By evening the penthouse had gone unnaturally quiet.
No more hurried footsteps, no more clipped security reports leaking under doors. Just the soft hum of the air system and the distant, muffled city—sirens, horns, life going on like no one had bled in the sky that afternoon.
Amara sat in her studio with her tablet dark in front of her, doing nothing and thinking too much.
Episode 124 was still live.
Every few minutes her phone buzzed with a new comment, a new theory, a new edit of Rheon braced against glass with blood on his side. Readers were losing their minds over the ambush. Some were furious she'd hurt him; others were delighted by the spike in danger. Someone had already drawn fanart of the wound, stylized and aesthetic, red against white.
She'd muted the notifications.
The silence felt heavier.
It pressed against her until she couldn't stand it.
She got up and opened the studio door.
Out in the corridor, the lights were dimmed to evening mode. Warm instead of clinical. The guard who'd been posted nearby earlier was gone.
From down the hall came the faint murmur of voices.
"…change the dressing again in a few hours," Ms. Kwan was saying. "We need to watch for swelling."
"I'm fine," Lucian answered, voice rougher than usual. "You're fussing."
"Someone in this household should," she replied.
Amara stepped into the main living area.
Ms. Kwan stood by the kitchen island, packing away antiseptic bottles and gauze. Her sleeves were rolled, and there was a faint smudge of pink near her wrist. She noticed Amara immediately; she always did.
"Ms. Reyes," she said. "You should rest. It's been a… long day."
"Is he okay?" Amara asked, skipping pretense.
"As okay as men like him ever admit to being," Ms. Kwan said. "The wound is not life-threatening. It will hurt for a while."
Guilt flared behind Amara's ribs.
"Do you need help?" she asked. "With… anything?"
"At the moment, no," Ms. Kwan said. "I've just finished with him. He'll need the bandage changed once more tonight, then tomorrow, then we can see how it's healing."
"I can do it," Amara said.
The words came out before she'd fully formed the thought.
Ms. Kwan blinked. "Pardon?"
"The bandage," Amara said, forcing her voice not to wobble. "I… I know basic first aid. And I…" She swallowed. "I need to see it. Properly. Not just… from across the room."
Because right now it was stuck in her head as a perfect overlay of the panel she'd drawn. Flat, clean, stylized. If she didn't see the real thing, it would stay that way.
And that felt wrong.
Dangerous.
"Need," Ms. Kwan repeated quietly.
Amara met her eyes. "Please," she said.
The older woman studied her for a long moment. Then she sighed, some tension leaving her shoulders.
"Come," she said. "He's in his room. If he tells you to leave, you leave. If you feel faint, you sit down."
"I won't faint," Amara said.
"You say that now," Ms. Kwan murmured.
They walked down a corridor Amara hadn't been down before. The air felt different here—cooler, less handled by staff, like the tower itself was holding its breath.
Ms. Kwan stopped at a door at the end and knocked once.
"Come in," Lucian's voice called. Lower than usual, but steady.
Ms. Kwan opened the door and stepped aside, letting Amara enter first.
Lucian's room looked exactly like she'd imagined and nothing like it at all.
Muted colors. Dark wood. Floor-to-ceiling windows pouring in the city's night glow. A bed that was too big, the covers rumpled in a way that suggested he'd been lying there and got impatient with the idea of staying down. Built-in shelves with more files than novels. A single framed photo turned face-down on the nightstand.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed in a fresh shirt, unbuttoned halfway, sleeves rolled. The bandage around his torso was visible where the fabric parted. Someone—Ms. Kwan, obviously—had done it neatly, white gauze smooth and tight.
He looked up when they came in.
For a second, some of the CEO armor slipped and the expression that crossed his face was pure, unfiltered exhaustion.
Then he saw Amara and it sharpened.
"Ms. Reyes," he said. "You're supposed to be in your studio. Or asleep."
"I'm terrible at both," she said. "I came to help."
He glanced at Ms. Kwan, questioning.
"She insisted," Ms. Kwan said. "I thought… it might be better than her imagining it."
"Did you?" he asked dryly.
"I am not entirely without intuition," she said. "And I am very tired. Someone needs to change the dressing in another hour. Either she does it, or you try to do it alone, or you call me back from the sleep I desperately require. Pick one."
"That's emotional manipulation," he muttered.
"That's logistics," she said.
She set down the supplies on the nightstand and patted Amara's shoulder once, unexpectedly gentle.
"Wear gloves," she said. "Clean around the wound, don't scrub it. New bandage, not too tight. If he starts to look gray, call me. If he tries to get up, sit on him."
"I am injured, not feral," Lucian said.
Ms. Kwan raised an eyebrow. "As if the two are mutually exclusive," she said.
She left before he could reply, closing the door with a soft click.
Silence settled.
Amara became acutely aware of every sound—the city hum, the rustle of fabric, her own too-fast heartbeat.
She stepped closer to the bed, hands suddenly awkward.
Lucian watched her, eyes unreadable.
"You don't have to do this," he said. "It's not your job."
"No," she said. "My job is apparently to draw disasters before they happen. Consider this… overtime."
His mouth twitched, but it wasn't quite a smile.
"Morbid humor," he said.
"It's that or cry," she said. "Humor's less messy."
She pulled on the gloves from the nightstand, the latex snapping softly around her wrists. Her binding buzzed under it, as if it resented being covered.
"Lie back," she said.
He arched an eyebrow. "You give orders now?"
"Only when the patient is being stubborn," she said.
He held her gaze for a heartbeat, then shifted back on the bed, bracing one hand behind him. The motion made his jaw tighten, a flicker of pain crossing his face.
She swallowed.
Up close, the fragility of human bodies was harder to pretend away.
Even this one.
She sat on the edge of the bed beside him, close enough to reach the bandage. The mattress dipped under their combined weight.
"Ready?" she asked.
"As I'll ever be," he said.
Her fingers found the edge of the gauze and began to peel it away, slow and careful.
The adhesive tugged at skin. He hissed through his teeth once, more out of reflex than real complaint.
Underneath, the wound revealed itself in stages.
First the clean white pad, stained brownish-red in an oval, sticking slightly where dried blood had glued it to the cut. Then, as she eased it away with soaked gauze, the actual line.
It wasn't as catastrophic as her brain had made it. Not a gaping gash, not an open maw. Just a long, angry slice along his side, the edges already knitting slightly, the center still raw. The kind of wound that would scar but not kill.
Maybe two inches longer than she'd drawn it.
Maybe an angle a degree or two off.
Close enough.
Her vision swam.
"Breathe," he said quietly.
She hadn't realized she'd stopped.
She forced air into her lungs.
The slash wasn't the only damage.
As she cleaned around it, wiping away dried blood, she saw more.
Above the main wound, closer to his ribs, four parallel gouges raked diagonally across his skin. Shorter than the central cut, shallower, but deep enough to have broken skin. The spacing was too even, too curved.
Claws.
Her hand trembled.
She moved lower, dabbing at the edges of the main gash, and saw bruising along his hip, an ugly, spreading purple. On the opposite side of his torso, near the back, a crescent of punctures—half-moon marks, each small on its own, together forming the unmistakable impression of teeth.
Not human teeth.
Wider.
Sharper.
Her stomach lurched.
"This wasn't just knives," she said, before she could stop herself.
He was watching her, not the wound.
"No," he said.
"They bit you," she whispered. "They… clawed you."
"Some people prefer teeth to paperwork," he said dryly.
"This isn't funny," she snapped.
"I'm aware," he said. "That was a joke. Very bad one. Don't tell Adrien or he'll stage an intervention."
She kept cleaning, focusing on the motion, on doing it properly. Gauze, antiseptic, soft wipes, avoid the center. The smell of the antiseptic cut through the metallic tang in the air.
The claw marks made her think of the courthouse wall.
The crescent bite mark made her think of wolves lunging in a circle, red light on wet stone.
Her wrist burned under the glove.
"In the… in the chapter," she said haltingly, "I only used knives. I didn't draw any—"
"I read it," he said.
Her head jerked up. "Already?"
"Word travels fast when your legal department is addicted to your comment section," he said.
"God," she muttered, mortified.
His voice went quieter.
"You kept it… human," he said. "Mostly."
"Mostly?" she echoed, dread prickling.
He tilted his head slightly, studying her.
"The way you drew the shadows," he said. "The angles. The way some of them moved. You didn't give them faces. You gave them… shapes."
Heat crawled up her neck.
She had. Without thinking. Some of the ambushers in the comic moved like people. Some moved like something else. She'd made their shoulders hunch wrong, their hands a little too long, their eyes a little too bright in the dark.
At the time, she'd chalked it up to stylization.
Apparently not.
She realized her thumb was pressed too hard into his skin near the edge of the bandage. He hissed softly.
"Sorry," she muttered, snatching her hand back a fraction.
"It's fine," he said.
Up close like this, with his shirt pushed aside and the city light edging his collarbone, he looked less like an untouchable CEO and more like what he kept trying to pretend he wasn't: a man with a body that could be hurt.
And a different kind of body under the surface that could do the hurting.
Her gaze caught on other marks as she worked.
Old ones.
Thin, pale lines crisscrossing his ribs, barely visible unless you were looking for them. A faint circular scar near his shoulder that looked like an old bullet wound. A thicker, ropey line along his side that curved almost exactly where she'd once drawn Rheon's "mysterious old injury" seasons ago, back when she'd been inventing backstory in the dark.
Back when she hadn't known he existed.
Her throat closed.
"Is it bad?" he asked.
She blinked. "The wound?"
"The look on your face," he said. "You look like you're about to be sick. Or cry. Or both."
"Occupational hazard," she said weakly.
"Of an artist?" he asked.
"Of someone who keeps finding out she's not making things up," she said.
He went quiet.
She finished cleaning, hands moving on autopilot now. Fresh gauze. New bandage, wrapped carefully around his torso, not too tight.
"Lean forward a little," she said.
He did, and she reached behind him, bringing the bandage around his back. The motion brought them closer than they'd been since the courthouse, her chest almost brushing his knee, her head near his shoulder. She smelled faint cologne, sweat, antiseptic, something underneath that wasn't quite anything she could name.
Her wrist buzzed like a live wire.
She tied off the bandage with a small, neat knot at his side.
"There," she said softly. "Done."
Her hands hovered, stupid and useless, above his skin.
He caught her wrist.
Not hard.
Just enough to stop the shaking she hadn't realized had started.
His thumb brushed the inside of her arm, right over the binding.
It flared.
A sharp ache shot up her arm and flared across her own ribs for a second, phantom pain mirroring the line of his wound.
She sucked in a breath.
He felt it too.
His eyes narrowed.
"Does it hurt you when I'm injured?" he asked.
She swallowed. "It… echoes," she said. "Only when I touch it. I think. I haven't exactly had a sample size before today."
He held on a second longer, as if testing the pulse there, then slowly let go.
She slipped her hands back into her lap, gloves creaking faintly.
For a moment they just looked at each other.
The city glowed behind him, a halo of neon and glass.
The bandage around his torso was stark white against his skin.
"So," he said quietly. "Did you enjoy writing it?"
The question hit her harder than any accusation.
Her throat worked.
"That's not fair," she whispered.
"I didn't ask if it was fair," he said. "I asked if you enjoyed it."
She almost said no.
The word rose automatically, defensive, ready.
Then she remembered the way it had felt last night—anger fizzing under her skin, the satisfaction of putting the knife in his side on the screen. The ugly little rush when she'd hit Publish and watched the comments explode.
"I thought I would," she said, honest and hoarse. "That was the point. I was angry and scared and tired of you making rules about how I get to dream, so I put you in the crosshairs where I could control it. I wanted it to hurt. On the page."
"And did it?" he asked.
"Yes," she said. "For about ten minutes."
"And now?" he said.
She swallowed hard.
"Now I feel like I shoved you toward a bus and then watched you get hit," she said. "Even if the bus was already coming, even if I didn't start it, even if you would have stepped into the road anyway… I… I gave it a storyboard."
Her vision blurred.
She blinked hard, refusing to let tears fall on his bed.
"I didn't want this," she said. "Not like this. Not… real."
He watched her, his face unreadable.
She braced for anger.
For coldness.
For the precise, scalpel-mean words he used on enemies and incompetent executives.
Instead, he said, "Good."
She stared. "Good?"
"If you'd said you enjoyed it," he said quietly, "we'd have a very different problem."
A shaky, disbelieving laugh escaped her. "I'm glad this qualifies as 'not a problem' in your world," she said.
"It qualifies as… human," he said. "You were angry. You expressed it in the only safe place you thought you had. The current did… what it always does. It found a pattern. That's not the same thing as you sitting here and taking pleasure in my blood."
Her gaze dropped to the faint stain on his skin where she'd missed a smear.
"I still feel like it's on me," she said.
He exhaled slowly.
"You're not the first artist whose pages have lined up with my injuries," he said.
She looked up sharply. "You keep saying that."
"Because it's true," he said. "Old songs. Old stories. Old paintings. The pack has always had someone sketching shadows before they fall. Usually they don't know us personally. Usually they don't live in the tower."
"That makes it better?" she asked.
"It makes it… familiar," he said.
He studied her face.
"But you are different," he added.
Her skin prickled. "How?"
"You're not just drawing the shape of things," he said. "You're catching the angle. The timing. The… emphasis."
"Congratulations," she muttered. "I'm very precise at traumatizing us both."
A ghost of a smile touched his mouth and faded.
"In the chapter," he said, "how many attackers did you draw?"
"Four," she said. "Two in front, one behind, one on the side."
"There were five," he said.
"Then it didn't match," she said quickly, seizing on the difference like a life raft. "See? Close, but—"
"You drew one in the reflection," he interrupted. "In the first panel. In the glass. You didn't give them a body. Just eyes."
Her stomach dropped.
She remembered, suddenly, the tiny detail she'd added in a rush last night—eyes in the glass, multiple layers of danger, because one of the early comments had once complained she didn't use reflections enough.
She hadn't counted that one as an attacker.
He had.
"You shouldn't remember my panels that well," she said faintly.
"I remember patterns," he said. "It's my job."
He leaned back slightly, wincing as the bandage protested.
"Where did you put the cameras?" he asked.
She frowned. "What?"
"In the episode," he said. "The security cameras. You mentioned them glitching. Where were they?"
"In the hallway," she said slowly. "One at the corner, one above the emergency exit. They flickered right before the ambush. It's—"
"Exactly where ours were looped," he said. "You saw the real placements once, in person, weeks ago. In a different corridor. You shouldn't have known which ones they'd hit today."
Her heart hammered.
"I guessed," she said weakly.
He shook his head once.
"How did you know they'd come through the maintenance stairwell?" he asked.
She stared.
"I didn't—"
"In the panel where Rheon hears the door," he said, "you drew the hinges on the left. That door opens inward, from a narrower frame. You drew the maintenance door, not the main exit. You've never been on that floor."
She felt slightly sick.
"You're extrapolating," she said. "You're reading too much into—"
"Am I?" he asked softly.
His gaze was too sharp, stripping away defensive layers.
"How did you know one of them would go for my back?" he continued. "You couldn't have seen that in the chapter's POV. But you drew the bruise higher than the main wound. The half-moon. The bite."
"I didn't draw that," she protested. "I never—"
She broke off.
Because she had.
Not in the main spread.
In a tiny sketch in the margin—a quick scribble of teeth in a shoulder, something she'd almost erased and then left because it "looked cool."
The memory hit her like cold water.
He saw her realize it.
"This isn't fanfiction anymore, Amara," he said quietly. "This isn't you throwing darts in the dark and getting lucky. This is… more."
"More what?" she whispered.
"More than coincidence," he said. "More than inspiration. More than… just art."
The words hung between them:
More than just an artist.
She swallowed, throat tight.
"What are you saying?" she asked. "That I'm cursed? Blessed? Your personal doom cartoonist?"
One corner of his mouth twitched despite everything.
"In the old stories," he said slowly, "there were always one or two in each generation who could… see the undercurrent. Not just feel it. Not just be pushed by it. See it. Translate it. When they drew, or sang, or wrote, the pack paid attention."
"Seers," she said, tasting the word like something too big for her mouth.
"Not exactly," he said. "Not passive. Not just watching. They shaped how we understood what was coming. The angle. The… emphasis."
"Storytellers," she said softly.
"Threaders," he said. "Ink-bearers. Names change. Function doesn't."
"And you think I'm one of those," she said.
"I think you might be something… adjacent," he said. "We don't usually bind them to us with contracts. We don't usually get sued by them either."
Her laugh came out harsh. "So I'm a legal modern seer with a content schedule," she said. "Great. Love that."
His eyes were steady on hers.
"You are not just some girl who drew the wrong man and got unlucky," he said. "You are tied to something that has been pulling at us since long before Valtor Group had a logo."
"That's not comforting," she said.
"It's not meant to be," he said. "It's meant to be… accurate."
Her gloved hands twisted in her lap.
"So what," she said. "You keep me here as your… ink-bearer? Your story shield? Your… what did Zara call it, 'subtitles' for the pack?"
"There are worse fates," he said.
"I can think of a few better ones," she shot back.
Silence stretched.
Then, almost reluctantly, he said, "I brought you in to control a problem. Contain it. Turn a liability into an asset. That was the logic."
"And now?" she asked.
"Now I'm starting to think," he said slowly, "that I didn't pull you in at all."
A chill ran down her spine.
"What do you mean?" she whispered.
"I think the current wanted you closer," he said. "With us. Where it could use you properly."
"So I was… always going to end up here?" she asked. "With you. With this."
"Maybe not here, exactly," he said. "Maybe not me. But in someone's tower. In someone's den. In someone's story."
Her chest hurt.
She wanted to be furious.
At fate. At magic. At him. At herself.
Instead she just felt tired.
"I hate it," she said quietly.
"I know," he said.
He didn't apologize.
She hadn't really expected him to.
"Does it scare you?" he asked, after a beat.
Her laugh was small and sharp. "That my spite doodles get people knifed in real life?" she said. "Yes, Lucian. It scares me."
"Good," he said again. "Hold on to that. It's when it stops scaring you that we're in real danger."
He pushed himself up slightly, testing the bandage. His face tightened, but he stayed upright.
"You did well," he said. "With the dressing."
"I watched a lot of medical dramas," she said. "And panicked enough in real life to compensate."
He studied her for another moment.
"You should sleep," he said. "You look like you're about to fall over."
"You should lie down," she retorted. "You look like you got jumped in a stairwell."
"Accurate," he said.
"Try not to do it again," she said. "I'm running out of emotional bandwidth for matching injuries."
He almost smiled.
"Stay out of my corridors," he said. "I'll try to stay out of your spite arcs."
It wasn't a truce.
But it was… something.
She peeled off the gloves, dropping them into the small bin Ms. Kwan had left. Her fingers looked pale and thin, the binding on her wrist a faint, angry outline under the skin.
As she stood, her knees wobbled.
He reached out without thinking and touched her elbow, steadying her.
The contact was brief.
Enough.
"Goodnight, Ms. Reyes," he said.
"Goodnight, Mr. Valtor," she replied.
She made it to the hallway before her vision blurred again.
In the safety of the empty corridor, she pressed her back against the wall and slid down until she was sitting on the carpet, breathing hard.
Her hands—her traitor, storyteller, ink-bearer hands—rested in her lap.
There was no blood on the gloves now.
But when she closed her eyes, she saw red anyway.
Not gushing.
Not cinematic.
Just a long, precise line along a man's side.
Exactly where she'd put it.
Exactly where the world had followed.
"Blood on her hands," she whispered to herself, the phrase feeling like a chapter title and an accusation.
Her wrist buzzed once, low and insistent.
She didn't know if it was agreement or warning.
She pushed herself to her feet and walked back to the studio.
The tablet waited on the desk, black screen reflecting her face.
When she touched it, it woke up on the drafts page.
A blank file sat at the top.
Untitled.
For a moment she just stared at it.
Then, with fingers that still remembered the heat of his skin and the drag of gauze over a wound she hadn't created but had definitely helped call into focus, she renamed the file.
Ep125 – Blood on Her Hands
Her chest tightened.
She didn't open it.
Not yet.
She turned off the screen, the title echoing in her mind.
If she really was more than just an artist, if the current really had its claws in her, then every line from here on out had to be drawn with the knowledge that someone, somewhere, might bleed where she put the ink.
Lucian was right about one thing.
As long as it scared her, there was hope.
She just didn't know if hope would be enough to keep her story—and his—on the page, instead of written in flesh.