26. Lumi
TWENTY-SIX
LUMI
They’d talked until almost dawn.
She’d stayed. After the sketchbooks, after the kiss, after the drawer finally open between them—she’d curled into the corner of the studio couch and said okay, explain the wolf thing with the same focus she brought to a new technique, and he’d explained it.
The biology, the recognition, the pack language for what he’d known before he had words for it.
By the time she’d left the studio, the certainty had settled—not lighter, but cleaner.
Three days later, the investigation moved from theory to evidence.
Nyx’s office hadn’t changed since Lumi’s first visit—windowless, sublevel, the persistent hum of servers—but the content on the monitors had.
Three screens. Three different kinds of damage.
Nyx stood with her arms crossed, the blue light catching the flat planes of her face. She didn’t ease into the briefing. Nyx didn’t ease into anything.
“Your assistant’s devices.” She tapped the left screen.
A file directory expanded—folders labeled by date, organized with the efficiency of a person who intended to be thorough.
“Unpublished Nightbloom spreads. Process sketches. Pencil roughs I’m guessing you hadn’t shown anyone outside your studio. ”
Lumi’s fingers curled around the edge of the desk.
“Encrypted communication logs.” Middle screen.
Email chains—redacted sender addresses, but the routing patterns formed a clear line between Tessa’s account and a domain Nyx had already identified.
“The recipient address traces to Harlan Cray’s personal server.
Not his studio account. Personal. Whoever set this up wanted distance from the professional side. ”
“And the timeline.” Right screen. A spreadsheet—dates, file access logs, creation timestamps.
Nyx zoomed in on the critical column. “Every fabricated sketch in the anonymous email was created AFTER Tessa had access to your originals. The metadata is consistent. She scanned your pages, transmitted them, and the forgeries were built on top of your actual linework.”
The room was cool. The servers hummed. Lumi’s eyes followed the timeline, tracing the dates backward—the weeks when Tessa had arrived early to organize supplies, stayed late to “file reference materials,” offered to digitize the physical archive. Every act of helpfulness a Trojan horse.
I gave her a key. I gave her my early drafts. I showed her every step of my process because she asked and I thought she wanted to learn.
“How long.” The words came out even. Flatter than she intended.
“Seven months. The access pattern starts in April. Escalates in August when the Axan Dark collaboration was announced.”
Seven months. Half a year of smiling across the light table and handing over ammunition.
“The corporate trail.” Nyx pulled up a fourth window—financial records, wire transfers, a web of shell companies that simplified into a single line when she stripped the layers away.
“Victor Slade. Titan Comics. He’s funding Harlan’s legal campaign.
Attorneys, PR, the fabrication operation.
Slade’s fingerprints are on the money. Harlan’s fingerprints are on the story they’re telling. ”
Lumi absorbed this. A personal vendetta with corporate infrastructure. Harlan’s ego backed by Slade’s checkbook, Tessa’s access the key that unlocked all of it.
“I need to talk to her.”
Nyx was steady. No opinion. No advice. Nyx dealt in evidence, not emotions.
“Your loft. Tomorrow. I’ll have the documentation packaged for Keanu by tonight.”
Tessa, her studio assistant, arrived in the afternoon.
She stood in the doorway of Lumi’s loft—the living side, the undamaged side, the side that still smelled like her grandmother’s furniture oil and the Dominican coffee Mika kept stocked in the cabinet.
Tessa’s face was drawn. Dark circles. She’d been crying before she arrived—the evidence in her swollen lids, the red threading through the whites of her eyes.
Zeir stood by the kitchen counter. Arms crossed. Silent. His presence filled the corner of the room without occupying the center of it—visible protection, deliberate restraint. He’d positioned himself near the exit. Not blocking it. Marking it.
Lumi sat on the couch. Hands in her lap. She didn’t stand when Tessa entered. Didn’t gesture to the empty chair. Didn’t offer water, tea, or any of the small civilities she’d extended to this woman for two years.
“Sit down.”
Tessa sat. Perched on the edge of the armchair, spine rigid, fingers knotted in her lap. She opened her mouth—
“Don’t.” Lumi’s voice was quiet. Controlled. The kind of controlled that cost more than shouting. “Don’t start with an apology. Don’t tell me you’re sorry. I need you to tell me the truth, and I need you to do it before I lose the ability to sit in this room with you.”
Tessa swallowed. “Harlan approached me in March. He—he offered co-credit. On a project. My name on the cover alongside his.” Her fingers tightened. “He offered to introduce me to editors at houses you can’t reach from indie publishing. Dark Horse. Image. The places where careers happen instead of—”
“Instead of mine.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“It’s what you took.” Lumi didn’t waver.
“I hired you when three studios turned you down. I taught you how to build a page from thumbnails to finished inks. I trusted you with early drafts—pages no one saw before the ink dried.” Each sentence landed with the precision of a woman who’d spent the night choosing her words.
“You had access to the thing I care about most in the world. And you gave him the ammunition to destroy it.”
Tessa’s composure cracked. Tears—genuine, messy, the kind that couldn’t be performed. “I didn’t think he’d go this far. I thought he wanted reference material. Style studies. I didn’t know about the fabrication until I saw the blog post—”
“You gave him unpublished roughs, Tessa. Process sketches. Pencil roughs with my handwriting in the margins. What did you think he was going to do? Frame them?”
The beat that followed was surgical. Tessa’s breath hitched. Her gaze dropped to her knotted fingers.
“Who else?” Steady. Controlled. “Who else is behind this?”
“Victor Slade.” The name came out small. “Titan Comics. He’s paying for the legal team. The PR firm that pitched the blog story. He approached Harlan after the collaboration was announced. Harlan had the grudge—Slade had the resources.”
“What does Slade actually want?”
“Axan Dark’s distribution agreements. He’s been trying to crack them for two years—poach the channels, pull the licensing deals, chip away at the catalog’s reach. The collaboration announcement was the last straw. Too high-profile. Too successful. He saw an opening.”
Corporate money. A personal vendetta weaponized by a man who wanted Axan Dark destabilized. Lumi stored it in the same compartment where she kept the dated sketchbooks and the timestamped photographs and the meticulous paranoia that had once been her weakness and was now her arsenal.
“Get out.”
Tessa stood. Swayed. Looked like she wanted to say one more thing—an explanation, a defense, a plea.
“Get out of my studio. Get out of my life. Don’t contact me. Don’t contact Mika. Don’t contact anyone in my circle.” She didn’t raise it. She didn’t need to. “If I see your name near Nightbloom again, Keanu will make sure it’s the last professional decision you ever make.”
Tessa left. The door closed behind her—quiet, final. The loft settled.
Lumi sat on the couch. Hands in her lap. Spine straight. The composure held for four seconds. Five. Six.
Then it broke.
Not the way it had broken in Zeir’s office—two tears, controlled, recoverable. The composure she’d held while Tessa sat across from her—every measured sentence, every controlled pause—crumbled. Her assistant. The woman she’d trained, championed, advocated for. Gone. And worse than gone—weaponized.
Zeir crossed the room. He didn’t speak. He wrapped around her—the same steady certainty from his office, unhesitating and absolute—and she pressed her face into his shoulder and let the damage surface.
She cried. Hard. Silent, shaking breaths that she muffled against his shirt. He held on. Didn’t try to fix it. Didn’t say it was okay. Didn’t offer platitudes or plans or the kind of empty reassurance that crumbled under the weight of real betrayal.
He stayed.
Minutes passed. Her breathing evened. She pulled back. Dragged her sleeve across her eyes. Drew a long, unsteady breath.
“Well.” Her voice was wrecked but her chin was level. “That was the worst Tuesday of my life. And I once had a flood destroy two hundred copies in storage. So the bar was already high.”
His arm stayed around her. “You’re remarkably funny when you’re devastated.”
“It’s a coping mechanism my therapist and I have discussed at length.”
He let out a breath—quiet, almost inaudible. She leaned into his side and let the warmth of him anchor her to the present.
Slade. Harlan. Tessa. Three names. A corporate conspiracy dressed as a personal vendetta.
She’d grieve later. Right now, she had a war to plan.