1. Lumi
ONE
LUMI
The smell of turpentine hit before the coffee did.
The hold music was Vivaldi. Tinny, warped Vivaldi. She was going to lose her mind.
A vine from the pothos on the windowsill—Moriarty, named for obvious reasons—had crawled across the sill and was inching toward her open ink tray. She grabbed the vine mid-reach without breaking stride. “Moriarty, I swear, if you drown in cadmium red, it’s natural selection.”
The hold music clicked. A human voice. She spat the brush into her free hand.
“No, I understand mistakes happen.” She dragged the pothos vine back toward the sill and tucked it behind the succulent—Hela, who was thriving because Hela always thrived, because some villains were built to survive neglect.
“What I don’t understand is how a professional printing company confuses page order in a sequential narrative. ”
The voice on the other end offered a rehearsed apology.
“Sequential.” She stopped pacing. Surveyed the stacks of ruined copies. “As in: one thing follows another. It’s literally how stories work. I shouldn’t have to explain narrative structure to a printing company. That’s like explaining water to a fish.”
The voice suggested a reprint timeline of four to six weeks.
“Four to—” She pinched the bridge of her nose. Breathe. She had a convention in twelve days. Twelve days, three hundred useless copies, and the fern on the far end of the windowsill was browning at the tips again. Iago. Dying, as always. On brand.
“Two weeks,” she told the voice. Not a request. “Your mistake, your rush order. Two weeks or I’m switching to the printer in Red Hook who’s been courting me since Volume 1.”
She hung up before they could counter-offer.
Tossed the phone onto the couch—the battered leather thing she slept on more nights than her actual bed, stationed in the dividing line between the living side and the studio side of the loft.
The living side was curated: her parents’ art on the walls, quality furniture her grandmother had chosen, a silk rug that had no business sharing airspace with cadmium red.
The studio side looked like a creative crime scene.
Half-finished watercolor panels pinned to every available corkboard.
Ink bottles in graduated shades of black and crimson lined up on the drafting table in color order, which she’d deny was obsessive and everyone else would disagree with.
Reference books stacked in towers that defied physics.
And pinned above her desk, the pages she’d been re-inking since 3:00 a.m.—a panel she’d spilled coffee on during a deadline spiral, the stain bleeding across Sable’s outstretched hand in a way that looked almost intentional.
Almost. She’d still spent four hours fixing it.
She dropped onto the couch. The leather groaned. The vanilla candle on the side table—lit to mask the turpentine, never quite succeeding—flickered as the couch cushion exhaled. Four in the morning until now. No food. Two pots of coffee. Her hands trembled when she held them out.
She’d left a note on the drafting table—Tessa’s handwriting, neat and efficient, reminding her about the Portland reprint invoice and the archiving backlog.
Three months in and her studio assistant was already indispensable.
That was either excellent hiring or the beginning of a dependency Lumi didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to examine. She set the note aside.
Eat, maybe. At some point. After.
After was always the answer. After this page. After this convention. After the print run. After, after, after—a word that stretched endlessly ahead of her, pushing rest and nourishment and anything resembling a personal life into a future that never quite arrived.
She pulled the nearest Nightbloom page into her lap.
Sable mid-transformation. Her villain’s face caught between human grief and monstrous power, the lines raw, the inks heavy.
She’d drawn this panel after a bad night—one of those 2:00 a.m. spirals where loneliness and ambition tangled into a knot she couldn’t unpick, so she’d poured the whole mess into Sable’s expression.
Rage and isolation rendered in brushstrokes so raw, they made her chest ache to look at them.
The industry called her work “too dark.”
She traced Sable’s jaw with her thumbnail. Too honest. That’s what they mean.
Three years of building Nightbloom alone. Three volumes. A cult following. Critics who praised her villain-building in the same breath they used to explain why mainstream publishers wouldn’t touch her. “Too niche.” “Too intense.” “Love the work, but it’s not marketable.”
She sold at conventions. Through indie shops.
Online, when her website cooperated, which was roughly half the time because she’d built that herself too.
Every dollar from sales went back into printing, distribution, convention fees.
She funded the entire operation from earned income and sheer stubbornness.
There was a trust fund she didn’t touch.
A safety net her father had built with the quiet, practical love that defined him.
She borrowed from it in emergencies—equipment failures, the time a flood ruined two hundred copies in storage—and repaid every cent.
The ledger she kept was meticulous. Obsessive, Keanu called it. Principled, she corrected him.
She didn’t need the money. She needed to know she could do it herself.
Her gaze drifted to the shelf behind the couch.
The Shadowfang Chronicles. Every volume. Spines cracked from rereading, Post-it flags bristling from the pages like colorful quills. Next to them: The Architect. Crimson Doctrine. The entire Axan Dark villain catalog, their spines cracked and flagged.
She set the Nightbloom page down. Harlan Cray was a locked room in her mind and she intended to keep it that way.
The documentary deal he’d just landed—the wave of industry acclaim cresting behind him like a tide that rewarded the wrong things—was reason enough to keep the door bolted.
She rubbed her eyes with paint-stained fingers.