Her tablet chimed like a polite alarm clock.
Orientation begins in 5 minutes. Please proceed to the main living area.
The words glowed calmly, as if they weren't announcing the start of twelve weeks under supervised captivity.
Amara wiped her palms on her leggings, checked her reflection once—still tired, still real—and stepped out of her room.
The hallway felt different now that she knew it belonged to her, sort of. Or rather, that she belonged in it. Cameras watched from the corners, quiet and steady, their lenses dark but alert. She imagined a row of faceless security people somewhere, watching little squares where she was a moving pixel.
The main living area was already occupied.
Ms. Kwan stood near the kitchen island, tablet in hand, posture immaculate. A security guard leaned against the far wall, pretending to be relaxed and failing. And near the windows, hands in pockets, looking out over the city as if it were something he owned—and maybe he did—stood Lucian.
He turned when he heard her footsteps.
Gray eyes. Just gray. No glow. No hint of the thing she'd seen in the hallway, the gold that had burned through like a warning.
"Ms. Reyes," he said. "On time. Good."
She forced herself to walk forward like her legs weren't whispering wrong direction.
"Welcome to the operational side of our arrangement," Ms. Kwan said. "Today we'll go over basic house procedures and security expectations."
House procedures. Security expectations. She was going to choke on euphemisms.
"Mr. Valtor will address the creative and… narrative rules," Ms. Kwan added, with a slight nod in his direction. "I will handle the rest."
Of course he would handle the narrative rules. The wolf laying down laws about the story.
They sat at the island—Amara on a stool, Ms. Kwan opposite her, Lucian at the end, not sitting but close enough to make her aware of his presence in her peripheral vision.
Ms. Kwan tapped her tablet; a list appeared on the screen that faced Amara. Clean font, numbered items. It looked like a standard corporate onboarding.
It wasn't.
"First," Ms. Kwan said, "movement."
Just that word made Amara's shoulders tense.
"For the duration of the initial twelve-week term, your default location is this residence," Ms. Kwan continued. "You may move freely within designated areas: your room, the guest wing, common living spaces, the gym, and the studio Mr. Valtor has prepared for you. Access to other floors is restricted."
"And outside?" Amara asked. "You know, the big thing with sky and trees and actual air?"
"You may leave the building with prior approval," Ms. Kwan said. "Excursions will be escorted. For now, we recommend limiting outside activity to essential appointments."
"So… supervised walks," Amara said. "Like a very well-fed dog."
Lucian's gaze flicked to her. "Like a high-value witness," he said. "Or a person under protective custody. The metaphor is up to you."
Her wrist pulsed faintly at the word custody.
"No overnight stays elsewhere, no last-minute trips," Ms. Kwan went on, unfazed. "If you need something from the outside world, request it. We can arrange most things."
"Can you arrange my old life?" Amara asked.
Ms. Kwan's mouth twitched, almost sympathy. "We can arrange familiar items," she said. "Not familiar circumstances."
The list marched on.
No unauthorized guests in the penthouse. No packages without prior clearance. No delivery drivers allowed to the private elevators. No posting photos or videos that revealed the interior layout.
It sounded less like house rules and more like guidelines for living in a witness protection program designed by a minimalist magazine.
By the time they got to "emergency evacuation procedures," Amara's brain had turned the rules into a buzz.
She glanced at the top of the screen.
VALTOR PENTHOUSE – HOUSE PROTOCOL SUMMARY
Underneath, a line she hadn't noticed before:
Compliance with these protocols is a condition of your continued protection and residency.
Her wrist tingled again, as if someone had plucked the invisible string tied there.
"Questions?" Ms. Kwan asked.
"Yeah," Amara said. "What happens if I accidentally break a rule?"
"It depends on the rule," Ms. Kwan said calmly. "And the intention. You'll be warned. Repeated violations will result in reassessment of your suitability for this arrangement."
"Reassessment," Amara echoed. "Is that corporate for 'thrown to the wolves'?"
"Sometimes," Lucian said.
She looked at him sharply. He didn't look away.
"Relax," he added. "We don't expect perfection. Just… obedience to the parts that matter."
"I love being a bullet point," she muttered.
"We're done with the basics," Ms. Kwan said. "Mr. Valtor?"
He moved then, finally taking a seat on the other side of the island, close enough that she could see the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw, the precise line of his throat when he swallowed.
"House rules are one thing," he said. "Our rules are another."
"Our. Not his. Not yours. Both. Her stomach knotted.
"You are here as part of a creative program," he said. "Not as a prisoner. Not as a guest. As… something between."
"Charming," she said. "Love being a mid-tier category."
"That means your work is central," he continued. "It's the reason we're bending the world around you instead of letting it crush you. So let's be clear about the boundaries around that work."
He tapped the tablet in front of him. A new screen mirrored onto hers, this one carrying a different title.
NARRATIVE & PUBLIC COMMUNICATION GUIDELINES – AMARA REYES
It sounded like the most boring pamphlet in existence. Her pulse jumped anyway.
"Rule one," he said. "No unsupervised public releases of creative work that involve werewolves, CEOs, or any character that could reasonably be interpreted as derivative of your previous series. That includes webcomic updates, side stories, 'what-if' sketches, and late-night doodles you think are 'just for fun' that accidentally go viral."
She bristled. "So I can't post my own art without your approval," she said. "At all."
"You can draw whatever you like," he said. "The restriction is on publication. You show it to me first. To our team. We determine what is safe to release."
"Safe for you," she shot back.
"For you as well," he said evenly. "There are people watching you now who will dissect every pixel for clues. I'm not interested in playing whack-a-mole with your subconscious online."
Her cheeks burned. "My subconscious is none of your business."
"Your subconscious put my scar on a character three weeks before you saw it," he said. "It is very much my business."
The room felt smaller.
"Rule two," he went on, before she could respond. "No discussing my personal life, habits, or… condition… in any public forum. No sly comments, no half-jokes, no 'you'll never guess who I'm living with' posts."
"I barely post selfies," she said. "You think I'm going to start subtweeting my captor?"
"People leak without realizing," he said. "A complaint about the coffee, a photo of a view, a throwaway line about being 'high above the city'—it doesn't take much for the internet to connect dots. We minimize available dots."
He said it so matter-of-factly that she wanted to throw something.
"Rule three," he said. "No unsanctioned contact with journalists, influencers, or anyone likely to amplify your situation. All media inquiries go through our PR team. You say nothing without counsel present."
"So basically: shut up, draw, and don't tell anyone what's happening," she said. "Got it."
"You can talk to your friends," he said. "Within reason. They are already in this, whether you like it or not. But you will be careful with details. You will not put them—or you—at further risk by treating this like an amusing anecdote."
The worst part was that a small, begrudging piece of her brain agreed. This wasn't the kind of story you told over drinks. At least, not if you wanted to stay alive.
"And rule four," he said.
"There's more?" she asked.
He paused.
"This one is less… legal," he said. "More… practical."
She waited.
"You will tell me," he said slowly, "if you dream something."
Her skin went cold.
"I always dream something," she managed. "Everyone dreams. That's not exactly actionable."
"You know what I mean," he said. "When you have one of those dreams. The ones that become panels. The ones that reveal things you shouldn't know. You will tell me. Immediately. You will not turn them into content before we… assess them."
Her chest felt tight. "You want access to my nightmares now," she said. "Fantastic. Maybe we can monetize them."
He watched her, steady. "Your dreams drew blood," he said quietly. "We need to see where the knife lands, before someone else does."
She wanted to tell him no. To say her dreams were the only private space she had left, the one place his cameras couldn't reach.
Her wrist buzzed, faint and insistent, like the answer had already been coded into her the moment she signed.
"Let me get this straight," she said, voice thinner than she liked. "I can't go outside alone, I can't post my own art, I can't talk about you, and I have to report my inner monologue like some kind of narrative cop. Anything else, Alpha?"
The nickname slipped out before she could swallow it back.
His eyes sharpened.
"Don't call me that," he said. The words came out too fast, too sharp.
"Why?" she asked, leaning into the flicker of power. "Too close to the bone?"
"It's not my name," he said. "It's a character's. One you built on my back. Keep that boundary."
"So it's okay for you to own my life," she said, "but I can't call you the name of the monster I accidentally turned you into."
The air thickened.
Lucian stood.
The movement was controlled, but she could feel the tension in it. The almost-sound of muscle caging something in.
"There's one more thing I want to show you," he said. "Before we continue this argument in circles."
He nodded to Ms. Kwan. "We'll take it from here."
Ms. Kwan tapped something on her tablet and slipped out, taking the security guard with her. The absence of extra bodies made the room feel bigger and more dangerous at once.
"Come," he said.
The word rubbed her the wrong way. "You know you sound like you're talking to a dog when you say it like that," she snapped.
He paused, just a fraction.
"So stop hearing it that way," he said, and walked toward one of the closed doors off the main space.
She followed, because the alternative was sitting alone on a stool stewing in anger.
The door he opened led to another hallway, shorter than the guest wing, quieter. At the end of it, he paused in front of a door with a black panel identical to the one on her room.
"Your studio," he said.
He pressed his wrist to the panel; it blinked green. "We've keyed it to your access band as well," he added. "Try it."
She held her phone up, thumb hovering over the wolf icon. The panel lit, then turned green again. The door clicked.
Something complicated fluttered in her chest.
He opened the door and stepped aside, letting her go in first.
She had always imagined her dream studio.
It had windows, a big desk, a ridiculous number of monitors. It smelled like pencils and fresh paper and coffee. Sometimes, in the fantasy, it was a little messy; she liked to imagine organized chaos.
The room she stepped into now blew all of those half-formed visions out of the water.
It was… perfect.
Not in the sterile, magazine way the rest of the penthouse was. This had been designed for a purpose. Her purpose.
One wall was entirely windows, like in her bedroom but wider, flooding the room with even, indirect light. Neutral blinds were half-down, diffusing the city into soft shapes.
The opposite wall was lined with shelves and drawers in warm wood tones, already stocked: sketchbooks in different sizes, high-end pens, mechanical pencils, markers. A small army of art supplies arranged in precise rows, all top-tier brands she'd only ever drooled over online.
In the center of the room sat a large desk, facing the window but angled so she could see the door. On it: a massive monitor, a high-spec desktop tower tucked neatly underneath, cables managed to invisibility. Next to it, on a stand, a screen-tablet larger and newer than anything she'd touched before. Even from across the room she recognized the model. She'd watched review videos of it at three a.m., telling herself she'd buy it "someday."
Someday was apparently today.
There was a second chair on the other side of the desk—simpler, but comfortable. A space for someone to sit and watch. Or critique.
She walked in slowly, afraid that if she moved too fast, the whole thing would vanish like a mirage.
The floor under her feet was a soft rug, easy on joints for long hours. The air smelled faintly of new electronics and paper. No dust. No history.
He'd built her a studio.
Not a corner. Not a borrowed table.
A room.
"How long…" she began, then stopped. "When did you put this together?"
"A week," he said, stepping in behind her. "Less. Once the possibility became likely, I instructed my people to assemble what you would need."
"You don't even know what I need," she said softly, tracing the air over the tablet. She didn't dare touch it yet.
He gave her a look. "Adrien and our research team scraped your online wishlists, interviews, streams," he said. "Your forum posts about equipment. Your patrons' Q&A where you ranted about your tablet's lag. We extrapolated."
Her cheeks burned. "You stalked my art supplies wishlist," she said. "Of course you did."
"I prefer the term 'due diligence,'" he said. "You're here to work. I want you equipped."
"It looks like you've been planning this for months," she said. "Not… days."
He didn't answer immediately.
"It doesn't take me long to make decisions," he said finally. "Or to implement them."
She moved closer to the desk, fingers hovering over the stylus. It lay there in a neat little holder, innocent, perfect.
If she picked it up, it would be real.
A small screen to the side of the monitor caught her eye.
At first she thought it was another tablet. Then she saw the feed.
Four little rectangles, black and white. Different angles of the studio: door, window, shelves, desk.
"Seriously?" she asked, pointing at it. "You put a camera in my studio too? Are you worried I'll attack the paper?"
"There's no audio," he said. "Visual only. And only for this room and the hallway outside. It's for your safety as much as ours. If something happens while you're working, we see it."
"Like what?" she demanded. "Spontaneous combustion? Werewolf attack?"
His jaw flexed.
"You are bait," he said quietly. "Whether you like it or not. I'd rather not leave you alone with your back to the door."
The back of her neck prickled.
He was too close behind her. Not touching, but present, a heat at her shoulder.
Tension threaded the air between them.
Not the clean, professional tension of employer-employee. Not the distant wariness of plaintiff-defendant.
Something messier.
He had built her a dream. A room that whispered work here, make things, forget the outside, even as it reminded her, with cameras and restricted doors, that nothing she did would be unwatched.
She should have felt grateful.
She felt… cornered.
"This is a cage," she said, echoing her own thoughts from earlier. "A very pretty one, but still."
"It's a studio," he said. "If I wanted you in a cage, you'd be in one. This is an investment."
"You keep saying that," she snapped. "Investment. Asset. Variable. You talk like I'm a stock, not a person."
"You are both," he said. "People are assets. Assets can be people. That's how power works."
Something hot surged in her chest.
"And what does that make you?" she demanded, turning to face him fully now. "If I'm an asset, what are you? The owner? The handler? The… keeper?"
His gaze didn't flinch.
"It makes me the one who has to live with the consequences if you make the wrong move," he said. "It makes me responsible for containing what you've stirred up."
"I didn't stir anything," she said. "I drew. In my tiny apartment. With my crappy tablet. I didn't ask to become your—" she groped for the word "—project."
"You published," he said. "You made it public. You fed it energy and attention. You didn't intend to, perhaps, but that does not change the outcome."
"I'm not your pet," she burst out.
The words hung there, loud to her own ears.
Not your pet.
Not your experiment.
Not your project.
Something in his face shifted.
For a heartbeat, the air around him seemed to ripple—the same way it had in the corridor, when his control had broken along the edges.
His eyes darkened.
Then, like someone striking a match inside them, gold flared.
It was quick. A flash rather than a long burn. But she saw it.
The gray irises ringed in molten metal. Pupils tightening, then widening, like something inside him had shoved against the bars.
Her heart thudded.
He took a breath.
It sounded like it cost him something.
"You are not a pet," he said finally, each word measured. "A pet has no choice. You had one."
"Some choice," she said. "Sign the magical binding contract or die slowly under a lawsuit. Very humane."
His jaw clenched. His gaze flicked, involuntarily, to her wrist.
She wondered what he saw when he looked there. Whether the binding lines that had flashed for her were visible to him all the time. Whether they glowed when she defied him.
"You are here," he said, "because every other path led to worse outcomes. For you. For me. For people who don't even know this exists. That does not make you a pet. It makes you a—"
He cut himself off, shifting his weight, as if he'd almost said something he didn't mean to.
"A prisoner?" she supplied.
"A partner," he said instead.
She laughed, incredulous. "Partners share power," she said. "Partners walk into something together. You dragged me here by the throat of my story and locked the door."
For a second, they just stared at each other.
The tension in the air tightened.
It wasn't the good kind. Not the slow, magnetic pull she sometimes wrote between her characters, where banter tipped into something else.
This was brittle. Hot with anger. Frayed by fear. Tinted with a strange, unwelcome intimacy that came from knowing what his breath felt like near her neck, what her dreams had done to his reality.
"Believe it or not," he said quietly, "this is the softest I know how to be."
The admission knocked something sideways in her.
She opened her mouth, then closed it, unsure which of the fifty possible retorts wanted out most.
The monitors on the side desk beeped softly, a subtle notification from the security system. A tiny green light blinked in one corner of the camera feed screen.
He glanced at it, shoulders loosening a fraction, the moment cracking.
"Your first work session is in an hour," he said, back to business. "You'll meet with Adrien and one of our media strategists. They'll explain how this" —he gestured at the room— "interfaces with the WebVerse program."
"The one you have your claws in," she said.
He let the metaphor go.
"You're free to familiarize yourself with the equipment until then," he said. "If you need help, request it through the tablet. Someone will assist. No one will enter without your permission unless security alarms trigger."
"How generous," she said.
He turned toward the door.
At the threshold, he paused, hand on the frame.
"Do not mistake supervision for ownership, Ms. Reyes," he said, not looking back. "I have no interest in micromanaging your every stroke. I care about the edges. The places where your story touches mine."
"And the parts where I make you look bad," she said.
"The parts where you make me look… true," he corrected.
Her throat tightened.
He looked over his shoulder then, just enough for her to see his profile, the set of his mouth.
"You're not a pet," he said again, softer now. "Don't act like one. Don't act like prey, either. Prey runs. That makes things… happen."
His eyes sparked gold once more, a quick flash like sunlight on a blade.
Then he stepped out and closed the door.
Silence fell, broken only by the faint hum of electronics.
Amara stood in the center of the studio, pulse hammering, wrist buzzing faintly like someone had tightened a hidden band by a notch.
She looked at the camera screen, at the tiny rectangles showing an empty room, an empty hallway.
"You're not a pet," she told herself under her breath. "You're not prey."
She walked to the desk.
Her hand hovered over the stylus, then closed around it.
It fit so perfectly in her grip that for a second she forgot everything else.
The anger. The rules. The cameras.
It was just her and the tool she'd chased for years.
She sat.
The chair cradled her like it had been designed for her spine. The tablet woke at her touch. A blank canvas glowed on the screen.
The binding at her wrist hummed.
The cameras watched.
The wolf had laid out his rules.
She lowered the pen to the screen anyway, hand steady now, and drew the first line in a place where his supervision couldn't quite reach: the gap between what she was allowed to put on the page and what she knew she'd never stop seeing in the corners of her vision—gold eyes, claw marks, and a cage in the sky.