The first time she cheated, it was over something stupid.
Not fate.
Not prophecies.
Not life-or-death battles between packs.
Stairs.
Amara was halfway down the marble staircase, wearing socks—because of course this palace of a house had cold, dramatic floors and she had no respect for friction—when her heel slipped on the edge of a step.
She pitched forward.
Her tablet flew. Her stomach dropped. For one frozen heartbeat she saw the future: her face smashing into the next step, teeth cracking, tablet shattering into glittering plastic.
Then the world tore.
It was tiny. A paper rip at the edge of hearing. Her vision jittered, like someone hit pause-play on reality.
And she was back at the top of that same step.
Her body staggered backward, breathless, hands clutching the banister. The tablet was still tucked under her arm. Her teeth were intact. No pain. No fall.
Just a ghost of impact echoing down her bones.
"Oh," she whispered.
She knew what she'd done even before she checked the tablet.
On the screen, in a quick-sketched panel she barely remembered drawing in her panic, there was a simple adjustment: her foot landing firmly on the step instead of slipping; a crooked little speech bubble above her own chibi head saying, "Careful, idiot."
She must have dragged her pen across the glass as she flailed, her brain reaching for the power before her mind caught up.
The panel shimmered faintly, then went still.
No headache. No nosebleed. Just a light pressure behind her eyes, like she'd stared at the sun for too long.
Harmless, she told herself, heart pounding. That was… fine. That was self-preservation. Even fate didn't want busted teeth.
She made it down the stairs very carefully the second time, fingers welded to the banister.
The second cheat was an accident, too.
Probably.
Amara sat in the kitchen nook later that morning, sipping coffee and scrolling through comments like she wasn't a walking, talking glitch in the universe.
The readers were wild as usual:
"Amara is definitely the true villain, change my mind."
"Lucian is so toxic I want ten more chapters."
"If they don't kiss by ch50 I'm rioting."
She snorted into her mug.
Footsteps clicked on tile. Zara flopped into the chair across from her in an oversized hoodie that probably cost more than Amara's old apartment.
"I'm stealing your toast," Zara said, already reaching.
"That's my breakfast," Amara protested weakly.
"Alpha's orders. The artist has to live on vibes and trauma alone."
Before Amara could yank the plate away, Zara's elbow clipped her mug. Hot coffee sloshed in slow-motion, arcing toward the girl's bare legs.
Amara didn't think. Her body flinched; her hand spasmed across the tablet lying on the table.
In one quick, messy line, she sketched the mug landing safely upright. No spill, no burn. Just a wobbly little drawing of a coffee cup with a triumphant "!" above it.
The air crackled.
For one split second, sound vanished. The hum of the fridge, the ticking of the wall clock—everything cut to silence. Zara's face blurred at the edges, like a low-res screenshot.
Then it all snapped back.
The mug thumped back onto the table, coffee sloshing but staying inside the cup.
Zara blinked. "Whoa. I swear that was about to—whatever." She shrugged and kept talking, already ranting about some influencer wolf-girl on HowlTok.
Amara stared at the mug.
Her heart tap-danced. That same pressure squeezed behind her eyes, then dissolved.
Okay. So little things didn't cost much. Like… microtransactions of karma.
Her stomach unclenched slowly.
"It's just… guardrails," she murmured to herself later, in the studio. "Not cheating. Guardrails."
Her reflection in the tablet glass lifted an eyebrow at her.
The third time, it wasn't an accident.
Lucian's voice floated faintly through the half-open door of his office as she walked past.
"…and if Q3 numbers dip again, we'll have to cut that branch completely."
There was that sharp, controlled edge to him. The one that made board members sweat and made her brain draw him with his tie loosened and shirt stained with someone else's blood.
She should've kept walking.
Instead she hesitated, hovering in the hallway outside like some kind of guilt-ridden ghost.
"I'm telling you, the leak didn't come from my team," someone inside protested. "We've tightened everything since—"
A different voice cut in. Adrien. Smooth as ever. "We'll need to review all digital access tied to the artist, too. If the enemy knows she can affect outcomes, they'll try to compromise her devices. With all respect, Alpha—"
"Leave Amara out of this," Lucian said, low and final.
The warmth that flickered in her chest at that—quick, dangerous—nearly made her step inside.
Instead she walked away on quiet feet.
By the time she reached the studio, her palms were sweaty. Her mind replayed the conversation, zeroing in on the words: numbers dip. Cut that branch.
Every time the pack made a "business decision," someone's life got rearranged. Someone lost their job. Maybe their house. Their sense of safety.
She sat down hard at her desk.
The tablet woke under her touch, showing the last unfinished panel: a generic cityscape, lights like teeth in the darkness.
Slowly, she opened a new layer.
"I'm not rewriting the market," she told the empty room. "That's… huge. Messy. Dangerous."
Her pen hovered.
"But maybe," she whispered, "I can make one call that stops someone from getting fired today."
She drew it small.
A tiny panel in the corner of the city scene: a faceless employee getting an unexpected email—Your position has been temporarily reassigned, not terminated—because a contract renewed, because a client decided not to bail last-minute.
She wrote the words: "Client extends deal by six months."
Her fingers tingled as the line settled.
The now-familiar glitch pressed against her ears: a muffled pop inside her skull, like her brain had a bad audio cable.
When it passed, she slumped back, panting softly.
A minute later, her phone buzzed.
Zara: omg you still awake?? Dad just texted Lucian, one of the "impossible" clients renewed their deal. He looks less murdery. Maybe he won't murder you this week. 🎉
Amara stared at the message.
The coincidence felt less and less like coincidence.
Her spine went cold and hot at the same time. Small fix. Tiny rewind. No visible disaster.
Far away, some employee had no idea that a girl in a borrowed T-shirt and messy bun had just redrawn a thread in their life.
Her pen spun slowly between her fingers.
"This is how every villain origin story starts," she told the tablet. "Just a bunch of tiny good intentions with no fine print."
The tablet did not argue.
Over the next few days, the tiny edits multiplied.
Nothing dramatic. Nothing that would make the moon bare its teeth.
Just… nudges.
She rewound a conversation with one of the junior wolves after she accidentally snapped at him from stress. In the first version, his ears had flattened, eyes dimming. In the second, she softened her words, added a strained joke. He left with a real smile.
She erased a humiliating moment where she'd tripped over her own shoelace in front of half the estate's staff, adjusting the panel so she caught herself on the wall instead of eating floor. Later, when she actually walked that hallway, her muscles skipped that clumsy misstep as if they remembered the better version.
She sketched a missed text reminder for her mom back in her old city, editing it so she replied instead of forgetting. The next day, her mom's relieved "Glad you're okay, this job sounds… weird but I trust you" voicemail made Amara's throat tight.
Each time, the world stuttered.
A blink too long. A frame dropped in reality's animation. A word half-said, then re-said.
Most people didn't notice. Humans' brains smoothed over the skips. Wolves were more sensitive—they frowned sometimes, pausing mid-step like they'd heard a distant echo—but life rolled on.
The cost was… manageable.
Mild nausea. A short wave of vertigo. Once, a nosebleed that stopped after a couple tissues.
Compared to the pain of rewriting the red-moon prophecy, these cheats were pennies.
"If the universe were that upset," she muttered one evening, sprawled on the studio floor with her tablet balanced on her knees, "you'd at least send a lightning bolt. Or a strongly worded email."
The moonlight spilling through the skylight said nothing.
Lucian noticed.
She should have expected that. His entire life was reading micro-shifts—stock markets, competitor behavior, the scent of lies on someone's skin.
The first sign came on a Tuesday.
They were in the glass-walled training room, watching a sparring match between two lower-ranked wolves. The metallic tang of sweat and the heavier musk of fur filled the air.
One of the fighters misjudged his footing near the edge of the mat. Amara saw the future in a flash: ankle twisting, bones cracking, weeks of limping.
Her pen was already in her hand, hidden behind her notebook.
A quick stroke: foot lands cleanly.
The air shivered.
The wolf's heel hit the mat. He wobbled, then recovered, lunging forward with a grin. No injury. No crack.
Lucian's head snapped toward her.
His eyes weren't gold. But they weren't fully human, either. They narrowed, faint lines appearing between his brows.
Amara pretended to be very interested in a doodle of a coffee cup in the margin.
Later, in a strategy meeting, she watched a pack elder reach for a folder that dropped in her earlier draft—spilling confidential papers onto the floor in front of the wrong set of eyes. This time, after a quick sketch, the elder adjusted his grip. The folder stayed shut.
Lucian's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
He glanced between the elder and Amara, slow and assessing.
She felt his gaze like heat on the side of her face.
That night at dinner, Zara watched a waiter almost collide with a tray of soup and gasped. The world flickered. The collision unfroze into a neat sidestep. Soup saved. Waiter spared. Zara laughed it off.
Lucian didn't.
He set his fork down and stared at the table as if listening to something only he could hear. His wolf sensing a hitch in the heartbeat of the house.
By the end of the week, the estate felt like a scratched CD. The occasional skip, the tiniest repeat. A glass that was on the edge of a counter, then wasn't. A sentence that re-started mid-word.
"Did I already say that?" Zara frowned at breakfast on Friday, poking her cereal.
"Nope," Amara lied smoothly. Her headache pulsed in agreement.
Lucian's chair scraped back. He rose from the table without finishing his coffee.
"We're done for now," he said to no one in particular, voice too calm.
Amara's stomach knotted.
He cornered her the next night.
Literally.
The studio had become her favorite place in the estate—a high-ceilinged room with a massive skylight and shelves lined with sketchbooks, reference books, and fancy art supplies she didn't dare touch yet.
She thought she was alone.
The only sound was the scratch of her pen and the occasional tired sigh. On the tablet screen, a chibi version of Lucian scowled at a stack of paperwork in a bonus comic she'd promised readers.
She was mid-panel when the air changed.
Not in the glitch way. In the wolf way.
Pressure rolled into the room first, like storm fronts do, followed by the quiet click of the door closing.
"Amara."
Her hand jerked. A line of ink sliced across chibi-Lucian's forehead, giving him a cartoon scar.
She slowly lifted her head.
Lucian leaned against the closed door, arms folded across his chest. He'd lost the suit jacket somewhere, leaving him in a black dress shirt rolled at the sleeves. The top buttons were undone, exposing just enough collarbone to make her brain short-circuit.
His expression, though, was pure Alpha. Flat, controlled, eyes darkened to deep amber.
"Hey," she tried, voice too bright. "If you're here for bonus comics, I have a very cursed doodle to show you—"
"Don't." The word snapped through the room like a trap.
Her mouth shut with an audible click.
He pushed off the door and crossed the room in a few long strides. He didn't grab her, didn't loom, not exactly—but he was close enough that she could feel his body heat, smell the clean spice of his soap mixed with something wild beneath.
He reached past her, and for a second she flinched, expecting him to seize her tablet.
Instead he pressed a button on the side and killed the screen.
The studio plunged into a softer dim, lit only by the pale wash of moonlight through the skylight.
"We need to talk," he said quietly.
"Historically," she said, heart racing, "those are never the words you want to hear from anyone who has lawyers on speed dial."
No smile. Not even an eye-twitch.
"Lucian," she tried again, gentler, "what's—"
"What did you do?" he interrupted.
The question hung in the air between them.
Her throat worked. "I… drew bonus chibis. I regret the proportions—"
He leaned down, bracing one hand on the edge of the desk beside her tablet. The motion caged her without touching her. His voice dropped.
"Don't lie to me."
The wolf in him thickened his tone, something primal wrapping around the words. Her own instincts flared—fear, yes, but something else, something that recognized him on a level deeper than logic.
Her pulse thundered in her ears.
"I've felt it," he continued. "For days."
"What exactly?" she whispered.
His gaze searched her face like he could peel back her excuses and see the panels she'd drawn underneath.
"The world," he said slowly, "stuttering."
He spoke the word she'd been trying not to think.
"Moments repeating. Edges of things…doubling. A step taken, then untaken. A decision starting one way, then sliding another. My wolves feel it too. They flinch at nothing. They smell the ghost of something that almost happened and didn't." His jaw flexed. "That is not how reality is supposed to feel."
Her fingers dug into the seat of her chair to keep them from shaking.
He angled his head, eyes narrowing further. "At first I thought it was the prophecy's death throes. Or the enemy's artist learning new tricks." His gaze dropped briefly to her wrist, where the faint silver pattern of her mark hid under her skin. "But it's you, isn't it?"
"Lucian—"
"How many times," he asked, voice soft but dangerous, "have you rewound my world without telling me?"
Air lodged in her lungs.
Every tiny fix replayed in her mind: stairs, coffee, folder, conversation, bus. Names she didn't know, lives she'd brushed with the tip of her pen.
Her tongue felt thick.
"I—" she started, then stopped.
The moonlight carved sharp lines along his cheekbones. His hand clenched once on the desk, knuckles whitening.
He leaned in that last inch, close enough that she could see the ring of gold igniting in his eyes.
"Tell me what you've done, Amara."