19. Zeir
NINETEEN
ZEIR
Nyx’s security office occupied a windowless room on the sublevel of Axan Dark. Blue screen glow. Three monitors. The hum of servers and the coiled stillness of a woman who processed information the way other people breathed—constantly, silently, without visible effort.
Nyx’s fingers moved across the keyboard. The anonymous email’s routing path filled the center monitor—proxy chains, VPN redirects, the digital equivalent of a hall of mirrors.
“Routed through six proxies. Two offshore. Encrypted at three layers.” She didn’t look up. “Competent.”
“Cost?”
“Significant. This isn’t a personal vendetta running on spite. Someone funded the infrastructure.” She pulled up a second screen. “Whoever wants this buried has money behind it.”
“But?”
“The image files.” She pulled up metadata on the second screen.
Strings of data—timestamps, software signatures, device identifiers.
“Whoever encrypted the email scrubbed the routing clean. But the high-res scans carry their own metadata. Creation date. Software used. And a ghost signature from the scanning device.”
She highlighted a string of characters. “Every professional scanner writes a device fingerprint into the file header. Most people don’t know it’s there.
This one—” she tapped the screen, “—is a Fujitsu fi-7160. Common enough. But the firmware version narrows it to a batch sold in the Northeast in the last eighteen months.”
“Can you match it?”
“If I get access to the suspect devices, yes. The fingerprint is unique to the hardware. Match the device, match the forger.”
Zeir stood behind her, arms crossed, tracking each data point with the focus he brought to every detail that mattered.
Nyx had never failed to find what he needed to find.
She operated with the same philosophy he applied to villain-building: follow the logic, trust the evidence, let the architecture of the problem reveal its own weaknesses.
“How long?”
“Depends on how many scanners I need to check. If I have a short list of suspects—” she glanced back at him, “—days. If I’m casting wide, weeks.”
“Lumi’s assistant has a Fujitsu in the studio. She uses it for digitizing reference material.”
Nyx’s fingers paused. One beat. Then resumed.
“I’ll start there.”
The third-floor studio was dark when he returned. Midnight. Manhattan glowed through the industrial windows—pale silver, the city’s insomnia reflecting off glass towers across Tenth Avenue.
She’s not yours to protect. She told you that. She walked away and you said you understood and you meant it.
He sat at the work surface. Stared at the Nightbloom pages. Sable’s face stared back—defiant, unguarded, the work of a woman who poured the truest things into her art because she had nowhere else to put them.
The studio door opened.
Kael didn’t knock. He never knocked.
“Brenn’s been making calls.” He dropped into the chair opposite. “He’s framing the Stone collaboration as a vulnerability. ‘Outside talent with unvetted loyalties.’ His words.”
Zeir’s hand tightened on the drawer pull. “Lumi’s loyalties aren’t the issue.”
“I know that. You know that. Brenn knows that too—he’s not worried about her loyalty. He’s worried about yours.” Kael met his eyes. “An alpha who’s personally invested in a human artist during a plagiarism crisis. That’s the angle. That’s what he’ll bring to the elders.”
“Let him.”
“Z.” Kael leaned forward. The easy grin was gone. The brother underneath—steady, strategic, unflinching. “Show them the work. The collaboration pages. It’s the best thing this company has produced in five years. Make them see it.”
“If I show them the work, they see how deep this goes.”
“They already see how deep this goes. Brenn’s not blind.” He picked up his coffee. “The question isn’t whether they’ll figure out you’re invested. The question is whether you let them define what that means.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Think fast. Brenn’s not waiting.”
Kael left. The coffee cooled.
His mother called at eleven. He was still at the studio window—Manhattan below, the city’s cold geometry running south toward the harbor.
“I spoke with Ozara today.” Her voice was smooth. Calibrated. The tone of a woman who never said anything without three reasons behind it. “She mentioned Lumi’s been under some professional pressure.”
“Did you and Ozara plan this?”
“Plan what, dear?”
He could hear her smiling.
“The collaboration. The portfolio finding its way to Kael’s desk. The entire convergence of events that put a Stone artist in my studio.”
“Darling, I’m a retired art history professor. I drink tea and attend book clubs. I hardly have the reach to orchestrate—”
“Mother.”
Another silence. Longer. Then, softly: “She’s remarkable, isn’t she?”
The honesty caught him off guard. Not the question—the answer that rose before he could stop it.
“Yes.”
One word. The most he’d said to anyone about Lumi. His mother let it sit without pushing.
They hung up. He stood at the windows for an hour after.
Zeir pressed his forehead against the glass. The city spread below him—millions of lights, millions of stories, and somewhere in Bushwick a woman was standing over her kitchen counter probably eating cold Thai food because he’d texted her two words and she’d listened.
He hadn’t washed the paint off his shirt. It hung in his closet. Cerulean and raw sienna. The ghost of her grip.
His phone glowed on the counter. No reply to the eating text. No reply to the message from last night.
But she’d eaten.
He’d take it.