3. Lumi
THREE
LUMI
Coltrane had run out. She didn’t restart the record.
The silence was its own kind of company—the scratch of her brush on paper, street noise filtering through old windows, the radiator’s arrhythmic clank.
She worked. That was what she did when the world pressed too close—she picked up a brush and disappeared into the lines.
Sable’s world was controllable. Sable’s world made sense.
In Sable’s world, the villain was powerful and selective and operated on an ideology so watertight that readers nodded along even when she did terrible things.
Unlike the real world, where the person you trusted most took what you made and put his name on it and you couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
She inked the final line on the repaired panel.
Held it at arm’s length. Sable stared back at her—a woman becoming a monster, or a monster remembering she was a woman.
The ambiguity was the point. The industry wanted villains who were clearly evil or clearly redeemable.
Lumi drew villains who were clearly human.
The darkness was the appeal, not the obstacle.
Afternoon light shifted through the windows. The light deepened to gold. Her phone buzzed on the couch cushion.
Mom.
She picked up on the third ring. “Hey.”
“Are you eating?”
“Yes.”
“Real food or ‘artist food’?”
Lumi glanced at the empty pastelito bag. Technically a pastry counted as real food. It had flour in it. Flour was a grain. Grains were a food group. “Real food.”
“What kind of real food?”
“What’s artist food?”
“Anything you can eat with one hand while the other hand holds a brush.” Ozara’s voice carried the quiet warmth of a mother who had raised two children and learned that the direct approach worked on Keanu and the flanking maneuver worked on Lumi.
“Your father used to eat entire sandwiches sideways during his banking days. It was disturbing. I don’t want that for you. ”
Lumi smiled despite herself. Sideways sandwiches. She’d inherited more from her dad than financial discipline. The man could eat a burrito while reviewing spreadsheets without dropping a single grain of rice. It was, honestly, impressive.
“How are you sleeping?”
“Fine.”
“How many hours?”
“Several.”
“Lumi.”
“Four. Ish.”
Ozara didn’t push. That was the thing about her mother—she knew when pushing would make Lumi dig in harder. She changed direction with the practiced ease of a woman who’d spent twenty years consulting for artists with egos the size of their talent.
“I’m proud of you.”
The words landed in a soft place Lumi hadn’t braced for. Her throat tightened. She pressed her thumbnail into the palm of her free hand.
“For sleeping four hours?”
“For all of it. The work. The fight. The way you keep going.” She paused. “You don’t have to do it all alone, honey.”
Yes, I do. That’s the whole point.
“I know, Mom. I love you too.”
They talked for another ten minutes. Ozara didn’t mention the Axan Dark collaboration.
Didn’t mention publishing or distribution or any of the words that would have made Lumi’s walls go up.
She asked about the convention prep. About Moriarty’s newest growth spurt.
About whether Keanu had sent over the updated contract language for her merchandise licensing.
After they hung up, Lumi sat with the phone in her ink-smudged hands and studied the wall where her mother’s latest gift hung—an early work by an artist Ozara had discovered before anyone else.
The brushstrokes were bold and unafraid.
Ozara had given it to her the week after the Harlan disaster, without explanation.
Lumi had understood anyway: This is what courage looks like in paint. Don’t forget.
Evening fell in layers. Gold to amber to the blue-gray of a Brooklyn dusk.
She’d worked through the afternoon—finishing the repaired panel, starting layouts for a convention-exclusive print, answering three emails from indie shops requesting restocks.
The loft darkened around her in increments she didn’t notice until the pendant lamps clicked on their timer and her world shifted from daylight to lamplight.
She’d heated a can of soup at some point. The bowl sat half-finished on the kitchen counter. Progress.
Now she sat cross-legged on the couch in the warm pool of lamplight, her brush behind her ear, the loft humming with the quiet of a space that knew her rhythms. The Nightbloom pages were pinned to the corkboard above her desk, Sable’s face repeated in various stages of transformation—rage, grief, power, isolation.
A woman who poured her entire capacity for love into the single thing she chose to protect, and destroyed everything else.
She reached under the couch.
The private sketchbook. The one no one saw. Not Mika. Not Keanu. Not Ozara. It was small, bound in dark leather, the pages thick and cream-colored and filled with work that had nothing to do with Nightbloom.
She opened it to the last drawing.
Two silhouettes. A man and a woman. Reaching for each other across a gap that was more than physical—it was the space between wanting and risking, between loneliness and the terrifying possibility of being known.
She’d drawn them a dozen times. The poses shifted—sometimes the woman was reaching harder, sometimes the man. The gap never closed.
She picked up a pencil. Sketched new lines. The woman’s hand extended, fingers spread, the gesture both invitation and warning. The man’s silhouette leaned forward—not reaching yet, but oriented. Turned toward her. Listening.
She stopped before the hands touched. She always stopped.
Closed the sketchbook. Pressed it between her palms. The leather was lit by the lamp.
She’d made peace with the distance. Or told herself she had.
She shoved the sketchbook under the couch. Picked up her phone.
Mika’s words circled: putting Nightbloom in front of people who deserve to read it.
Ozara’s voice: You don’t have to do it all alone.
*The Shadowfang volumes on the shelf behind her, spine-cracked and Post-it flagged, the work of a man whose creative philosophy ran through her veins whether she admitted it or not.
She typed a text to her agent.
Fine. Set up the meeting. But if he tries to make Nightbloom “more accessible,” I’m walking. And by walking I mean I’m setting his vintage first editions on fire. Metaphorically. Probably.
She hit send. Watched the screen.
Her agent’s reply was a single emoji: a champagne bottle popping.
Lumi tossed the phone onto the couch. Leaned back. Stared at the ceiling where the pendant lamp threw a circle of amber against the exposed brick.
In twelve days, she had a convention—already half-planning to postpone it, if the meeting went the way she needed it to.
In less than that, she had a meeting with a man whose work had taught her everything she knew about darkness.
A man she’d studied, admired, and borrowed from in ways she’d never admit.
This is either the best decision you’ve made since going indie or the worst. Knowing your luck, it’ll be both.
On the windowsill, Moriarty’s vine had crept back toward the ink tray.
She didn’t stop it.