She lasted one night before breaking her own rule.
"Never again," she'd told herself in the hallway after bandaging him. Never again would she weaponize the panels. Never again would she let her anger steer her hand.
Then she sat in front of the blank file named Ep125 – Blood on Her Hands and stared until the cursor felt like a heartbeat.
She wasn't angry this time.
She was something worse.
Hollow and buzzing. Guilty and wired. Afraid of what she'd already done and more afraid of what she might do by doing nothing at all.
If she didn't write the aftermath, readers would fill it in themselves. They'd build theories more wild than anything she could corral. They would spin his blood in ten directions, some of them crueller than hers.
If she did write it, she might be giving the current more lines to trace.
"Okay," she whispered to the empty studio. "Consequences, not curses. We draw fallout, not knives."
Her wrist hummed as if it were listening.
She started.
No ambush this time. No weapons. No new wounds.
Just Rheon dealing with the one she'd already given him.
She drew him on a hospital bed in the boardroom's private med bay, shirt off, side bandaged. She drew his Beta yelling at him, his staff fussing, investors calling. She drew him grimacing through stitches, making gallows jokes about hazard pay while secretly cataloguing every weakness exposed.
She poured her own guilt into his internal monologue.
He'd thought he was the only one who could turn a story into a weapon.
Turns out, he was just arrogant enough to believe fate didn't have a pen of its own.
She stopped herself before the line became too pointed.
She almost made the wound worse on the page than it was in reality—added more blood, more drama, a brush with death. She made it smaller instead. Less heroic. More annoying. Something that would hurt every time he breathed and remind him he wasn't untouchable.
Her wrist burned when she drew the bandage.
It seared when she added a panel of his hand, fingers pressed to the gauze, eyes distant.
"Fine," she muttered. "You don't like metaphors. Noted."
She didn't draw the claw marks.
She didn't draw the bite.
Those, she left out of the comic entirely.
They felt too close to the old ways, too close to the part of him readers weren't supposed to see.
She posted the episode just before dawn, hands shaking, thoughts half-prayer, half-apology.
Then she crawled into bed and tried to sleep.
She didn't dream of red moons.
She dreamed of timestamps.
Numbers ticking up the side of log files, lining up in neat vertical columns, her own chapter upload time and his blood soaking into his shirt settling in side by side like entries in a ledger.
When she woke, her phone was already hot with notifications.
Comments. Tags. DMs. Clips.
She didn't open any of them.
Not yet.
The penthouse felt more normal than it should have: coffee smells, faint clinking of dishes, the distant thump of a closed door. No one knocked on her studio. No one told her to stay put.
For a few surreal hours, she almost managed to pretend this was… not normal, never that, but stable.
Lucian was alive. The bandage had held. No more attacks. No new episodes of her pen directing knives.
She was halfway through thumbnailing a new, harmless chapter—flashback, childhood memory, no physical danger—when her access app buzzed.
MEETING: L. VALTOR – PRIVATE STUDY – NOW
No polite request. No "if you're free."
Just now.
Her stomach clenched.
She found him in a room she'd never been in before.
The private study was smaller than the main office, but it felt heavier. Darker wood, fewer screens on the walls, more actual books. The desk was old, scarred, solid—a cousin of the ritual table from her dreams, tamed and polished for corporate life. The only modern concession was a wide monitor angled so he could see it from his chair.
He was on his feet when she entered, sleeves rolled, bandage hidden under a crisp black shirt. He looked better than he had last night—color back in his face, eyes clear—but there was a tension in his jaw that hadn't eased.
On the screen, windows were open side by side.
Her pulse stuttered.
On the left: a WebVerse dashboard, logged into an account that clearly wasn't hers but had access to exactly the information it needed. Episode titles and publish times lined up in neat rows. Ep124 – Ambush in the Glass Tower. Ep125 – Blood on Her Hands. Dates. Timestamps down to the second.
On the right: a security feed. Not video; he hadn't gone that far. Just logs. Time, floor, alarm triggers, camera glitches, security team dispatch notices.
Two vertical columns of numbers.
She didn't have to read them to see the pattern.
Her upload.
Hours later, the attack.
He didn't say anything at first.
He let her walk closer.
Let her see.
"If this is a performance review," she said, voice too thin to sound like a joke, "I'd like HR present."
"Sit down," he said.
There was a chair in front of the desk.
She didn't want to use it.
She wanted to keep moving, pacing, restless.
She sat.
He remained standing for a moment, one hand on the back of his own chair, as if anchoring himself. Then he moved around the desk and sat too, facing her, the monitor between them like a lit altar.
He tapped one line on the screen.
"One twenty-three a.m.," he said. "You hit publish on Ep124."
Her throat worked.
"Yes," she said.
He tapped another, lower down.
"Fourteen thirty-one," he said. "Cameras on the south maintenance corridor looped for exactly thirty-seven seconds. That was your ambush window."
She swallowed.
The numbers blurred.
"That's a lot of hours between them," she said weakly. "Causality usually works with less coffee in between."
He ignored that.
His finger moved.
"Fourteen thirty-four," he said. "Alarm trip on the restricted floor. Fourteen thirty-six, first responder arrives. Fourteen thirty-eight, second. Fourteen forty, we shut it down."
She forced herself to look at her side of the screen.
Comments had exploded overnight. Her readers had done their usual thing—time stamps filled the feed as fans bragged about staying up late to scream in real time, about waking up to angst and coffee, about her ruining their lunch breaks.
"It's just a story," she said, hearing how thin it sounded. "You said it yourself. The threats were already there. I just… picked a shape."
"Sometimes the shape is the difference between a shove and a fall," he said.
His voice was controlled. Too controlled.
He clicked.
A new window opened.
Screenshots of the episode, neatly captured.
The corridor. The camera. The door. The knife.
"The maintenance stairwell," he said. "You'd never seen it. Not that one. You put the hinges on the right side. You put the keypad where ours is. You drew the exit sign backwards because your point of view was flipped, but the door… is the same door."
"I know how buildings work," she said. "Doors aren't that original."
"You knew which camera would glitch," he said. "Which junction would loop. You added static in the exact place we found interference. That isn't 'drama,' Amara. That's detail."
"I guessed," she said, louder now. "I guessed. I've been living in your stupid tower for weeks. I see cameras in my sleep. If I wanted to draw a believable assault, I'd put them where it made sense."
He clicked again.
A schematic popped up.
Colored lines, labeled floors, access points.
Somewhere in the cluster of lines, she saw the route of the maintenance stairwell.
He zoomed.
Her stomach dropped.
He overlayed her panel.
The line of her drawn corridor sat neatly on top of the schematic like a tracing.
"The fifth attacker," he said. "How did you know he would come from behind?"
"I—"
"You framed the shot from the front," he said. "You shouldn't have known about the one at my back. But you had Rheon flinch right before impact. You angled his shoulder like he'd been hit from behind. You drew the bruise you bandaged last night."
Her head spun.
"No one has seen that," he said softly. "Not the public. Not my board. Not even half my security team. The bite mark is under the bandage you changed. You couldn't have referenced it when you drew Ep124."
She stared at him.
He stared back, relentless.
"Was it in your dreams?" he asked. "The exact angle of impact? The layout of the corridor? The way they moved?"
She clenched her hands in her lap.
"I made it up," she said, one last time. "I wrote what felt dramatic."
He leaned forward a fraction.
"I don't believe you," he said.
The words hit harder than any shout would have.
She flinched.
"Then what do you want me to say?" she demanded. "That I'm psychic? That I'm running some weird blood-magic fan club? I don't know, Lucian. I don't know how it works. I'm not sitting here scripting your near-death experiences."
His jaw tightened.
"I don't believe in coincidences," he said. "Not this many. Not in this pattern. Not when the bond burns every time you draw too close to reality."
He turned the screen off.
The room felt darker without it.
"Here is what I know," he said. "You drew an ambush. The ambush happened. You drew the placement of cameras and doors you had no way of accessing. You predicted a fifth man. You wrote a wound you then had to bandage. You can swear to me that you didn't intend to make it happen, but you can't swear to me that the current didn't use you to… align things."
She felt very small in the chair.
"So this is my fault," she said dully. "Officially. On the record."
"No," he said. "This is your… responsibility. There's a difference."
"Feels the same from over here," she muttered.
He steepled his fingers, the pose more closed than thoughtful.
"From now on," he said, "things change."
She braced.
Ulcer. Lobotomy. Exile.
"You do not post without me," he said.
She blinked. "I already—"
"Not 'send me the draft five minutes before you hit publish,'" he cut in. "Not 'text me a summary and call that consent.' I mean nothing goes live—no teaser, no bonus art, no angsty tweet—without my explicit approval. You draw your chapters here, on this machine"—he nodded toward a second monitor on the side, blank for now—"not on your laptop in the middle of the night when you're angry and unsupervised."
Her spine stiffened.
"You want to… watch me draw?" she said.
"I want to know when the bond heats up," he said. "I want to see which strokes make your wrist burn before the world does. I want to spot an ambush on the page before it becomes one in my corridors."
"And if I say no?" she asked.
His gaze didn't waver.
"Then I bring this," he said, tapping the now-dark monitor, "to the elders. To the council. To people older and less patient than I am. They will not offer you dampening spells and controlled schedules. They will cut the thread the only way they know how."
Her heart skipped.
"You mean kill me," she said.
He didn't look away.
"I mean remove the conduit," he said. "One way or another."
Cold settled in her bones.
"I thought I was under your protection," she said quietly.
"You are," he said. "As long as you're under my control."
The word landed between them and crackled.
Owned.
Collared.
She heard Zara's voice from days ago, teasing and too sharp: You dragged a storyteller into the heart of our mess and slapped a binding on her. You're either trying to break her or make her one of us.
"This is not protection," she said. "This is possession."
"It's both," he said, maddeningly calm. "The pack protects what it claims. We don't extend this level of effort to strangers."
She laughed, brittle. "Wow," she said. "Lucky me."
"You are alive," he said. "You are in this tower. You have equipment and an audience and a say in how we handle this. That is more than most ink-bearers have ever gotten."
"You keep calling me that like it's a job description and not a curse," she snapped.
"Call it what you want," he said. "It doesn't change what you are."
"What I am," she said, voice rising, "is a girl who drew a hot wolf CEO and got sued for it. I didn't ask for your bond. I didn't ask for your old ways. I didn't ask to be your… conduit."
"No one ever does," he said softly.
Silence settled.
Hot, buzzing, thick.
He leaned back a little, some of the hard edge in his features easing—but not his resolve.
"From now on," he repeated, "your drawing schedule is ours. I will know when you start, when you stop, and what you're working on. You will keep a dream journal—no locks, no codes. I will read it. Every morning. If you wake from a ritual, I will know about it before you finish your coffee."
Her skin crawled.
"You want my nightmares too," she said. "Of course you do."
"I want to see the echoes while they're still small," he said. "Before they find knives. Before they find teeth."
"My head is not your security feed," she said.
"It is," he said quietly. "Whether you like it or not. That's the problem. I'm not making it so. I'm acknowledging it."
Her wrist burned, as if agreeing with him.
She curled her fingers around it, nails digging into her own skin.
"And if I… mess up," she said, barely audible. "If something slips through anyway. If I draw something you can't stop."
"Then we deal with it," he said. "Together."
It was almost gentle.
Almost.
The word together lodged in her chest.
"This is an ultimatum," she said. "Dress it up how you want."
"Yes," he said. "It is."
She looked at him.
Looked at the man whose blood she had washed off his skin, whose breath she had felt hitch when the antiseptic bit, whose jaw had clenched as he admitted he was afraid.
Looked at the alpha who could send her to the council with a word and watch them erase her.
Looked at the only person standing between her and the kind of fate people wrote scary campfire stories about.
It was hard to breathe around all of that.
"I hate you," she said.
It came out cracked, half-truth and half-defense.
A muscle jumped in his cheek.
"You hate what I'm asking you to be," he said. "There's a difference."
"You don't get to define my feelings," she snapped.
"Then define them yourself," he said.
She opened her mouth.
Closed it.
Because under the white-hot anger, under the humiliation of being collared and scheduled, something else pulsed.
Fear, yes. Thick and sour.
But also—
The memory of his hand closing around her wrist on the balcony, warm and careful. The way his voice had dropped when he'd said, I don't want you broken. The way he'd told her, You're not just unlucky, like he was naming something sacred and terrible at once.
There was a pull there.
Unwanted.
Unwelcome.
But real.
"Whatever I feel," she forced out, "doesn't change the fact that you're treating me like… property."
"You are not property," he said. "You are an asset."
She stared at him.
"Wow," she said flatly. "That's so much better."
"And a liability," he added. "And a person. And a problem. And, unfortunately, my responsibility."
"You say that like it's a burden," she said.
"It is," he said. "And it's one I chose the moment I didn't let my lawyers bury you in court."
That shut her up.
For a second.
"You chose me for your convenience," she said.
"I chose you because the current had already chosen you," he said. "Because leaving you out there, unsupervised, drawing us from a distance, would have been worse. For you. For me. For everyone who runs under this moon."
His voice had gone low again, that dangerous mix of command and confession.
Her stupid heart tugged toward it like a needle toward north.
She hated that.
He watched it in her eyes.
Not the heart, but the battle.
"This isn't a romantic kidnapping fantasy, Amara," he said quietly. "I'm not your mysterious monster boyfriend. I'm the man with a knife to his ribs who has to decide whether the girl holding the pen is his shield or his executioner."
Tears pricked the back of her eyes.
The worst part was that the sentence made her want to draw it.
The panel was already there in her mind: his face half in shadow, her hand clutching a fountain pen that dripped ink like blood, a knife's point just out of frame.
"You don't get to threaten me with death and police my uploads and then talk about 'we' like this is some kind of partnership," she said.
"I know," he said. "I'm doing it anyway."
The honesty made her want to scream.
He pushed a small device across the desk toward her.
It looked innocuous.
Just a stylus, sleek and dark, heavier than the ones she used.
"What's this?" she asked.
"A new pen," he said. "Linked to the binding. It will monitor when your wrist heats up and flag any strokes that cross certain… thresholds. Adrien helped design the tracking. It doesn't record content—just spikes. It's a… compromise."
"You want to track how insane I'm getting in real time," she said.
"I want to see when reality and your panels start to… touch," he said. "Before we see the fallout in blood."
"And if I don't use it?" she asked.
His expression hardened.
"Then you're not drawing under my protection," he said.
There it was.
The line.
She picked up the stylus.
It was warm already, buzzing faintly where her fingers wrapped around it.
The binding flared, recognizing something.
It felt like slipping a collar on herself.
"You're going to kill my art," she whispered.
He shook his head once.
"No," he said. "I'm going to keep it from killing me."
The room felt too small.
The desk too close.
Her own skin too tight.
She stood abruptly.
"I need air," she said.
He didn't stop her.
He watched her walk to the door, eyes on the slight stagger in her step.
"Amara," he said.
She paused, hand on the handle.
"There is one more condition," he said.
Of course there was.
"Of course there is," she muttered. "Why not."
He held her gaze.
"If you dream something that feels… big," he said. "Ritual. Blood. Moons. Pack. Anything you think the old ways would care about… you wake me. Immediately. You don't write it down first. You don't sketch it. You don't try to 'process' it alone. You come to me."
"You want me knocking on your door in the middle of the night with nightmare fuel," she said.
"Yes," he said simply. "I do."
"Why?" she demanded.
"Because if you're the ink-bearer the current has chosen," he said, "then I need to hear its stories from your mouth before they make it to your page."
The room hummed around that sentence.
For a second, all the control and strategy and threat fell away, and she saw what sat under it: a man who was genuinely afraid of what she might see without him.
Of what might happen to her if she saw it alone.
Something in her chest twisted.
"I'll think about it," she said.
He nodded, once.
"That's all I'm asking," he said.
"That's not true," she replied.
He didn't argue.
She left.
The penthouse corridors felt narrower than they had that morning. The walls carried his scent, his rules, his eyes.
In the studio, her old stylus lay on the desk where she'd left it.
She picked it up in her free hand.
Old pen in one palm, new in the other.
Unbound art.
Bound ink.
Her wrist buzzed under the weight of the new one, the binding reacting like a creature that had just been given a leash.
Owned, she thought.
Protected, the bond seemed to hum back.
She set the old pen down.
For now.
On impulse more than decision, she went to the balcony.
The city spread beneath her, neon and restless.
The moon was thin tonight, a white sliver, innocent-looking.
She pressed her hands to the railing and let herself finally feel everything she'd been deflecting.
The anger at him, at the council, at the old ways that had wrapped claws around her life. The guilt over the wound below his ribs, shaped too much like her panel to dismiss. The claustrophobia of being scheduled, watched, managed.
And under all of it, maddening and insistent, the tug.
The way her pulse had stuttered when he'd said we. The way her skin remembered the warmth of his when she'd bandaged him. The way his voice had dropped when he'd admitted fear—not just for himself, but for her.
Fear mixed with that pull made a strange new thing in her chest.
She hated it.
She didn't trust it.
But she couldn't pretend it wasn't there.
"You are such a cliché," she told herself under her breath. "Falling for the monster in the tower."
The wind snatched the word falling and threw it back at her as failing.
Maybe that was more accurate.
Behind her, somewhere in the tower, Lucian was probably watching her usage logs, reading her dream journals in advance, mapping her upload windows to his security reports.
She should have felt like an experiment.
Instead, standing alone under the thin, pale moon, she felt like a character in someone else's script.
His ultimatum had tightened the leash around her throat.
But it had also tied their fates tighter together.
If she drew wrong, he bled.
If he misread the patterns, she died.
Owned, she thought again.
Bound.
And for the first time, she wondered—not just with anger, but with a tiny, traitorous spark of curiosity—what it would mean to lean, just a little, into the pull instead of fighting it.
To see what story the current was trying to write with them both.
Her wrist buzzed, the new stylus warm in her hand.
"Fine," she whispered to the night. "We'll play it your way. For now."
The city lights flickered.
The moon held its breath.
And somewhere inside the tower, the wolf she'd drawn into existence watched the ink-bearer who'd become his problem and his shield, wondering which one of them would bleed first when the next chapter came due.