7. Lumi
SEVEN
LUMI
Act normal. You are a professional artist here for a professional meeting. You are NOT a fangirl walking into a cathedral of everything you’ve secretly worshipped for a decade. Cool. Calm. Indifferent.
Lumi repeated this on the L train from Bushwick, her portfolio propped between her knees, her reflection staring back from the dark window with the expression of a woman who was not remotely calm.
She’d worn her armor: paint-splattered Doc Martens, a vintage Bowie tee under a structured black blazer, statement earrings shaped like tiny daggers.
Her wild curls refused to be tamed, as usual, so she’d stopped fighting them somewhere around the Bedford stop and accepted that her hair was going to do whatever it wanted. Much like the rest of her.
She’d rehearsed boundaries. Practiced indifference.
Spent forty minutes on the train composing a mental list of reasons this meeting was a terrible idea, and a shorter, more treacherous list of reasons she was going anyway.
The convention had been postponed—the Greenpoint binder working through the misprinted copies on schedule, the deadline salvaged—which had removed the excuse she’d been half-planning to use.
The shorter list won. It always did.
Chelsea in late September was golden. The gallery district caught afternoon light in ways that made the sidewalks glow, and Lumi tracked the shifting colors the way she tracked everything—as palette, as reference, as potential.
The tree-lined blocks near the High Line were beautiful in a curated way that made her Bushwick sensibilities bristle and her artist’s eye involuntarily catalog every shadow.
The Axan Dark building stopped her mid-stride.
The building she’d seen in photos a hundred times.
Seeing it in person stopped her breath—the preserved industrial bones, the careful renovation.
She’d expected corporate glass. This was a place that respected what it had been.
The kind of building that said we know what this building was and we intend to honor it.
The logo above the entrance—subtle, charcoal, easy to miss unless you were looking.
This is where Shadowfang was built. This is where The Architect was born. You are standing in front of the building that published every villain you’ve dissected for five years and you will NOT lose your composure on a public sidewalk in Chelsea.
She walked in.
The lobby hit her like a fist made of beauty.
Double-height ceiling. Polished concrete floors.
And the walls—original comic art under museum-quality lighting.
Not prints. Originals. Pages she’d studied in published form, dissected for technique, traced for influence—and here they were, framed and preserved with the reverence of a gallery that understood what it held.
The curation was exquisite. Whoever arranged this had an eye that rivaled the best gallery directors she’d grown up watching her mother consult for.
Oh God, is that an original Tanaka ink wash? Don’t touch it. Don’t you dare touch it. Put your hand down.
Her hand was six inches from the glass. She retracted it with the guilty speed of a child caught reaching for the museum exhibit.
“Lumi Stone?”
She turned. The man approaching was younger than she’d expected—late twenties, sharp suit, easy grin, the kind of face that made people trust him before he’d said a word. He carried two coffees and the charged energy of someone who was about to enjoy this more than he let on.
“Kael Axan. Head of marketing and professional sibling.” He offered one of the coffees. “Fair warning—my brother’s studio looks like a hurricane hit a comic book museum. He’ll critique your work before he says hello. And he’ll be right about at least half of it, which is the annoying part.”
She liked him immediately. That was inconvenient, because she’d planned to dislike everyone in this building on principle.
“Does he know I’m here?”
“He’s been rearranging your pages since seven this morning. So.” Kael pressed the elevator button. “Yes.”