14. Zeir #2
Low. Brief. A sound that bypassed his throat and emerged from somewhere primal—the wolf surging past years of discipline in a fraction of a second. Not a cough. Not a throat-clearing. An animal warning another animal away from what it considered its own.
Kevin froze. His hand lifted from Lumi’s shoulder as if the fabric had burned him. He looked at Zeir. Looked at the door. Made a calculation that involved self-preservation and very little else.
“I’ll—email the layout.” He was gone before the sentence ended.
The studio was very quiet.
Lumi turned in her chair. Slowly. Her expression was the combination of shock, curiosity, and barely suppressed amusement that he was learning meant she’d registered an anomaly and was about to dissect it publicly.
“Did you just growl at Kevin?”
“I cleared my throat.”
“Throat-clearings don’t make grown men leave the room.” She stood. Arms crossed. “Kevin is six-two. He practically sprinted. That man keeps photos of his golden retriever on his desk and brings homemade banana bread to the office. What did Kevin ever do to you?”
“Nothing.”
“You growled at him. Like an animal. At a man named Kevin. A man in a Hawaiian shirt who has never harmed anyone in his life.”
“I didn’t—”
“You did. I was sitting right here. The sound came from your chest, not your throat, and it made a six-foot-two man flee the room like he’d seen a bear.
” She tilted her head. Studying him with artist’s eyes—the same sharp, dissecting focus she brought to everything she studied.
“You have a thing. I don’t know what it is yet. But you have a definite thing.”
“He touched your shoulder.” The words were out before he could stop them. Flat. Honest. The wolf speaking through the man’s mouth without permission.
Silence.
Lumi’s eyebrows rose. Her arms uncrossed. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again.
“Okay.” She took a breath. “That’s interesting.”
He turned back to the work surface. His jaw was tight enough to crack a molar. Every shred of alpha control he’d built. Every hour of the wolf behaving, obeying, staying leashed. Undone by a man in a Hawaiian shirt putting his hand on her shoulder.
“We should get back to work.” The words came out flat. Barely even.
“Sure.” She sat. Picked up her brush. Didn’t look at him. “But for the record—we’re coming back to this. The growling thing. The elbow catch at the market. The way you always stand between me and the door. We’re going to have a conversation about it.”
“There’s nothing to discuss.”
“Right.” She dipped the brush. “Nothing at all.”
She didn’t bring it up again. She didn’t need to. The awareness sat between them for the rest of the afternoon—heavy, unspoken, reshaping the air.
LUMI
The growl.
She replayed it on the taxi ride to Brooklyn. Over and over, the way her brain replayed a scene that wasn’t working—isolating the wrong note, studying it from every angle.
The sound had originated deep inside him.
Low, brief, involuntary. Not performance.
Not intimidation. A reflex—the same category as flinching from heat or pulling your hand off a hot stove.
His body had reacted to Kevin touching her shoulder before his mind caught up, and the reaction had been a sound that no human throat could produce.
She added it to the growing list of things about Zeir Axan that didn’t add up. The stillness. The reflexes. The way he always positioned himself between her and the door.
He said, “he touched your shoulder.” Not “I was clearing my throat.” Not “it was a cough.” He told you the truth.
The taxi crossed the Williamsburg Bridge. Brooklyn opened up ahead—the low skyline, the industrial edges, the neighborhoods she knew by heart. Her phone buzzed.
Mika.
How was today?
She studied the screen. Typed.
He growled at Kevin for touching my shoulder.
Mika: Like a WHAT?
Like a wolf. A really big, really possessive wolf. Kevin sprinted, Mika. A six-foot-two man in a Hawaiian shirt.
Lu. This man stocked your workspace with your exact paper brand and now he’s growling at men who touch you. That’s a pattern.
The pattern is alarming.
The pattern is alarming AND other things and you know it.
She shoved the phone in her bag. The taxi turned onto her block. Bushwick in late October—the trees thinning, the light going gray and gold, a neighborhood that ran on coffee and ambition.
Her loft was quiet.
She put on Portishead and tried to work. Color corrections. Her hands moved on autopilot while her mind circled Chelsea Market.
The heat of his hand. The way his fingers had dragged when he let go—deliberate, unmistakable.
She’d told him about her father.
That was the part that unsettled her most. Not the elbow catch.
Not the growl. The fact that she’d sat at a table in a crowded food hall and told Zeir Axan about her dad.
About Harlan. About the wound that lived under every professional decision she made.
She didn’t tell people about her dad. Mika.
Keanu. Her mother. That was the list—and she’d handed it to Zeir Axan over tacos.
His face when she spoke. The deeper quiet—not polite, not waiting for her to finish. Listening like her words were the only sound in a crowded room.
You told a man you’ve known for weeks the thing you don’t tell anyone. And instead of exposed, you were—heard. Seen. That’s either the best sign or the worst sign and you don’t know which yet.
She set down the correction pen. Reached for the sketchbook.