29. Nari
TWENTY-NINE
NARI
The door was open.
Not ajar. Not cracked. Open. Three inches of gap between the frame and the reinforced steel she’d paid a small fortune to install because a contractor told her Tribeca lofts were easy targets, and she’d laughed and said, “Install it anyway. I like overkill.”
The lock wasn’t broken. Picked. She could tell by the scratch pattern on the faceplate—a faint arc of silver where the picks had scraped the brass. Nari stared at those scratches for four seconds before her brain started moving.
Four seconds. That’s how long it took. Four seconds of nothing—no thoughts, no sarcasm, no observations. Four blank, airless seconds where every sound in the hallway went dead.
Then her brain caught up to her eyes and everything happened at once.
She pushed the door open with her elbow. Not her hand—fingerprints, contamination, chain of evidence. Her father was a lawyer. Some training went bone-deep before you turned ten.
The loft looked like a body after surgery.
Same shape, same bones, but opened and handled by hands that didn’t belong there.
Couch cushions pulled from the sectional and stacked against the wall.
Bookshelves emptied in sections—manga volumes pulled forward, fanned open, reshelved crooked.
The kitchen drawers were all open an inch.
Not rifled. Searched. By people who knew how to put things back and chose not to bother.
Her feet carried her to the booth before her mind gave the order.
The glass door was closed but the light was on—she’d left it off.
Inside: her scripts had been sorted through.
The stack on the music stand was taller than she’d left it, which meant they’d been removed, examined, and replaced by someone who didn’t know the order.
Her desk drawer—the one with Hideo’s digitized voice notes—was shut.
But the cassette case on top had been moved two inches to the left.
She knew this because the dust ring didn’t match.
They went through my recording booth. Four months to get the acoustic calibration right. If they touched my condenser mic—
She checked. The Neumann sat untouched on its shock mount, pop filter at the correct angle, cable undisturbed. Relief punched through her ribs so hard, she grabbed the doorframe.
Fine. It’s fine. The mic is fine.
She made herself breathe. Made herself look. The production cels on the living room wall—three original Celestial Ronin pieces from Hideo’s personal collection, worth more than the furniture combined—hung straight. Untouched. The frames hadn’t been moved. The glass wasn’t smudged.
First-print cels. Museum-grade. Worth six figures apiece. And they left them on the wall.
That’s when the fear sharpened into focus. Because a thief who ignores six-figure art isn’t a thief. A thief who searches a recording booth, opens a desk drawer, and sorts through scripts isn’t looking for valuables. They’re looking for information.
They wanted the Sora Nightwind originals.
The sketchbooks. The unpublished arc. The proof that Voidborn was built on stolen bones.
They’d come for the evidence—and the evidence wasn’t here.
It was in the Wixx family archive on the Upper West Side, behind a fire-rated vault door that James had installed in 2003 because he treated his father-in-law’s work like classified documents.
Thank you, Dad. Thank you for being the most paranoid lawyer in Manhattan.
She walked the loft once. Counted the violations. Booth: searched. Desk: opened. Bedroom: dresser drawers ajar, closet door open, but nothing taken. Bathroom: untouched. Kitchen: drawers pulled. No damage. No vandalism. No message.
Clean, professional, and targeted. Someone had sent people who knew what they were doing and exactly what they were looking for.
Nari stood in the center of her living room, surrounded by the wreckage of her ordered world, and did the thing she did when the ground shifted under her feet.
She pulled out her phone and called Takumi.
He made it in twelve minutes. She heard him coming from the stairwell—sneakers slapping the steps too fast, a muffled yowl of protest, and Takumi’s voice saying, “Shh. We’re on a rescue mission. Act professional.”
He appeared in the doorway holding a cat carrier. Inside it, Emi pressed his enormous orange face against the mesh and stared at the loft with the disapproval of a health inspector.
“Why is the cat here?”
Takumi set the carrier on the kitchen counter. “I panicked. He’s emotional support.”
“He’s a cat.”
“He’s judging the situation.” Takumi looked around the loft. His face lost its usual animation, going tight and still. “That IS support.”
He walked the space the same way she had—perimeter first, then booth, then bedroom. She watched him notice the same things she’d noticed: the staged quality of it, the deliberate restraint, the cels untouched on the wall.
“They didn’t take the art.”
“No.”
“They weren’t after money.”
“No.”
Takumi’s jaw tightened. His eyes cut to the booth—to the desk drawer she’d told him about, the one with Hideo’s recordings. “The sketchbooks?”
“Upper West Side. Vault.”
“Good.” He exhaled hard. “Your dad is the most paranoid man alive, and I have never been more grateful.”
Emi made a low, guttural sound from the carrier—a noise somewhere between a growl and a complaint—and Takumi unzipped the top. The cat emerged with the gravity of a Supreme Court justice entering a courtroom, leaped to the counter, and sat. Facing the front door. Ears forward.
“See?” Takumi gestured. “Guarding.”
“He’s staring at a wall.”
“Strategically.”
Nari laughed. It came out wrong—too high, too short—and she pressed her knuckles to her mouth to stop the second one.
Takumi crossed the kitchen in three steps and put his arms around her.
No questions. No commentary. His chin on top of her head, his ridiculous designer jacket creaking as he squeezed.
She let him hold her. Allowed herself the exact duration of weakness she could afford, then pulled back and straightened her spine.
“Okay.” She ran her hands over her face. “Okay. I need to call—”
She stopped. Because she’d been about to say Dojin. Not the police. Not her father. Not building security. Dojin.
When did that happen? When did the first name in my emergency contact list become a man I’ve been kissing for less than a week?
Takumi watched her face. Read the calculation happening behind her eyes. Said nothing, which was the loudest Takumi had been in the twelve years she’d known him.
She dialed. It rang once.
“Nari.” His voice was warm and steady and immediate—no delay, no sleep-fog, no hold-on-let-me. One ring. Her name. Like he’d been waiting for it.
Her stomach dropped. Not fear—she’d already processed the fear, filed it, put it in the inventory column.
This was different. This was the sound of a man saying her name with his whole chest and her body responding before her brain had time to argue.
A heat low in her abdomen. A loosening in her spine.
Pavlovian. Humiliating. Exquisitely timed.
My loft was broken into and his voice is making my knees unreliable. Priorities, Wixx.
“Someone broke into my loft.”
Silence. Two seconds. When he spoke again, the warmth was gone. What replaced it was low and flat and had edges.
“Are you hurt?”
“No. I wasn’t here. I came home, and the door was open. Picked.”
“Are you inside?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t touch anything else. I’m on my way.”
The line went dead. She stared at the screen. Twenty-three seconds. The entire call had lasted twenty-three seconds and he hadn’t asked a single unnecessary question.
Takumi raised one eyebrow. “That was either a phone call or an emergency dispatch. Hard to tell the difference.”
“He’s coming.”
“Of course, he is.” Takumi leaned against the counter. Emi headbutted his elbow. “You called the bear before the cops. You know what that means.”
“It means he has security resources the NYPD doesn’t.”
“It means you trust him more than the city of New York.”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked at the cels on the wall—Hideo’s art, still hanging, still safe—and let the truth sit where it landed.
“I’m going to document what they touched.” She picked up a pen and a legal pad from the kitchen drawer. “Make yourself useful. Check the bedroom. Tell me if anything’s missing from the closet.”
Takumi saluted. Emi stayed on the counter, watching the door, ears still forward.
Good cat.
She pulled up a stool at the kitchen island.
Picked up the pen. And started documenting everything they’d touched, everything they’d moved, everything they’d looked at and left behind—turning the violation into evidence one line at a time.
The scratch of pen on paper was the steadiest sound in the loft, and she held onto it like a script before a difficult take: one word, then the next, then the next, until the shaking stopped.