The cursor blinked in the empty panel like it was tapping its foot at her.
Amara sat in the studio, stylus in hand, blank canvas glowing. The city lay in soft focus beyond the windows, smudged by a gray afternoon. The room smelled faintly of coffee and electronics.
Behind her, Lucian stood.
Not sitting in the extra chair he'd so kindly provided. Standing.
He didn't say he was supervising.
He didn't have to.
His presence filled the space between her shoulder blades and the door, a line of heat and gravity she couldn't ignore. She'd half-expected him to pace or sigh or check his phone; he did none of those things. He simply stood a few steps back and to the side, where he could see the screen and—she realized with an irrational flicker of irritation—her face in profile.
"Whenever you're ready," he said.
As if readiness was a switch she could flip.
"Just to be clear," she said, without looking back, "you do realize I normally spiral for three hours before starting a chapter, right?"
"You have forty minutes," he said. "We can negotiate the spiraling later."
"Wow," she muttered. "So generous."
She pulled up the last published episode of Alpha of the Boardroom—the one that had ended on a cliffhanger, her wolf-CEO cornered in the burning boardroom, his hand over his scar, snarling at fate.
The comments were still rolling in days later, a flood of caps-lock heartbreak and theories. She skimmed a few as a distraction.
HE CAN'T DIE I WILL SUE YOU
the symbolism of his ring burning???? ma'am
Alpha is literally Lucian Valtor at this point ffs
if you get sued I will help you hide the body (of the lawyer not the wolf)
She swallowed and closed the comment pane.
This new chapter would not go where she'd planned.
In her original outline, she'd had Alpha ripping his ring off and throwing it into the fire, exposing the scar properly for the first time. The readers would see it, and one in-universe reporter, and that would be the moment the world began to suspect what he was.
Now, sitting in a real skyscraper with the real man whose scar she'd drawn, the idea felt less like a narrative beat and more like pulling the pin on a grenade.
"Write," Lucian said quietly, after a stretch of silence.
"I will," she said. "Once I decide how much self-sabotage I'm aiming for today."
The stylus hovered.
She exhaled.
New file. New title.
EPISODE 117: A DIFFERENT KIND OF FIRE
The first panel came easily: a wide shot of the burning boardroom, like before, but she softened the details. Less focus on the specific layout, more on smoke and heat. The man at the center—no longer labelled Alpha on her layers, but Protagonist_1—stood in silhouette, his ring hand clenched.
She started to write narration.
The fire didn't scare him. The truth did.
She paused.
Once, she would have added: The truth under his ring, burned into his skin like fate's bite.
Her hand moved on its own, adding the phrase.
Before she could fully read it, his voice cut in.
"No," Lucian said.
Her hand jerked; the stylus left a small, accidental streak on the margin.
"No?" she repeated, twisting in her chair to look at him.
He'd moved closer at some point, arms folded now, expression cool. From here she could smell the faint, clean cologne he wore, the one that reminded her of expensive hotels and fresh paper.
"That line," he said. "The ring. The bite. Too specific."
"It's already canon," she said. "Readers have seen the scar. I can't pretend it doesn't exist."
"You can be… less explicit," he said. "Imply. Suggest. That is your job, isn't it?"
"My job used to be telling the truth as dramatically as possible," she shot back. "Now it's… what, lying with access to better equipment?"
His jaw flexed. "Your job is to stop feeding people a blueprint," he said. "You can still tell a story without mapping reality onto it with coordinates."
She looked back at the line.
The truth under his ring, burned into his skin like fate's bite.
Her chest ached.
She deleted "ring."
The truth under his skin, burned into him like a bite he could never forget.
The change felt small and huge at once. A single erased word that shifted the whole angle of the mirror.
"Better," he said, reading over her shoulder.
She bristled at the proximity.
"If you're this picky over one line, this is going to take seven years," she muttered.
"You'll adapt," he said.
She kept going.
She changed the name first.
Not Alpha anymore. Not in captions, not in dialogue bubbles. It hurt, but she did it.
She'd always planned to reveal his "real" name later; now she pulled that trigger early, even if it wasn't the name she'd first imagined.
In the dialogue layer, she erased ALPHA from the speech balloon tag and typed RHEON instead.
Lucian said nothing to that. If he had an opinion about the fictional name she was giving the reflection of him, he kept it to himself.
Panel after panel, she redrew the boardroom slightly altered—fewer specific fixtures, more smoke. She kept the core emotional beats: the building burning because of his choices, the weight of leadership, the realization that the people he'd sworn to protect were in danger.
But the sharpest details—how the windows were structured, the pattern of the emergency lights, the exact placement of scars—she blurred.
Every time she veered too close to something she knew now—something she'd seen in real corridors, real courtrooms—she felt it.
A faint hum at her wrist. A prickle along the binding.
She didn't know if it was her imagination or the contract magic nudging her away from lines that would snap.
At one point, in a margin sketch, she started to doodle a hand on a wall, fingers leaving claw marks.
The stylus moved almost without her thinking, muscle memory and fear meeting on digital ink.
The instant she completed the arc of one gouge, a sharp heat flared at her wrist.
She hissed and jerked back, dropping the pen.
"What?" Lucian asked, instantly alert.
She cradled her wrist, heart racing. The skin was unmarked, but the sensation had been unmistakable—a quick, electric warning, like touching a metal doorknob after walking over carpet.
"I drew something it didn't like," she said, a little breathless.
His gaze flicked to the screen. The half-finished sketch of the wall filled one corner—four lines starting to carve down, faint but undeniable.
He stepped forward and, without asking, tapped the Undo icon.
The gouges vanished.
The binding in her wrist cooled.
"Don't test it," he said quietly.
"I wasn't trying to," she said. "It's just… in my head."
"Keep it there," he said.
The anger that had been simmering under her skin since they'd started flared.
"That's the problem," she snapped. "Nothing stays 'just in my head.' That's not how this works. I turn things into pictures. That's my whole deal. You're asking a fire not to produce smoke."
"I'm asking you not to burn down the forest we're standing in," he countered.
She made a strangled sound of frustration and snatched up the stylus again.
For the next hour, they danced along that edge.
She'd sketch, write, tweak. He'd watch, occasionally interjecting with a low "no" when she nudged too close to an echo of his life. Sometimes she caught it herself first—the way his office in the comic almost mirrored the one she'd glimpsed through a briefly open door in the real penthouse, the phrasing of a line that sounded too much like something he'd said in court.
It was infuriating.
It was also, in a warped, creative-masochist way, fascinating.
She was being forced to reinvent, to dodge and weave around the very details that had given Alpha of the Boardroom its eerie realism. Every change felt like a small betrayal and a small act of survival at once.
In the new version of the scene, Rheon didn't tear off his ring and expose a specific scar.
Instead, he tore off his tie and used it to wrap a burn on his forearm, covering it before anyone could see the skin underneath.
A little less literal.
A little less dangerous.
"Your readers will complain," Lucian said quietly, watching as she inked his bandaged arm.
"They always complain," she said. "Half of them live for it."
She added a close-up panel: Rheon's face half in shadow, firelight reflecting in his eyes.
She was careful, so careful, not to let them glow the way she knew they could.
When the last panel was complete and the dialogue finished, she sat back.
The episode's thumbnail glowed on the screen, waiting to be uploaded.
Her stomach twisted.
This would be the first chapter published under the collar.
Not that anyone out there would know.
"You're not publishing under the old title," Lucian said. "We agreed on that."
She sighed. "I know."
The series dashboard already showed the change they'd forced through on WebVerse: Alpha of the Boardroom now sat under a new header.
BLOOD MOON CONTRACT – by AmaraReyes
The cover art had been hastily swapped to a more abstract image: a city skyline under a red moon, no visible scars, no faces.
Comments on the announcement post had been… intense.
did they MAKE you change it?
is this bc of the lawsuit??
blood moon contract sounds even hotter ngl
if lucian valtor's lawyers are reading this pls know we hate you
She clicked "New Episode."
The upload window opened. She dragged the finished file into the box; a progress bar inched across.
Title: Episode 117 – The Fire That Stays
The summary field waited.
Under Lucian's gaze, she typed:
Rheon faces the flames he created—and the secrets he still refuses to show anyone.
Her fingers hovered over the tags.
#werewolfboss #officefantasy #angst #slowburn
She hesitated, then added a new one.
#newcontract
Lucian made a dissatisfied sound.
"That will invite questions," he said.
"They're already asking," she replied. "Might as well lean into the metaphor."
His silence said he didn't like it, but he didn't stop her.
She checked the content boxes, their new legal disclaimers glinting at the bottom:
This work is entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Sure.
Her chest hurt.
She hovered over the "Publish" button.
Lucian stepped closer.
She didn't have to look to know exactly where he stood now—just behind her shoulder, slightly to the left, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him along her back, like a space heater set to "complicated."
The studio suddenly felt too small.
"You're hovering," she said, voice too tight.
"I'm ensuring compliance," he said.
"That's what all hoverers say," she muttered.
Her thumb trembled over the trackpad.
She felt ridiculously exposed. Posting a chapter had always been vulnerable, but usually it was just her and her anxiety and the internet. Now it was her, her anxiety, the internet, and a supernatural CEO breathing somewhere in her peripheral vision.
"Just hit it," he said quietly.
"I'm not used to someone watching me do this," she snapped.
"You posted your work to millions," he said. "You're not exactly a private person in this context."
"That's different," she said. "They weren't in the room."
The binding at her wrist hummed, not in warning this time, but in a strange, anticipatory way, like recognizing a moment the contract had been written for.
She swallowed.
"Fine," she whispered.
She clicked Publish.
A little confetti animation popped up on the screen, ridiculously cheerful.
Episode 117 is live!
She almost laughed. It sounded like a taunt.
Within seconds, the real-time metrics panel started ticking.
10 views.
47.
189.
632.
The comment counter blinked from 0 to 12 to 49 to 103 so fast her head spun.
They watched the numbers climb together, an absurd, quiet intimacy: creator and subject, predator and problem, both seeing the world react to the mixture she'd just poured into the feed.
"Open them," Lucian said.
"You sure?" she asked. "This is basically a live focus group on your fictional doppelgänger."
"I'd rather know than not," he said.
She clicked the speech bubble icon.
Comments poured down the side of the screen.
@wolfedupreads: THE NAME CHANGE IM SCREAMING WHO IS RHEON AND WHERE IS MY ALPHA
@legalhotmess: okay but the way this FEELS like she's negotiating something behind the scenes??
@moondrunk: "the truth under his skin burned into him like a bite" HELLO ARE WE STILL IN COURT??
@CEOslut420: if this isn't about lucian valtor then why does it hurt like it IS
@inkedat3am: new art style slightly softer??? did something happen to you bestie blink twice
Another one:
@publicfigurestan: if this is your "fictional" apology chapter to LV's lawyers i want you to know i would still perjure myself for you queen
Her face heated.
Lucian's presence sharpened.
"They're not subtle," he said.
"They never are," she said weakly. "That's half the fun. For them. Not for my legal team."
One comment shot to the top, boosted by likes:
@moonhowls: okay conspiracy time: what if she actually MET the guy she based him on and that's why stuff feels different now 👀 like she saw something she wasn't supposed to and now she's rewriting the story around it
Her skin crawled.
Lucian made a low noise in his throat, one that might have been amusement, might have been annoyance.
"They're closer than they should be," he murmured.
"They're always closer than they should be," she said. "That's fandom."
He didn't reply.
Another notification popped up: the series itself had jumped categories, trending tags reshuffling around it.
BLOOD MOON CONTRACT – #3 in Supernatural Romance | #1 in Office Drama
"There," she said hoarsely. "Congrats. You're officially more fictional than ever."
The metrics kept climbing.
Views: 12.3k.
Comments: 679.
Shares: 1.1k.
Her heart thudded.
Every share was another ripple in the pond, another chance for someone who shouldn't see it to see it.
Lucian stayed where he was, just behind her, long enough to read a few more out-loud disasters.
@lunarlawyer: as an attorney i would like to say this is absolutely NOT how settlements work and ALSO PLEASE DROP THE DOCUMENTARY CUT
@feralforfiction: rheon is clearly going thru it like SOMEONE SUED HIM IRL LMAO
She hastily scrolled past that one.
"Enough," he said finally.
He stepped back.
The air near her neck cooled.
"You've done what you needed to do," he said. "The rest is noise."
"That 'noise' is my career," she said, turning to face him. "My community. My—"
"I know," he said. "We'll monitor it."
"We?" she asked. "Like you're going to sit here refreshing my comments?"
He didn't answer.
He looked… distant, all of a sudden. As if his thoughts had slid somewhere else—calculating risk, maybe, or listening to some internal frequency she couldn't hear.
"Keep working," he said. "There will be more chapters. More adjustments. For now, rest. Eat. Don't read every comment. You'll go mad."
"That's the point," she said. "Madness feeds the art."
A corner of his mouth twitched, infinitesimal. "Try not to feed the wrong monster," he said.
Then he left.
No dramatic exit. No parting threat. Just a man in an expensive shirt walking out of a studio he'd built to watch the repercussions of a story he wished didn't exist.
The door clicked shut behind him.
For a moment, the only sound was the soft whir of the computer fans and the frantic scroll of comments on the screen.
Amara stared at the metrics until the numbers blurred.
Then she closed the tab.
Her wrist still hummed faintly, charged by the act of publication. It felt like the invisible ink there approved, or at least acknowledged that a condition had been fulfilled: The Artist Will Create Under Supervision.
She pushed her chair back and stood, limbs buzzing with a strange mix of adrenaline and exhaustion.
The rest of the day blurred.
Adrien stopped by with "feedback" on how closely the readers were sniffing around the truth. Ms. Kwan brought food she barely tasted. The guards rotated, their faces changing but their alertness constant.
Evening slid in, turning the city outside into a field of lights.
She tried to draw again after dinner, but the lines wouldn't come. Every time she set her stylus down, she saw comment snippets hovering in the white space, accusing, adoring, demanding.
She finally gave up and wandered back to her room.
The penthouse was quieter at night in a way that felt heavy, not peaceful. The hum of workday activity had faded: no more footsteps of staff, no more muffled conversations behind doors. The air felt thicker, like the building was holding its breath.
She should have tried to sleep.
Instead, she drifted toward the big living room windows like a moth.
The lights were dimmed out here, only a few lamps casting warm pools across the hardwood floor. The city beyond was fully awake now—a glittering map of movement and electricity, the river a dark snake with occasional reflected glows sliding along its spine.
She stopped when she saw him.
Lucian stood on the balcony.
The glass door was half-open, a thin strip of night air seeping in. He was just a dark silhouette at first—tall, straight, hands resting lightly on the railing.
He wasn't in a suit jacket now. Just a white shirt, sleeves rolled up, first two buttons undone. It made him look less like a headline and more like a person who had taken off his armor for the day and forgotten who he was without it.
The moon hung low above the city—fat, bright, not quite full but close. It painted his profile in silver when he turned his head slightly, gaze fixed somewhere far beyond the buildings.
She almost turned away.
This felt intrusive. Too intimate. Not the forced closeness of studio supervision, but something else—a private moment she wasn't sure she was meant to see.
The binding at her wrist stayed quiet.
She took that as a sign that the contract didn't consider "looking at a man on his balcony" a breach.
She stepped closer, bare feet silent on the floor.
He didn't turn immediately, but she sensed when he registered her presence. Some slight shift in his shoulders, some internal radar pinging.
"You should be sleeping," he said, without looking back.
"You should be in a boardroom," she replied. "Yet here we are."
His fingers tightened briefly on the railing.
"Did you read them?" he asked. "The comments."
"Some," she said. "Enough."
"And?" His tone was neutral. Too neutral.
"And they know there's something different," she said. "They can feel it. They're good at that."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Their speculation," he said. "About us."
The word "us" sat strange in his mouth.
She leaned against the doorframe, arms folded, watching him through the gap.
"They're shippers," she said. "They'd speculated about us even if we'd never met. Creators and muses. Enemies and forced collaborators. It's… a genre."
"They think you're involved with me," he said.
She snorted. "Some of them think I'm secretly your mistress," she said. "Some think I'm an AI your company built to write propaganda. Some think I'm actually you."
He huffed out something that might have been a laugh, low and humorless. "That last theory is new," he said.
"They've had stranger," she replied.
The wind ruffled his hair slightly. An ordinary, human thing.
But his face…
He looked haunted.
There was a distance in his eyes she hadn't seen before, even in court. A kind of thinness around the mouth, like he was holding something in by sheer habit and habit was fraying.
"Does it bother you?" she asked, before she could stop herself. "What they think?"
"They've thought worse," he said. "They've called me monster before."
"They didn't know how right they were," she said lightly.
He shot her a look. In the moonlight, his eyes caught the light oddly—reflective, like an animal's in the dark. For a heartbeat, she thought she saw that gold again, muted by distance.
"You think I enjoy this," he said quietly. "Dragging you here. Writing contracts that bind your wrist. Standing behind you while you post."
"Do you?" she asked.
He looked back at the moon.
"No," he said. "I enjoy control. Order. Predictable returns. There is nothing predictable about you. Or this."
"The comments disagree," she said. "They're already trying to chart us."
He was silent.
The city hummed.
After a while, he said, so softly she almost missed it, "They look at that version of me—the one you made—and they fall in love with the monster. They excuse him. They make playlists. They write stories where he is worse and better than I am."
There was an odd bitterness in his voice.
"That version didn't have to make quarterly projections," she said.
"That version didn't have to keep anyone alive but his love interest," he replied. "I have… more variables."
She watched his profile.
He looked like her drawings and not like them at the same time.
Her Alpha had been a fantasy from the start: clean lines, calculated scars, carefully placed vulnerability. Lucian Valtor was messier. Real skin. Real flaws. Real haunted eyes watching a moon he clearly had complicated feelings about.
"There's something you're not telling me," she said softly.
He almost smiled. It was a small, crooked thing, gone quickly.
"There are many things I'm not telling you," he said. "For your safety and mine."
"Do you ever get tired of being cryptic?" she asked.
"Yes," he said. "But the alternatives are worse."
They stood in silence for a moment, sharing the view. The city pulsed. The moon watched.
"You did well today," he said finally, still not looking at her. "With the chapter."
She blinked. "Is… that a compliment?" she asked.
"Don't get used to it," he said. "But yes. You adapted. You didn't break anything."
"Except my heart," she said. "A little."
"Your readers will survive," he said. "They always do."
"I meant mine," she murmured.
He turned then, just enough to really look at her.
Moonlight traced the lines of his face, softened them. Up close, he looked less like the untouchable figure from magazine covers and more like a man who hadn't slept well in a long time.
"We will find a way through this," he said. "Or we won't. Either way, it will make a story."
"That's a twisted kind of optimism," she said.
"You're the one who wrote me as a tragic antihero," he said. "I'm just playing my part."
She wanted to say, I didn't write you. I wrote him. You wrote yourself into it.
Instead, she just said, "Try not to practice your brooding too hard. The comments will explode."
"They already have," he said dryly.
He looked back at the moon one last time, something unreadable in his gaze.
"Go to bed, Ms. Reyes," he said. "Tomorrow we do this again."
"Supervised storytelling," she said. "My favorite."
He stepped back from the railing, moving toward the door. As he passed her, the binding at her wrist buzzed faintly, like a tuning fork catching a note.
He paused for half a heartbeat, eyes dropping to her hand, then met her gaze.
"Remember the rules," he said. "But don't let them kill the thing that made your story dangerous in the first place."
She stared. "Are you… telling me to keep being a problem?" she asked.
"I'm telling you to keep being you," he said. "Within the lines."
"Within your lines," she said.
"For now," he replied.
Then he was gone, footsteps receding into the soft-lit halls.
Amara stepped out onto the balcony, into the cool night air.
The moon hung over the city, too bright, too close, like an eye.
She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling the faint thrum of invisible ink under her skin and the echo of his presence still lingering in the air where he'd stood.
Her latest chapter was out there, already burrowing into thousands of minds.
Her next ones would be born under watchful eyes and binding magic, in a glass cage above a city that thought it knew her.
She tilted her head back and looked at the moon until her eyes watered.
"Okay," she whispered to no one. "First supervised chapter down."
The wind tugged at her hair.
"In twelve weeks," she added, "either I walk out of here with a story no one's ever written before… or I don't walk out at all."
The thought should have terrified her.
It did.
It also, in some dark twisted part of her writer's brain, felt like the most honest hook she'd ever had.