Amara had discovered there was a very specific kind of silence that followed a near-betrayal.
It wasn't peaceful. It was the hush of a house after a plate shatters in the kitchen and nobody moves yet. Everyone has heard it. Nobody wants to be the first to say, "What broke?"
Gray Tower hummed with that silence now.
On the surface, nothing had changed.
Erikson was "on a brief, mutually agreed sabbatical." The official memo framed it as a health-related leave, full of words like rest, family, and recalibration. Human staff clucked sympathetically at the news. The stock market twitched and then recovered.
Inside the Accord levels, the narrative was sharper.
A board member's login had been caught trying to walk confidential risk briefs out of the building.
The firewall had blocked it.
Eira was dissecting every packet of data like it had fangs.
Lucian was quieter, which was somehow worse than if he'd shouted.
And Amara… had drawn the wrong traitor.
Her Episode 48 comments still screamed in her notifications: heartbreak over the soft CFO, endless debates about coercion vs greed. The fandom had built a mini-culture around the idea that the "harmless" man had snapped.
Reality had looked at her script, shrugged, and said, "Cute, but no."
Now every time she entered a room, a new voice whispered in the back of her head:
You picked the wrong crack on purpose. I respect the impulse.
She tried to ignore it.
She failed.
She started with Adrien.
Because, honestly, he was easiest to resent right now.
He sat at the edge of the war room table, as he often did, in his carefully unthreatening suit. No wolf edge to him. No golden eyes. He was human, as far as she knew. Human, with a law degree and an Accord liaison badge and a talent for making horrible things sound reasonable when you wrapped them in good language.
Today, the table glowed with a projection of city blocks and red-coded sectors. Eira walked them through some updated rotation plan. Wolves nodded, frowned, asked terse questions.
Adrien tapped notes into his tablet with a stylus, calm as ever.
They'd been late to the meeting—Amara and Lucian both—and when they'd slipped into their chairs, everyone's eyes had flicked to them, then away. Nobody mentioned Erikson out loud. His absence sat at the table like a ghost.
"South docks remain priority," Eira said. "We assume the attempted export was either a direct leak to our rivals or a test to see what they can get. We move patrol Beta to overlap with—"
Amara didn't hear the rest.
She was watching Adrien.
When Eira said "attempted export," his face did not change.
No tightening around the mouth. No widening of the eyes. No micro expression of oh-shit like the junior wolves around him.
He might as well have been listening to a recap of a show he'd already seen.
Her brain immediately supplied a running commentary:
Of course he's calm. He's a lawyer. Lawyers are trained to be dead inside.
Or he knew this was coming. Or he's the one feeding your little oracle their bullet points.
She hated that second voice.
She hated how plausible it felt.
Adrien looked up from his tablet at one point and caught her staring.
"Everything okay?" he mouthed, one brow lifting.
She forced a thumbs-up.
He studied her for a beat longer than was comfortable, then gave a tiny shrug and went back to his notes.
The thing that unsettled her wasn't his calm.
It was how patient it felt.
Like a man sitting through the middle chapters of a book he's already read, waiting to see if someone has changed the ending.
When the meeting broke for a coffee refill, Lucian stepped aside with Eira and Rao, voices low.
Amara drifted toward the back wall, pretending to examine the map.
Adrien joined her a second later, handing her a mug.
"I don't drink black coffee," she said automatically.
"It's cocoa," he said. "You looked like you were about to jump out of your skin. Sugar helps."
She sniffed it.
Cocoa.
She hated that he was right.
"Rude of you to be perceptive," she muttered, taking a sip.
He leaned against the wall beside her, shoulder almost touching hers.
"Rude of you to eyeball me like I've grown extra teeth," he countered.
Heat crawled up her neck.
"I wasn't," she lied.
He gave her a look.
"You were," he said. "Badly."
She stared into the cocoa.
"What did you think would happen?" he asked, voice softer now. "We catch one near-traitor and suddenly the whole tower relaxes? Wolves hold grudges. Humans hold grudges. Everyone smiles and pretends not to while they recalculate."
"I'm not recalculating," she said.
He looked at her profile.
"You're you," he said. "You're rewriting the whole function."
His phrasing pinged something in her memory.
Rewriting.
She thought of her episode. Of the DM from Subscriber000. Of the way Adrien had never once commented publicly on her comic, but somehow knew exactly when episodes dropped.
"I drew it wrong," she blurted, before she could stop herself.
He tilted his head.
"The betrayal," she said. "In the comic. It was supposed to land different. I thought… if I wrote it a certain way, maybe the real thing would echo. Or… I don't know. Soften. And then reality did its own thing, and an anonymous cryptic jerk got the prediction prize instead."
Adrien took a slow sip of his own drink.
"Ah," he said. "Fate envy."
"That's not a thing," she said.
"It is," he said. "Humans have been comparing prophecies since forever. Everyone wants to be the one whose forecast comes true. Even stock analysts get weird about it."
"That's not what this is," she insisted. "I don't care about being right. I care about—"
She cut herself off.
I care about not being outplayed in a game I didn't volunteer for.
Adrien watched her quietly.
"You know being able to sketch storm clouds," he said slowly, "doesn't make you a meteorologist. Or a god. Or the only person with an umbrella."
"You're mixing your metaphors," she said.
"You're avoiding the point," he replied.
There it was, again—his irritating habit of sounding like he'd read a few pages ahead.
She almost asked him, right then: Are you InkBetweenLines? Are you Subscriber000? Are you something else that can see the curve of this story and just not telling me?
Instead, she said:
"How do you stay so calm when everything keeps almost exploding?"
He considered.
"Practice," he said. "And the knowledge that sometimes, panic is exactly what whoever lit the fuse is hoping for."
She thought of the threads in her comment section. Of someone poking her with "glass" metaphors until she reacted.
"So we… don't panic," she said.
"On the outside," he said. "Inside, be my guest. I won't tell."
She snorted.
When she looked back up at his face, she checked again, very carefully, for anything that shouted liar! traitor! secret oracle!
All she saw was a tired man with lines around his eyes from squinting at too many contracts.
It didn't stop the itch.
He's too calm, she thought. Too good at talking about fate envy.
Too good at being exactly what you expect him to be, another part of her countered.
She hated that her own mind had become a debate stage.
At night, the debate got worse.
Sleep came in fits.
On the third night after the board incident, she gave up entirely and took the elevator down to the media floor at two in the morning, hoodie over pajamas, hair in a lopsided bun.
Most of the wing was dark, monitors asleep. The city outside was a scatter of blue and orange, windows like glowing nodes in a nervous system.
Zara's cave, however, was lit up like a spaceship.
Multiple screens. Code scrolling. A quiet playlist pulsing through speakers.
Zara sat cross-legged in her chair, one leg jiggling, blue light painting sharp angles across her face. She had two phones within reach, and she was texting quickly on one with her thumb while the other hand danced over the keyboard.
For a moment, Amara just watched.
Zara's expression was intense, not playful. No obvious smile. No muttered jokes. Just focused, secretive energy.
Amara's brain helpfully whispered: Secret accounts. Anonymous usernames. Someone who knows exactly how to bury a message in noise.
Her chest tightened.
"Hey," she said aloud, forcing casual into her voice.
Zara jumped so hard her headphones slipped.
"Jesus—Amara," she said, clutching her chest. "I could have died. Announce yourself like a normal human."
"You're the one sitting in a dark room like a supervillain," Amara said, stepping inside. "I half-expected you to swivel around in your chair stroking a cat."
"Can't have a cat," Zara said automatically. "Half the pack would sneeze to death."
She pulled the headphones fully off and spun the chair toward Amara.
The phone she'd been texting on flipped face-down on the desk with a light, practiced movement.
The gesture hit Amara like a low-grade shock.
Lucian did that with confidential files. Eira did that with classified reports.
"Couldn't sleep?" Zara asked.
"Head won't shut up," Amara admitted. "Figured I'd come watch you juggle satellites."
Zara grinned, but there was a tightness around her eyes.
"Come see my circus," she said, gesturing her closer.
Amara circled the desk, trying not to look at the face-down phone and failing.
One of the monitors showed a familiar interface: her comic dashboard. Comment filters. Word clouds. Zara had set up an overlay that highlighted certain phrases in red: leak, real, Accord, werewolf.
A smaller window in the corner listed usernames that had triggered alerts in the last week. Two stood out in crimson:
InkBetweenLines
Subscriber000
"They're quiet tonight," Zara said. "No new pieces of cosmic wisdom. Subscriber dropped the DM, then nothing."
Amara folded her arms.
"And your other windows?" she asked, nodding at the screens showing code and what looked like network maps.
"Trying to track where certain anonymized traffic originates," Zara said. "IBL's VPN hops are creative. I keep running into dead nodes that smell like Accord back channels."
"And your phone?" Amara asked, before her courage could evaporate.
Zara blinked.
"What about my phone?" she said.
"You flipped it over like it was a classified file," Amara said. "Just… curious what's so secret you can't let the resident chaos magnet see it."
Zara stared at her for a beat.
Slowly, a smirk crept back.
"Wow," she said. "Paranoia looks good on you. Very noir heroine."
Amara's cheeks heated.
"I'm not paranoid," she lied.
"You are so paranoid," Zara said. "Which, to be fair, is a reasonable adaptation to living here."
She picked up the phone, turned it toward Amara, and unlocked it with her thumb.
Messages popped up.
Group chats. One labeled "Beta Squad – meme dump". Another: "Dad 😑". A third: little wolf emoji and a string of pack nicknames.
She scrolled through one thread with deliberate slowness.
"Tonight's secret?" she said. "Convincing three different patrol leaders that they cannot, in fact, use thirst-trap photos in their human dating profiles while also being on rotation. Someone's going to screenshot you, bro."
One recent message was from a contact labeled "Theo – Northside":
"if another human girl calls my eyes 'feral' on hinge I'm going to set something on fire"
Zara had replied:
"NO YOU'RE NOT. We talked about this. Use emojis. Don't howl in the voice notes."
Amara snorted, despite herself.
Zara flipped through another chat: this one with a contact saved as "Baba 💀".
Her father, apparently, sending her links to obscure articles about "the decline of literacy in modern youth." Zara had responded with memes of wolves reading books.
"See?" Zara said. "Just my tragic social life."
The suspicion in Amara loosened a notch.
Her eyes, traitorous, flicked back to the other phone on the desk. The one still face-down.
"And that one?" she asked quietly.
Zara's gaze followed.
For a moment, she didn't say anything.
Then she reached for it, thumb tracing the case.
"This one," she said, "is my burner for crawling places we don't want tied to Gray Towers. Leaks. Darker forums. Some wild supernatural corners. Places where someone like IBL might hang out when they're not gracing your comments."
She turned it over.
The lock screen was a generic cityscape.
"Locked," she said. "Because if anything on here gets out of my hands, I want it to be useless."
Amara believed her.
Mostly.
It didn't stop the little seed of doubt that whispered: She knows exactly how to be invisible. If anyone could be running troll accounts under different names, it's her.
Zara studied her face.
"You're looking at me like I just confessed to running a secret cult," she said.
"I don't—" Amara started.
"Don't lie," Zara said gently. "You're allowed to be freaked out. A stranger online is predicting our moves. Someone inside this world is talking in your language. You're allowed to look sideways at the people closest to you and go, 'Could it be you?'"
Silence pooled between them.
Amara swallowed.
"Could it be you?" she asked, because subtlety had apparently left the building.
Zara blinked twice.
Then she laughed, short and sharp.
"God, no," she said. "I barely have time to run my official chaos, let alone a side hustle as your cryptic oracle."
"That's not a no on running side accounts," Amara pointed out.
Zara gave her a flat look.
"I have alts for monitoring," she said. "Not for playing with your head. If I ever want to mess with you, I'll do it to your face. With charts."
That sounded exactly like Zara.
It also sounded exactly like something someone would say if they wanted to be trusted.
The paranoia was relentless.
Amara rubbed her temples.
"Being able to redraw the future feels useless when I can't tell who's lying to me," she said. "Or who's… what."
Zara's expression softened.
"Fate powers don't come with social x-ray vision," she said. "If they did, every romance novel would be shorter."
"And less fun," Amara mumbled.
"Exactly," Zara said. "You see arcs. Patterns. Big moves. You don't get subtitles over people's heads that say 'secret traitor' or 'mildly repressed but basically fine.'"
"Shame," Amara said. "That would make things easier."
"Would it?" Zara asked. "Or would you never talk to anyone ever again?"
Touché.
Zara reached for one of the monitors, flicked open a window Amara hadn't noticed.
It was a snapshot of one of Amara's recent panels. The rooftop, three silhouettes under the moon: her, Lucian, and a third shadow half-hidden.
Zara zoomed in on the third figure.
The lines blurred, indistinct.
"I found this in your private folder," she said. "The one you named 'Do Not Show' and then left unencrypted. Amara."
Amara flushed.
"You hacked my sketch dump," she said.
"I live to protect you from yourself," Zara said. "Also, your file names are terrible. Anyway—this is how it feels for the rest of us. We know there's a third thing out there. A force. A player. We see its outline. We can't define it."
She glanced sideways at Amara.
"We don't know if it's one person with ten faces," she said. "Or ten people with one mask."
Amara thought of Adrien's calm. Zara's burner phone. Eira's half-told stories about burnt villages. Lucian's wolf pacing under his ribs.
"We don't know if it's one what," she corrected quietly.
Zara nodded.
"Take it from the professional paranoid," she said. "You can't live here without your trust graph getting messy. The trick isn't to never suspect anyone. It's to hold the suspicion and the love in the same hand without letting either crush the other."
"That sounds hard," Amara said.
"It is," Zara said simply. "Do it anyway."
Amara looked at her screens again.
At the red-highlighted usernames.
At her own dashboard.
At the faint, ghostly shape of that unlabeled third line she'd drawn in her private sketch.
Being able to rewrite fate, she realized, was like editing the lighting of a stage.
It changed the mood. It could hide or reveal. It could make certain paths easier to see, others harder.
But it did not tell her what the actors were thinking as they took their marks.
After that, she couldn't stop watching people.
Adrien's calm started to feel like a riddle she had to solve.
At training, she saw it again.
She'd come down to the hidden gym with Zara for "exposure therapy," as Zara called it—watching wolves in half-shift spar was a way to remind herself that the monsters in her comic were also people who got winded and made bad jokes between punches.
Lucian sparred with Rao in the center of the mat, claws half-formed, golden eyes sharp. Others circled, betting in low voices. The room smelled like sweat and fur and adrenaline.
Adrien stood near the entrance, hands in his pockets, jacket off, sleeves rolled up. He looked out of place in the wolf chaos, but he was there often enough now that nobody commented.
Halfway through a particularly brutal exchange, one of the overhead lights flickered, then popped, showering a few stray glass shards.
Wolves flinched. Someone swore. A junior nearly leapt forward, instincts primed for an attack.
Adrien merely stepped sideways, out of the radius, without even looking up.
Like he'd expected it.
Like his body had already mapped where the glass would fall.
Amara felt that now-familiar chill.
Later, in the hall, she tested something.
She "rewound" a tiny moment.
Zara, walking with them, coffee in hand, phone in the other. In her mind, Amara sketched the coffee tipping, spilling on Zara's shirt.
Her hand trembled until she mimed the change in a thumbnail: cup tilts, arc of liquid, curse word.
Reality shivered.
Zara stumbled.
The cup jerked.
Coffee sloshed up, almost spilling—
Adrien, walking on her other side, reached out without looking and steadied Zara's wrist, then the cup, with precise, practiced ease.
"Careful," he said. "Gravity's out to get you today."
Zara blinked.
"Thanks," she said. "That would have been tragic."
Amara's headache flared and faded.
Adrien glanced at her.
Just a glance.
Just long enough to make her wonder if he'd felt the tug too.
Or if he was just good at catching things.
She watched him walk ahead, shoulders relaxed, posture easy.
Maybe he just has good reflexes, she told herself.
Or maybe he can feel the same currents you do, another voice said.
She didn't like either answer.
By the end of the week, she'd catalogued a dozen moments like that.
Zara's late-night checks.
Adrien's not-quite-suprised reactions.
Eira's gaze lingering a fraction too long on certain names in the war room.
Even Lucian, who she knew was drowning in responsibilities, became suspicious in flashes: the way he seemed to know when she was about to have a vision, the way he sometimes flinched at panels she hadn't shown him yet.
Paranoia crept in like damp.
Every smile started to look a little like a mask.
Every joke a little too practiced.
Every "we've got you" a little too tidy.
At one point, she caught herself staring at her own reflection in the elevator mirror and thinking, What if it's you? What if part of you is writing those comments and hiding it from yourself?
That was when she realized she really needed to sleep.
One night, unable to, she ended up on the rooftop.
The city sprawled below, endless and indifferent. Cars moved like blood cells through glowing veins. The river cut a dark, gleaming line through it all.
She'd drawn this view so many times now that seeing it in raw pixels felt strange, like looking at a photo of her own hand.
Lucian joined her without announcement, his presence folding into the night like he'd been born from it.
"You're not supposed to be up here alone," he said.
"You're not supposed to appear dramatically like a gothic boyfriend," she said.
"Beta," he corrected automatically, but there was no heat in it.
He stood beside her, leaning on the railing, eyes scanning the horizon.
They were quiet for a while.
Wind tugged at her hair.
Down in the streets, someone laughed loud enough that it floated all the way up, thin and distant.
"I keep trying to see who it is," she blurted.
Lucian didn't pretend not to understand.
"Subscriber," he said.
"And maybe InkBetweenLines," she said. "And maybe whatever that third thing is between my panels and your maps. I look at you and Zara and Adrien and Eira and—" she huffed a bitter laugh—"me, apparently. I overlay metaphors. 'Hand on glass. Calm in storms. Words like patterns.' I connect dots that might not be there. It's like I'm drawing conspiracy webs on everyone's faces."
"Sounds exhausting," he said quietly.
"It is," she said. "And useless. Because even if I could see ahead perfectly, like they claim to, it wouldn't tell me what's inside anyone's chest."
He glanced at her.
"You can draw a wolf," he said. "You can't draw a promise."
"Exactly," she said. "I can nudge a timeline. I can send a coffee cup in a different direction. But I can't see the choice someone makes in the dark when no one's watching."
"Sometimes I can't either," he said. "And I've been reading people longer than you've been alive."
"That's reassuring," she deadpanned.
"It should be," he said. "It means you're not failing at some magical standard. You're just… human. Even when you're doing inhuman things with a stylus."
The wind picked up.
She closed her eyes, let it sting her cheeks.
"I keep thinking," she said, "if I draw it right, if I predict just right, I'll finally know who to trust. That the future will tell me who's safe. But it doesn't. It just keeps… branching."
He was quiet for a long time.
"Trust isn't a spoiler," he said at last. "It's a risk. Every time."
She opened her eyes.
"That's a terrible system," she said.
"I didn't design it," he said. "If I had, I'd have given you subtitles like you wanted."
She smiled, small and tired.
"Can I ask you something?" she said.
"Yes," he said.
"Do you ever look at your inner circle and wonder… if you picked wrong?" she asked. "If one of them is… something else. Somebody else."
He didn't answer immediately.
"I'd be a bad Alpha if I didn't use the word 'audit' in my head every week," he said. "I watch. I test. I set bait. I build redundancies."
"That's a yes," she said.
"It's also a no," he said. "Because if I let that question eat everything, I can't lead. At some point, you choose who to stand beside in a room full of unknowns and you say, 'Today, I'm trusting these ones, and if I'm wrong, we bleed.' Then you wake up the next day and choose again."
She thought of Zara's burner phone and Adrien's reflexes and Eira's stories.
"And me?" she asked, before she could swallow it. "Do you ever… audit me?"
He turned fully to her then, leaning his hip against the railing.
"Yes," he said.
The honesty stung and soothed in equal measure.
"And?" she asked.
His mouth softened.
"And every time, I land on the same conclusion," he said. "You're a chaos event I care about. You complicate my life. You mess with my plans. You scare my security advisors. You make my wolves feel seen. You make our enemies nervous. You terrify more people than you realize."
"That sounds like an HR complaint," she said.
"It's a job description," he said.
She swallowed.
"So you trust me," she said.
"Enough to build around you," he said. "Enough to bleed for you. Enough to tell you when I think you're about to do something catastrophically stupid and stand there anyway."
Her eyes burned unexpectedly.
"That sounds like a lot," she said.
"It is," he said. "You're worth a lot."
Silence.
"You should know this, too," he added, voice lower. "If one of us in the inner circle turns out to be your ghost writer, your oracle, your leak, that's on them. Not on you. Your power doesn't create their choices. It just shines light on the stage they're already standing on."
She let that sit between them, like a stone, like an anchor.
Far below, headlights moved.
Above, clouds drifted.
Between them, she stood with a man who was half-wolf, half-CEO, and wholly trying.
Being able to rewrite fate had made her arrogant in some ways, she realized. She'd started to expect the world to flicker when she said so. To bend neatly to her edits. To confess its secrets via convenient visions.
But trust, mistrust, lies, loyalties—those were smaller, messier things. They lived in unfinished conversations and late-night texts and the way someone's hand shook or didn't when they reached for a cup.
Her pen could scrape the surface of timelines.
It could not strip the masks off the people around her.
Maybe it never would.
Maybe that was the part that would always scare her most.
"You're quiet," Lucian said.
"Don't get used to it," she said.
He huffed a laugh.
She looked at the city again.
"Someone's competing with me," she said. "On that… third line. Whoever they are. They see patterns. They drop hints. They think they're clever."
"They might be," he said.
"Yeah," she said. "But so am I."
She tightened her grip on the railing.
"I can't control what they see," she said. "Or what they leak. Or how many usernames they hide behind. All I can do is keep drawing, keep choosing, and keep deciding who I stand next to even when I'm afraid."
He nodded, once.
"Good," he said. "Because whoever's out there watching us, I'd rather they see our fear and our teeth at the same time."
"Poetic," she said.
"Bad influence," he said.
They stood there a while longer.
Amara let the paranoia sit in her chest like a second heart, beating alongside the first.
She knew it wouldn't go away. Not completely.
She knew she'd keep watching Adrien's calm and Zara's late-night screens and Eira's silences.
She knew the next cryptic comment would still make her pulse spike.
But she also knew this now:
Being able to rewrite fate didn't make her omniscient.
It just made her responsible.
For the choices she made with what she saw.
For the people she chose to trust, and distrust, in a world where no prophecy came with a guarantee.
Up in the tower, under the indifferent sky, Amara exhaled.
Somewhere in the city, a stranger with a blank avatar might have been watching.
Fine.
Let them.
They weren't the only one who could see ahead.
And they weren't the only one who could decide what to do with that sight.