The next EPISODE / RISK SYNC – 16:00 popped up on her shared calendar with a cheerful little chime that did not match the subject line:
Agenda:
Review upcoming arcs
Identify exploitable patterns in enemy behavior
(Optional) Stop fate from eating us alive
Amara stared at it for a second, then snorted.
"Of course," she muttered, grabbing her tablet and heading for the studio. "Battle plans with emojis."
Lucian was already there when she walked in, leaning over the central table. No suit today—dark shirt, dark jeans—but the CEO was still there in the straight line of his back, the Alpha in the way he tracked her entrance without looking directly at the door.
Zara sat on the couch with a laptop, legs crossed underneath her, fingers flying over the keys.
"You're late," Zara said, glancing up.
"It's 16:01," Amara replied. "Time is a construct."
"In this house?" Zara said. "Time is a weapon."
Lucian flicked a look at his sister, then at Amara's tablet.
"Sit," he said. "We have an opportunity."
The way he said opportunity made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.
She slid onto her stool opposite him, setting her tablet on the table between them. The uneasy truce hovered in the air—less raw now, more like a bruise they both knew not to poke too hard.
Lucian tapped his own screen. The wall display behind him lit up with a series of screenshots.
Her comic.
Panels of wolves in suits, shadows in boardrooms, a back entrance with a flickering light. Overlaid were notes in another hand—tiny, aggressive text boxes with arrows.
"Where did you get those?" she asked, throat drying.
"From your biggest fans," Lucian said. "Or rather, their burner accounts."
Zara zoomed in on one screenshot. A familiar panel filled the screen: the rear loading bay of Gray Holdings, drawn in Amara's stylized, moody linework. In the margin, someone had drawn a rough floor plan and scrawled:
Blind spot?
2-cam gap = entry point
Test Wed / Fri rotation
Amara's stomach flipped.
"These are from a chat?" she asked.
"From three different chats," Lucian said. "We've been scraping enemy channels since Zara convinced Adrien to stop using his actual name for his alt accounts."
"In my defense," Adrien's voice called faintly from the hallway, "I thought 'DefinitelyNotAdrien' was subtle."
Lucian ignored him.
"We've known for a while they were using your episodes as intel," he continued. "Comparing timestamps. Looking for patterns. But this—" he tapped one annotation where someone had circled a panel and written 'Artist is ours?'—"this is new."
"New how?" Amara asked.
"They're starting to trust you," Zara said, grimacing. "Or at least, they're starting to trust that whatever you draw contains something real. Even when it doesn't."
Amara stared at the notes.
Little arrows. Questions. References to specific episodes. Someone had screenshotted her character banter and turned it into a partial key for her pack's patrol routes.
One line, near a panel of an open conference room door, was underlined twice:
Weak link = staff entry.
Night shift / Wed
"We patched that weakness weeks ago," Lucian said. "Moved the cameras. Changed the routes. They don't know that. They only know what they saw in your panels months back."
"So they're ghosts," Amara said. "Walking through a version of the building that doesn't exist anymore."
"Exactly," he said.
Her mind spun.
"And you want to… what?" she said slowly. "Patch more vulnerabilities, or—"
"Use it," Lucian said.
Zara snapped her laptop shut, eyes glinting.
"Welcome," she said, "to the part where we go on offense."
They moved from evidence to whiteboard with terrifying speed.
Zara flung a fresh document onto the wall screen. Lucian pulled up a schematic of the building complex: main tower, subsidiary offices, underground parking, side structures. The neat architectural lines looked strangely naked without people, without story.
Amara sat with her tablet stylus hovering, watching them.
"Patterns first," Lucian said, sliding into his CEO voice. "How long between your episodes and their moves?"
"Two to four days," Zara said. "They don't copy everything—just the tactical bits. When you have a rooftop confrontation in Episode 15, they try to trap our scouts on a mid-rise roof three nights later. When you draw a patrol skipping a corridor, they probe that same pattern the following weekend."
"So they believe the comic shows them our blind spots," Lucian said.
"Or at least, it used to," Zara said. "Before we started using it to mislead them."
Amara chewed her lip.
"If we show them a weakness," she said, "they'll assume it's real. Or at least plausible enough to test."
"Which is exactly what we want," Lucian said.
She looked up sharply.
"Define 'want'," she said.
He met her gaze.
"I want them to test an opening that doesn't exist," he said. "I want them to commit bodies and resources to an attack we already know the shape of. I want them to step exactly where you tell them to—and find my wolves waiting."
Her stylus felt heavier.
"So you want me to write a trap," she said.
"I want us to write a trap," he corrected. "Together. With full awareness. No hidden agendas."
Zara leaned forward, elbows on her knees.
"Look," she said. "They're already reading you. Already trying to use your work as a cheat sheet. We can either let them keep freeloading, or we can charge them for it—with interest."
Amara snorted weakly. "You make war sound like a subscription service."
"In a way, it is," Zara said. "They signed up when they started parsing your panel gutters for secret messages."
Lucian flipped to a different schematic: a mid-level conference floor in the main tower. He zoomed in on a particular room.
"This is Conference Room E," he said. "Medium-sized, decent view, no direct access to executive offices. We use it for external meetings that require privacy but not trust."
Amara recognized it; she'd sat there once, early on, when the lawyers had tried to explain "derivative rights" before she'd tuned them out and started doodling on her pad.
"It connects," Lucian went on, drawing a quick line with his finger, "to this service corridor. That corridor has two doors: one to the main hall, one to the emergency stairwell."
He tapped the stairwell.
"Two levels down, that stairwell hits the old security hub we no longer use. We moved our systems a year ago; they don't know that. To them, this looks like the nerve center."
Amara's breath hitched.
"And if they think they can reach the 'nerve center' by exploiting a weakness in Conference Room E's security…" she began.
"They'll try," Lucian finished.
"And what's actually in the security hub now?" she asked.
He gave her a thin smile.
"Reinforced walls," he said. "Remote-lock doors. Dampening tech. And about a dozen ways to make life very unpleasant for uninvited guests."
Zara waggled her eyebrows. "We call it The Mousetrap," she said. "Not that we're rude enough to call rival wolves mice. To their faces."
Amara's fingers drummed against the tablet.
"You'd be using my comic as bait," she said. "Feeding them a script they're already inclined to follow."
"Yes," Lucian said.
"And when they do what we expect," she said slowly, "we spring the trap."
"Yes," he said again.
She thought of her readers.
The ones who left long, heartfelt comments. The ones who made fanart of Zara with neon hair and wings. The ones who wrote essays about morality under her battle posts, as if the wolf war was a metaphor for their own messy lives.
"What about them?" she asked quietly. "The normal readers. The ones who aren't plotting ambushes in Discord servers. What happens to them when I turn an episode into a killbox blueprint?"
"They see a story," Lucian said. "That's all. A tense, well-drawn infiltration scene. Emotional stakes. Cliffhanger. They don't get a floor plan; they get a vibe."
Zara nodded. "We'll be careful," she said. "No real labels, no exact measurements, no shots that match the actual building one-to-one. We'll make it feel true without actually being true."
"You've been doing that your whole life," Lucian added. "Turning feelings into panels. This is the same, with a sharper edge."
She winced at the word edge.
"What if it goes wrong?" she asked. "What if they see through it? What if someone else gets hurt who wasn't supposed to be there?"
Lucian's eyes softened a fraction. Not much. Enough.
"That's why we plan it together," he said. "Why we brief the guards, clear the floors, limit unknown variables. There is always risk. I'm asking you to help me control it, not pretend it doesn't exist."
Her stylus hovered over the screen.
The truce, she realized, wasn't just about not fighting each other.
It was about what they did when they chose to fight together.
Deadly effective, the outline in her head whispered.
If we get it right.
She exhaled, long and shaky.
"Okay," she said. "Let's write a trap."
Designing death as content was the most surreal thing she'd ever done.
They treated it like any other planning session at first. Structure. Stakes. Flow.
"Opening panel," Amara said, sketching loosely. "Wide shot. External view of Gray Holdings at night. Storm clouds optional. Establish the vibe: deal going down, something off."
"Foreground," Lucian suggested, "delivery truck. Marked with a generic catering company. No one looks twice at food."
"Relatable," Zara said. "Our enemies are basic."
Amara drew the truck.
Next panel: interior of the conference room. A stylized Lucian analog (she refused to use his actual name in-comic) sat at the head of the table, flanked by faceless executives. Papers, tablets, the glow of a presentation screen.
"We'll make it a 'business meeting' with a foreign investor," she said, roughing in silhouettes. "My readers will think it's set-up for corporate drama."
"The enemies will think those investors are potential allies," Lucian said. "Or hostages. Either way, it's bait."
They worked beat by beat.
Panel: a bored security guard glancing at his phone near the staff entrance.
"He's not real," Lucian said. "We don't have anyone that lax in that position. But they'll believe it. Everyone believes in lazy guards."
Panel: a camera feed glitching for a second, static across the top corner.
"Zara can simulate this without actually dropping coverage," Lucian said. "We've done it before."
Panel: a shadow slipping through a door propped open by a piece of cardboard.
"Subtle enough that casual readers see it as background," Amara murmured. "Obvious enough that people looking for vulnerabilities will grab a screenshot."
She hated how good she was at that.
They kept going.
By the time they reached the mid-episode turn, the plan was clear.
In the comic, the rival pack's proxies would slip through the "weak staff entrance," creep along a seemingly empty service corridor, and open the door to the "old security hub" just as the fake meeting reached its tensest moment.
"It needs to feel like a victory for them," Lucian said. "Right up until the last page drop."
"So we storyboard it like a heist," Amara said. "Tension, close calls, heroism on their side. I'll make them charismatic. A little funny, even. Readers will root for them."
"And then?" Zara prompted.
"And then," Amara said, "we cut to black right as they reach for the door."
She pictured it: final page of the episode, hand on the handle, a sliver of darkness beyond.
Caption: TO BE CONTINUED.
"We don't show what's inside," she said. "Not yet."
"In real life," Lucian added, "they open it and step into a locked box with my best fighters watching through one-way glass."
He outlined their actual plan while she sketched the fictional one.
On the night the episode dropped, the real Conference Room E would be empty. The real security staff would run lean—just enough visible presence to match the comic, with actual muscle stationed two floors down.
The old security hub, repurposed, would be waiting: reinforced, soundproofed, with remote locks tied to Lucian's phone. Zara would sit in the live surveillance center, watching the feeds like a twisted live-action watch party.
"We'll need to clear the surrounding floors," Lucian said. "Limit any civilians in the area. If this works, we'll have at least six enemy wolves contained. Maybe more."
"And if they send humans instead?" Amara asked.
"Then we adjust," he said. "Wolves don't waste human assets on untested holes, though. They'll want healing and claws."
It was obscene how easily her storytelling brain slotted all of this into structure. Setup, escalation, payoff.
Except this payoff would be in broken bones and blood, not comment counts.
At one point, her stylus slipped.
She realized her hand was trembling.
Lucian's gaze flicked to her fingers.
"We can stop," he said quietly.
She shook her head.
"No," she said. "We said we'd do this together. I'm just… realizing my career has taken a weird turn."
"Hey," Zara said gently. "You were already drawing a war. We're just making sure the right people win."
"I don't know if there is a 'right' in this," Amara said. "But I know who scares me less."
She glanced at Lucian.
He held her stare, gave a tiny nod.
"Then let's keep it that way," he said.
Posting day felt like holding a lit match over a trail of gasoline.
Amara sat at her desk with the episode queue open, finger hovering over the "PUBLISH" button. Her heart thudded against her ribs. Her power prickled under her skin, restless, like it wanted in on the act.
"No edits," she murmured to it. "Not this time. We let the story run."
Behind her, Lucian stood with his arms folded, eyes on the screen. Zara perched on the arm of the couch, laptop already open to a dozen tabs: analytics, monitoring tools, a private tracking dashboard she'd labeled DUMB ENEMY MOVES 💀.
"You sure?" Zara asked.
"No," Amara said. "Yes. Sort of. If anyone wants to object, now would be the time."
No one did.
She tapped the button.
The episode went live.
Immediately, the metrics dashboard lit up.
Zara whistled low. "Engagement spike," she said. "Comments pouring in. People LOVE corporate espionage, apparently."
Amara watched the numbers climb.
"Can you see… them?" she asked. "Our not-so-friendly subscribers?"
Zara grinned and swiveled her laptop to show a split-screen: on one side, public comments—fans screaming about cliffhangers, shipping characters, debating whether the rival pack's proxies were hot; on the other, a rapidly updating list of handles in a private channel.
"You see these?" Zara said, pointing at a row of usernames: NightHowl, GlassMoon, Wolf_Theory. "These are some of our favorite enemy voyeurs. They just went from 'idle' to 'very online'."
New lines popped up in the enemy chat feed, scraped in real-time:
NightHowl: new ep. meeting in E wing.
GlassMoon: staff door, 2nd panel. code?
Wolf_Theory: glitch on cam 3 again. same pattern as ep 12.
NightHowl: weak spot confirmed.
GlassMoon: we can mirror. Wed night.
Amara's blood went cold.
"They're actually doing it," she breathed. "They're treating it like… instructions."
"Give it a day," Lucian said. "Maybe two. They'll want to confirm. Put eyes on the site."
"And if they decide it's a trap?" she asked.
His mouth curved without humor.
"Then we'll know they're smarter than we thought," he said. "And we'll adapt."
She hated that geopolitics had become a subscriber retention game.
Zara tapped a few keys. "I'm setting alerts for these IPs," she said. "If any of them so much as Google 'Conference Room E floor plan', I'll see it."
Amara forced herself to step away from the screen.
If she watched every refresh, she'd go insane.
Instead, she did what she knew how to do.
She opened her sketchbook and drew.
Not prophecy. Not traps.
Just a page of wolves asleep in a pile, paws twitching in dream.
Two nights later, Zara's voice crackled in Amara's earpiece.
"They're in," she said.
Amara's whole body switched to high alert.
She was in the surveillance room, a floor above the old security hub. The walls were lined with monitors showing every angle of the "weakness" they'd advertised: staff entrance, corridor, stairwell landing. Extra screens showed the surrounding floors, now eerily empty.
Lucian stood in front of the main console, one hand on the back of Amara's chair, the other holding his phone with the lock controls. His wolf was close to the surface; she could feel it in the way the air charged around him.
On the central feed, a catering truck pulled up to the service bay.
Logo: URBAN BITE CATERING.
"Original," Amara muttered. Her voice sounded too loud in her own ears.
Three figures stepped out.
They wore uniforms matching the truck's branding, caps pulled low, collars up. To any casual observer, they looked like underpaid staff hauling trays toward another corporate meeting.
To Amara's eyes, tuned now to the subtler tells, they were wrong.
Too alert. Too fluid in their movements. Too careful where they put their feet.
"Zoom," Lucian said.
The camera feed tightened on their faces as they passed.
Brief flashes of eyes—too bright, too sharp. The taller one at the back carried himself like a leader trying not to. The shortest one sniffed the air near the door, lips tightening slightly.
Wolves.
"I know him," Zara said, voice tinny in Amara's ear. On another screen, her avatar flitted between feeds from a separate control room. "Backside Beta from the Ashridge pack. Name's Kade. Likes bombs too much. Hates us more."
Lucian's jaw ticked.
"How many?" he asked.
"At least six wolves scent-wise," Zara said. "Three visible. Three cloaked around the corner. No humans."
"They followed the script," Amara whispered.
On the camera, the trio approached the staff door.
Inside, their guards played their parts: one visible near the reception desk, coffee cup in hand; one exiting down the main hall; no one in the corridor.
The "lazy" guard Amara had drawn in the comic leaned back in his chair, phone in hand.
In reality, Dane was a hair-trigger away from ripping someone's throat out, but he sold the slouch.
Kade flicked a glance at him, judged him, dismissed him.
Amara's stomach twisted.
"I don't like this," she said under her breath.
"You shouldn't," Lucian said. "It's an ambush."
On the security feed, the group slipped through the staff entrance just as a camera "glitched"—Zara triggering a brief static overlay to match the episode.
"Corridor," Zara said. "They're heading down, just like good little subscribers."
The wolves moved with predatory grace, checking corners, sniffing air. They didn't speak; they didn't need to. Their formation tightened near the stairwell.
Amara's fingers dug into the edge of her seat.
"This feels wrong," she said. "We're… we're playing with them."
Lucian's hand tightened fractionally on the back of her chair.
"This is war," he said calmly. "We're taking away their habit of treating your work like a free advantage. There will be a cost. I'd rather it be theirs."
On the screen, Kade reached for the stairwell door.
Amara's heart hammered.
Everything in her screamed panel.
Hand on handle. Caption: TO BE CONTINUED.
Except this time, she was awake to what came after.
The door opened.
The wolves slipped inside, one by one.
The stairwell was dim, exactly as she'd drawn it. Enough to feel right. Not enough to show what had changed.
They padded down two flights, as expected.
Zara narrated in a low murmur. "They're not checking the other floors. Overconfident. Good. Three more wolves in the stairwell now. Total of eight."
Lucian's eyes never left the screens.
"Positions?" he asked.
"Team Alpha in the hub behind the far wall," Zara said. "Team Beta above the stairwell, ready to drop. Team Gamma on the exterior, just in case anyone gets creative."
Amara saw flashes of familiar faces on side feeds. Wolves she'd drawn a hundred times in exaggerated poses, now crouched for real behind barriers and bulkheads.
Adrien, rolling his shoulders, half-shifted, eyes bright.
Dane, jaw clenched, hand flexing.
Another wolf, a woman Amara only knew by her comedy in the group chat, now dead serious with a tranq gun.
"Door in three," Zara said. "Two. One."
On the central feed, Kade's hand touched the handle of the "old hub" door.
He pushed.
The door swung inward.
For half a second, the wolves appeared to relax.
The room beyond looked exactly as the old blueprints suggested: banks of monitors, empty chairs, half-lit panels. The smell of old electronics and recycled air.
Then Lucian tapped his phone.
At once, the door slammed shut behind them, heavy locks thudding into place.
Lights snapped on—brighter, colder than in the comic. Panels lit, not with security feeds, but with live views of the wolves themselves, caught from multiple angles.
Kade spun, eyes widening.
"What the—"
The sound cut out as the room's dampening field kicked in. On the monitors, Amara saw his mouth move, saw the others snarl, saw teeth flash as they realized.
The trap had sprung.
In the stairwell, a secondary door sealed, cutting off their retreat.
In the hub, vents slid open with a soft hiss, releasing a fine mist.
"Nonlethal knockout gas," Zara said quickly. "Don't freak. We're not gassing them like villains in a cartoon."
On-screen, the wolves reacted fast, pulling up collars, covering faces. One tried to pry the door open. Another launched at the glass wall, claws scraping.
The wall did not yield.
"Time to contact is twenty seconds," Lucian said evenly. "Full effect in forty."
"Why not just rush in and fight them?" Amara asked, voice tight. "Your wolves could take them."
"We could," he said. "And we'd lose people. This? This is cleaner. Fewer funerals."
She clamped her mouth shut.
On the feed, Kade looked up, directly into one of the cameras.
For a moment, Amara felt like he was looking at her.
He bared his teeth in a soundless snarl, eyes blazing.
Then his knees buckled.
One by one, the wolves went down—slower than humans would have, their systems fighting the chemical off as long as they could. But the dosage had been calibrated for their biology.
They slumped to the floor, breathing, unconscious.
Silence settled over the surveillance room.
Amara realized she'd been holding her breath.
She let it out in a shaky rush.
"It worked," Zara said softly. Relief crackled through her voice. "We got eight. No outgoing calls, no alarm signals. Their comms were jammed the second they stepped over the threshold."
Lucian's shoulders dropped a fraction.
"Alpha team," he said into his mic. "Go in. Masks on. Secure them. No unnecessary roughness. We want them alive and talkative."
On the feeds, wolves in full gear poured into the hub, moving efficiently between the fallen bodies. Zip ties. Sensor tags. Careful checks for weapons.
Adrien stepped into frame, mask on, eyes gleaming behind the visor.
He looked up at the nearest camera and gave a jaunty salute.
"To the inkwitch," he said, voice filtered. "Nice script."
Amara swallowed hard.
Her hands were still shaking.
She tore her eyes away from the monitors to look at Lucian.
He was watching the feeds with a predator's intensity, but when he felt her gaze on him, he turned.
Their eyes met.
"It worked," she said, stupidly. As if the evidence wasn't literally on fourteen screens.
"Yes," he said.
The wolf in him was close—the gold in his eyes brighter, his pupils narrow. Victory thrummed around him, a subtle energy that made her want to step back and closer at the same time.
"I just drew a room," she said, voice low. "I just posted a chapter."
"You just turned their bad habit into a noose," he said. "You showed them a story they wanted to believe, and they walked into it."
"That sounds…" She searched for the word. "Horrible."
"And necessary," he said.
She looked back at the monitors.
The enemy wolves were unconscious, lined up neatly. One had a printout sticking out of his pocket—a crumpled stack of pages with her panels on them, notes scrawled in the margin.
Zara zoomed in.
Panel 3 – guard distracted
Panel 7 – staff door
Panel 9 – cam glitch
"Follow comic route"
Amara's skin crawled.
"They printed it," she whispered. "They actually printed my episode and used it as a blueprint."
"And we used their trust in you against them," Lucian said. No gloating. Just fact.
She pressed her knuckles to her mouth.
A part of her, cold and scared, thought: If I can do this for him, I could do it for someone else. For anyone who learns the right way to ask.
Another part thought: Better it be him than them.
Lucian's hand lifted off her chair.
For a second, she thought he might touch her. He didn't. He just rested his palm flat on the table beside her instead, grounding himself.
"Look at me," he said softly.
She did.
"This is not the only way we'll use your work," he said. "It's not even the way I prefer. But you need to see what happens when we aim it on purpose instead of letting them cherry-pick whatever they want."
"You just turned me into a weapon," she said.
"You were a weapon the moment they started reading you like scripture," he replied. "Today, at least, you were our weapon."
"That doesn't make me feel better," she said.
"It's not supposed to," he said. "War shouldn't feel good. But it should feel honest."
Behind him, the screens showed the aftermath: wolves being dragged out, doors unlocking, the hub venting clean air.
Amara exhaled slowly.
"Will they know?" she asked. "The rest of their pack? Will they realize we played them?"
Lucian's mouth curved into something sharp.
"Oh, yes," he said. "When their strike team doesn't come home. When their moles report that our 'weakness' was a cage. When we leak just enough of this to their channels to make it clear."
Zara's voice chimed in. "Already on it," she said. "I've got a bot account ready to post some very dramatic 'leaked security footage' stills. Nothing that reveals the real layout. Just enough to make them paranoid about ever trusting your panels again."
Amara blinked.
"So I lose them," she said. "As intel. As leverage."
Lucian shook his head.
"You lose them as freeloaders," he said. "They'll still watch. They'll just be scared, now. Uncertain. That's valuable too."
She thought of the annotations on the printout. The confidence in those scribbles: weak spot confirmed.
Deadly effective.
The phrase from her earlier outline thrummed through her head.
"I don't want to get used to this," she said quietly.
"Good," Lucian said. "I don't want you to, either."
He paused.
"But," he added, "I am going to remember today when you tell me you're useless in this war."
She made a choked sound.
"I never said useless," she muttered. "I said… disorganized."
"Your disorganization," he said, "just bagged us eight enemy operatives without a single casualty on our side. I'll take that over tidy any day."
On one of the side feeds, Kade's unconscious face filled the screen, mouth slack, eyes closed.
Amara's stylus hand twitched with the urge to draw him. To understand him. To turn him into a character instead of a threat.
Later, she promised herself. When he's in a cell and not in a position to rip out your throat.
Lucian straightened.
"I have to go," he said. "Interrogations. Negotiations. Making sure no one gets clever and escapes."
She nodded numbly.
He took a step toward the door, then hesitated.
"Amara," he said.
She looked up.
"For what it's worth," he said, "I know what I asked you to do today. I won't ask lightly again."
"You'll ask again," she said. It wasn't accusation. Just fact.
"Yes," he said. "Because it works."
Something like grim pride flickered under the nausea in her gut.
Their partnership was not clean.
It was not kind.
But it was effective.
Deadly effective.
"Go," she said, voice rough. "Before I redraw the building out of spite."
He huffed a quiet laugh.
"As you wish," he said, and slipped out, already half in Alpha mode.
The door closed.
The surveillance room hummed.
Amara sat there, watching the monitors slowly shift from crisis to normal operations. She rubbed her thumb against the edge of her tablet, feeling the faint grooves in the casing.
Somewhere in the city, rival wolves would wake up to the news that their "invincible" Beta had been outplayed by a webcomic episode and a girl with a stylus.
Somewhere in a cell downstairs, Kade would eventually open his eyes, look at the one-way glass, and—if he was smart—wonder whether the story he'd trusted had been on his side after all.
She leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes for a moment.
The bond pulsed faintly, a distant echo of Lucian's adrenaline and satisfaction. Underneath it, her own emotions tangled: guilt, relief, a sick, sharp thrill that scared her.
She had always wanted her art to matter.
She hadn't imagined this.
When she opened her eyes again, one of the feeds showed a reflection: her own face, pale and tired, surrounded by screens full of wolves.
The artist.
The weapon.
The trap writer.
"For the record," she told the empty room, "if anyone ever makes a movie out of this, I'm demanding so many content warnings."
On the wall, a notification popped up:
EPISODE / RISK SYNC – RECAP – TOMORROW 10:00
She shook her head.
"For the record," she added, "we're going to need a better name for those meetings."
No one answered.
Outside, the city moved, unaware that an invisible script had just run to perfection.
Inside, in the dim glow of the screens, Amara understood—really, viscerally—that when she and Lucian aligned, when his strategy and her story pulled in the same direction, they were not just dangerous.
They were a loaded narrative, aimed straight at anyone foolish enough to believe they could read her panels and stay ahead.
Their partnership had drawn first blood.
And the story was nowhere near done.