By noon, the internet had decided it owned her.
Amara sat at her desk in an old T-shirt and sweatpants, hair scraped into a knot with a pencil, watching comment bubbles multiply faster than she could read them. The app's notification dot might as well have been an alarm. Every time she cleared it, it came back angrier.
The newest top thread was a meme.
Someone had taken a panel from Episode 67—her Alpha standing in the burning boardroom—and slapped it next to a photograph of Lucian Valtor at a real press conference.
The caption read:
"Corporate Wolf: Canon vs IRL 🐺🔥"
Below it, the replies rolled in.
I can't unsee this help
author really woke up and chose LAWSUIT
she said 'what if I made defamation sexy'
lmao girl you're so brave I'd have a panic attack
Amara did, in fact, feel like she was having a very quiet panic attack.
Her spoon clinked against the edge of an untouched cereal bowl. The flakes had gone soggy an hour ago.
"Brave is one word for it," she muttered. "Stupid is another."
She flicked down, thumb moving automatically.
More memes. Someone had photoshopped wolf ears onto a photo of Lucian in a tux. Another had made a fake movie poster: ALPHA OF THE BOARDROOM – Starring Lucian Valtor (who doesn't know about this yet, please don't tell him).
Then came the sharper comments.
you're gonna get SUED lol
this is funny until his lawyers find it
as someone who works in law: oops
defamation speedrun any%
A new user chimed in:
That man is real, girl. And not the type who laughs about this stuff.
The words felt heavier than the others. Not joking, not dramatic. Just… factual.
Amara stared at them until the text fuzzed, then snapped the app closed.
Her home screen wallpaper greeted her: one of her older panels, Alpha Lucian standing at his window, city lights below him like a galaxy, expression unreadable. The version she'd drawn months ago, long before she'd ever seen Lucian Valtor's real face.
"My bad, okay?" she told his digital outline. "I wasn't trying to summon a billionaire."
The tablet on her desk pinged.
She switched to her email tab.
The inbox looked the way her sink usually did: overflowing and vaguely depressing. Newsletters she never read, client updates, discount codes from stores she never bought from.
And one new message at the top, in bold.
From:[email protected]
Subject:Notice regarding unauthorized depiction and defamation
Her mouth went dry.
For a moment she just… sat there. Staring at the subject line, feeling her pulse in places that weren't supposed to pulse: fingertips, ears, throat.
Then she forced herself to click.
The email opened with boring, terrifying professionalism.
Dear Ms. Reyes,
We are contacting you on behalf of Valtor Group and its Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Lucian Valtor. It has come to our attention that content you have created and distributed via the platform "WebVerse Comix" under the title "Alpha of the Boardroom" may contain an unauthorized depiction bearing strong resemblance to Mr. Valtor, and may constitute defamation and/or misuse of likeness under relevant law.
Her vision tunneled.
She skimmed down, catching fragments:
"cease and desist"
"immediate removal of specific content"
"potential legal action"
"kindly respond within 72 hours"
The tone was almost polite, which made it worse.
There was even a line at the end:
We would prefer to resolve this matter amicably.
Amicably. Like they were neighbors arguing about loud music, not a billionaire corporation emailing a girl who lived in a shoebox apartment where the bathroom door didn't close all the way.
Her phone started buzzing again on the desk. She jumped.
Caller ID: Landlord.
Of course.
She let it ring twice, then braced herself and answered.
"Hello?"
"Amara." His voice had that specific tightness that meant he was smiling in the way people do when they're not actually smiling. "I hope I'm not catching you at a bad time."
"No," she lied. "Just… working."
"I only called to remind you," he continued, "that the rent from last month is still outstanding."
"Yes, I know, I—"
"And this month is due tomorrow," he added, over her. "I have been patient, but I also have bills, you understand. I cannot let you slide again. If it is not paid by the end of the week, I will have to consider other options."
Other options. Eviction dressed in a polite shirt.
Her chest tightened until her ribs felt too small.
"I'm expecting a payment soon," she said, because she was always expecting a payment soon. "I can send you part of it tomorrow and the rest—"
"I need it in full, Miss Reyes." His tone softened a fraction. "I like you. You are quiet, you don't break things. But this is business."
Business. The same word the email had used: matter. Not life. Not home. Matters and business.
She swallowed hard. "I understand."
"Good." He sighed. "I hope we do not have to speak again about this. Have a nice day."
The line went dead.
Amara lowered the phone slowly, then set it down like it might explode.
The apartment seemed smaller than it had the night before. The walls closer. The ceiling lower. Even the window felt narrower, the strip of city outside reduced to a tight band of gray buildings and sky.
Her eyes slid back to the screen.
The email sat there, neatly spaced. No insults, no all caps, nothing that screamed. It didn't have to. It was the kind of message that let money and structure do the yelling.
A laugh slipped out of her, thin and sharp.
"Wow," she said to nobody. "Big day. Viral fame. Legal threat. Possible homelessness. Should have bought a cake."
She clicked reply, fingers hovering over the keyboard, then closed the window instead. She needed time to think—preferably without imagining Lucian Valtor himself reading her every word and frowning.
The icon for her comic script file blinked invitingly from the desktop.
Work.
That, at least, made sense.
She opened the draft for Episode 68. The thumbnail sketches stared back: more flames, more claws, a cliffhanger she'd thought was hilarious when she outlined it last week—now sitting there like an invitation for a lawsuit.
"This is fiction," she told herself firmly, picking up her stylus. "I don't know this man. He doesn't know me. There is a difference between inspired by and based on and—"
Her voice wobbled.
She bit her tongue, leaned in, and started cleaning up a panel line.
Her hand remembered how to move even while her brain skittered like a cornered mouse. She redrew Lucian's—no, the Alpha's—jaw from a slightly different angle. She softened the scar, shortened it by a millimeter. Changed the shape of his ring. Tweaked his hair.
Little things. Cosmetic surgery in ink.
Every few strokes, she caught herself glancing at the open browser tab with Lucian Valtor's image, and quickly alt-tabbed back to her canvas like she'd been caught doing something indecent.
"Totally different," she muttered, adding another shadow under his cheekbone. "Completely unrecognizable. Could be any murderous billionaire wolf."
The joke fell flat even in her own ears.
Anxiety didn't sit still. It crawled.
It crawled up from her stomach, where the landlord's words had settled; it crawled down from her skull, where the email subject line repeated in sterile, unforgiving font. It settled in the tendons of her drawing hand, making her strokes a little too stiff.
She zoomed out. The page looked fine. She zoomed in. All she saw were mistakes.
Another notification pinged on her phone.
You have 1 new email.
Her brain heard: You have 1 new problem.
She refused to look this time. Instead, she forced her focus onto the dialogue bubble hovering over Alpha's burning-amber eyes.
In the rough script, she'd written: "Let them come. I was born to be their nightmare."
She deleted it.
Her fingers hovered, then typed:
"Let them come. I've survived worse than humans with lawyers."
She stared at the line.
Slowly, helplessly, a laugh broke through her tight chest—real this time, startled and a little hysterical. She changed "lawyers" to "pitchforks" and then back again. The meta joke was too sharp; if anyone ever pulled those panels into a real courtroom, it would look bad.
Her stylus wobbled.
"Stop it," she told herself. "He's not going to see this. Billionaires have better things to do than read webcomics in the middle of the night."
Outside, someone slammed a car door. A dog barked twice. Life went on, indifferent.
On the screen, her werewolf CEO bled and smirked and defied fate, perfectly unconcerned with legal emails or rent or the very real man who shared his face.
Amara kept working, line over line, color over color, as if she could bury her anxiety beneath layers of digital paint.
But every so often, her gaze slid back to the minimised email icon glowing at the edge of the screen—waiting, patient.
And under the hum of her cheap desk lamp and the scratch of her stylus, another sound pulsed that she couldn't ignore:
The low, steady ticking of a countdown she hadn't started, but that was already running.