She didn't sleep so much as black out in small, useless chunks.
Every time she managed to drift off, she jerked awake again with her heart racing and the phantom sensation of hot breath on her throat. At some point the digital clock on her nightstand stopped being numbers and became a mocking slideshow: 2:17, 3:41, 4:09. Her brain kept replaying the same frames: gold eyes too bright for a human face, the sound of fingernails—or not-nails—tearing into painted stone, his voice shredded around the word please.
By the time gray morning seeped through the blinds, she felt hungover without the minor comfort of having chosen the poison.
A message from Patel waited on her phone.
Patel:Hearing continues at 10. I'd like you there at 9:30. We'll talk options.
Options. His polite euphemism for ways to lose more slowly.
She dressed in something marginally less wrinkled than yesterday, grabbed Leah's coat again like a talisman, and took the bus back to the courthouse, the city sliding by in dull, unfriendly colors. Nobody else on the bus had claw marks on their building in their immediate future. They were scrolling, yawning, existing.
She clung to that normalcy until the moment she stepped through the courthouse security check.
The air inside felt different now that she knew where the walls could bleed.
She told herself she was being dramatic. That she could just go straight to 6B, sit down like a normal defendant, and pretend yesterday had only held one level of horror. She managed exactly thirty seconds of that plan before her feet betrayed her, turning left instead of right at the corridor fork.
The hallway to the back stairs was quieter than the main artery. Morning staff trudged past with files and coffee, their faces blurred by her lack of sleep. No one looked twice at her. There was nothing special about a small, tense woman in an oversized camel coat.
The emergency lights from yesterday were off; the fluorescents buzzed in their usual cheap chorus. Everything was sharp, flat, overlit—the mundane harshness of a weekday.
She turned the corner.
For half a heartbeat, her treacherous brain filled in what it expected: Lucian braced against the wall, shoulders bowed, veins standing out, eyes bright as molten coins. That impossible moment replayed itself like an overlay.
Then it cleared.
The corridor was empty.
Just a stretch of wall, painted the same suffocating courthouse gray as everywhere else. A fire extinguisher box. Two closed doors with bland labels: STORAGE, MAINT.
Her pulse picked up anyway.
She stared at the section of wall where he'd pinned her, where his hands had been.
From back here, it looked… normal.
Her throat tightened. Maybe this was the moment she'd find out she'd truly lost it. Maybe she'd walk up and put her hand on smooth paint and have to admit, finally, that the claw marks only lived in her skull.
She forced herself closer.
One step.
Another.
She stopped where she remembered sliding to the floor. Her fingers hovered near the wall, trembling.
Then she saw them.
Four deep, vertical lines, carved into the paint and plaster. Paler than they'd been last night, dust brushed away, but unmistakable. They ran from just above her shoulder height down almost to her waist. At one spot, the grooves bit so deep she could see stone or concrete beneath, a darker underlayer exposed like bone under scraped skin.
Someone had stuck a strip of yellow tape below them: MAINTENANCE – REPAIR ORDER FILED.
Under that, a handwritten note in thick marker: Vandalism? Cameras?
A small plastic evidence marker cone—like the ones she'd seen on crime shows—sat on the floor nearby, numbered in permanent black: 14.
She stared.
Vandalism.
Of course. That was the only box most people would have for this. Some angry defendant, some bored teenager, some bored cop with a knife. Nobody would jump straight to the billionaire CEO's hands partially turned into claws and he tried not to eat me.
Footsteps approached.
She jerked her hand back as if caught doing something she shouldn't.
A man in a navy blazer and worn shoes came around the corner, carrying a clipboard. Maintenance, probably. Forty-something, with salt at his temples and the tired look of someone who'd been fixing this building since before she learned to draw.
He saw her, then the wall, then shook his head.
"People," he muttered, stepping around her to peer at the gouges. Up close, they looked even more obscene—too clean, too deep. He ran a knuckle along one, winced. "Got some strength, whoever did this."
"Did they…" Amara's voice came out rough. She cleared her throat. "Did they figure out who?"
He snorted. "You kidding? Cameras in this hallway are from, like, the Pleistocene." He pointed up. The dome in the corner was clouded with age, filming everything with the visual clarity of a potato. "Security says the feed glitched during the outage anyway. All they got was static."
Static.
Of course they did.
"So what, they just assume…?" she asked.
"Kids, probably," he said. "Or someone with a key to be somewhere they shouldn't." He scribbled something on his clipboard. "Lawyers get rowdy after hours too. You wouldn't believe what people do in these halls when they think nobody's looking."
She believed it. She just had a more specific example than he realized.
He clicked his pen closed. "Anyway. We'll patch it. Slap some plaster on, paint over. Wall forgets. Building forgets." He gave her a sideways glance. "Best thing, sometimes."
She nodded, throat tight.
He moved on, whistling something tuneless as he checked the fire extinguisher box.
Wall forgets.
Her brain wouldn't.
She reached out, just once, when he wasn't looking, and pressed her fingertips into one of the grooves. It was colder in the depth of it, like the stone still remembered the heat of his hands and cooled in reflex afterwards.
"Amara!"
She jolted.
Leah's voice. Closer than she'd expected.
Her best friend appeared at the far end of the hall, hair pulled up, scarf looped three times around her neck like a fabric barricade. "There you are," Leah said, jogging toward her. "Patel's looking for you. He says if you don't check in soon he's going to drag you in by your coat."
Leah slowed as she came closer, eyes flicking from Amara's face to the wall, to the yellow tape and the gouges.
"What the hell," she breathed. "Did the building fight back against the lawyers or…?"
"Vandalism," Amara said. "Apparently."
Leah stepped closer, peering. "Yikes," she said. "Somebody was really mad about their parking ticket."
She reached out and traced the air over the grooves, not quite touching. "You okay?" she asked then, turning her head to study Amara properly. "You look like you swallowed a ghost."
Amara opened her mouth.
I watched him do that. I felt him do that. He put his face here and I almost screamed but I didn't and that scares me almost as much.
None of it made it to her tongue.
"I just… didn't sleep," she said instead. "The case. The cameras. The … everything."
Leah's expression softened. "Yeah," she said. "Kind of a lot, huh."
She hooked her arm through Amara's. "Come on, disaster artist," she said gently. "Let's get you yelled at by your lawyer properly. Then we can fantasize about burning capitalism down on the sidewalk."
Amara let herself be steered away.
As they turned the corner, she glanced back one last time. The maintenance guy was already taping plastic over the damaged section, framing the claws out of sight. Soon it would be smooth again. New paint. No marks.
If she hadn't come early, she might never have seen it. Might have convinced herself the whole thing had been some cruel stress hallucination.
Now she had proof.
It didn't help as much as she'd hoped.
Courtroom 6B was brighter than yesterday, as if determined to prove it could function like a normal room in a normal building where normal, non-monster things happened.
The buzz that greeted her as she walked in was the same circus, just slightly more subdued; people were tired, too. Reporters still watched her with hungry eyes. Fans—how had fans gotten in here?—whispered behind hands. Someone had drawn a little wolf doodle in the margin of their notebook.
Lucian was already at the plaintiff's table.
Perfectly composed.
Dark suit fresh. Tie straight. Hair immaculate. No sign of a sleepless night, no hint of the savage strain that had twisted his features barely twelve hours ago.
He glanced up as she came in.
Their eyes met.
For half a second, she searched his gaze for gold.
All she saw was cool gray.
Polite, distant, bored. The eyes of a man who'd sat through a thousand hearings and found them all equally tedious.
He gave her the barest nod—professional courtesy, or a predator acknowledging that he'd seen you live another day. Then he turned back to Adrien, who was murmuring something while flipping through a binder.
If she didn't have the grooves in the wall burned into her fingertips, she could have believed she'd dreamed it.
The judge entered. "All rise." The room stood, sat, shuffled.
The day's proceedings blurred together like yesterday's, only louder inside her own head. Patel argued about chilling effects again. Adrien countered. The judge frowned, scribbled notes, asked more tight questions about likelihood of success and balance of harms.
Amara sat very still, watching her life be dissected in legalese while the man who had nearly put his teeth in her shoulder took neat notes with a fountain pen.
Once, during a lull when the judge was reading, Adrien leaned over to whisper something to Lucian. Lucian smiled—small, controlled, a practiced curve of the mouth.
Her entire body clenched in irrational, retroactive anger.
You don't get to almost shift in a hallway and then smile like that in court. That's cheating. That's using two genres at once without permission.
She realized her hands were fists in her lap. She forced them to unclench.
At a midmorning break, the judge declared another fifteen-minute recess. "Do not stray too far," she warned. "We still have a lot of ground to cover."
The room emptied in waves. Reporters floated toward the back, checking their phones, whispering headlines. Leah caught Amara's eye from the bench and mimed drinking; she'd brought her a coffee, she mouthed, out in the hall.
Before Amara could stand, Patel touched her elbow.
"Wait," he said. His voice was low, but there was something harder in it today. Less room for jokes.
She sank back down.
He leaned in. "I had another… informal chat with Adrien this morning," he said. "They're reassessing their settlement posture."
"Meaning?" she asked, hearing the hollow quality in her own voice.
"Meaning they're still aiming to take your comic offline permanently," he said. "That hasn't changed. But there's some movement on damages. And—this is important—they hinted they might be willing to drop the demand for full character rights assignment, if we agree to a broader non-compete about wolves and CEOs."
Her heart skipped. "So they don't own my monster," she said, "they just forbid me from ever using him again."
"In any recognizable form, yes," he said. "Which, from a practical standpoint, is… not that different. But it's less philosophically galling."
He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Look, Amara. Off the record? If they put a halfway reasonable number on the table, I think you should seriously consider taking it."
The words landed like a quiet betrayal, even though she'd known they were coming.
"You told me we could fight," she said. "That I had rights. That the law—"
"You do," he cut in gently. "And you still do. Fighting and winning are not the same thing."
He glanced at the bench, then back at her. "I've been watching the judge," he said softly. "She's not unsympathetic. But she's cautious. She's not going to set some grand precedent here about artists and public figures. She's going to protect what she sees as the safer interest. That's how judges stay judges."
"So I'm the unsafe interest," Amara said bitterly. "Great."
"You're the weaker one, in terms of power," he said. "You don't have a PR machine. You don't have money to survive a long injunction and trial. Every extra month this goes on is a month you don't earn from your work, a month your comic sits half-dead online, a month you spend waking up at 3 a.m. wondering if they'll take your equipment."
He hesitated, then added quietly, "And that's not even touching what it's doing to your head."
Her throat tightened.
He didn't know about the hallway. About claws in plaster and breath at her throat. He was talking about ordinary legal stress.
She wasn't sure she remembered what "ordinary" felt like anymore.
"If you fought all the way to trial," he went on, "best-case scenario, you win some limited right to keep a heavily altered version of Alpha online, with disclaimers plastered everywhere, after years of hell. Worst case, you end up with a judgment you can never pay off and a story you still can't publish."
He fixed her with a weary, kind gaze. "Sometimes," he said, "the bravest thing isn't being the test case. It's walking away before they grind you down to dust."
A hot, frustrated pressure built behind her eyes. "Walk away to what?" she demanded. "Draw flowers? Make corporate logos? This is my story."
"It's one story," he said gently. "You will write more. You're clearly capable. But you won't write anything if you're crushed under this. They can outlast you, Amara. That's their biggest weapon. Not the law. Time."
Time.
The same thing Lucian had twisted yesterday in the hallway, stretching seconds into a monstrous eternity.
She glanced across the aisle.
Lucian sat listening to someone on his team, face impassive, sleeve brushing against his watch as he moved his hand. The watch was simple, expensively understated. She wondered how many hours it had marked while he'd stood against that wall, while something inside him had clawed at the surface.
He looked composed now.
Untouchable.
Like he could do this—court, strategy, pressure—every day for the next ten years and come out merely slightly annoyed.
If she tried to match that stamina, she'd burn out in months.
Patel followed her gaze. "He lives in this world," he said quietly. "You don't. You're a visitor. That makes you more interesting, but it also makes you more fragile here."
"And your advice is to… what?" she asked. "Let him win? Let him buy my silence with less money than it would cost him to replace one of his pens?"
"My advice," he said, choosing each word carefully, "is that if a settlement appears that allows you to walk away without crippling debt and without handing over your characters like war spoils, you should take it."
He paused. "Fighting will not just bruise you," he said. "It will break you. Maybe not in ways you can see right now, but… I've watched clients go through this. They come out smaller."
Smaller.
She thought of the way Lucian's pupils had shrunk into slits. The way her own world had shrunk to the space between the wall and his chest.
She didn't want to be smaller.
She also didn't want to be crushed.
"I can't promise I'll be noble," Patel said. "My job is to get you out with as little damage as possible, not to make case law for future generations of webcomic creators."
She let out a shaky breath that might have been a laugh. "Sorry to ruin your chance at glory," she said.
"Oh, believe me, if glory shows up at a discount, I'll take it," he said. "But I don't want it at your expense."
The judge's clerk poked her head in. "Counsel," she called, "five minutes."
Patel straightened. "Think about it," he said. "You don't have to decide today. We don't even have a number yet. But when it comes, don't instinctively say no just because it feels like surrender. Sometimes it's strategy."
She nodded because she couldn't trust her voice.
As he stood, she caught one last glimpse of the gouges in the wall, in her mind's eye.
Officials would patch them. Paint would smooth over the evidence. In a week, no one would know claws had ever dragged there.
In court, Lucian's posture said nothing happened.
Her lawyer's eyes said even if it did, it's outside the story we're allowed to tell here.
She sat there, in the narrow space between realities, hands folded tightly in her lap, and wondered if she was being slowly devoured from two sides at once.
By a legal machine that could eat her life.
And by a story—the one she'd thought she controlled—that had sunk its teeth into something real and refused to let go.