The next morning, Amara bargained with the universe.
"Just filler," she muttered, padding barefoot into the studio. "No fights, no blood, no haunted moon. You get doodles, I get a not-exploding brain. Deal?"
The bond around her wrist hummed, neither agreeing nor refusing, just… there.
Lucian had left early. She'd felt him go in that odd, subtle way she was starting to recognize: a lightening in the tower, the absence of his presence like a missing weight on the other end of a rope.
On her desk, the new stylus waited.
It buzzed faintly when she picked it up, syncing with the throb under her skin.
"Morning, parasite," she said.
Her headache from the day before hadn't vanished completely, but it had faded into a manageable pressure. Enough to think. Enough to draw without feeling like she was bargaining with a god every time she opened a new canvas.
Per their uneasy truce, she started small.
Not a chapter.
Just a chibi.
On the screen, she sketched a tiny Rheon in a suit three sizes too big, tie knotted all wrong, scowling as a cartoon coffee cup pursued him with homicidal intent. The bond warmed, amused.
"See?" she said. "Harmless."
By midmorning, the tower slid into one of its rare almost-normal rhythms.
Lucian was in some meeting across town. Zara was off at a "networking event" that suspiciously involved neon lighting and bass drops. Adrien haunted the penthouse like a particularly well-dressed ghost, drifting between phone calls and snack raids.
The incident with the drink happened just before lunch.
Amara was in the kitchen, refilling her water, when Adrien barreled in, mid-call, Bluetooth in his ear, waving one hand.
"…no, you can't just put 'miscellaneous' on a binding clause, that's not—"
He broke off, skidding to a halt as Ms. Kwan thrust a glass into his free hand.
"Hydrate," she ordered. "If you faint on my floor again, I'm charging you rent."
"It was one time," he protested, taking a gulp. "And it was dramatic."
Amara leaned against the counter, watching, the scene already arranging itself into panels in her head. Adrien, gesturing, Ms. Kwan unimpressed, the tower humming quietly behind them.
He turned to emphasize a point, drink in hand.
That was when Lucian walked in.
He'd returned without her noticing, tie loosened, phone still in his hand. He stopped in the doorway, mid-sentence.
"—no, I don't care what they—"
Adrien pivoted.
His elbow clipped the glass.
It tipped.
Amara watched, uselessly transfixed, as water arced through the air in slow motion, catching the light, heading straight for the front of Lucian's shirt and the phone in his hand.
There was a collective inhale.
The water hit.
Lucian reacted fast enough to save the phone, jerking it out of range, but not fast enough to save his shirt. Cold splashed across his chest, spotting dark down the front in an irregular, comic-patterned stain.
Adrien froze, face horror-struck.
"Ah," he said. "There it is. The moment my will to live exits my body."
Ms. Kwan muttered something about "children" and grabbed a towel.
Lucian closed his eyes, jaw tight, then opened them again, directing a look at Adrien that could have curdled steel.
"Call you back," he said into the phone, hanging up before the person on the other end could respond.
Then he looked at his dripping shirt.
Then at Adrien.
"I," Adrien said meekly, "am so sorry?"
Amara bit back a laugh. Her brain had already framed the entire thing: the arc, the face, the towel, the unimpressed housekeeper, the drenched CEO.
"This is going in a blooper," she said without thinking.
Lucian's eyes flicked toward her.
"If you must," he said dryly, accepting the towel.
Adrien perked up. "Oh, definitely," he said. "Make me look glamorous. Tragic. Heroic, even."
"You look like a golden retriever who ran into a glass door," Ms. Kwan said.
"Perfect," Adrien said. "Draw that."
—
She did.
Back in the studio, she opened a new mini-episode.
Not part of the main arc—just a bonus panel set. WebVerse loved those: behind-the-scenes glimpses, silly domestic moments. Readers ate them up, and they were supposed to be safe. No cosmic binding lines. No mortal peril.
Just a spilled drink.
She sketched fast, the memory still fresh.
Panel one: Adrien gesturing with a glass, expression animated, Ms. Kwan deadpan in the background.
Panel two: Lucian in the doorway, mid-sentence, eyebrows lifting.
Panel three: the glass tipping, water frozen mid-arc, the angle perfect, droplets catching light.
Panel four: full impact, splash across Rheon's suit (she stylized Lucian's real-world shirt into Rheon's fictional wardrobe without thinking), his face contorted in a deadpan of course expression.
She gave Adrien chibi sparkles of shame.
It made her snort.
The bond watched, warm and quiet.
Safe, she told herself.
Even if her doodles could nudge reality, this had already happened. It was over. She wasn't scripting the future; she was memeing the past.
When she finished, she threw a quick overlay of tones on, slapped a silly title at the top—Bonus Ep – Alpha vs. Gravity—and hit Publish.
Confetti.
Ping.
Within minutes, comments began to roll in.
@boardroomtrash: LMAOOO ADRIEN MY BELOVED CLUMSY KING
@moondrunk: CEO GETS BAPTIZED BY TAP WATER 💦
@inkbearerstan: i love seeing the 'monsters' do normal stupid things 🥹
She was still smiling when she noticed the typo.
In panel three, she'd written "Attorny At Splash" on Adrien's mug instead of "Attorney At Splash." An in-joke she'd loved now had a missing "e."
Normally she'd let it go. Fans gleefully hunted for her typos; it was practically a fandom sport.
Today, her brain felt too raw for that.
Fine, she thought. Micro-edit. That's harmless.
She opened the WebVerse creator dashboard and tapped into the bonus episode.
WebVerse had rolled out a new feature recently—one she'd barely used. Live panel edits without pulling the whole episode down. Just swap the image, auto-update, no big announcement.
She selected panel three, zoomed in on the mug, corrected the lettering, and re-exported.
As her cursor hovered over Update Panel, the bond on her wrist tightened.
A warning.
She hesitated.
"It's a letter," she told it. "Not destiny."
She clicked.
The change went through in a second.
Typo fixed, mug corrected, comments none the wiser.
The bond eased.
Nothing else happened.
She let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding.
"See?" she said. "Harmless. You need to chill."
Her headache stayed a dull throb.
Her stomach didn't flip.
For a blissful ten minutes, she let herself believe that maybe, just maybe, there were things small enough to slip under the current's radar.
Then she decided to fix the splash.
That was the second typo, in her opinion.
Not in spelling—composition.
The angle was off. In the panel, the water hit Rheon more violently than it had hit Lucian. She'd exaggerated it for comedy, but now, looking at it, the line of the splash felt wrong. Too punishing. Meaner than the real moment.
She watched the panel a long time, stylus hovering.
In the kitchen, Lucian had gotten wet. Slightly. Annoyed, not humiliated.
In her drawing, the splash looked like a bucket.
Something twisted in her chest.
He was already bleeding to match her panels; did she really need to soak him harder on the page?
"Fine," she muttered. "We soften it. Little mercy. That's allowed."
She opened panel four in her editor.
Zoomed in on the arc of water.
With careful strokes, she redrew the splash.
Less direct hit, more near-miss. Several droplets still catching him, but the bulk of the water splashing across the floor, onto his shoes, onto Adrien's already ruined dignity.
She adjusted Rheon's expression accordingly.
Less deadpan, more startled-annoyed.
She stared at the new version.
Better.
Kinder.
She exported the revised panel and loaded it into the WebVerse editor.
Her wrist prickled.
"Don't," she told it. "It already happened. I'm not changing the world; I'm changing a punchline."
She hovered over Update Panel.
The stylus tip touched the glass.
She clicked.
—
The world… skipped.
That was the only word her brain supplied for it.
For half a second, everything went white—not the burning white of pain, not the blank white of paper, but a flat, in-between white, as if the universe's buffer screen had popped up.
Sound cut out.
The hum of the air system.
The distant traffic.
The soft buzz of her tablet.
Gone.
Her stomach dropped, as if someone had yanked the floor down a few inches.
She tried to breathe.
Air didn't move.
Her heart hammered.
The bond on her wrist flared, a hot ring of pressure.
Then the white folded inward, like a page turning.
She was in the kitchen.
Not standing there, not fully. More like her awareness was hovering just above her own shoulder, watching a memory from inside its own skin.
Adrien.
Glass.
Ms. Kwan.
Lucian in the doorway.
Déjà vu punched her so hard she nearly gagged.
"Oh no," she whispered—or thought she did. Her mouth didn't move. The version of her in the scene didn't flinch.
Adrien turned.
The glass tipped.
Water arced through the air.
Only it didn't.
Not the same way.
Amara watched the stream of water hesitate—no, wobble—ever so slightly, the line of its trajectory stuttering. For a split second, she saw both versions overlaid like tracing paper.
In one, the arc struck Lucian's shirt dead-center, splattering up his tie.
In the other, the stream curved lower, clipping the edge of his jacket and mostly hitting the floor.
The two paths flickered.
Spill.
Near-miss.
Spill.
Near-miss.
Her lungs burned.
She wanted to reach out, to grab the glass, to do anything, but she was locked in place, forced to watch the frame redraw itself.
The bond pulsed: once, twice.
The ink chose.
The water slapped the floor.
Some droplets spotted Lucian's trousers, darkening the fabric at the knee. His shirt caught maybe three drops, nowhere near the soaking from before.
The phone remained safely away, as in the original.
Adrien made the same horrified face, but smaller. Ms. Kwan's sigh was the same. Lucian's jaw tightened the same way.
Their words barely changed.
Adrien still babbled apologies.
Ms. Kwan still fetched a towel.
Lucian still hung up his call, voice clipped.
It was the same scene.
But not.
As the towel dabbed at a lesser stain, the white folded back.
Sound roared in.
She was in her studio again, tablet in her lap, stylus in her hand, Update successful notification blinking at the top of the screen.
Her lungs dragged in air with a ragged gasp.
The headache slammed back for a beat, sharper, then receded to a dull roar.
Her vision doubled.
The room spun.
She dropped the stylus.
Her chest heaved, like she'd sprinted up twenty flights of stairs.
Sweat prickled at her hairline.
She heard her own heartbeat in her ears.
For a long, panicked minute, she sat perfectly still, afraid that if she moved, the world would tear again.
Eventually the spin eased.
Her breathing slowed.
She swallowed, throat dry.
"That didn't happen," she whispered.
But it had.
Twice.
Her memory held both versions now, layered.
In one, Lucian's shirt had been badly stained, water running down his tie. Ms. Kwan had tutted louder. Adrien had fussed with napkins in a flurry of guilt.
In the other—now—the stain had been minor, quickly dealt with, the incident brushed off faster.
Which one was real?
Both, her gut said.
Her wrist throbbed.
She stood on shaky legs and stumbled out of the studio.
The kitchen looked the same as always.
Ms. Kwan wiped down the counter.
Adrien was gone, no doubt wreaking havoc elsewhere.
No towel lay crumpled on the floor. No damp shirt hung over a chair.
Lucian's voice drifted faintly from down the hall, crisp, mid-conversation. If he'd changed clothes, she had no way of knowing. Maybe he'd come and gone. Maybe—
"Mei," Amara croaked.
Ms. Kwan glanced up. "Yes?"
"Earlier," Amara said. "The… water."
Ms. Kwan raised an eyebrow. "Adrien's little performance?"
"How bad was it?" Amara asked, gripping the doorframe. "On his shirt, I mean. Lucian's."
Ms. Kwan considered. "Minor," she said. "Annoying. Trousers got the worst of it. Five minutes with a towel, that was all."
"Are you sure?" Amara pressed. "You didn't… take his shirt to soak? Or complain about 'children drenching your clean laundry'?"
Ms. Kwan frowned slightly. "No," she said. "It was hardly a disaster. Why?"
Amara's mouth went dry.
"No reason," she lied. "Just… thought it was worse."
"Must have been your angle," Ms. Kwan said. "Everything looks bigger when you're the one standing in the splash zone."
Amara managed a weak smile and retreated.
Back in the studio, she pulled up the security app Lucian had once shown her—the limited version he'd allowed her to have, restricted to "non-sensitive" feeds. The kitchen was one of them, rewinding thirty-six hours on a scrub bar.
Her hand shook as she scrolled back.
There.
Adrien.
Glass.
Lucian in the doorway.
She hit play.
The scene unfurled.
The glass tipped.
The water hit the floor.
Not the shirt.
Her stomach flipped.
She scrubbed back, watching again, searching for any sign of a previous version—ghost-stains, double motions, glitches. There were none. The recording showed only the near-miss reality.
If she hadn't been there, she would have believed it.
She was there.
In both.
Her head spun.
She pressed fingers to her temples, breathing fast.
"Okay," she whispered. "Okay, okay, okay."
She'd drawn the spill the way she remembered it: hitting his chest.
Then she'd edited it to a near-miss.
And reality had… adjusted.
Not the whole day.
Not even a full minute.
Just a few seconds.
A single arc of water.
Rewritten.
The cost of that rewrite still throbbed behind her eyes.
Her limbs felt heavy, like she'd run a marathon while underwater.
Each breath scraped her throat.
It felt like… paying.
With herself.
For the story's correction.
The bond hummed, weirdly calm.
She stared at the tablet.
Her hand crept toward it, then stopped.
A terrible thought unfolded, slow and awful.
The ambush.
Her spiteful panel.
The angle of the knife.
The size of the wound.
The way reality had bent to match it, carving his skin in the shape of her anger.
And now this.
A clumsy drink edited into a near-miss.
Not just scripting forward.
Rewinding back.
"Can I undo you?" she whispered to the empty room, thinking of Lucian's side, of the bandage she'd wrapped, of the scarf of scar tissue underneath.
Her eyes flicked to the chapter list.
Episode 124: Ambush in the Glass Tower.
Her finger hovered over it.
"Don't be stupid," she told herself. "It was days ago. Bigger stakes. If a glass of water cost you this much, what would changing a wound do?"
Her lungs still felt too tight.
Her forehead still throbbed.
She imagined hitting Edit Panel on the frame where the knife sliced across Rheon's side. Redrawing it shallower. Off to the side. Less deep. Less angled.
She imagined the world skipping again.
This time not to a kitchen, but to a corridor painted in panic and blood.
She imagined choosing.
Her hand shook.
She pulled it back.
"Not yet," she whispered.
Not like this.
Not alone.
She closed the editor.
The bond pulsed once, like approval—or relief.
She couldn't tell.
What she could tell was that she felt wrung out.
As if something had reached into her and pulled a thread too fast, unraveling a piece of her to pay for a tiny mercy.
She sank into her chair.
Her breath still came shorter than it should.
Her heart still beat too hard.
But under all of that, a cold, clinical realization clicked into place:
She could revise.
Not just foreshadow.
Not just predict.
She could edit.
She could rewind.
A little.
At a cost.
The idea made her dizzy with horror and a small, awful flicker of hope.
All those times she'd wished she could erase a line, redraw a moment, take back a panel before it went live… the universe had apparently decided to grant that wish.
In the most cursed way possible.
Her pen wasn't just a script.
It was an editor.
And every revision took something out of her.
She thought of Lucian's face when she'd bandaged him.
Of the way his hand had closed over her wrist in the study.
Of the knife-wound panel, still live, still matched to his skin.
He'd said trying to cut the bond could kill her.
Apparently it had other, subtler ways of doing the job.
"I am not telling you about this yet," she told the air, meaning him. "You will turn me into a patch machine."
The bond radiated a quiet, amused skepticism.
She set the tablet down and stood, legs unsteady.
She made it to the bathroom before the next wave hit.
Not pain this time.
Not exactly.
Just… emptiness.
Like someone had scooped out a ladleful of her and left the hollow echo behind.
She gripped the sink, knuckles white, and stared at herself.
Her pupils looked blown.
Her skin was too pale.
A line of ink was smeared along the side of her hand, where she'd unconsciously brushed the stylus while drawing.
The sight of it made her chest constrict.
She scrubbed it off under cold water, watching black spiral down the drain.
When she looked up again, her reflection seemed… double.
For a split second, she saw two versions of herself: one with her current memories, one with only the near-miss version of the spill, no recollection of a soaked shirt at all.
Then the image snapped back together.
She stumbled away from the mirror.
The world righted itself.
"I can't keep this to myself," she muttered.
But she didn't move toward the door.
Didn't call Lucian.
Didn't pull out her phone.
She sank onto the edge of the bed instead, hugging her arms around herself, and tried to sort her thoughts into something that wouldn't sound like madness.
If she told him, he'd do what he always did with dangerous data: catalog it, strategize around it, weaponize it.
He'd ask her—order her—to edit things.
Small things at first.
Then bigger.
He'd stand at her shoulder while she paid with dizziness and short breaths and pieces of herself, and he'd file away every reaction for future use.
Not because he was cruel.
Because he was him.
An alpha whose life was now, unmistakably, subject to her pen.
She shuddered.
"What if he asks me to erase the wound?" she whispered. "What if I try and something worse fills the gap?"
Because that was the other thing.
Stories hated blank spaces.
If she redrew the knife line, the universe wouldn't just leave an empty panel.
It would find another way to fill it.
Another threat.
Another scar.
Maybe bigger.
Maybe on someone else.
Her head ached.
Her chest hurt.
The bond hummed, neither pushing nor pulling, just sitting there like a patient predator.
She lay back slowly, staring at the ceiling.
She could feel the day's events pressing against her skull.
The spilled drink.
The near-miss.
The white buffer of the world between versions.
The dizzy aftermath.
"I don't know the rules yet," she told the silence. "I'm not rewriting anyone until I do."
The universe didn't disagree.
It didn't comfort her either.
She closed her eyes.
Behind her eyelids, the moon appeared again.
Not red.
Not white.
Half-and-half.
One side blank and bright; the other smeared with ink that seemed to be drying, cracking at the edges.
Between them, a thin line ran down the middle.
Like a seam.
Like an edit.
Her wrist throbbed on that beat.
She opened her eyes, heart racing.
The room was the same.
Her tablet sat dark on the desk.
She could still feel the lightness where the water had changed its path.
"I can't stop drawing," she whispered. "I can't let myself be turned off. And now I can't even trust erasing."
For someone whose entire life had been built on drafting and redrafting, on fixing lines and tweaking panels, on edits as salvation…
That felt like the worst penalty yet.
Silence hurt.
Now she knew that revision did too.
Rewriting reality— even a little—meant slicing into herself.
She didn't know yet which pain she feared more.
The ache of holding the story back—
Or the cost of letting it rewind.