She hung up before they could counter-offer. Tossed the phone onto the couch—the battered leather thing she slept on more nights than her actual bed, stationed in the dividing line between the living side and the studio side of the loft. The living side was curated: her parents’ art on the walls, quality furniture her grandmother had chosen, a silk rug that had no business sharing airspace with cadmium red. The studio side looked like a creative crime scene.
Half-finished watercolor panels pinned to every available corkboard. Ink bottles in graduated shades of black and crimson lined up on the drafting table in color order, which she’d deny was obsessive and everyone else would disagree with. Reference books stacked in towers that defied physics. And pinned above her desk, the pages she’d been re-inking since 3:00 a.m.—apanel she’d spilled coffee on during a deadline spiral, the stain bleeding across Sable’s outstretched hand in a way that looked almost intentional.
Almost. She’d still spent four hours fixing it.
She dropped onto the couch. The leather groaned. The vanilla candle on the side table—lit to mask the turpentine, never quite succeeding—flickered as the couch cushion exhaled. Four in the morning until now. No food. Two pots of coffee. Her hands trembled when she held them out.
She’d left a note on the drafting table—Tessa’s handwriting, neat and efficient, reminding her about the Portland reprint invoice and the archiving backlog. Three months in and her studio assistant was already indispensable. That was either excellent hiring or the beginning of a dependency Lumi didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to examine. She set the note aside.
Eat, maybe. At some point. After.
After was always the answer. After this page. After this convention. After the print run. After, after, after—a word that stretched endlessly ahead of her, pushing rest and nourishment and anything resembling a personal life into a future that never quite arrived.
She pulled the nearest Nightbloom page into her lap. Sable mid-transformation. Her villain’s face caught between human grief and monstrous power, the lines raw, the inks heavy. She’d drawn this panel after a bad night—one of those 2:00 a.m. spirals where loneliness and ambition tangled into a knot she couldn’t unpick, so she’d poured the whole mess into Sable’s expression. Rage and isolation rendered in brushstrokes so raw, they made her chest ache to look at them.
The industry called her work “too dark.”
She traced Sable’s jaw with her thumbnail. Too honest. That’s what they mean.
Three years of building Nightbloom alone. Three volumes. A cult following. Critics who praised her villain-building in the same breath they used to explain why mainstream publishers wouldn’t touch her. “Too niche.” “Too intense.” “Love the work, but it’s not marketable.”
She sold at conventions. Through indie shops. Online, when her website cooperated, which was roughly half the time because she’d built that herself too. Every dollar from sales went back into printing, distribution, convention fees. She funded the entire operation from earned income and sheer stubbornness.
There was a trust fund she didn’t touch. A safety net her father had built with the quiet, practical love that defined him. She borrowed from it in emergencies—equipment failures, the time a flood ruined two hundred copies in storage—and repaid every cent. The ledger she kept was meticulous. Obsessive, Keanu called it. Principled, she corrected him.
She didn’t need the money. She needed to know she could do it herself.
Her gaze drifted to the shelf behind the couch.
The Shadowfang Chronicles. Every volume. Spines cracked from rereading, Post-it flags bristling from the pages like colorful quills. Next to them: The Architect. Crimson Doctrine. The entire Axan Dark villain catalog, their spines cracked and flagged.
She set the Nightbloom page down. Harlan Cray was a locked room in her mind and she intended to keep it that way. The documentary deal he’d just landed—the wave of industry acclaim cresting behind him like a tide that rewarded the wrong things—was reason enough to keep the door bolted. She rubbed her eyes with paint-stained fingers.
TWO
LUMI
The door opened without a knock.
Mika Torres entered carrying a paper bag from their Dominican bakery and two cafecitos in a cardboard tray. She wore paint-splattered overalls over a vintage hip-hop tee, her curls piled in a topknot secured with what appeared to be a calligraphy pen. She kicked the door shut with her heel, assessed the studio in one sweep—the stacked misprints, the re-inked panel drying on the desk, Lumi on the couch looking like a woman who’d been awake since a time that started with the number four—and set the food down on the coffee table with the decisive thud of a woman who did not negotiate about breakfast.
“Eat. Then we fix it. In that order.”
“I was eating.”
Mika looked at the two empty coffee mugs on the drafting table. Looked at Lumi. Raised one eyebrow in a way that could have ended diplomatic careers.
“Coffee is not food.”
“It has beans in it. Beans are food.”
“That’s not how nutrition works and you have a degree.” Mika pushed a cafecito and a pastry into Lumi’s hands. Pastelitos de guayaba, still warm, the glaze catching the morninglight. “Eat the actual food. Drink the cafecito. Then show me the damage.”
“The damage is three hundred copies of Volume 3 with the climax printed before the inciting incident.” Lumi bit into the pastelito. The guava filled her mouth with sweetness so sudden, her empty stomach cramped in gratitude. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was until the food hit, and then she was ravenous. “Sable’s big betrayal scene shows up on page forty-seven instead of sixty-two. The emotional payoff arrives before the setup. It’s like reading a breakup text before the first date.”
“So a Tuesday for you.”
“Wow.”
