They should have caught them all.
That was the part Amara couldn't stop staring at on Zara's monitor: the neat little line of numbers at the bottom of the feed.
ENTRY: 9
NEUTRALIZED: 8
Zara flicked between screens like she was shuffling a digital deck of cards.
"Could be a sensor glitch," she said, not sounding convinced. "Or double-counted a wolf that straddled the threshold. These systems are old. They were designed for humans, not furry math problems."
Amara tore her gaze away from the numbers to look at Lucian.
He hadn't moved from where he stood in front of the main console. One hand rested on the desk, relaxed but not really. The other was braced on his hip. To anyone who didn't know him, he probably looked calm.
Amara knew better.
The air around him had gone sharp at the edges, like the moment just before a window cracks.
"Roll it back," he said.
His voice was quiet. That was worse than a growl.
Zara scrubbed back through the footage of the stairwell, the service corridor, the loading bay. Cameras flicked in reverse: wolves rising from the floor, doors unlocking, gas drifting backward into vents, Kade and his team un-fainting and walking backward up the stairs.
She let it play forward again, this time at half-speed.
Amara watched.
Nine blips on the sensor overlay when the truck arrived. Nine signatures within the perimeter. Eight bodies in the trap.
"Here," Lucian said, tapping the screen.
The moment of entry.
The catering truck rolled through the gate. The guard at the booth scanned the QR code on the digital clipboard Zara had programmed, waved them through.
"One, two, three," Zara counted as the disguises stepped into view. "That's Kade and his two frontliners. Scent profile matches. Then… four, five, six…"
Three more wolves peeled off the blind side of the truck as it parked, just like she'd drawn: hugging shadows, slipping behind supports.
"Seven and eight," Zara added, pointing at two more figures dropping from the truck bed itself, landing in a crouch. "They go straight for the staff door."
Amara leaned closer.
"That's eight," she said. "Where's nine?"
Zara frowned, hitting pause.
For a moment, the image froze: truck, bay, guards, wolves mid-step.
The ninth sensor blip pulsed in the corner of the schematic. It was inside the perimeter, but not on any camera.
"That's impossible," Zara muttered. "Everything down there is covered. Even the spots that aren't supposed to be."
Lucian's eyes narrowed.
"No," he said. "Not impossible. Sloppy."
Zara bristled. "Hey—"
"Not you," he cut in. "Us. All of us. We assumed if it wasn't on your screens, it didn't exist."
He nodded at the bay shot.
"Again," he said. "Standard speed. Don't focus on the wolves. Look at the negative space."
Amara swallowed and forced herself to obey.
They watched the clip a third time.
Truck arriving. Guards talking. Wolves stepping out.
This time, she ignored the obvious threats and watched the corners, the edges, the places nothing was supposed to be happening.
A flicker.
Near the edge of the frame, in the tight wedge between the concrete wall and the truck's shadow, the darkness moved.
Not much. Just enough that, if she slowed the feed another notch, it resolved into a shape: a narrow figure in dark clothing, pressed flat to the wall, letting the bulk of the truck hide him.
He didn't follow Kade. He didn't move with the others.
He waited.
Amara's mouth went dry.
"There," she whispered. "Pause."
Zara froze the frame and zoomed in until the pixels fuzzed.
The figure's face was turned away, ducked under the brim of a cap. Gloved hands. Generic jacket. Nothing distinctive enough to sketch clearly.
But the posture…
He was watching.
Not the building.
Them.
Even in a grainy freeze-frame, there was a quality to his stillness that made her skin crawl. The others were predators slipping toward a kill. He looked like someone watching a play, waiting for the next act.
"Who the hell is that?" Zara breathed.
Lucian's jaw clenched.
"Not on any of our wanted lists," he said. "Or they'd have sent his file with Kade's."
"He doesn't go in with them," Amara said. "Look."
They let the footage continue.
Kade and the others moved exactly as planned, slipping through the staff entrance when the "lazy" guard looked away, heading down the corridor and into the stairwell.
The ninth figure stayed in the shadows until the bay was momentarily empty.
Then he slid along the wall, quick and quiet, and vanished past the camera's edge.
"Next angle," Lucian said.
Zara switched to a feed that covered the inner parking ramp.
There: the same narrow figure emerging from behind a pillar, moving in the opposite direction from Kade's team. Not toward the stairwell.
Toward the outbound lane.
He walked with purpose, not haste, blending perfectly into the flow of building staff finishing a shift. At the gate, he paused just long enough to adjust his cap, keeping his face turned away from the booth camera.
A second later, he was gone. Out of frame. Beyond the perimeter.
"Sensor shows he stays inside the fence for forty-two seconds," Zara muttered, fingers flying as she cross-referenced. "That's enough time to watch the others go in, count the guards, maybe sniff the air…"
"Then he leaves," Lucian finished, voice flat. "Before we spring the trap."
Amara's stomach twisted.
"So he knows something's off," she said. "He notices something and bails."
Zara nodded slowly.
"He's not like the others," she said. "They saw an opportunity and took it. He saw something else."
Lucian's gaze flicked to Amara.
"What did you draw?" he asked.
She looked at him blankly. "What?"
"In the episode," he said. "How many infiltrators did you show?"
She swallowed.
"Eight," she said. "Same as Kade's team. Three on-panel, five implied."
"You didn't feel anything… extra? Anyone in the margins?" he pressed.
Annoyance pricked through her anxiety.
"I'm not the all-knowing narrator of your life, Lucian," she said. "I drew what I saw. What the story gave me. Eight sneaks, a glitch, a door."
"The story gave you?" Zara repeated. "You make it sound like it's its own person."
Amara almost said it is.
She didn't.
She thought instead of how the panels sometimes "arrived" in her head, fully formed, hours or days before she drew them. Of the way some images refused to change, no matter how many times she tried to redraw them.
Of the trap scene she'd sketched in her notebook before they'd formalized it. In it, eight wolves steps into the hub. Eight bodies hit the floor.
Nine had come.
Eight had fallen.
Something in the math itched under her skin.
"Let's say this isn't a sensor error," Lucian said. "Let's say there really was a ninth. One we didn't plan for. One your comic didn't show. What does that mean?"
"It means your trap wasn't perfect," Zara said, blunt. "Somebody slipped the net."
"It means," Amara said slowly, "that this is the first time something… big has happened that wasn't in the panels. Or the panels didn't see it. Or… refused to."
They both looked at her.
"What do you mean, refused to?" Lucian asked.
She rubbed her temples.
"I mean," she said carefully, "that up until now, reality and the comic have either matched or… adapted around each other. When I drew that first attack, and then the attack happened, it felt like the world was following the outline. When we changed the rooftop outcome, it felt like the outline was being rewritten, but still—there was an outline."
She gestured at the frozen image of the shadowed figure on the wall.
"This guy," she said, "is off-script."
Zara frowned. "Maybe your magic's just lagging. Bad Wi-Fi from the universe."
Lucian didn't smile.
"Maybe," he said. "Or maybe somebody else just picked up a pen."
The words sent a little electric shock down her spine.
"You think he's like me," she said. "A… what, rival cartoonist of doom?"
"No," Lucian said. "If he were like you, we'd have seen his work already."
"Comforting," she muttered.
Zara chewed her lip, eyes flicking between feeds.
"Whoever he is," she said, "he's smart enough to smell a setup. That means he's going to go back to his Alpha and say, 'Hey, the comic isn't a cheat code anymore. It's a trap'."
"And he'll be right," Lucian said.
Amara flinched.
"That's going to make your future traps harder," Zara pointed out. "They won't be able to trust your episodes enough to step where we tell them."
"Good," Lucian said, to Amara's surprise.
Zara blinked. "Good?"
"If they stop treating her art like an instruction manual," he said, nodding at Amara, "that's one less direct line into our strategy. It means they have to work harder again. It levels the field."
"It also means we lose the advantage we just proved we have," Amara said.
He met her eyes.
"I never planned to rely on one tactic," he said. "Especially not one that burns you out every time we use it."
The part of her that had sat watching Kade go down in the gas-filled room nodded, grudgingly grateful.
The part of her that had felt the sharp, sick thrill of the trap working scowled.
"So we caught eight," she said. "One slipped. He takes the story of what happened back to his pack. What exactly does he know?"
Zara pulled up another feed: external cameras showing the building from across the street. She played them side by side with the interior trap footage.
"He knows they went in," Zara said. "And that they didn't come out."
"That could be anything," Lucian said. "Bad op. Wrong intel. He doesn't necessarily know about the gas, the locks, the hub's upgrades."
"If he's sensitive," Amara said slowly, "he might have felt the shift."
They stared at her.
She rubbed her arms, suddenly cold.
"When I do big changes," she said, "when I edit a panel after the fact or force something to go a certain way, reality… hiccups. The air thickens. The lights stutter. It's subtle, but—if you're paying attention, you'd notice."
"You think he felt the 'hiccup' when we sprung the trap," Zara said.
"Maybe not exactly then," Amara said. "Maybe earlier. When he saw how perfectly everything lined up with the episode. Or when he caught a whiff of… me."
Lucian's pupils flared.
"You think he scented you," he said. It wasn't a question.
Amara swallowed.
"I've been in those halls," she said. "In that conference room. On that floor. Your wolves know my scent now. If he's sensor-tuned, he could have picked up a trace that didn't match any of your packs. Something weird. Something… ink."
"Ink is not an official scent," Zara said faintly.
"Maybe it is now," Amara muttered.
They fell silent, each chasing their own version of the escaped wolf's perspective.
Outside, through the surveillance room's tiny high window, the sky was turning the color of old bruise. Evening creeping in.
The trap had worked.
And something had slipped anyway.
Hours later, after the initial flurry—securing the captives, starting interrogations, sending out carefully vague messages to allies—Amara sat alone in her studio.
Her tablet glowed on the table, the episode she'd posted earlier still open. Eight little figures slipped through a door in the last panel she'd drawn.
No shadow in the corner.
No ninth.
She tried to add him.
Just a small figure, half-hidden in the loading bay, head turned away.
The stylus hovered over the screen.
Her hand refused to move.
She frowned and forced her fingers down.
The line came out wrong.
Too thick. Too jagged. It snagged on the digital canvas like a physical thing. She tried to refine it, to give the figure shape, but every stroke broke apart, pixels slipping out from under the stylus like oil.
Her headache began as a pressure behind her eyes.
"You are not the boss of me," she muttered to the blank spot, as if the universe could be shamed into compliance.
She hit undo.
The sketch disappeared, leaving the panel exactly as it had been: eight infiltrators, one open door, no watcher.
She tried again, this time on a blank page. No context. No panel borders.
"Okay," she said under her breath. "Just a guy in a cap. Narrow shoulders. Smug air. Give me something."
A faint impression pressed against her mind's eye.
Not an image, exactly. More like the feeling of being observed. Thin, cool, curious.
She dragged the stylus across the screen.
The line came out… wrong again.
Not jagged this time. Slippery. It refused to hold an edge. Every time she tried to describe him, the proportions skewed: arms too long, head too small, features dissolving as soon as she gave them form.
The ache in her skull sharpened.
Her vision blurred at the edges like someone was smudging her reality.
"Okay, stop," she whispered, dropping the stylus and pressing her fingers hard into her temples.
The pressure eased instantly.
She opened her eyes.
The blank page stared back at her. Only a few faint, malformed lines remained, like the echo of a face she'd seen in a dream and forgotten upon waking.
"You feel that?" she asked the empty room.
It didn't answer, obviously.
But something in the air had shifted.
For months, she'd treated the story in her head like a river. Sometimes it carried her along. Sometimes she thrashed against it. But it had always been there, flowing, offering scenes and beats and twists.
Today, for the first time, she had the queasy sense that the river had noticed her trying to dam it.
She thought of the trap. Of how clean it had been.
Too clean.
Narratively lazy, a part of her brain muttered. You pulled off a perfect victory on the first try. No cost. No complication.
Stories didn't like that.
Stories liked balance.
Setback after success.
Consequences.
She'd handed fate a neat little script and said, Here, follow this.
Now fate had sent back a note: No.
A knock sounded at the studio door.
She jumped hard enough that her chair skidded.
"Come in," she called, voice only slightly strangled.
Lucian stepped in, pausing in the doorway as always. His tie was loosened, his sleeves rolled up, a faint smear of something—dust? blood? coffee?—on his forearm. He looked tired in that way only people who could punch through walls if they felt like it ever managed: contained exhaustion, like the strain had nowhere visible to go.
"How bad?" she asked immediately.
He blinked. "Interrogations?"
"No," she said. "Your arm."
He glanced down.
"Not mine," he said. "One of theirs. They woke up cranky."
She grimaced.
"Do we know anything?" she asked. "Names, packs, grudges?"
"Nothing we didn't already suspect," he said, crossing to the table. "Ashridge and Thornbite working together. Kade still likes explosives. Their Alpha still thinks he's clever."
"And the ninth?" she pressed.
He hesitated.
"We got a scent," he said. "Thin. Old. Hard to place. None of the captives would talk about him. Or maybe they genuinely don't know who he is."
"Perfect," she muttered. "The Plot Device Who Must Not Be Named."
He gave her a look.
"Zara says he could be a freelancer," he said. "Mercenary. Wild-card. Someone the packs hire for information, not muscle."
"Like an evil consultant," she said. "Great. I hate consultants."
He huffed out something that was almost a laugh, then sobered.
"How are you?" he asked.
She tilted her head.
"Which answer," she said, "do you want? The PR one, the artistic one, or the honest one?"
"Honest," he said.
She exhaled.
"Tired," she said. "Guilty. Scared. A little… high on the fact that the plan worked. And—"
She hesitated.
"And?" he prompted.
"And something feels off," she said. "Wrong. Like we pushed our luck and the story pushed back."
His brows drew together.
"Explain," he said.
She gestured helplessly at the tablet.
"I tried to draw him," she said. "The unsynced guy. The ninth. I can't. It's like trying to sketch fog. My hand glitched. My head hurt. The lines wouldn't stick."
He glanced at the screen.
On it, the faint wrong-lines she'd failed to fully erase looked almost like scratches.
"Maybe you're just exhausted," he said. "You've been going non-stop."
"Maybe," she said. "Or maybe…"
She hesitated.
He waited.
"Or maybe the story doesn't want to be that controlled," she said finally. "We turned it into a weapon today. A precise one. We said: this page, this panel, this door, this outcome. And it did it. It lined up."
She met his gaze.
"And now," she said, "it's reminding us it has teeth."
"You think your power is… rebelling?" he asked carefully.
"Not just mine," she said. "The whole thing. The way reality and the comic talk to each other. It's like they're saying, 'You don't get to turn us into a spreadsheet.'"
Silence settled between them.
In the corner, the studio's old radiator clicked like an annoyed metronome.
"Do you know," he said slowly, "how comforting it is that you're as unnerved by how powerful you are as I am?"
She gave him a look.
"This is not one of those 'we're the same' moments, Lucian," she said. "You're used to making the world move when you push hard enough. I'm used to posting fan comics and hoping people don't comment weird stuff about my line art."
"And now?" he asked.
"And now I get headaches if I try to draw something the universe doesn't like," she said. "And we get mystery wolves who refuse to be turned into panels."
He studied her face.
"Did you see him?" he asked quietly. "Before today. In any sketch. Any draft. Any dream."
She thought back.
She'd had odd flashes since the rooftop: a shape at the edge of a frame, a feeling of being watched when she drew late at night. But nothing she could pin down.
"No," she said. "Not like this. Not as a… hole in the script."
His jaw worked.
"I don't like unpredictable variables," he said.
"Yeah," she said dryly. "I've met your calendar."
He didn't rise to the bait.
"That's why we work," he said instead. "My control fetish. Your chaos magnet. They cancel each other out."
"I'd call it more of a toxic synergy," she said.
He stepped closer to the table, bracing his hands on the edge. The pose was familiar now: the stance he took when they were about to plan something risky.
"This doesn't change the truce," he said. "Or the fact that what we did was effective."
"I know," she said.
"But it means," he went on, "we can't assume the next trap will go as cleanly. Or that your power will cooperate when we want it to."
"Welcome," she said, "to my entire experience of having a brain."
He shot her a look that said I am trying to be serious.
She sobered.
"I get it," she said. "We got cocky. We thought we could storyboard a war. Now the war is reminding us it has a say."
His mouth twitched at storyboard a war.
"Then we adjust," he said. "We go back to treating your visions as warnings, not guarantees. We stop assuming the enemy will follow your panels like a to-do list. We treat every unsynced move as a new data point, not a failure."
She nodded, even as a coil of unease tightened in her stomach.
"Lucian?" she said.
"Yes?"
"What if it's not just the enemy," she asked. "What if… something else is making unsynced moves too."
His gaze sharpened.
"You mean… who?" he asked.
"I don't know," she said. "The city. The… narrative. Whatever weird cosmic script decided I get nosebleeds for rewinds and you get golden eyes for emotions. What if the more we try to fix it, the more it… wriggles."
He considered that.
"I don't believe in fate," he said.
She snorted. "Says the man whose wolf sniffed a stranger in a hallway and said 'mine'."
He ignored that.
"I believe in patterns," he corrected. "Systems. Cause and effect. People who think it's all pre-written are just too lazy to look at the levers."
"And if there's a lever we can't see?" she asked.
"Then we find it," he said simply. "Or we learn to fight around it."
He straightened, rolling his shoulders like shaking off a weight.
"Unsynced or not," he said, "one mission succeeded. One unknown slipped. That's still a net gain. Eight captured. Eight fewer teeth at our throats. We take the win, note the anomaly, and move."
She wanted to believe him.
We take the win.
Note the anomaly.
Move.
He started for the door, then paused.
"Amara," he said, without turning.
"Yeah?"
"If you see him," he said slowly. "If he shows up in your panels. In your dreams. Anywhere. You tell me."
She almost made a joke about charging extra for nightmare reporting.
Then she remembered the slippery lines on her tablet, the way her hand had refused to hold his shape.
"I will," she said.
He nodded once and left.
The door clicked shut.
Amara sat there for a moment, listening to the quiet.
Her tablet screen dimmed.
She tapped it awake, flipped to a fresh page.
"Okay," she told it. "New rule. We don't try to pin him down. We just… watch for where he doesn't fit."
Her stylus hovered.
Without really deciding to, she sketched a panel frame.
Inside it, she drew a crowded city street at dusk. People blurred in motion, cars, neon signs, all the usual background noise she loved. She let her hand wander, filling in small details: a kid with a too-big backpack, a woman with a dog, a bike leaning against a post.
No wolves.
No traps.
Just life.
When she pulled back, the panel looked fine.
Except.
In the far corner, by a lamppost, where she'd meant to put a trash can, her lines had done something she didn't intend.
A thin shape leaned there, hands in pockets, head tipped just enough that the brim of a cap hid their face. Not fully formed. Not crisp. But there.
Watching.
Her breath caught.
She hadn't consciously drawn him.
But the story had.
He wasn't smiling. Not exactly.
But there was a tilt to the blank suggestion of his mouth that felt like amusement.
Like someone who'd just watched two clever people learn that even when they thought they were holding the pen, the page still had opinions.
Amara stared at the panel until her eyes stung.
Then, very slowly, she labeled it in the corner, in the smallest letters she could manage.
Unsynced
Her hand shook as she wrote.
For the first time since the courthouse, since the rooftop, since Lucian had called her mate and weapon and miracle, she felt something new slither under her skin.
Not just fear.
Not just power.
A sense that she'd been playing at being the author of this mess, when maybe—just maybe—she was still only one of its main characters.
And somewhere out there, in the cracks between panels, another reader had picked up the book.
And smiled.