The forest wasn't one she'd ever seen, but her brain knew exactly how to light it.
Trees like black ribs. Fog hanging low, tinted the color of old bruises. The ground thick with leaves that weren't green anymore, just dark smears under bare feet and paws.
And above it all: the moon.
Not silver.
Not white.
Red.
Not a cartoon red or a romantic horror-movie red, but a deep, wrong-stained crimson, like someone had dragged a thumb dipped in blood across the sky and left it there to dry.
In the dream, Amara wasn't exactly her.
She was… an eye.
A camera.
The world around her snapped into panels on instinct.
Long vertical frame: the forest path, stretching ahead between towering trunks.
Wide double-page spread: a clearing, rough stones in a circle, shadows circling.
Inset panel: a hand—no, a clawed hand—pressing against a rock streaked with something dark.
She moved between angles without walking.
In one frame, she stood at the clearing's edge as wolves paced in a ring around the stones—too big, too focused to be normal animals. Fur dark, eyes bright, some gold, some pale, all intelligent. In another, she hovered overhead, the clearing a perfect composition: the stone circle, the wolves, the red moon framed dead center.
And at the center of everything, always, a man.
Lucian.
Not in his suit. Not in any clothes she recognized.
Barefoot in the dirt, shirt open and hanging, chest smeared with something dark in lines and sigils that meant nothing and everything. His hands were streaked too, and his eyes—
Gold.
No gray at all.
They glowed from inside, like molten metal.
He was arguing with someone she couldn't quite see—another figure at the edge of the clearing, tall, wrapped in a long coat that moved like smoke. Their voices overlapped, distorted, like sound through water.
She couldn't hear the words, but she could see them.
In her mind, they lettered themselves in the margins.
The old ways aren't enough anymore.
They kept us alive.
They kept us small.
In one panel, Lucian's fingers curled into fists, claws slipping free, tips dark.
In another, the other figure gestured toward the forest, toward the world beyond, where faint skyscraper silhouettes bled into the trees, as if the city and woods had been badly photoshopped together.
The next panel jumped.
Lucian, on his knees on the stone.
The red moon directly overhead.
Wolves closer now, teeth bared, not at him but… for him.
Blood—his? someone else's?—splashed across the rock in a familiar arc. It pooled in the grooves of carved symbols, turning them into lines of script she half-recognized from old mythology books and late-night internet dives.
She wanted to look away.
She shifted angles instead.
Close-up: his hand gripping the edge of the stone, knuckles white, veins raised.
Extreme close-up: his ring, darker now, the metal slick with red.
Wider shot: his head thrown back, jaw opening on what she knew—knew—was a howl, even though the sound was muted, replaced by the slow, steady thump of her own heartbeat.
The scene zoomed again.
Wolves lunged.
Not at him.
Around him.
A protective rush of fur and muscle and teeth, forming a living wall between him and something in the trees. Eyes flashed between trunks. More shadows. More shapes. Something old and hungry and not on his side.
Red moon.
Black forest.
White teeth.
Gold eyes.
The whole thing was a perfect splash page.
Her artist brain catalogued it even as her dreaming self trembled.
This would break the site, some detached part of her thought. The comments would never recover.
Then the red of the moon bled downward.
Across the trees. Across the stones. Across Lucian's skin and the wolves' fur. It seeped into the ground like ink spilled on paper and kept going—up, sideways, settling into clean lines.
Panel borders.
They snapped into place around each moment, crisp white edges containing the chaos.
The clearing became a canvas.
Her hand—somehow both hers and not hers—reached out, stylus in grip, ready to trace.
Just as the tip touched the first line of the ritual circle, pain flared at her wrist.
White-hot.
Like someone had heated the invisible ink there until it glowed.
She jerked.
The dream shattered.
She woke with a strangled gasp, bolting upright in bed, heart pounding so hard it hurt.
The room around her was dark and still, the faint city glow leaking around the edges of the blackout curtains. Her sheets were twisted around her legs like she'd been fighting them. Her wrist burned under the thin skin, the binding throbbing in time with her pulse.
For a second, she didn't know where she was.
Forest?
Courtroom?
Stone circle?
Penthouse.
The word dropped into place like a weight.
She was in Lucian's cage in the sky.
Not in a red-moon forest.
Not yet.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stumbled to the desk in the corner before her body had fully caught up with her mind.
Her tablet was where she'd left it.
The second her fingers brushed the screen, it woke.
Blank canvas.
No time for coffee.
No time for calming breaths or reality checks.
The images were bursting behind her eyes like afterimages from staring at the sun. She had to get them out or they would stack and suffocate her.
Her wrist buzzed angrily when she curled her fingers around the stylus, then eased, like the magic hated this but understood it.
"Just thumbnails," she whispered hoarsely. "Just composition. Not content. Calm down."
She started drawing.
Not full detail; she didn't have time for that.
Loose shapes.
Circles for heads, rectangles for stones, scribbled trees. She mapped the clearing first—the arrangement of rocks, the arc of wolves, the negative space where Lucian's body had been in the center.
She blocked in the red moon as a simple circle with a note: blood tint.
She stopped herself before adding the exact pattern of the symbols carved into the stone. Her wrist had started to heat the second she thought about it.
"Fine," she muttered, leaving them as vague hash marks. "Secrets for later."
She moved to the next composition: low angle, looking up from behind Lucian's shoulder at the moon, wolves in the foreground. The angle felt perfect. Balanced. Every line made sense.
She flicked to a new layer and scribbled tiny lettering notes in the margins.
SFX – heartbeat (slow, heavy)
NO HOWL SFX – silence is scarier
Panel after panel poured out of her.
Lucian's eyes—gold, brighter than any she'd drawn before.
The other figure at the edge of the clearing, always half-obscured, a cloak or coat hiding their face.
A hand painted in lines of dark, glistening… she refused to write blood. She wrote ink instead.
Her wrist flared when she tried to sketch the exact shape of the wolves' eyes.
She backed off, reducing them to glowing ovals, leaving the detail to imagination.
By the time the adrenaline faded enough for her to notice the passing time, dawn was smudging the sky outside.
Her room had shifted from black to blue-gray.
Her hand cramped. Her wrist ached. Her tablet screen was full.
Not of a finished chapter.
Not of polished panels.
But of… designs.
Bones.
A whole sequence laid out in rough strokes—a ritual under a red moon, a pack around a stone, him at the center of something that felt less like a magic trick and more like a sentence.
She leaned back, breathing hard.
"You're supposed to tell him," she reminded herself aloud, voice raspy. "Rule four. Dreams. Rituals. Any of that."
Her wrist buzzed in agreement, like a dog nudged with its name.
She closed her eyes.
How, exactly?
Hey, Lucian, quick question: does your family do blood magic in the woods, or is that just my overactive imagination? Also, follow-up: if I post it as a special episode, will your elders send me a fruit basket or throw me in a pit?
The idea of walking up to his office with a stack of nightmare thumbnails made her want to crawl out of her own skin.
Instead, she did what she always did with inconvenient truth.
She labeled it.
DREAM SEQUENCE – DO NOT PUBLISH
She locked the file behind a password only she knew, buried two folders deep behind innocuous names—"Ref_Backgrounds_2" and "ExtraRefsFinalFINAL."
The binding pulsed once, disapprovingly.
She ignored it.
"I'm not posting it," she told the empty room. "I'm just… cataloguing. You should like that. You're all about records."
The magic didn't answer.
It rarely did with words.
It preferred heat and hurt and humming silence.
She splashed cold water on her face in the bathroom, catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror—dark circles etched under her eyes, skin sallow, hair a wild halo. The kind of look her readers romanticized in fanart of "tortured creator Amara," except in real life it just looked like stress.
By the time she stepped into the main living area, the sky was properly light.
Lucian was already at the kitchen island, shirt sleeves rolled, empty mug in hand. He looked too awake for the hour, which probably meant he'd never really slept.
His gaze flicked to her, taking in the tired eyes, the way she rubbed her wrist without thinking.
"Dreams," he said, not a question.
"Your cameras have night vision now?" she shot back automatically.
"I can recognize an artist on three hours of sleep," he said. "Even without cameras."
"Congratulations," she muttered. "You've unlocked the 'trauma recognizes trauma' perk."
"Anything…" he began, then paused. "…concerning?"
She hesitated.
Yes.
Red moons. Wolves. Stone circles. The old ways Adrien danced around like a live wire.
She could show him the file. She could put the tablet on the island between them and say, Is this real? and watch his face.
She pictured his reaction. The way his eyes would sharpen, the way his hand might tighten on the mug. The way the air around him would change.
The way the binding would burn.
Her wrist pulsed as if hearing her indecision.
She forced her hand off it, fingers curling around the back of a chair instead.
"Just… stress dreams," she said lightly. "Courtrooms. Comment sections. Coffee spills."
Something like relief flickered across his features, quickly smoothed.
"Those we can handle," he said. "Don't let them eat your whole day."
"You say that like I get a choice," she said.
He looked like he wanted to say more.
He didn't.
He finished his coffee and left for whatever pre-9 a.m. meeting awaited, and she was left with her half-truths tapping against the inside of her skull like moths.
—
The dreams didn't stop.
They got worse.
Not always forests and rituals.
Sometimes they were city scenes—streets she'd never walked but knew how to draw. Lucian on a skyscraper rooftop under a sky choked with clouds, a red glow leaking from the edges. Glass shattering in slow motion, shards hanging in the air like tiny mirrors catching bits of his reflection.
Sometimes they were battles—brief flashes of teeth and claws and dark shapes slamming into each other in tight, close-quartered spaces that looked more like parking garages than mythic fields. Wolves lunging between concrete pillars. A familiar profile snarling with too-long canines bared, gold eyes blazing as his hands—claws, hands, both—caught another figure by the throat.
Sometimes they weren't about him at all.
A woman running through an alley, barefoot, flanked by shadow-wolves that didn't cast shadows. Zara's silhouette on a rooftop, hair whipping in the wind, red smear of moon behind her. A circle of people, not wolves, standing around a fire, faces all turned up, eyes reflecting the flames in a way normal eyes shouldn't.
Every time, the dream framed itself.
Her subconscious had apparently accepted "storyboard mode" as default.
When she woke, her brain felt like a hard drive overheating. The images sat there, crisp and complete, begging to be captured before waking logic could sand down their edges.
She drew.
She told herself she was just sketching, just dumping, just emptying the trash that her dream processor had generated overnight. Better to have them on a screen where she could examine them than cycling behind her eyes like unskippable ads.
Her wrist didn't agree.
Some mornings, the binding only hummed, irritated but tolerable, as she roughed in a composition of Lucian standing on broken glass. Other days, when she moved too close to a symbol, a name, an angle that felt like truth, it flared, heat licking under her skin until she backed off.
She learned the edges by feel.
No runes on the stones.
No names in the circle.
No drawing the full shape of the thing behind the trees.
Abstraction.
Impression.
She could get away with…the vibe.
The details, the binding guarded like a dragon.
She ended up with a folder full of almosts.
Almost-rituals. Almost-transformations. Almost-history.
She started labeling them.
DREAM_01 – forest / red moon / pack ring
DREAM_02 – rooftop / glass / blood on tie
DREAM_03 – alley / girl + shadow-wolves
DREAM_04 – underground parking / fight / teeth
DREAM_05 – circle of people / fire / chant (sound muffled)
The list got longer.
The bags under her eyes got darker.
Her normal work—the actual, for-public-consumption chapters of Blood Moon Contract—started bleeding at the edges.
A throwaway background shot in one episode now had a red moon filter in the sky, just faint enough that readers could chalk it up to artistic flair. A crowd scene in a later chapter subtly included a woman whose silhouette looked suspiciously like the girl from DREAM_03, half-hidden in the background. A panel of Rheon standing at his office window now had a ghosted reflection of trees over the cityscape, like the forest was always there, layered under the concrete.
Lucian caught a few of these.
"This sky," he said one afternoon, tapping a panel where Rheon looked up at a slowly reddening moon. "Too close."
"It's color grading," she argued. "Atmosphere. No one's going to read ancient blood ritual into a slightly saturated background."
"Your readers read too much into everything," he said. "That's why we're here."
She rolled her eyes. "Fine, I'll make it less dramatic," she conceded. She dragged the hue slider on the moon back toward a safer silver. It still looked wrong to her, like she'd desaturated a feeling.
The binding hummed its weird approval.
"Happy?" she muttered at her own arm later.
It didn't answer.
—
The bleed wasn't just one-way.
Reality started picking up panel borders.
Sitting in a meeting with Adrien and a PR woman whose hair was sharp enough to cut glass, Amara found herself watching their movements like she was thumbnailing a scene.
Adrien gesturing with a pen—medium shot, hand in foreground.
The PR woman raising an eyebrow—reaction panel, tight close-up.
Lucian leaning back in his chair, fingers tapping once, twice, three times on the table—silent beat panel, sound effect: TAP TAP TAP.
Her mind couldn't stop framing.
It was like living inside one of her own time-lapse drawing videos, except she was both artist and subject, both watching and watched.
"—if we lean too hard into the supernatural tags," the PR woman was saying, "we risk tripping the platforms' moderation in some regions. We want mystery without explicit labels. 'Urban myth' plays better than 'monster boyfriend' in certain markets."
"We are not using that phrase in a deck," Lucian said flatly.
Adrien twirled his pen. "The monster boyfriend segment is not small," he said. "We ignore them at our peril."
Amara snorted before she could stop herself.
Three sets of eyes swung to her.
"Professional insight?" Adrien prompted, eyes bright.
"Just… appreciating the phrase 'monster boyfriend segment,'" she said. "I'm sure there's a marketing deity that died a little when you said that."
"May their metrics rest in peace," Adrien said.
Lucian pinched the bridge of his nose. "Focus," he said.
"We are focused," Adrien replied. "We're focused on the fact that her comic is threading a needle between legal safety and feral fandom. Which brings us to—"
He flicked to the next slide on the wall display.
A chart appeared. Engagement over time. Spikes where episodes had hit particularly raw nerves. A red line overlaying a blue one.
"Notice the last three uploads," Adrien said. "Engagement is up, not down, despite the… necessary edits. They're speculating harder. They're sensing something shifting in the tone."
"Because I'm having prophetic blood-moon dreams," Amara muttered.
Adrien glanced at her, interest flickering.
"What was that?" he asked.
"Nothing," she said quickly. "Just… artist whining. Ignore me."
He didn't.
He watched her a second longer than necessary, like he was cataloguing the tremor in her fingers where they gripped her stylus.
"As I was saying," he continued, turning back to the chart, "we don't need to lean into the obvious hooks to keep them. They're hooked on the undercurrent. The sense that there's a bigger story under the boardroom drama."
"The undercurrent," Lucian repeated slowly.
"Call it lore," Adrien said. "Call it the old ways. Whatever."
The phrase dropped like a stone into the room.
The old ways.
It was nothing. A turn of speech. A casual phrase.
But the second he said it, Amara's vision stuttered.
The conference room blinked.
For a heartbeat, the polished table became rough wood, scarred and stained. The glass walls flickered into stone. The gentle hum of the air conditioner was replaced by crackling fire.
She saw wolves.
Not around a forest circle this time.
Around a table.
Big shapes sitting in the shadows between flickers of flame, eyes catching the light, teeth flashing in brief, quick smiles far too sharp to be human. Hands and paws overlapped, blurred at the edges, as if her brain couldn't decide on the right anatomy.
She saw Lucian at the head, younger, hair longer, jaw unlined by corporate stress, but eyes the same gold.
She saw a symbol carved into the center of the table—a circle inside a circle, lines radiating out—and a knife resting on it, blade dark with something not entirely metaphorical.
She saw a hand reach out and slice its palm open over the symbol.
She smelled copper.
Her wrist burst into flame.
The conference room slammed back into place.
Glass walls. Leather chairs. The faint hiss of the projector.
Adrien's voice kept going.
"—and we have to be careful not to evoke old myths too literally, or we're going to have a very annoyed legal team and some very interested groups sniffing around."
Amara clutched her wrist under the table, nails digging into her own skin.
"Fine," Lucian said. "We thread the needle. Again. We always do."
He sounded… strained.
She forced herself to breathe.
Panels flickered at the edges of her vision.
Adrien's profile, mouth moving in a smooth line of pitch-perfect spin—close-up, dialogue-heavy panel.
Lucian's hands flat on the table, veins visible—silent beat.
Her own reflection in the black screen of her tablet, eyes wide—*small inset, no dialogue, just SFX: thump.
"You okay?" Adrien asked, too casual.
She blinked.
He was looking at her now, not the chart. His gaze had that too-observant glint she was learning to recognize—the one that meant he'd noticed more than was polite to bring up.
"Fine," she lied. "Just making sure I'm not accidentally summoning anything with my pen."
"Sweetheart," he said, "if you were summoning things, we'd be charging admission."
Lucian's jaw tightened.
"Don't encourage her," he said automatically.
Adrien's smile flashed, quick and sharp. "I'm not encouraging," he said. "I'm… acknowledging."
His eyes slid to her wrist, where her fingers were still pressed too tightly over the binding.
He noticed.
Of course he did.
Adrien saw everything.
"That's enough for today," Lucian said abruptly, standing. "You have what you need, Adrien. Ms. Reyes has pages to finish."
Translation: leave her alone.
Adrien leaned back, hands up.
"As you wish," he said lightly. "Try not to bleed on the quarterly reports today. We're low on towels."
He winked at Amara as he left, like they were sharing a joke only he understood.
Her skin crawled.
—
That night, the dreams shifted again.
No forest.
No obvious rituals.
No red moon.
Instead, she dreamed of a desk.
Not hers.
Old.
Scarred.
The same one she'd seen layered over the conference table.
In the dream, she hovered above it like a drone camera.
Hands rested around it—some calloused, some delicate, some with rings that glinted in the firelight. The symbol carved into the center pulsed faintly.
No faces.
Just hands and arms and the occasional flash of a forearm tattooed with lines that looked suspiciously like the ones she'd been chasing in her sketches.
A voice spoke.
Not Lucian's.
Older.
Roughened.
The old ways were never meant to stay old. They were meant to be updated.
They were meant to survive.
Another voice—Lucian's this time, younger, hoarser.
Survival isn't the same as living.
The hands around the table shifted.
One tapped a rhythm—two, three, four—just like his fingers on the conference room table.
The scene blurred.
The symbol in the center of the table became the Valtor Group logo for a second—elegantly simplified lines, sterilized for corporate branding. Then it flickered back to its carved, bloody origin.
Art direction, her brain whispered. Rebrands.
She woke with the taste of smoke in her mouth.
And another composition ready to go.
This one she almost didn't draw.
Her wrist thrummed warning the moment she touched the stylus.
"No," she whispered. "No old symbols. No tables. You win."
She sat there for a long time, staring at the blank canvas, fingers twitching.
Then she rationalized.
If I don't put them somewhere, they'll leak out sideways. Better to control it. Better to keep them in my own files where I can see them. Better than letting them ambush me in courtrooms and kitchens.
The magic didn't argue.
It just burned.
She sketched anyway.
Not the symbol.
Not fully.
Just the table.
Hands arranged around it like petals around a flower. The firelight. The sense of age.
She left the center blank.
Not even a circle.
Just negative space.
Her wrist cooled fractionally.
"Compromise," she muttered. "You're welcome."
—
Reality grew thinner at the seams.
She started seeing things in reflections.
Once, brushing her teeth, she glanced up at the bathroom mirror and saw not her own bleary face, but the outline of trees behind her, faint as fog. When she blinked, they were gone, replaced by her towel hanging on the door.
Another time, passing a window at night, she caught a flash of movement in the glass—something low and four-legged loping along the balcony, fur rippling. She spun toward the real balcony and saw only city lights and empty space.
She didn't mention it.
To anyone.
Zara sent her a meme one afternoon—a badly photoshopped wolf in a business suit sitting at a desk, captioned: "me at my 9-5 pretending the old gods aren't watching."
ZARA: tell me this isn't your life right now
AMARA: rude. inaccurate. my wolf doesn't wear that cheap of a tie
ZARA: LMAO
ZARA: jokes aside, u sleeping?
AMARA: define "sleeping"
ZARA: ..
ZARA: ok so no
ZARA: dreams?
She stared at the last word for a long time.
AMARA: everyone dreams.
ZARA: some ppl dream louder than others
ZARA: if it gets too loud, text me
ZARA: i know a few ways to turn the volume down that don't involve silver or sedatives
Silver.
She swallowed.
AMARA: noted. for now i'm just drawing more than ever
ZARA: ofc u are. that's what we do when reality gets weird
ZARA: we make it worse but prettier
She almost typed: I saw him in the woods. Under a red moon. Your "old ways" look like my nightmares.
She deleted it before she finished the sentence.
Telling Zara meant telling the pack.
Telling the pack meant telling the person at its center.
Instead, she added another note to her private file.
DREAM_06 – table / hands / symbol blanked
Adrien said "old ways" → flash overlay / burn at wrist
Zara texted about dreams
reality bleed increasing (reflections / balcony)
She was turning her own life into documentation.
Case notes on a haunting she wasn't entirely sure wasn't self-inflicted.
That night, she went to the balcony herself.
The sky was mostly clear, the moon pale and normal-looking, city glare muting it. The air was cool, the kind of temperature that used to mean hoodies and late-night walks home with Leah, talking about story twists and dumb boys.
Now it just meant she could see her breath in brief white puffs.
She pressed her hands to the railing, feeling the cold bite of metal under her palms.
The city sprawled below, a circuit board of lights and motion.
Somewhere out there, people were reading her latest chapter, refreshing for updates, making fan theories, drawing their own interpretations. Somewhere out there, someone might be sketching her in a panel, trapped in the tower, collared artist of the wolf CEO.
The moon looked harmless.
She stared at it until her eyes watered.
For a moment, the edges of it bled.
Not all the way red.
Not like in the dream.
Just a faint rust ring around the white, like an optical illusion.
She blinked hard.
It stayed.
Her wrist thrummed.
"You're not real," she told it. "You're just smog and insomnia."
The moon didn't answer.
Of course it didn't.
Her brain did.
It laid a panel over the view, framing her hands on the railing, the city beyond, the moon overhead. It added a tiny caption in neat lettering.
Reality and imagination are supposed to be separate layers.
In the next invisible panel, the layers bled.
She laughed softly, the sound closer to a sob.
"Congratulations, Reyes," she muttered. "You've officially become that asshole author who can't tell where the story stops."
Her wrist pulsed once, not in pain this time, but in a strange, sympathetic echo.
Behind her, inside the penthouse, she heard a door open.
Footsteps.
Lucian's.
She didn't turn.
He stepped onto the balcony a moment later, his presence a familiar weight at her side now, like a third railing.
He didn't come right next to her. He stopped a few feet away, hands in his pockets, eyes on the city.
"You're awake late again," he said.
"So are you," she replied.
"Occupational hazard," he said.
"Which occupation?" she asked. "CEO or… whatever the other one is."
He ignored that.
For a while, they stood in silence, watching the city and the pale not-red moon.
"Adrien said something today," she said finally, "about 'the old ways.'"
His shoulders tensed, just a little.
"He talks too much," Lucian said.
"So do you," she said. "Just in a different dialect."
He shot her a sidelong glance.
"You said your dreams were just stress," he said.
"They are," she said. "Mostly. Courts, comments, coffee. The usual."
"And otherwise?" he asked quietly.
The binding at her wrist buzzed like a wasp trapped under her skin.
She could tell him.
Not everything.
But some.
That she was seeing designs she'd never intended to draw. That her sleep felt more like someone else's storyboard than her own rest. That the phrase "old ways" now came with migraines and secondhand smoke.
She thought of his face if she showed him the forest clearing.
She thought of the way his eyes had gone so haunted watching the normal moon a few nights ago.
She thought of the pack, of Zara's jokes, of Adrien's too-sharp glances.
"It doesn't matter," she said.
It came out too fast.
Too defensive.
He heard it.
His jaw tightened.
"It matters if it's hurting you," he said.
She laughed, brittle.
"This whole situation is hurting me," she said. "That's baked in. You dragged my brain into your house and shook it. Of course it squeaks."
"That's not an answer," he said again.
"Neither are yours," she shot back.
He went quiet.
The city hummed.
After a long moment, he said, "You're not the first artist to dream of us."
The words were soft enough that she almost thought she'd imagined them.
She turned her head slowly.
He was still looking out at the city, not at her.
"In other places," he said. "Other times. The pack has always attracted… narrators. Visionaries. People who see the current under the surface. Some of them draw. Some write. Some just speak. It's… inconvenient."
"And you… what?" she asked quietly. "Sue them into silence?"
"Sometimes," he said. "Sometimes we protect them. Sometimes we fail."
The admission made her chest ache.
"What do you do when they start dreaming the rituals?" she asked before she could stop herself.
His fingers tightened in his pockets.
The binding flared.
He knew exactly what she meant.
"You told me it was just stress," he said.
"I also told you I wasn't a pet," she said. "We both lie when it's convenient."
He exhaled, long and slow.
"The old ways are dangerous," he said. "For us. For you. If your dreams are touching them, you need to be careful."
"I am careful," she said. "I don't post them. I don't ink them. I barely let myself sketch them. I leave the symbols blank, like your precious legal redactions."
"You're sketching them," he repeated.
She winced internally.
Too much.
She'd said too much.
His gaze cut to her wrist.
"How bad is it?" he asked.
She swallowed.
"Manageable," she said.
He stepped closer, closing some of the careful space he usually kept between them.
"Show me," he said.
He didn't mean the art.
He meant the binding.
Her hand moved before her brain could decide.
She turned her wrist up, the skin pale in the moonlight, the faintest shimmer of something under it if you knew where to look.
He lifted his hand, hesitated, then laid his fingers gently against the inside of her arm.
The contact was light.
Careful.
Nothing like the crushing grip in the courthouse hallway.
His fingers were warm.
The magic under her skin… wasn't.
It felt like cool fire now, a hard band that pulsed against his touch.
He closed his eyes.
For a second, the world narrowed to the point where his hand met her wrist.
The city sounds faded.
The moon brightened.
She saw—felt—something move through the bond.
Not just the usual hum of conditions and clauses and thou shalt not spoilers. Something older. Deeper.
Recognition.
His jaw clenched.
He pulled his hand back, breaking the contact as if it had burned him.
"It's getting worse," he said.
Not a question.
She laughed, soft and tired.
"So is your pack's PR," she said. "At least we're in sync."
"This isn't a joke," he snapped.
"I know," she said. "That's why I'm laughing."
He studied her face for a long moment.
"You should have told me," he said.
"Maybe," she said. "But every time I tell you something, my life gets smaller. My room. My freedoms. My ability to choose what I draw. So forgive me if I hesitated to hand over my nightmares too."
Something like hurt flickered in his eyes.
It vanished quickly, buried under steel.
"I don't want to make your life smaller," he said quietly. "I want to keep it."
"Intact or just… existent?" she asked.
He didn't answer.
He turned away, hands back in his pockets, shoulders tight.
"The old ways are not your story," he said. "They're mine. Ours. You don't have to carry them."
Her laugh came out harsh.
"Too late," she said. "They're already downloading into my update queue."
"Then we find a way to block the connection," he said. "To mute it. There are things we can—"
"Like what?" she interrupted. "Spells? Pills? Cut out my Wi-Fi brain? I'm already half-caged up here. Now you want to shut down the one thing that's actually mine?"
"That 'one thing' is tearing holes in reality," he said. "Or did you miss the coffee stains?"
The memory of teal and brown and burn flared sharp.
She looked away.
"I'm not doing it on purpose," she said.
"I know," he replied. "That's what scares me."
They fell into silence again.
The moon watched.
After a while, he said, "Adrien will have… ideas. Options."
"Oh good," she said. "The charming lawyer-priest of your weird cult. Can't wait."
"He's not a priest," Lucian said. "He's a hazard."
"Pot, meet kettle," she muttered.
He almost smiled. Almost.
"We'll talk tomorrow," he said. "When you've slept. When I've… thought."
"You think better under red moons?" she asked.
He stiffened.
She regretted it immediately.
"Goodnight, Ms. Reyes," he said, voice flat.
He went back inside.
The balcony felt colder without him.
Amara stared at the city until her eyes stung, then finally dragged herself back to bed.
When sleep came, it was thin and restless.
No forest this time.
No table.
Instead, she dreamed of a blank page.
Just white.
Her stylus hovered over it, unable to touch down.
Every time she tried, her wrist flared, and the line vanished before it formed.
In the center of the page, words appeared in neat, hand-lettered script.
Where does the story stop?
The letters bled.
Not red.
Not black.
A mix.
She woke with tears on her face and the sudden, terrifying certainty that she was no longer just drawing a comic about a werewolf CEO.
She was sketching the edges of a secret that had survived in shadows for centuries.
And it was sketching back.