He noticed the redirect. Filed it. You’ll— what? Meet her? Like her? Survive her interrogation? He let it pass because she needed him to.
“Revka—my mother—makes brisket that could achieve the same geopolitical effect.” He paused. “She also has no concept of personal boundaries. She told a woman at a fundraiser that I drew portraits unconsciously and needed to find someone worth drawing.”
“Did you? Find someone worth drawing?”
The question hung between them. Pizza box. Cold coffee. The hum of a building that had housed a press conference and a breakdown and was now hosting an evening that felt—impossibly, improbably—like a first date.
“Yes.”
She held his gaze. Then looked away. Reached into her bag.
The sketchbook she’d never shown anyone.
“I’ve never shown anyone this.”
She set it on her crossed knees.
He opened it. Page by page. Slow. The same focused attention she’d watched him give museum originals, gallery pieces, the rare first editions in his collection. Except this wasn’t reverence for history—this was reverence for her.
Romantic silhouettes. Reaching for each other across empty space. Never touching. A man and a woman separated by a gap that her pencil refused to close. The loneliness rendered in graphite—tender, aching, the output of a woman who drew love in secret because she was afraid to live it.
He stilled on a page near the middle. Two figures backlit by a window. The woman’s arm extended. The man’s hand half-raised. The space between them glowed.
She looked at the floor. Her pulse hammered.
“These are extraordinary.”
She didn’t answer.
“Lumi.”
She looked up. His expression—she’d mapped every version of his face over weeks. The professional mask. The alpha control. The unguarded flash that broke through when he caught her elbow at Chelsea Market. None of them matched what she saw now.
He sees it. He sees all of it. The loneliness and the wanting and the fear.
“There’s more.” Her throat was dry. “Not in the sketchbook.”
She didn’t plan to say it. Mika’s question from weeks ago—are you going to let Harlan take this too?—had been lodged under her ribs like shrapnel. And today, knowing Zeir stood at a podium and staked his name on her work without asking, watching him absorb her anger without flinching, watching him saydonelike it was the simplest word in the English language?—
The shrapnel dislodged.
“Sable’s ideology. The way she’s selective about what she protects. The way her logic holds even when her actions are monstrous.” She kept her gaze on his. “I didn’t build that from nowhere. I’ve been reading your villains for years. Shadowfang. The Architect. Crimson Doctrine. Your characters taught me how to build a villain who’s relatable without being redeemed.Sable has your fingerprints on her.” A breath. “Not your designs. Your philosophy.”
The building hummed. Rain against the windows. She waited for the word thief to land between them. For the accusation that would confirm her worst fear—that the line between what Harlan did to her and what she did with Zeir’s output was thinner than she could survive.
TWENTY-FIVE
ZEIR
She sat across from him with her hands clenched in her lap and told him the truth as if it might kill her.
He heard every word. His brain caught each one, turned it over, held it. But his body understood faster. The crack in his sternum—the locked place—walled off since he shut a drawer and pretended he didn’t need to draw—splintered.
The art that moved him. The pages that made his wolf recognize her before his brain caught up. It wasn’t coincidence. It wasn’t parallel talent arriving at similar conclusions. She’d been studying his characters for years—absorbing it, filtering it through her own heart—and building a villain that gave his philosophy the emotional core he’d never been brave enough to access himself.
They’d been talking to each other through their art for a decade. He hadn’t known. She had.
Her chin lifted. Braced.