Up close, the logo on the glass door looked like a brand you'd press into someone's skin.
VALTOR GROUP – LEGAL
Adrien held the door open with one hand, the gesture easy, almost gentlemanly. His other hand still held her letter, folded neatly along the original crease lines.
"Right this way, Ms. Reyes," he said.
His voice had the same quality as the email: polite, controlled, neutral enough to be read as friendly or terrifying depending on context.
Today, Amara's brain picked terrifying.
The conference room beyond the door was not the burning boardroom from her panels, but it was close enough to feel like an uncolored version waiting for her to shade it in. A long, dark table stretched toward a wall of uninterrupted glass. The city sprawled beyond it, softened by a thin veil of cloud. Leather chairs lined either side of the table, too many for the three people in the room.
Two of those people she didn't recognize: a woman in a charcoal sheath dress with a tablet in front of her, and a man in a navy suit whose suit probably cost more than Amara's entire apartment. Both looked up when she entered. Both wore expressions carefully arranged somewhere between curiosity and mild boredom.
The third person—
Was not in the room.
Her muscles, wound tight, stuttered on that realization. Somewhere, she had expected to feel his presence instantly, like walking into a room with a bonfire lit at the far end.
Instead, there was only expensive silence and the faint hum of the building's air system.
Adrien gestured to a chair halfway down the table. "Please, have a seat."
She crossed the room on legs that didn't feel entirely hers. The carpet under her flats was so thick her footsteps made no sound. When she pulled the chair back, it slid smoothly, well-oiled.
"Water?" Adrien asked, already reaching for a glass jug.
"Yes," she said, because it sounded like something a functioning adult would say.
He poured, set a glass near her hand, then took a seat closer to the head of the table. The woman in the sheath dress tapped something on her tablet. The man in navy flipped open a folder.
No one spoke.
Amara's heart pounded so loudly she was half-convinced the room could hear it.
"So," she began, then stopped, because saying so in front of people like this felt like starting a speech with yo.
Adrien spared her the effort. "Thank you for coming on such short notice, Ms. Reyes," he said. "We appreciate your cooperation."
"Appreciate" did a lot of work in that sentence.
"This is Ms. Kwan, from Compliance," he continued, nodding to the woman. "And Mr. Douglass, from External Affairs."
They both inclined their heads. Neither offered their hands. She wondered if they did that under different circumstances, when the person on the other side of the table wasn't potentially a legal problem disguised as an artist.
"And, of course," Adrien said, "you are here because of a particular… overlap between your work and Valtor Group's CEO."
He said it lightly, as if "overlap" were a polite coincidence and not You drew my boss as a monster to a few hundred thousand people.
"I—" She cleared her throat. Patel's script floated up through her fear. I understand your concern. I did not intend… "I know the email sounded bad," she said carefully. "I just want to say upfront that I never meant to target Mr. Valtor personally. I'm a—"
The door behind her clicked.
The air changed before the sound fully registered.
It was subtle. A shift in temperature that wasn't actually temperature. The way the other two at the table went even stiller. The way Adrien's shoulders straightened a fraction, as if an invisible line had tightened between him and whoever had entered.
Amara didn't turn right away. Her fingers clenched around her glass instead, cold water sloshing dangerously near the rim.
She heard footsteps—unhurried, confident. The sound of a chair moving at the head of the table.
"Don't let me interrupt," a voice said.
She'd heard that voice before on short clips in news articles, talking about quarterly earnings and market expansions. Through her laptop speakers, it had sounded distant, a soundbite filed under rich man says something slick.
In person, it was lower. Warmer. And edged with something sharp, like a knife left in the sun.
Amara turned.
Lucian Valtor looked almost nothing like her drawings—and exactly like them.
He was taller than she'd mentally accounted for, height amplified by the cut of his suit and the way he held himself. Not slouched, not exaggerated. Just… aligned, as if gravity itself deferred to his spine.
His hair was shorter than in some photos she'd seen, brushed back neatly, dark against the pale sharpness of his face. Clean shave. Cheekbones you could hang a lawsuit on. Skin that the world had clearly not allowed fine lines to touch yet.
He wasn't bleeding. There was no fire.
But the bones of him were the same ones she had sketched a hundred times.
Most importantly: the scar.
It was faint in this light, just a pale crescent at the corner of his mouth, a thin line that tugged his lip slightly when he spoke, like a permanent half-unfinished smirk. Shorter than she'd drawn it originally. She had exaggerated it, made it more dramatic, because fiction loved visible damage.
Reality had been subtler.
Now, sitting at the head of the table, he rested one hand on the polished wood.
A ring gleamed there: silver, simple but heavy-looking. A dark stone set in the center.
Her stomach flipped. She had given her Alpha a ring like that. A mark of power, she'd called it in notes no one else ever saw, an heirloom of the pack. She hadn't known why she'd chosen that design.
Apparently, her subconscious had.
His eyes flicked to her.
They were not wolf-gold.
They were gray. Cool, clear gray, the kind of color that in a different context might have been soft—like worn T-shirts or rain clouds. In his face, it read as steel. Observing. Calculating.
"Ms. Reyes," he said. "I see you found us."
A part of her mind noted inanely that his voice matched the expensive paper: smooth, heavy, meant to leave an impression.
"I had directions," she managed. "On the letter."
A corner of his mouth twitched, not quite amusement.
Adrien cleared his throat lightly. "Mr. Valtor, this is Amara Reyes, the creator of Alpha of the Boardroom. Ms. Reyes, Mr. Lucian Valtor."
As if she didn't know.
As if she hadn't drawn a man with his face kneeling on broken glass under moonlight.
Lucian's gaze didn't leave hers. "So you are the one turning me into a… wolf on the internet."
He said "wolf" like it tasted half amusing, half offensive.
Heat crawled up her neck. "It's… fiction," she said.
He leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers, the exact gesture she'd put into dozens of panels. Her heart thudded.
"Is it?" he asked mildly. "From what my team tells me, the resemblance is quite specific."
Adrien slid a printed page across the table—one of her panels, enlarged. It was the Episode 67 splash: Alpha standing in the burning boardroom, shirt torn, scar stark at the corner of his mouth, ring catching the firelight.
Beside it, neatly printed, was a photo from a business magazine: Lucian in a suit, standing at a similar angle in front of his glass window, city lights behind him, ring visible on his finger.
The side-by-side comparison stole her breath for a second even though she'd already seen similar memes online. Here, in the sterile light of this room, it looked less like fan fun and more like evidence pinned to a courtroom board.
"I'm going to repeat this question once," Lucian said, still calm. "How did you arrive at this particular design?"
"I…" Patel's mental script tried to line up in her head, but her brain felt like someone had knocked the words off the shelf. "I like drawing office dramas," she blurted, then winced internally. Smooth. "I mean, strong, dramatic characters. I watched a lot of shows. Movies. You see a lot of CEOs frame their windows like that. The scar—" She gestured vaguely to her own mouth, then dropped her hand. "I thought it looked cool."
"Cool," he repeated, voice flat.
"And the name?" Ms. Kwan from Compliance spoke up for the first time, her tone precise. "Lucian Valt. That's not a coincidence?"
Amara dragged air into her lungs, feeling it catch halfway.
"I… like Latin," she said. "Lucian—the sound of it. Valt as in… vault. Like something locked up, you know? It wasn't meant to be you."
Lucian's eyes did something almost imperceptible then.
They hardened—not in the way someone's expression sharpens when they're angry, but in the way metal might cool and set. The temperature in the room didn't change, but she felt colder.
"Ms. Reyes," he said, voice losing the pretense of casual. "Let me be perfectly clear. I have lived most of my adult life under cameras. My face, my habits, my mannerisms are not obscure. It would be very easy, for example, to use photographs of me as a reference for a character and later claim it was all subconscious."
"I didn't," she said, fingers tightening around the water glass. "I've never—maybe I saw you in passing on a headline once, but I didn't sit there with your photo and trace your jaw. I swear."
He watched her for a beat that stretched too long.
She had drawn those eyes cold before. She'd given her Alpha plenty of panels where he watched enemies, or lovers, or prey with that same stillness. But cartoon eyes, no matter how well rendered, didn't do this.
Didn't make you feel like you were being weighed the way butcher scales weighed meat.
"You expect me to believe," he said finally, "that you—who make a living studying faces, bodies, composition—just happened to conjure a character with my silhouette, my scar, my ring, my primary place of work, and my first name, and then put him in situations that portray him as a violent, morally dubious creature, all without any intention to use my existing public image?"
"I don't make a living," she said, before she could stop herself. The words slipped out, thin and bitter. "I make barely enough to not die. And no, I didn't 'conjure' you. I conjured a bastard in a suit because that's what people like reading. I gave him a scar because broken pretty things sell. If my brain stole your face from somewhere, it did it without telling me. But I did not sit down and say, 'today I will ruin Lucian Valtor's PR for fun.' I didn't know you existed."
Silence followed that. Heavy. The kind that made you want to fill it with babble just to hear something.
She bit down on her tongue and looked at the table instead.
His hand was still resting there, near the printed panel. Up close, the ring's stone wasn't black like she'd thought in photos. It was a very deep green, with veins of something lighter catching the light when he moved. The design was slightly different from what she'd drawn: more angular, less ornate.
She realized she was staring and shifted her gaze back up.
Lucian's eyes met hers again, and for one fractional second, something flickered through them.
Not recognition. Not anger.
A flash of color that had no business being there.
Gold.
It could have been a trick of the lights. A reflection from the table. A glitch in her terror-fogged vision.
Except she'd spent months drawing that particular shade. She knew what it looked like when it ate through gray.
Amara's spine went very cold.
Then it was gone. His eyes were cool gray again, steady.
"Stalking can take many forms," he said softly. "Sometimes it's physical. Sometimes it's digital. Sometimes it's… creative."
"I'm not stalking you," she said, heat flooding back into her cheeks. "I don't even follow you on anything. I draw wolves, Mr. Valtor. Not you."
"Wolves," he repeated. One corner of his mouth lifted. It didn't reach his eyes. "Yes. Let's talk about that. In your story, this… Alpha—" He said the word like it left a bad taste. "—is presented as a supernatural creature. A werewolf. He runs a corporation that bears a suspicious resemblance to mine. He is alternately glorified and condemned. Your readers strongly associate him with me. Do you understand how that might be considered damaging?"
"He's a villain," she said. "They're supposed to condemn him. That's the point. And glorify him a little, because people like villains. He's not a documentary. Nobody actually thinks you sprout claws at night."
Adrien coughed softly. "Some of the fan discourse online suggests otherwise," he said. "There are threads speculating about your… 'inhuman focus' and joking that you must be some kind of beast. People are connecting your fiction to Mr. Valtor's public image in ways that could cross lines."
"Mr. Hale." Lucian's voice cut neatly through the air. "Thank you."
Adrien inclined his head and shut up.
Lucian leaned forward slightly, forearms resting on the table now, bringing him closer to Amara's end of the world.
"There are legal questions here," he said. "My team will address them. Use of likeness. Potential defamation. The fact that you are currently profiting, however modestly, from a work that appears to appropriate my image."
The room's edges blurred. Her body felt too hot and too cold at once.
"But what I am most interested in," he continued, "is why."
"Why… what?" she asked hoarsely.
"Why me," he said. "Why this fantasy. Why this combination of details. If you are not, as you claim, deliberately mining my life, then something else is happening that I don't like, and I need to understand it."
Her mind flashed to dreams of burning boardrooms, of wolves under city lights, of eyes that glowed where no one could see.
She swallowed that down.
"I needed a monster," she said, because if she said anything else, she'd start sounding insane in a different way. "And the world keeps handing us rich men in towers. I stitched one together. If it looks too much like you, I'm sorry. It wasn't personal."
"It is now," he said.
The quiet finality in his tone landed like a stone on the table between them.
Ms. Kwan shifted her tablet, the faint click of the case loud in the silence. "Mr. Valtor," she said, "we should perhaps outline our expectations, so Ms. Reyes understands the gravity of the situation."
"By all means," he said, eyes still on Amara.
Kwan cleared her throat. "Ms. Reyes, our initial position is as follows. We require you to immediately cease distribution of any episodes of your comic that contain the character resembling Mr. Valtor, and to remove existing episodes from public access while this matter is under review. We also request you refrain from creating new content featuring that character, or any substantially similar, pending further discussion."
Her ears rang. "You want me to… delete my comic."
"Take it down," Kwan corrected. "Not necessarily destroy all files. Yet."
The yet made Amara's stomach lurch.
Douglass, the External Affairs man, finally spoke, voice smooth. "In addition," he said, "we may ask for a public clarification to your readers that your work is purely fictional and not based on any real individuals, to mitigate potential reputational harm."
A public clarification. A post that might as well say: Hey, everyone, sorry for drawing the rich guy with claws and blood. Please don't be mad at me while I sink back into obscurity.
Patel's instructions pressed against the inside of her skull: Don't agree to anything on the spot. Don't sign.
"I…" She gripped the glass hard enough her knuckles ached. "I can't answer that right now. I need to speak to my counsel."
Kwan's eyebrows lifted. "Your… counsel?"
Amara swallowed. "I consulted a lawyer. Before coming. I was told not to make any agreements without… without running them by him."
Something in Adrien's expression flickered—an almost invisible note of respect. Douglass looked mildly annoyed. Kwan's mouth flattened into a line.
Lucian, however, looked largely unaffected.
"Of course you did," he murmured. "Sensible."
He stood then, the motion smooth. The others followed suit a second later, like orbiting bodies adjusting to a central mass.
The sudden change in height made Amara's head swim. She pushed her chair back more slowly.
Lucian walked down the length of the table toward her, unhurried. Up close, his presence felt even more concentrated, as if the air around him had a different density. Not heavier, exactly. Just… more.
He stopped a comfortable distance away. Close enough that she could see the faint pulse at his throat. Close enough that she could smell something under the generic office air—expensive cologne with a sharp, fresh note.
Or maybe that was her imagination, too.
"Ms. Reyes," he said quietly, so that for a moment it felt like there was no one else in the room at all. "You have stepped very far into my world without permission. Whether you did so consciously or not is, at best, a mitigating detail."
Her palms dampened. "I didn't mean to—"
He held up a hand. The gesture was small, but it silenced her as effectively as if he'd snapped shackles on her words.
"I will give you this courtesy," he continued. "You may consult your lawyer. You may consider your options. But understand me clearly: if we do not reach an understanding that satisfies me, I will not hesitate to pursue every legal avenue available."
His gray eyes held hers, unblinking.
"And I am very good," he said softly, "at making problems disappear."
For a heartbeat—just one—the room seemed to tilt.
His pupils narrowed, not in the human way that comes with brighter light, but in a way she had only ever drawn: a thin ring of gray darkening around an inner circle that flashed molten, impossible gold.
She blinked, and they were normal again.
Maybe they had always been normal. Maybe her brain, steeped in wolves and fire, was projecting. Maybe.
He stepped back, the moment snapping.
"Adrien will be your point of contact," he said, voice returning to corporate smooth. "He will send formal documentation of our position by the end of the day. I suggest you act quickly, Ms. Reyes. The internet moves fast. So do reputations."
He inclined his head a fraction—less than a nod, more than dismissal.
The meeting was over.
She wasn't sure how she got back to the lobby.
One moment she was in the boardroom, the city a backdrop for a man who might as well have stepped out of her panels. The next she was in the elevator again, watching her reflection shake faintly in the mirrored walls, visitor badge crooked, hair slightly frizzy at the edges.
Her phone buzzed in her bag.
When she fished it out, two notifications waited:
[1 New Email: S. Patel & Associates]
[1 New Email: [email protected]]
The doors opened onto the ground floor with a soft chime.
She stepped out into the bright, polished lobby, throat tight, heart pounding.
Above her, the glass tower stretched into the sky. In her story, she had set it on fire with a swipe of her stylus. In reality, it loomed untouched, indifferent.
For the first time since she'd started drawing Alpha of the Boardroom, Amara Reyes felt like the monster in her story might not be the one on her tablet.
It might be the one who had just looked her in the eye, accused her of stalking, and promised—calmly, almost kindly—to crush her if she didn't play by his rules.