He finished the piece on a Thursday night. Hung it on the bare wall behind his drafting table—the one every visitor saw first. He centered it. Stepped back. Looked.
Good.
On the drafting table, he set the ring. A simple band made by a pack artisan—someone who worked in silver and understood that craftsmanship was a form of devotion. The etching was intricate: intertwined line work, wolf and nightbloom. His clean geometry and her wild, organic strokes woven into metal. The art was the proposal. The ring was the punctuation.
He texted her at ten.Come to Axan Dark.
Three dots. Then:It’s Thursday. I’m in pajamas. The pajamas have cats on them. This is not studio-appropriate attire.
Come anyway.
Is this an emergency or are you being dramatic?
I don’t do dramatic.
Zeir. You once redesigned an entire issue cover because the villain’s shadow fell at the wrong angle. You absolutely do dramatic.
Come to Axan Dark. Please.
Thepleasedid it. She’d told him once that his pleases were so rare they functioned as alarm bells. Twenty minutes later, the building’s front door buzzed. He let her in.
FORTY-TWO
LUMI
The building was empty. Her footsteps echoed in the stairwell—sneakers on concrete, the hollow percussion of a space that usually hummed with production and was now holding its breath.
She’d thrown a coat over the cat pajamas. Hadn’t changed. Hadn’t bothered with shoes that matched or hair that cooperated. If Zeir Axan was summoning her to Chelsea at ten at night on a Thursday, he was getting the unfiltered version.
Third floor. The studio door was open. Warm light spilled into the hallway—the amber glow of the pendant lamps they worked under, the ones that made everything look like a Rembrandt.
He stood by his drafting table. Black T-shirt, gray sweats, barefoot. Hair pushed back like he’d been running his hands through it. He looked?—
Nervous.
She’d never seen him nervous. She’d seen him face down a rogue wolf, stare down a council of elders, negotiate a billion-dollar licensing deal with the emotional range of a marble statue. Nervous was new. Nervous on Zeir looked like a slight tension in his shoulders and a deliberate stillness in his hands, as ifhe’d calculated the appropriate amount of composure and was applying it manually.
“You’re barefoot.” She stopped in the doorway.
“I was here.”
“You live on the Upper West Side.”
“I was working.”
“In bare feet.”
“I took my shoes off.”
“Why?”
“Because I was comfortable.”
She squinted at him. Zeir Axan, comfortable in the workspace, barefoot and in sweats, with that unmistakable look on his face. The math was doing interesting things.
“Okay.” She stepped inside. “You have approximately thirty seconds to explain why I left my extremely warm couch and my extremely judgmental plant to come to Chelsea in cat pajamas before I?—”
She saw the piece.
