20. Nari
TWENTY
NARI
The corporate filing read like a bedtime story written by a sociopath.
Nari sat cross-legged on her living room floor at one in the morning with her laptop balanced on a stack of manga volumes and three browser tabs open to the New York Secretary of State’s business entity database.
Chet Baker had given way to Nujabes hours ago—lo-fi beats that matched the clicking rhythm of her keyboard.
A mug of cold matcha listed sideways on the coffee table.
She’d forgotten it existed around eleven forty-five, when the paper trail started making her stomach hurt.
Meridian Creative Partners, LLC. Filed in Delaware, where every company that wanted to be invisible filed.
Single managing member listed as Halloran Consulting Group.
She clicked through to Halloran. Another LLC.
Filed in Nevada. Managing member: a holding company registered to a P.O. box in the Caymans.
Three shells deep. Someone paid a lot of money to not have their name on this.
She pulled the laptop closer and opened the pitch deck she’d photographed from the production office bulletin board last week.
Everyone left pitch decks lying around studios.
Nobody expected the lead voice actress to photograph them in the bathroom during a break.
Nobody expected the lead voice actress to be conducting a forensic audit of their flagship property, either, but here they were.
Voidborn Requiem. Pitched to Keiser Entertainment over a year ago by Meridian Creative Partners. Original concept, the deck claimed. A fresh mythology built from the ground up. Bold, cinematic, unprecedented.
Nari scrolled to the concept art page and held it next to the photo of Hideo’s notebook on her phone.
Fresh mythology. Ground up. Unprecedented.
Except the protagonist’s oath is adapted from a Heian-era poem that my grandfather translated in 1987. Including the deliberate error in the fourth line. Because Grandpa thought flaws made things human.
She’d traced the pitch backward. Meridian Creative Partners had no website, no portfolio, no public-facing employees. A company that existed only on paper. And it had somehow developed an “original” animation concept that shared structural DNA with thirty years of unpublished Wixx estate archives.
Her phone buzzed. Takumi.
Takumi: It’s 1 am. Are you investigating or are you sleeping?
Nari: Define investigating.
Takumi: Hunched over your laptop surrounded by documents looking like a beautiful conspiracy theorist.
Nari: Then yes.
Takumi: Did you eat dinner?
Nari: I ate intent. And half a granola bar.
Takumi: I’m sending you food tomorrow. Real food. The kind that requires chewing.
She dropped her phone and turned back to the screen. Halloran Consulting Group’s registered agent had a name: Kenneth Pruitt. She searched him. LinkedIn profile: Senior Vice President of Business Development at Mercer Global Media.
The room tilted.
Nari closed the laptop. Opened it. Closed it again.
Mercer Global.
Brent Mercer. One of the three largest media conglomerates on the East Coast. Acquisition-driven.
Aggressive. Known in the industry for buying content libraries and wringing them dry.
Her father had mentioned him once at a dinner party—James Wixx didn’t waste words on people he disliked, and he’d used four: “Creatively bankrupt. Professionally dangerous.”
She stood. Paced the length of her loft—south windows to kitchen and back, bare feet on hardwood, her brain doing what it did when information arrived faster than she could organize it: sorting, connecting, discarding, ranking.
Meridian pitched Voidborn to Keiser. Meridian traces back to Mercer Global. Voidborn is built on Grandpa’s work. Which means Mercer’s people stole it. But Keiser bought the pitch. Did Dojin know what he was buying? Did he know where it came from?
She stopped pacing.
Did the man who brought her rooftop honeycomb and sat on a studio floor in the dark because she was sad—did he know he was profiting off a dead man’s stolen legacy?
Her chest tightened. Not anger—or not only anger. The specific ache of wanting an answer she wasn’t sure she’d survive hearing.
She picked up Hideo’s notebook from the coffee table.
Ran her thumb over the leather. The cover was soft from sixty years of handling, the spine cracked in three places from where he’d opened it flat to draw.
It smelled like old paper and ink and the sandalwood incense Suki burned in the brownstone study.
I’m going to find out. And I’m not going to be gentle about it.
The studio smelled different at night. Without bodies filling the rooms, without the coffee machine running and the hum of monitors and the chatter of production assistants who treated caffeine as a personality—the building stripped down to its bones.
Acoustic foam and cold air, and the faint chemical tang of animation supplies drifting up from the floor below.
Nari was in the recording booth. Not performing—reading.
She’d booked a late session to work on Episode Ten’s monologue, but the monologue had ended an hour ago, and now she was sitting in the producer’s chair with Hideo’s notebook and the Voidborn bible side by side, making notes in the margins with a red pen she’d stolen from Priya’s desk.
The hallway door opened. She heard him before she saw him—footsteps too heavy for anyone on the production team, the faint creak of a man who took up more space than most doorways planned for.
Dojin stopped in the doorway of the control room. He’d lost the blazer somewhere between his office and here. Shirt untucked, sleeves pushed up his forearms, tie absent. His eyes found her immediately—always did, every room, like a compass she hadn’t given permission to install.
“You’re here late.”
“You’re here later.” She closed Hideo’s notebook. Slid it under the Voidborn bible. Casual. “Does the CEO do bed checks, or is this a special occasion?”
He leaned against the doorframe. Crossed his arms. The position made his forearms do unreasonable things, and she noted this with the studied detachment of a woman who’d been noting unreasonable forearm behavior for weeks.
“I saw the studio lights from the street.”
“You were walking past the studio. At eleven p.m. On a Thursday.”
“The tower’s three blocks away.”
“Three blocks in the wrong direction from your apartment.”
“I was checking on the building.”
“You were checking on me.”
“The building includes you.”
Smooth. Annoyingly smooth.
She stood from the chair and moved to the mixing board, putting distance and professional equipment between them. Needed the barrier. Needed her brain to stop registering the way his presence reorganized every room he entered—making it smaller, warmer, harder to breathe in.
“I have a question.”
His expression shifted. Attentive. Patient. Bear-steady, if she’d known to call it that. “Ask.”
“Voidborn. Where did the concept come from?”
The shift was subtle. A straightening in his shoulders. Not defensive—alert. “Why?”
“Because I’m voicing a character built on a mythology I’ve never seen pitched before, and I’m curious about the creative DNA.”
He studied her. She let him. Kept her breathing even, her face in the pleasant neutral she wore at industry events when someone asked about Hideo and she had to perform gratitude instead of grief.
“Meridian Creative Partners,” he said. “External pitch. They brought the concept to us fourteen months ago. Full bible, concept art, episode outlines. We licensed it for development.”
“Meridian Creative.” She made her voice flat. Incurious. It cost her. “I’m not familiar.”
“Small firm. Boutique. They approached us through a broker.”
“Through a broker.” She picked up Priya’s red pen. Turned it between her fingers. “So you never met the creators directly.”
“The pitch meeting was with Meridian’s representatives. Standard acquisition process.” He stepped into the room. Closer. She clocked the distance—six feet, five feet, the invisible perimeter where his warmth started registering against her skin. “Nari. What’s this about?”
She met his eyes. Held them.
Tell him. Not yet. The evidence was strong, but the chain wasn’t complete, and James Wixx’s daughter knew better than to show her hand before the cards were counted.
“Professional curiosity.” She smiled. It didn’t reach her eyes, and they both knew it. “Yua’s mythology is unusually specific for an original property. I wanted to understand the source.”
He watched her for a long beat. His gaze had weight—physical, present, like standing too close to a fire.
“If there’s a problem with the property—”
“No problem.” She set down the pen. “Just asking.”
The silence between them held tension like a held breath. She broke it first—she always did.
“You’re wearing my jacket.”
She looked down. She was, in fact, wearing his jacket. Had been wearing it over her shoulders during the late session because the studio ran cold at night and it was there and it was warm and it smelled like him and she’d stopped pretending that was a coincidence three days ago.
“You didn’t ask for it back.”
“Do you want me to?”
“Did I say that?”
His eyes tracked the jacket’s shoulders where they hung past her own, the sleeves she’d rolled twice and still fell to her fingertips, the collar turned up against her neck. His jaw worked once. A muscle in his throat moved.
“It looks better on you.”
“Everything looks better on me. That’s not the compliment you think it is.”
He laughed. Low, warm, and it did damage. It always did damage. She’d been tracking the specific damage his laugh caused since the rooftop—a loosening behind her ribs, an unwinding in her spine, like her body recognized the sound and decided safety was a place rather than a concept.
You might be building a case against this man’s company. His laugh has no business making you feel safe. Get a grip, Wixx.
“Go home, Nari.”
“You first.”
They looked at each other. Neither moved.