The door clicks again.
Amara startles, halfway between standing up and talking herself out of touching the tablet. For a second she thinks she imagined it—her nerves are frayed enough to hallucinate sounds now.
Then Lucian is back in the doorway.
He's still in the same black shirt, sleeves rolled, top buttons undone, but something in his face has changed. The cold Alpha mask is gone; what's left is… stripped down. Raw around the edges. Like he's already crossed a line in his head and now he's just catching his body up.
"I thought you left," she says. Her voice comes out too small in the big room.
"I did," he answers.
He shuts the door behind him with a soft finality that makes her palms sweat.
"Then you turned around?" she asks, trying for light and landing somewhere near hysterical.
He doesn't smile.
"Reality-bending confessions," he says, "should probably be met with something more than grounding and parental controls."
"That was already a lot," she mutters.
"I know." He studies her for a moment, like he's measuring how much more she can take. "But if we're going to do this honestly, it has to go both ways."
Her stomach drops.
"Oh," she says faintly. "You're going to tell me you're secretly three raccoons in a suit. That would actually make a lot of things make sense."
"Sit," he says.
The word has that Alpha weight again, but there's no bite in it this time. Just urgency.
She sinks back into her chair because her knees are unreliable anyway.
Lucian crosses the room slowly. Not the controlled prowl he uses in the boardroom, not the languid stride in public events. This is somewhere between: a man trying to remember how to move like a human while the thing under his skin paces.
He stops a few feet in front of her, far enough to give her space, close enough that she can see the faint stubble on his jaw, the tension in his shoulders.
"You know I run a company," he says. "You've made an entire viral series mocking my schedule."
"Affectionate mocking," she says automatically.
His mouth twitches. Briefly.
"You know the public version of me," he goes on. "Lucian Gray, CEO. Investor. Philanthropist. All those interviews you watched before you signed your contract."
She remembers watching him on her cracked laptop, framed by glass and city lights, answering questions with that cool, clean smile. She'd thought at the time he looked like a panther in a suit—beautiful, dangerous, bored.
"Yeah," she says. "I've seen the TED talk."
He nods once. "Here's what you don't know."
The air shifts.
It's not a glitch. It's not the muffled pop the world makes when she edits a panel. This is heavier, thicker. Pressure rolling off him like heat off asphalt.
He closes his eyes for a heartbeat.
When he opens them again, they're wrong.
Gold floods his irises, swallowing the brown. Not just a ring—full, molten gold from edge to edge, pupils narrowing to sharp, predatory slits. For a surreal second, the reflection of the skylight gleams in them like tiny moons.
Amara's breath catches.
"Okay," she whispers. "That's… new."
He doesn't look away.
Something ripples under his skin, a subtle, horrifyingly fascinating shift. The tendons in his neck stand out, muscles along his jaw tightening. The veins on the backs of his hands rise, his fingers flexing once like the bones are rearranging themselves.
He exhales, and the sound isn't entirely human.
It's lower. Rougher. A rumble riding underneath, like a growl buried in the shape of a man's sigh.
Then his canines lengthen.
It's not some dramatic movie snap where his entire mouth transforms. It's small—a flash of too-sharp white when his lips part. The two teeth are longer, pointed enough to slice skin without trying.
Her heart slams against her ribs.
"You—" She swallows, words tangling. "Okay, weird question, but… are you about to eat me?"
His brows lift, the tiniest shred of humor piercing the tension. "If I were, I wouldn't start with a partial demonstration."
"Oh, cool," she says, slightly too loud. "You do full demonstrations."
His shoulders roll, shirt stretching awkwardly across them for a moment as if something broader presses at the seams. His shadow on the floor warps, edges blurring into shapes that don't fully match his body.
He looks like Lucian wearing a Lucian-costume that's one size too small.
"Amara," he says.
"Yes," she squeaks.
"Look at me."
She forces herself to meet his gaze.
The gold isn't just a color; it feels like a presence, sharp and assessing. Every instinct in her body screams predator in big, flashing letters.
"This is what I am," he says quietly.
She tries to laugh and fails. "Insufferably intense?"
His lips curve, but only for a second.
"A werewolf," he says.
The word crashes through her brain like a drunk elephant.
For a second, all she can do is blink at him.
"Nope," she says finally. "Try again. You missed April Fools by several months."
"Amara."
He says her name like an anchor.
"Werewolves aren't real," she insists, grasping for the scaffolding of rationality. "They're… full-moon clichés the internet uses for fanfic and questionable kink memes."
He bares his teeth—not a smile, not a snarl. There's enough sharp white there to make every horror movie she's ever seen flash before her eyes.
"You are a girl," he says, voice even, "who can draw a line on a tablet and make the world obey. And you're telling me I'm the implausible part?"
She hates that he has a point.
She also hates that her brain has already started cataloguing the details she missed: the way he moves too quietly for someone his size, the way he can cross a room without she ever hearing his footsteps. The way his eyes sometimes catch light wrong. The way wolves in her panels have always felt too… accurate when she's drawn them.
Pieces click into place with a sickening inevitability.
"Zara," she says weakly. "Is she…?"
"A wolf," he confirms. "Born one. Loud about it, as you've probably noticed."
"And Adrien?"
Lucian's jaw tightens. "Turned. Later."
She stares at his hands. At the faint tremor in them as he holds the transformation half-checked.
"Can you… fully shift?" she asks, voice barely above a whisper.
He nods once. "Not here. Not yet. It's harder to stay halfway than it is to let it all out."
"Then why…?"
"Because if I show you everything," he says, "you might run. If I show you nothing, you have every right to think I'm lying. This is the middle ground."
She inhales shakily. "Okay. Fine. Hypothetically. Let's say I believe you. All those times I drew you with the stupid wolf ears in bonus comics…"
He huffs. "Accurate. Annoying, but accurate."
Her head spins.
"And the company?" she asks. "The skyscrapers, the boardrooms, the shareholders… Are they all secretly werewolves, too? Because I'm going to need you to tell me how HR handles full-moon scheduling."
"We're not allergic to sunlight," he says dryly. "And no, the entire corporation isn't wolves. That would be a disaster."
He drags a hand through his hair. The motion is jerky, like his muscles aren't entirely aligned with the gesture.
"Gray Holdings is a legitimate company," he says. "Real assets. Real employees. Real profit. It's also a cover."
"For what?" she asks, though she already knows the answer. The shape of it presses at the edges of her mind, matching too well with the arcs she's drawn.
"For my pack," he says. "For the territory we control. For the war we're fighting."
War.
The word settles heavy between them.
"The attacks in your comic," he continues, "the ambushes, the sabotage, the rival Alpha with the charming smile and a taste for blood—those weren't just dramatic plot beats. They're based on real events. Real losses."
Her stomach twists.
"But I made those up," she protests. "I thought… I thought I was just being overdramatic. Readers love carnage."
"You pulled from something," he says. "Maybe from the same place you pull your rewinds from. Maybe from the way the world bleeds into your panels whether you want it to or not." He shrugs one shoulder. "We were… impressed. And unnerved. At first."
"At first," she repeats. "Meaning…?"
"Meaning when your little webcomic started going viral," he says, "and random humans on the internet were sharing almost blow-by-blow recreations of pack incidents that never made the news, my wolves panicked."
"Understandable," she mutters.
"They wanted to shut you down," he goes on. "Scare you. Bribe you. Kill you, some of them."
Her breath stutters.
"Cool," she says faintly. "Love that my options were 'take the contract' or 'die for content.'"
"I didn't let them touch you," he says, and there's steel in it.
She clamps her mouth shut on the retort that wants to come out. This doesn't feel like the moment to poke the Alpha.
"Instead," he continues, "I set up a meeting. Indirectly, at first. Zara slid into your DMs."
"With a meme," Amara remembers. "A wolf meme."
"It worked," he says simply. "We brought you in. Offered you a contract. Gave you an official panel to draw on and a story to focus your… talent."
"And you let me keep posting," she says slowly. "Even when it made you look like the villain half the time."
His mouth twists. "Controlling the narrative is easier when you're one of the writers."
She thinks about all the arcs she's done: the rival pack painted in sleek black, the moral ambiguity of Lucian's choices, the way readers constantly argued in the comments about whether he was a monster or a martyr.
"You used my comic," she says, realization dawning. "As camouflage."
He inclines his head. "Partly. If humans saw something strange—heard a howl they couldn't explain, saw something on a dark street—they'd write it off as fans being weird. Viral marketing. ARG nonsense. We flooded the internet with just enough fake wolf content to drown the real."
"That's…" She hesitates. "Actually, that's kind of brilliant."
"Now who's complimenting my strategy?" he says dryly.
"But the attacks," she presses. "When I drew the ambush at the river, the warehouse fire, the rooftop fight—those… happened?"
"Some already had," he says. "Some hadn't. Not yet."
Her skin goes cold.
"So I was… predicting your war," she says. "Framing it in pretty panels for people to comment, 'omg I love the angst' under."
He flinches, just barely.
"Yes," he says. "And no. You weren't just predicting. You were… syncing. Locking in tracks that other people were already laying. We noticed when incidents in the field started matching your drafts down to the angle of the moon."
"Why didn't you tell me?" she explodes. "You just let me keep drawing, thinking I was being edgy, while my 'storyboards' were getting people hurt?"
"That's why we brought you in," he snaps back, some of his control cracking. "To keep you close. To monitor you. To understand what you are before someone else did."
"Well, congratulations," she spits. "You figured it out. I'm a walking spoiler account for your real-life war."
His shoulders rise and fall once. "It was more complicated than that," he says, voice low again. "Sometimes your panels gave us warnings we wouldn't have had otherwise. We rerouted patrols because of a sketch you posted at three in the morning. We avoided traps because Zara noticed you kept drawing the same alley with different victims."
She sways a little.
"So while I was stressing about deadlines," she says, "you were using my cliffhangers as intelligence."
"Yes."
"And you never thought to mention, 'hey, by the way, your fictional wolves are real and some of them work in accounting'?"
His eyes flash.
"We were going to tell you," he says. "Carefully. Slowly. After we understood more. Then the red moon prophecy happened."
She goes quiet.
Right. That.
"I had a choice," he says. "Tell you everything and risk you bolting, or… handle the immediate threat and hope we survived long enough to have this conversation later."
"And now we're having it," she says. "Because I admitted I've been messing with your reality like it's an Etch A Sketch?"
"Because you trusted me first," he corrects.
The words knock the wind out of her.
"I couldn't ask you to bare your throat," he says, "while I kept claws behind my back."
She stares at him.
"Is that a wolf proverb?" she asks weakly.
"Something like that."
Silence settles between them, thicker than before.
Her brain buzzes with too many questions, all jostling for first place.
"How many packs are there?" she blurts. "Is there like a global wolf Slack channel? Do you guys vote on Alpha of the Month?"
He actually laughs. It's short, rough, startled out of him.
"No global Slack," he says. "Too much risk of leaks. There are packs all over the world. Old ones, new ones, some that pretend to be biker gangs or security firms, some that live in the woods and pretend phones don't exist."
"And yours?" she asks.
He looks around the studio, as if the estate and the skyscrapers beyond are layered over the walls.
"We live in the cracks," he says. "Behind shell companies and subsidiaries. The city sees a corporate empire. My wolves see a network of safehouses, supply lines, territory."
"And your enemies?"
"Some wear suits like we do," he says. "Some wear fur more often. All of them would love to tear us apart. The attacks you draw? Those are just the pretty ones."
She swallows.
"And I've been broadcasting your weak points to millions of people," she says, feeling vaguely sick.
"Not exactly," he says. "We fed you some information. We also fed you disinformation. Let a few things play out differently on paper than on pavement. The enemy reads your comic too, you know."
Her jaw drops. "What?"
"Of course they do," he says. "It's free intel. If they think you're one of theirs, they'll look for messages in your work. Hidden signals. Leaves room for… misdirection."
She thinks of the comments she's seen from accounts with no profile pics, generic usernames, always a little too invested in battle logistics and territory maps.
"Oh my god," she whispers. "I've been running a propaganda machine and no one told me."
"That's… one way to put it," he says.
She rubs her face with both hands, fingers digging into her cheeks.
"This is insane," she mumbles through her palms. "I thought my biggest problem was shipping wars in the comments and the occasional plagiarism accusation. Now it's… actual wars."
Lucian's eyes soften slightly.
"Now," he says, "it's both."
She drops her hands.
"What do you expect from me?" she asks. "Now that I know. Do you want me to stop drawing? To keep drawing? To turn the comic into a recruitment poster?"
He shakes his head.
"I expect you to breathe," he says. "Tonight, at least. And to understand that you're not the only monster in the room."
She stiffens. "I'm not—"
"I don't mean that as an insult," he says. "You called yourself a threat, a freak, a danger. You're not wrong. But I'm not a shiny, innocent victim of your power either. I'm a man who can tear someone's throat out with his teeth and has, more than once."
Her stomach flips.
He holds her gaze, unflinching.
"I make decisions that get people killed," he says evenly. "On battlefields and in boardrooms. That's what Alphas do. That's what CEOs do, if they're being honest. The beast in me isn't just fur and claws. It's the part that looks at a map and chooses which dots live and which dots burn."
She searches his face, trying to see him the way others must: terrifying, unyielding, something to worship or fear.
"You scare me," she admits, voice barely audible.
"I should," he says. "You scare me too."
There's something almost like relief in saying it out loud, in naming the twin terrors between them.
"You bent time tonight," he says. "I half-shifted in your studio. We're past pretending this is a normal artist–client relationship."
"Yeah," she says. "Pretty sure my contract doesn't cover 'existential horror addendum.'"
"I'm having Legal draft a new clause," he says. "Section 13: In case of werewolves and timeline manipulation, all parties agree not to sue."
She snorts, then sobers.
"So where does this leave us?" she asks. "In a story sense."
He studies her.
"In a story sense," he says slowly, "we're standing on the first page of the act where both main characters finally know what the other one is."
"And then?" she presses.
"And then," he says, "we find out if they work together or destroy each other."
She hates that her heart skips at the first option.
"Lucian," she says quietly. "If your enemies know what I can do—"
"They will come for you," he finishes. "Every move we make from here on has to assume that. They already suspect something, because their plans keep… wobbling. Once they confirm, you're not just an artist. You're a prize."
She shivers.
"You said you'd protect me," she reminds him.
"I will," he answers, with an intensity that makes her believe him despite herself. "But to protect you, I need to know everything. No more secrets. No more pretending this is just content."
She nods slowly.
"Okay," she says. "No more secrets."
"We'll start tomorrow," he says. "War council plus… whatever you and I are. We loop in Zara and Adrien as far as necessary, no further. We lock down your devices. We strip your drafts for anything we don't want enemies seeing. And we figure out how to use your power without letting it use you."
She exhales. It sounds a little like a sob, a little like a laugh.
"That's… a lot," she says. "But okay."
Lucian's eyes dim slightly, gold receding around the edges, pupils rounding a little more. The air pressure eases as he lets the partial shift go, like a storm bank rolling back from the city.
"Amara," he says suddenly.
"Yeah?"
He hesitates.
"I'm sorry," he says. "For dragging you into this. Even if you were halfway here before I ever knew your name."
The apology scrapes something raw and hurting in her chest.
"I drew you before I met you," she says softly. "Maybe we were always headed here."
He huffs a breath. "I hate destiny."
"Same," she says.
They stand there in the moonlit studio, two impossible things sharing the same patch of floor, each a danger the other can't afford to lose.
Outside, somewhere in the sleeping city, a wolf howls.
Amara doesn't know if it's one of his or someone else's. She doesn't know if, right now, a rival Alpha is scrolling through her latest episode, looking for weaknesses between the lines.
She only knows that the story she thought she was telling has teeth now.
And that tomorrow, when she picks up her pen, every stroke will mean more than likes and comments.
Lucian looks up at the slice of sky, jaw tight.
"The war's been going on a long time," he says quietly. "Tonight, it got a new player."
He looks back down at her.
"And I don't think the enemy understands yet," he adds, "that the artist they've been underestimating is the one holding the eraser."
A chill runs down her spine.
For the first time, she doesn't know if that makes her want to run, or to draw.