Morning came like bad lighting.
No dramatic sunrise, no cleansing brightness—just a gray, tired wash of light leaking in around the blackout curtains, making the room look like a half-finished sketch someone forgot to color.
Amara woke up feeling like she'd been run over by a plot twist.
Her head throbbed dully, the kind of ache that lived behind her eyes and pulsed every time she thought about last night. Her throat was raw from yelling. Her chest… well. Her chest felt like someone had scribbled over her ribs with too many emotions and not enough erasers.
Mate.
Prisoner.
Not a prisoner.
We'll see.
She dragged herself out of bed on autopilot. Shower. Clothes. Hoodie that still smelled faintly like Zara, because fighting destiny went down easier in neon cotton.
Her tablet sat on the desk where she'd left it, black screen reflecting her face back at her: pillow-creased, hollow-eyed, hair doing its own upsetting fanfic.
She didn't touch it.
If she started the day by drawing, she'd either weaponize the episode schedule or redraw herself into a hole in the floor. Neither felt like a healthy breakfast choice.
Her body moved toward the door before her brain fully approved the decision.
Coffee first. Then crisis management.
The kitchen was already occupied.
Zara sat cross-legged on the counter, because of course she did, in an oversized T-shirt that said BITE ME in glitter letters. She was eating cereal straight from the box and scrolling on her phone, hair in a lopsided bun held together with what might have been a pen.
"Morning," Zara said, like it wasn't at all weird that Amara had almost escaped the building last night.
Amara made a noncommittal noise and beelined for the coffee machine, clinging to the rituals she understood: mug, button, wait, pour. Easy. Mechanical. No "mate" clauses.
"You look like you time-traveled through a blender," Zara observed.
"Thanks," Amara muttered, not turning around.
"Your episode comments are insane today, by the way," Zara went on, swinging her legs. "Half of them think Lucian is secretly the villain, half think he's secretly the love interest, and one unhinged person wrote an essay about how you're clearly the god of the universe."
"Cool," Amara said faintly. "Maybe they can take my shift."
She felt Zara's eyes on the back of her neck. The bond to Lucian hummed faintly like background static; this was something else—pack attention, friend radar.
"So," Zara said, too casually. "I heard you tried to sprint your way out of a fortified skyscraper at two in the morning."
Amara stiffened.
"Your guards snitched," she said, pouring coffee with more force than necessary.
"They're not my guards," Zara said. "They're my dad's. And also yours, now, apparently." She hopped off the counter, came to lean on the opposite side of the island. "Are you okay?"
No.
Yes.
Absolutely not.
Kind of.
"I don't like locked doors," Amara said, which was technically true and also left out basically everything.
Zara's expression softened.
"Yeah," she said. "We noticed."
Amara took a sip of coffee. It burned her tongue. Good. At least one kind of pain she could identify.
"You know he freaked out, right?" Zara said. "He pretended to be all calm Alpha about it when he called security, but his heart rate was like, ridiculous."
Amara tried not to care about that. Failed.
"He's very attached to not letting me die," she said. "We had a fight about it."
"I know," Zara said. "The walls are not as soundproof as everyone thinks. Adrien owes me fifty bucks; he bet you'd throw something."
"I didn't," Amara said.
"Your words," Zara said, "were the thrown objects."
That pulled the ghost of a smile from her.
"Look," Zara continued, growing serious again, "I get why you ran. I also get why he stopped you. You two are like—" she wiggled her fingers helplessly "—nuclear magnets or something. But this?" She gestured vaguely around them. "This cold war? It's going to kill you faster than any enemy."
Amara stared into her mug.
"I don't know how to not fight him," she admitted quietly. "He keeps saying words like mate and destiny and making decisions over my head. Every instinct I have goes feral."
"Yeah," Zara said. "He has that effect on people."
She was quiet for a beat, then added, "You know you can make demands too, right? It doesn't have to be all him declaring vows and you reacting. You can set terms."
Terms.
The word dropped into Amara's tired brain and made a small, tidy ripple. Not a fight. Not surrender. Terms.
She thought of last night: of the rooftop and the stairwell, of the way she'd thrown herself against the walls of this life like a bird against glass.
She could keep doing that. She could bounce until she broke.
Or—she could stop hitting and start negotiating.
Slowly, a different kind of plan formed.
It wasn't escape.
It was… structure.
"Zara?" she said.
"Yeah?"
"Is your Alpha awake?"
Zara snorted. "He pretends he doesn't wake up when your heart rate spikes, but yes. He's up. Probably brooding into a second cup of coffee by now."
"Can you… tell him I want a meeting?" Amara asked. "In the studio. With his human brain on, not the wolf one."
Zara's eyes lit with something very like relief.
"Oh my god," she said. "Yes. I can absolutely do that. Should I tell him to bring spreadsheets? He loves spreadsheets."
"Tell him to bring honesty," Amara said. "That'll be harder."
Zara's smile faded, replaced with a more careful one.
"I'll tell him," she said. "And… hey." She bumped Amara's shoulder gently. "I'm on your side, okay? Whatever terms you come up with."
Amara swallowed.
"Thanks," she said.
Zara's gaze flicked to her left wrist, where a faint red mark still lingered from the guard's grip.
"Make him earn it," she said. "The trust. Make it hurt a little."
A spark of wickedness stirred in Amara's chest.
"Oh," she said. "I intend to."
The studio was where this version of the war had started.
It seemed fitting that it became their war room.
Amara tidied without really thinking about it, stacking stray sketchbooks, straightening empty coffee cups. The familiar clutter of pens and screens and scribbled notes grounded her. This room was hers. Whatever wolves prowled the rest of the estate, here she was the one with the teeth.
She dragged the big drafting table away from the wall a little, giving it space in the center of the room like an altar—or a battlefield.
Her tablet lay in the middle, still dark.
By the time Lucian appeared in the doorway, she was ready enough not to flinch.
He paused on the threshold like he always did, as if respecting the invisible line between his territory and hers.
He looked marginally better than last night, in the way that a hurricane's aftermath looks better than the hurricane: still wreckage, just less motion. Dark T-shirt, dark jeans. No suit armor. His hair was damp, like he'd showered the night off and failed to scrub the bond out with it.
"Zara said you wanted to talk," he said.
"Yeah," Amara answered. "Come in. Close the door."
He obeyed, crossing the room with that too-quiet wolf grace, pulling the door shut behind him. The click sounded different this time. Less trap, more… boundary.
He studied the table, the way she'd arranged it like a makeshift conference setup.
"Should I be worried?" he asked. "It looks like you're about to fire me."
"Not yet," she said. "Sit."
He pulled out the high stool opposite hers and sat, forearms resting on the table. The tablet between them might as well have been a bomb.
For a moment, they just looked at each other.
Last night's fight sat between them, sharp-edged and unprocessed. The word mate prowled at the edges of Amara's awareness. The word monster sat behind his eyes.
She took a breath.
"I don't want to do that again," she said quietly.
His jaw flexed.
"Try to leave in the middle of the night?" he asked.
"Explode on each other until we both almost do something we can't take back," she said. "Running blind and slamming into walls is… exhausting. And it doesn't actually make me any less trapped. Or you any less unbearable."
One corner of his mouth twitched. Briefly.
"Noted," he said.
She made herself hold his gaze.
"I'm not saying I forgive you," she said. "For the doors. Or the secrets. Or the whole 'by the way, we're cosmically entangled' bomb. I'm still angry. I'm probably going to be angry for a while."
"I'd worry if you weren't," he said.
"But." She exhaled. "I don't want to be stupid, either. Me fighting you blindly, you trying to protect me blindly—those don't cancel each other out. They just make us both easier to hit."
He went very still.
"You want to stop fighting me," he said slowly.
"No," she corrected. "I want to stop fighting blind. There's a difference."
She placed her palms flat on the table, on either side of the tablet.
"I want a truce," she said. "With terms."
His eyes flickered, interest sparking under the exhaustion.
"Terms," he repeated.
"Yes." She swallowed, organizing the thoughts that had been spiraling all morning. "Here's the thing: like it or not, our messes are tangled now. My comic. Your war. My power. Your pack. Me pretending I can just walk away and post cute wolf memes on the internet while people are literally using my panels as tactical guides? That's not going to work. And you pretending you can keep me in the dark 'for my own good' while the enemy reads my episodes like weather reports isn't going to work either."
He didn't argue.
"That night on the balcony," she continued, "we did something that worked. For a minute. We treated my power like a lab experiment. You made parameters. I complained. We both watched the results. Nobody died."
"True," he said.
"So," she said, heart hammering, "I'm proposing we get back to that. But bigger. More honest. Less… you making all the rules and me having to break them to survive."
His gaze sharpened.
"What does that look like?" he asked.
She tapped the tablet with one fingertip, then took it back like it was hot.
"I will help you," she said. The words tasted strange. Heavy. "With the comic. With the… fate stuff. I will use what I see, what I feel, to help you avoid certain dangers. I'll modify episodes, delay arcs, amplify red herrings, whatever we decide together is smart. I'll stop doing secret rewinds in stairwells and lobbies."
His eyes narrowed.
"In exchange," she continued before he could interrupt, "you stop leaving me blind. No more 'we'll tell her later' about things that can literally kill me. No more hiding threats that are already circling me. No more sending me into rooms or scenes without context when you know someone in there wants to use me as a bargaining chip."
He was silent.
She pushed on.
"I am already in this war, Lucian," she said, voice tight. "You dragged me into the building. The universe dragged me into your bond. My power dragged me into prophecy. The least you can do is hand me a map."
His hands curled into loose fists on the table.
"I'd rather you stayed off the battlefield entirely," he said.
"You can't do that," she said. "Every time I post, I'm in it. Every time someone in the comments drops coordinates like a joke, I'm in it. Every time a rival Alpha reads between my panels, I'm in it. Ignoring that doesn't make it less real, it just makes me easier to hit."
He watched her for a long beat.
"And you think," he said, "that seeing the whole board will make you safer."
"I think seeing the whole board," she said, "will make my choices less accidentally catastrophic. If I know there's a real ambush at the river on Friday and I've also got a river ambush scheduled for Tuesday's episode, I can tweak the details so the enemy preps for the wrong river. Or the wrong time. Or the wrong target. If I know which pack is hitting which warehouse, I can stop unconsciously painting a perfect diagram for them."
He looked down at the tablet, then back at her.
"You're asking for access," he said. "Intel. Briefings. The kind of information we give lieutenants. Not… artists."
"Then stop treating me like just an artist," she said. "Or just a mate. Or just a liability. I'm a walking narrative problem. Use me properly or stop pretending you're protecting me."
His lips pressed into a thin line at mate, but he didn't correct her.
"And in return for this access," he said slowly, "you moderate the comic. Use it more… strategically."
She nodded.
"With conditions," she said. "I'm not turning it into blatant propaganda. Readers aren't stupid. If suddenly every episode is 'Wow, the Alpha is morally flawless and his enemies are just misunderstood losers,' they'll bail. And if I start drawing exactly what you tell me to, no questions asked, I lose the one place I still feel like myself."
A muscle in his cheek jumped, but he inclined his head.
"That's fair," he said.
"I'll help you avoid obvious disasters," she said. "I'll flag episodes that line up too closely with real plans. I'll lean arcs to create noise where you need noise. I'll stop 'predicting' things that will get people killed because I didn't know they were real. But I need you to stop treating my life like a twist you can spring on me at the last second."
His brows drew together.
"You think I like surprising you with danger?" he asked.
"I think you keep trying to protect me with half-truths," she said. "And half-truths get fate-artists killed."
That landed.
He exhaled slowly, looking away for a second at the skylight. The sky was washed-out blue today, the moon a faint ghost behind it.
"I don't like the idea of you anywhere near strategy meetings," he said. "Of you seeing the worst of what we do."
"I already see it," she said. "You send it to me as reference photos."
His mouth twisted.
"Also," she added, because she wasn't done yet, "if you want me to stop using my power in secret, you have to be in the room when we talk about how it works. Not just as an Alpha, but as someone who gets off on spreadsheets."
He blinked. "I do not—"
"You color-code your calendar," she said. "I've seen it. You have a whole column for 'threat mitigation'."
He looked personally attacked.
"Fine," he said. "We'll… make a system."
"Exactly," she said, tapping the tablet again. "Rules. Categories. Levels of interference. Things I can nudge without breaking anything. Things I must never touch unless someone is literally about to die. We figure out where the line is between 'helpful rewrite' and 'catastrophic butterfly effect'."
His gaze sharpened with the unmistakable glint of a man who lived for frameworks and flowcharts.
"And in exchange," she repeated, "you give me full transparency on anything that involves my work, my power, or my life. If you're using the comic to mislead enemies, you tell me. If you're planning a raid on a place that looks suspiciously like a set I just drew, you tell me. If there's a bounty on my head, you tell me."
His eyes flashed gold at that.
"There is no bounty on your head," he said, voice low.
"Great," she said. "If that changes, I expect a calendar invite."
Silence.
For a moment, the only sound was the faint hum of the building and Lily, the AC vent ghost, clicking somewhere above them.
Finally, Lucian spoke.
"You're right," he said, reluctantly. "I can't keep you safe by keeping you stupid. Not when the enemy already knows more about you than you know about them."
She blinked.
"I was prepared for more arguing," she admitted.
"Oh, I'm arguing with myself," he said dryly. "The part of me that wants you nowhere near a war council is currently punching the part that can see your strategic value in the face."
A tiny, involuntary smile tugged at her mouth.
"So," she said, carefully, "is that a yes?"
He stared at the tablet.
"At minimum," he said, "it's a… provisional yes."
She rolled her eyes. "Alpha for 'yes, but I hate it.'"
"Yes, but I hate it," he agreed.
They both exhaled, some invisible pressure shifting between them.
"Okay," she said, fingers finally sliding the tablet toward herself. "Then let's start small. Make a list."
His posture straightened almost automatically, habits kicking in.
"What kind of list?" he asked.
"Upcoming episodes," she said, unlocking the device. "Future plotlines I've rough-sketched. You tell me which ones accidentally line up with real operations or real threats. I'll mark them as red, yellow, green."
His brows rose.
"You're giving my war risks traffic lights," he said.
"You're welcome," she replied.
She opened her drafting app. Panels bloomed up: half-inked scenes, thumbnails, scribbled notes.
Lucian leaned in despite himself, shoulders brushing the air above the table. She tried not to notice how close he was. The bond hummed; she ignored it as best she could.
"Okay," she said, bringing up her schedule. "This is the next arc: 'Blood on the Skybridge.'"
He frowned. "Catchy."
"It tested well," she said. "Hero's trapped on a glass bridge between towers while enemies close in below. Lots of angst. Lots of shattered safety metaphors."
His jaw tightened.
"We have an actual skybridge between our holding in Midtown and the neutral venue," he said slowly. "We're supposed to meet a rival Alpha there in two weeks."
She paused.
"…Yeah, okay, that's a big red," she said. She scribbled a virtual X across the arc title.
"Postponed," she muttered. "Or scrapped."
"That," Lucian said, pointing at the doodle of a wolf silhouette on the bridge, "looks uncomfortably like time trying to do my job for me."
"You're not that cinematic," she muttered.
He gave her a look; she coughed.
"Next," she said hastily. "'Warehouse Ashes.' Big set-piece. Explosion, betrayal, dramatic reveal in the burning—"
"No," he said immediately.
She blinked.
"You didn't even let me finish the summary," she protested.
"Because we have a warehouse op scheduled in three days," he said. "If your readers see a burning warehouse this week and my enemies see a burning warehouse on the map, they will connect dots you didn't intend to draw."
She sighed and slapped a big red X on that too.
"This hurts me artistically," she muttered. "The symbolism was fire."
"Write something else symbolic," he said. "Preferably one that doesn't match my insurance paperwork."
She shot him a glare, but the part of her that had proposed this truce took the wins.
"Okay," she said. "Red ones are episodes we delay or rewrite completely. Yellow ones are…?"
"Arcs that touch on real events but not directly," he said. "Things we can bend without breaking."
She nodded, scrolling further down.
"What about this one?" she asked. "'The Wolf at the Door.' Emotional, mostly. No big fights. Hero hears scratching at the door when she's trying to sleep, convinced it's an enemy, turns out to be a packmate checking she's okay."
"Yellow," he said, after a moment. "We have wolves doing night patrols near your door already. Readers seeing that won't change anything. One of them probably is scratching your door, the idiot."
She snorted. "I thought that was the plumbing."
"You're getting a deadbolt," he muttered.
"See?" she said. "This is the kind of intel I need. Tell me when the scratchy noises are wolves and when they're actual threats."
They fell into a rhythm.
She'd pull up a title and quick summary; he'd filter it through his internal map of the city's invisible war. Some arcs got green lights: a training montage here, a flashback there, emotional conversations by a lake that didn't exist anywhere real.
"This one's safe," he said of a quiet slice-of-life episode where the pack watched crappy movies and bickered over pizza toppings. "We need more nights like that anyway."
Some arcs went yellow: safe if tweaked. Remove a landmark here, change a time there, swap the identity of a traitor so the enemies reading wouldn't get ideas.
"This," he said, pointing at a panel where a side character bled out in a stairwell, "happened last year in a different building. Change the stairwell layout. And the outcome."
She hesitated.
"The outcome?" she asked.
His face didn't change.
"The real version of that scene," he said, "still wakes three of my wolves up at night. They don't need to see it replayed panel-perfect on their phones."
Her chest tightened.
"Green for survival, then," she said softly, adding a note. "Same tension, different ending."
His gaze flicked to her face. For a second, gratitude cracked through the Alpha-control.
"Thank you," he said.
They worked like that for almost an hour.
Plotlines piled up like files on a table. Traffic lights glowed in her notes. The comic schedule slowly transformed from a chaotic emotional roller coaster into something sharper, layered: story on top, misdirection and defense underneath.
At some point, Lucian swiped open his own tablet and started building a mirror document: episode air dates cross-referenced with planned operations, known enemy movements, full moons. His fingers moved quick, efficient. The CEO and the Alpha, color-coding destiny.
"This is deeply cursed," Amara said at one point, leaning back and rubbing her eyes. "We're literally planning our lives around Webcomic Wednesday."
"You chose Wednesday," he said. "We adapt."
She snorted.
"Do you see it?" she asked, softer, after a while. "The value?"
His eyes flicked up from his tablet.
"Yes," he said simply.
"Say it," she pressed, because she was petty and tired and needed the validation.
He exhaled.
"Fine," he said. "Having a… fate-artist on my side is strategically invaluable. Happy?"
A warmth that had nothing to do with the bond flickered under her ribs.
"Deeply," she said. "I might put that on a mug."
"Don't," he said. "It'll show up in fan merch."
They fell quiet again, both scrolling, both thinking.
Eventually, she hit a batch of sketches labeled LONG GAME ARC.
Future episodes. Ones she barely remembered drawing—late nights where her hand had moved faster than her conscious brain, leaving behind strange, half-formed scenes like messages from someone else.
One in particular made her stomach drop.
It was a double-page spread: a conference table, shattered. Windows blown inward. Blood spattered on a familiar skyline view. Lucian on his knees amidst the wreckage, shirt torn, one hand pressed to a wound in his side.
She'd drawn it weeks ago and shoved it down the schedule, unready to unpack why it made her hands shake.
Now, under the studio lights and his steady gaze, it looked worse.
"That one," he said quietly, following her stare.
She swallowed.
"You recognize it?" she asked.
"No," he said. "Which might be worse."
Her throat was dry.
"It's far down the line," she said. "Could be metaphor. Could be influence from some show I watched. Could be… nothing."
He gave her a look.
"Does it feel like nothing?" he asked.
She stared at the broken glass, the way she'd inked the lines of his shoulders: braced, refusing to fall, even bleeding.
"No," she admitted.
He was silent for a long moment.
"When did you draw it?" he asked.
"Three weeks after the balcony," she said. "Two nights after the first time I rewound a fight for you."
He leaned back, jaw tight.
"It might never happen," she said quickly. "We've already changed the prophecy once. Maybe this is an alternate timeline that got… stuck in my drafts."
"Maybe," he said.
The air between them thickened.
She realized, with a cold clarity, that this was the test of their truce. Not the easy red-yellows. Not the warehouse or the skybridge. This: a possible future where he was on the floor and she was the one who'd drawn him there.
"What do we do with it?" she asked.
"Options?" he said, slipping back into battle-planning mode like a lifeline.
She forced her brain to cooperate.
"Option one: we ignore it," she said. "Call it a weird dream. Probably the worst option."
"Agreed," he said.
"Option two," she continued, "we post it exactly as-is and treat it like a warning sent to everyone—your side and theirs. Horrible option. Gives enemies images they can aim for."
"Absolutely not," he said.
"Option three," she said, "we dissect it. Figure out where it might be, what could cause that explosion, which allies and enemies would be in the room. We don't draw it yet. We treat it like… a landmine on the map."
His jaw flexed.
"And option four?" he asked.
She hesitated.
"Option four," she said slowly, "is we redraw it now. Proactively. A different outcome to the same scene. Or a different scene entirely for that date. We pay the price early and hope it shifts whatever the story was trying to do."
He went very still.
"You'd do that?" he asked. "Take that hit now?"
She swallowed.
"If the choice is between drawing you bleeding later or drawing you standing now," she said, "I'll take the migraine."
His eyes darkened, gold flickering at the edges.
"That is not your decision alone," he said.
"It's my hand," she said. "My price."
"It's my body in that panel," he countered. "My pack in the blast radius. My enemies reading the ripples. It's our war."
She pressed her lips together.
"Then it's our choice," she said. "Which means you don't get to pull the noble martyr card and take that away from me either."
For a second, his expression was pure, frustrated Alpha.
Then he exhaled, a slow, reluctant surrender.
"Our uneasy truce," he said, "is already annoying."
"You agreed to it," she reminded him.
"Yes," he said. "And I will keep that agreement."
He tapped the sketch with one fingertip, careful not to smear the virtual ink.
"Option three first," he said. "We study it. We see if we can identify the room, the angle, the people who aren't in the frame but should be. We treat it as a possible threat, not a fixed event. We don't redraw it yet. Not until we know what price that redraw demands."
She nodded slowly.
"Okay," she said. "That's… not terrible."
"And in the meantime," he added, "you don't post anything even remotely resembling this scene."
"Obviously," she said.
Their eyes met over the broken version of him on the screen.
For a heartbeat, the room felt like the hinge-point of a much larger story.
Then, as if some internal tension had snapped, Lucian sat back, scrubbing a hand over his face.
"This is going to require a schedule," he said, sounding deeply pained by the admission.
Amara blinked.
"A schedule," she echoed.
"Regular briefings," he clarified. "Before each episode. After major edits. You tell me when the pressure builds and you feel the urge to draw something you don't understand. I tell you when we plan moves that might intersect with your art. We treat your migraines like weather alerts."
Somehow, the mundanity of it—meetings, schedules, alerts—made the chaos feel a fraction less impossible.
"Fine," she said. "But if I get calendar invites titled 'Fate Sync', I'm quitting."
He smirked, just a little.
"No promises," he said.
They fell quiet again, the uneasy truce settling around them.
It wasn't peace.
It wasn't safety.
There was still the bond humming under Amara's skin like a second pulse. There were still locked doors and enemy Alphas and chapters she hadn't drawn yet that might already be waiting in some future corridor.
But there was something else now too. A thin, stubborn thread of we.
We will color-code this madness.
We will treat plotlines like battle plans.
We will stop lying to each other, at least about the things most likely to get us killed.
Lucian closed his tablet, fingers lingering on its edge.
"One more term," he said.
Amara narrowed her eyes. "If you say 'don't run', I swear to god—"
He shook his head.
"When we step into war together," he said, "with your art and my wolves, we leave the… other thing outside the door. The bond. The mate nonsense. The part of me that wants to protect you with my teeth instead of my brain. In here, at the table, we are Alpha and fate-artist. Strategist and asset. Equals."
The word asset made her flinch; the word equals kept her in her seat.
"And outside this room?" she asked quietly.
His gaze softened, edges of gold in his eyes.
"Outside this room," he said, "we'll… keep figuring it out."
She hated how much that hope hurt.
"Deal," she said, because whatever else was true, she needed this: a space where she could exist without the bond being the only lens.
He offered his hand, like he had that first day in the conference room, before she knew what he was, before he knew what she was.
"Truce?" he said.
The last time she'd taken his hand, she'd signed away her art to his company.
This time, she was signing herself into a different kind of contract: one with war and honesty and traffic lights over destiny.
She still didn't trust him completely.
She might never.
But she trusted that they were both tired of crashing into walls.
Amara slipped her hand into his.
Warm. Solid. Dangerous.
"Truce," she said.
The bond flared, sharp and bright, reacting to the contact. Heat shot up her arm, across her chest, not just attraction or fear—alignment. A tiny, treacherous sense of right.
She snatched her hand back before it got ideas.
"Battle plans now," she muttered. "Feelings later."
Lucian's mouth quirked.
"Agreed," he said.
They bent over the tablet again, two impossible creatures arguing about panel layouts and ambush routes, turning episode titles into strategy headers, turning cliffhangers into diversions.
Outside, the city moved, unaware that its next few weeks were being quietly storyboarded by a wolf and the girl who could nudge fate with ink.
Inside, in the moonlit studio, the uneasy truce held.
For now.