“I’m kidding. Mostly.” Mika dropped onto the couch beside her, pulling Moriarty’s vine off her shoulder where it had crept. “Six hours without eating. You’re going to be one of those artists they find preserved under a pile of their own pages. They’ll call it ‘method.’”
“At least my pages will be in the right order. Unlike certain printing companies I could name.”
Mika was already on her phone. Two calls. The first to a freelance binder in Greenpoint who could hand-correct the page order on the existing copies for a fraction of the reprint cost. The second to negotiate a rate that made Lumi’s eyebrows climb.
“Done. Eight days. He’ll pick up the copies Thursday.”
Lumi blinked at her. “How do you know a freelance binder in Greenpoint?”
“I know everyone.” Mika sipped her cafecito with the serenity of a woman who had an entire borough on speed dial. “It’s my superpower. Yours is drawing murder women. Mine is knowing a guy.”
“Villain women.”
“Murder women with impeccable fashion sense and tragic backstories. Tomato, tomah-to.”
“Sable doesn’t murder people. She makes morally complex decisions in a framework of?—”
“Babe, she decapitated a man in Volume 2.”
“He deserved it.”
“I’m not arguing that. I lettered the scene. The sound effect alone took me three drafts.” Mika set her cup down. The cafecito click against the table had a different weight to it. Heavier. The sound of a conversation about to change direction. “So. Your agent called me this morning.”
Lumi’s hand froze on her third pastelito. “My agent calledyou?”
“Because she knew you’d dodge her call.”
Fair. She’d been dodging her agent’s calls for two days.
“You’ve been shortlisted for a collaboration.” Mika said it the way a doctor delivered scan results—direct, no cushion, watching the patient’s face. “A major one. Axan Dark Publishing.”
The pastelito turned to chalk in Lumi’s mouth.
Axan Dark. The name hit like a door swinging open she’d been leaning against.
“No.”
“You haven’t heard the?—”
“I don’t collaborate.” She set the pastelito down. Her appetite vanished as quickly as it had arrived. “The last time I did, it cost me everything.”
“Lumi—”
“And Axan Dark is corporate. They’re the biggest villain publisher in the industry. They’ll want to sand the edges off Nightbloom, make Sable more ‘accessible,’ give her a redemption arc?—”
“Axan Dark built their entire brand on villains who don’t get redeemed.” Mika’s voice was calm. The calm of a woman who had anticipated every one of these objections and was swattingthem down like flies at a barbecue. “Their catalog is literally ‘love the villain because of the darkness, not despite it.’ That’s your whole philosophy.”
I know. Believe me, I know. I’ve read every word they’ve published.
Out loud, she went somewhere safer. “Zeir Axan. The industry’s Dark Lord. Wears black like it’s a religion and reportedly hasn’t smiled since 2019.” She picked at a fleck of dried paint on her knee. “I saw him at a panel once—he made a room full of grown adults nervous by standing still. That’s not a man, Mika. That’s a weather system.”
Mika snorted. “A weather system.”
“A cold front. With cheekbones.”
“So he’s hot.”
“I said he was a weather system.”