, but her hindbrain screamed wrong the way animals flee before earthquakes.
“Originals.” The big one pointed at the corkboard. His voice was gravel. “Process files. Sketchbooks. All of it.”
They were here for her art. Not her TV. Not her laptop. Her work.
Harlan.
The fabricated sketches. The anonymous email. The plagiarism campaign. And now this—hired men to steal the evidence that proved she’d created Sable.
The first man lunged for the corkboard. Lumi moved.
