8. Lumi
EIGHT
LUMI
The third-floor studio was everything Kael promised and worse.
Cavernous. Exposed ductwork running across a high ceiling.
Concrete floors. Original comic art covering every available wall—pages she recognized, pages she didn’t, all of them arranged with an eye for composition that bordered on obsessive.
Shelves of rare first-edition graphic novels lined one wall, spines organized with a librarian’s care.
A couch in the corner that had clearly been slept on more than once.
And dominating the center of the room, a massive antique drafting table positioned to catch the afternoon light through industrial windows.
Her Nightbloom pages were spread across it.
He stood behind the table with her work under his hands, and Lumi registered him the way she deconstructed any subject—in pieces, because the whole of him was too much to process at once.
Height first. He was tall in a way that reorganized the room around him, broad through the shoulders with the dense build of a man whose body was a statement whether he intended it or not.
Dark hair, kept short but slightly unruly at the temples.
A black Henley rolled to the forearms. And his hands—
Ink on his knuckles. Smudges of pigment she recognized by color.
She’d noticed that at the panel two years ago.
From across a crowded room, she’d clocked his hands before his face, and the ink stains that mirrored the paint on her own.
Production contact would do that—a publisher who spent his days correcting proofs and handling inks alongside his colorists would carry it.
But the quality of the staining was wrong for that.
Too deep in the creases, the kind that came from a grip held for hours.
She’d told herself it was professional observation. She’d been lying.
He looked up. Their eyes met across twenty feet of concrete floor and three volumes of her life’s work.
Sharp jaw. Amber eyes that assessed her with an intensity that was either deeply flattering or mildly threatening—she couldn’t tell which, and the ambiguity made her stomach tighten in a way she refused to catalog.
He didn’t smile. Didn’t offer a greeting.
Didn’t perform any of the social rituals that normal humans used to signal non-hostility.
He looks like one of his own villains.
Her body responded as though that were a compliment. It was. She hated that it was.
“This page is dishonest.”
No hello. No handshake. He held up a Nightbloom page—Volume 2, the scene where Sable burned her own throne to keep it from falling to her enemies—and dropped the accusation into the room like a grenade.
“Hello to you too.” Lumi set her portfolio on the nearest flat surface. “I’m Lumi. I believe we have a meeting?”
“You defaulted to anger when the moment called for grief.” He laid the page flat, his finger tracing the panel where Sable’s expression twisted mid-destruction.
“Sable isn’t angry here. She’s heartbroken.
But you drew rage because rage is easier.
Grief requires you to stay in the wound. You flinched.”
The accuracy hit like a slap.
Not because he was wrong. Because he was right—and he was the person whose work had taught her how to build that scene.
Having him call her emotionally dishonest on a page rooted in what she’d learned studying his characters was like having a secret mentor reject her homework.
The irony was exquisite. The sting was worse.
“I default to anger in most situations.” She crossed the room. Stopped at the drafting table. Close enough now to see the grain of the antique wood, the red editorial pen beside her pages, the Shadowfang Chronicles framed on the wall behind him. “It’s a personality trait, not a flaw.”
“In a person, perhaps. In a character, it’s a shortcut.”
“You want to talk about shortcuts?” She turned to the Shadowfang pages on the wall.
She knew this series the way a surgeon knew anatomy—every panel, every choice, every place where ambition exceeded execution.
“Your protagonist hides behind darkness instead of letting readers inside his head. Brooding isn’t character development. It’s a wall dressed up as depth.”
His chin lifted a fraction. The smallest tell—she’d surprised him.
“Your villain in Volume Seven stood in the rain for three pages.” She stepped closer to the framed art, pointing at that spread. “THREE PAGES of standing in rain. That’s not a character arc. That’s a man who doesn’t own an umbrella.”
His lips twitched.
It was the smallest movement—a micro-expression that lasted half a second and vanished behind that carved-granite composure. But she saw it. She’d made the industry’s Dark Lord almost smile, and the triumph was unreasonable and electric and she needed to stop staring at his mouth immediately.
“The rain was thematic,” he said.
“The rain was lazy. You used atmosphere to avoid doing the interior work. Your villain was standing in a downpour because you didn’t know what he was thinking, so you made it moody instead of specific.
” She turned back to him. “Which is ironic, because every other villain in your catalog has the most specific interior logic I’ve ever—”
She stopped herself. Barely. The sentence had been heading toward a confession she was not prepared to make in his studio on their first meeting.
His eyes narrowed. Not angry. Focused. He’d heard a sentence stop mid-air and he wasn’t going to pretend he hadn’t.
“Every other villain in my catalog has what?”
“Has made your company a fortune.” Smooth pivot. Not smooth enough. She was close now—near enough to see the pigments caught in the creases of his knuckles. The same marks she carried on her own. “I’m making an editorial observation, not writing a fan letter.”
“It sounded like a fan letter.”
“It sounded like professional critique from an artist who knows villain-building.” She tapped his red pen against the wood.
She’d picked it up without realizing—a habit, reaching for the nearest drawing tool the way other people reached for a drink.
“You started this conversation by calling my work dishonest. I’m returning the favor. ”
The argument lasted an hour.
She lost track of time and didn’t care. They tore through Nightbloom and Shadowfang with the ferocity of two fencers who had finally found an equal opponent.
He dissected her pacing—fair. She dismantled his emotional avoidance—fairer.
He pointed to a panel where Sable’s grief collapsed into spectacle.
She pointed to a spread where his villain’s ideology contradicted his earlier motivation.
He conceded the point with a curt nod that she found absurdly satisfying.
Their hands moved when they argued. His, controlled and deliberate—cutting through the air to isolate a point.
Hers, fast and expressive—painting the argument into the space between them.
At one point, she stepped closer to tap a panel on the wall and his nostrils flared—a sharp, involuntary inhale, like he’d caught a scent.
His pupils dilated. She was close enough to count the ink smudges on his thumb, close enough that the heat of him registered against her skin like standing near a wall that had been baking in the sun.
He didn’t step back.
She noticed.
When she referenced an obscure Golden Age villain to support a point about moral architecture, the line of his mouth shifted—one corner, barely a degree, there and gone before she could name it.
Her stomach flipped. She hated that it flipped.
She hated that a single fracture in his control landed harder than other men’s full laughter.
She hated that the argument was the most exhilarating creative conversation she’d had in three years and that the man on the other side of it was making her pulse knock against her wrists in a rhythm that had nothing to do with villain theory.
This is professional. This is creative discourse. You are not attracted to a man whose opening line was calling your work dishonest. Your standards are higher than this. Your standards are so much higher than—
He rolled his sleeves up another inch. Forearms. Ink stains tracing up from his wrists.
Okay. Your standards are exactly this low. Noted.