The first thing Amara registered was the sound.
Her phone, somewhere near her ear on the pillow, was buzzing like a trapped insect. One long vibration, then another, then a quick double, then a pause just long enough for her brain to decide it was over—before it started again.
"Stop," she groaned into the blanket. "I'm not awake. This is illegal."
The buzzing didn't care about legality.
She flailed a hand around until her fingers hit cold glass. The screen seared her half-open eyes with white light.
Notifications stacked down the lock screen like falling bricks.
[AlphaOfTheBoardroom – New comment]
[AlphaOfTheBoardroom – You gained 200 new followers]
[AlphaOfTheBoardroom – Your episode is trending!]
[Email: Payment reminder]
[AlphaOfTheBoardroom – New comment]
Her thumb hovered, then tapped the comic app almost by muscle memory. It opened straight to her dashboard.
For a second, she thought she was still dreaming.
The little bar that usually said "Total views: 12.4k" had grown a few extra digits.
Total views: 384,229
Amara blinked. Literally rubbed her eyes, because that's what people do in cartoons when they hallucinate.
She did it anyway.
The number stayed.
She sat up so fast the sketchbook on the bed slid to the floor with a slap.
"Okay," she whispered. "Okay no, that's broken. That's—bug. Glitch. Hack. Something."
She tapped into the stats page. It loaded with a scatter of graphs she never paid attention to because they were usually depressing.
Now they were insane.
Episode 67, uploaded five hours ago, had a spike that looked like someone had drawn a middle finger straight up the chart.
Episode 67 – When Gods Play With Fire
Views: 187,903
Likes: 57,204
Comments: 9,816
Her mouth went dry.
Her last episodes usually crawled to a couple hundred comments over a week. This one had nearly ten thousand in a night.
She clicked.
The comment feed roared to life, an endless scroll of screaming text.
AUTHOR-NIM WHAT HAVE YOU DONE
you can't kill him, we just got him??
this panel slaps so hard I'm calling my therapist
why is this so cinematic, are you okay at home
I CAN SMELL THE BUDGET IN THESE FLAMES
omg the way he smiles in the fire????
marry me, Alpha
no marry ME
Her heart pounded in her chest like she'd run up the stairs instead of just… sat upright.
Somewhere between the screaming and the marriage proposals, more sober comments appeared:
Anyone else get this in their recs out of nowhere??
I've never heard of this comic but this is CRAZY good
Got pushed to my front page, what the hell this art??
Featured. It had to be that. Someone at the platform had shoved her episode into a recommendation slot. Some algorithm had finally landed on her.
She laughed—a shaky, disbelieving sound that tasted like adrenaline.
"Okay," she said to the room. "Okay, universe. I see you."
Rent. Her brain whispered the word with the reverence other people reserved for the divine. More views meant more ad share, more ink gifts, more whatever microtransactions kept the app spinning. Maybe enough to stop the "RENT OVERDUE" from blinking at her like a threat.
She scrolled, letting the compliments wash over her. It felt like standing in the surf and letting wave after wave hit her chest.
Then she saw it.
Buried three hundred comments deep, under a thread of people arguing about whether the Alpha was morally redeemable or just hot, a single message stood out in plain font:
This is literally LUCIAN VALTOR.
No extra punctuation. No emojis. Just that.
A chill crawled down the back of her neck.
"Who?" she muttered.
She clicked the user profile. Brand new account. No avatar, no bio, no other comments.
Weird. But not weird enough to derail the endorphin high.
She backed out and kept scrolling.
More noise. More chaos.
Then the replies to that comment loaded.
THANK YOU I THOUGHT IT WAS JUST ME
omg yes the resemblance is INSANE
Wait. Who's Lucian Valtor?
Google him right now.
no seriously google him
I work in finance, this is gonna get her SUED LMAO
girl run, that man is REAL
The slow dread that had started at the base of her skull trickled down to her spine.
"Sued," she repeated under her breath. "No no no."
She opened a new tab and typed:
lucian valtor
Enter.
The search results exploded with polished headlines.
LUCIAN VALTOR: The Youngest Self-Made CEO in the City
"Corporate Wolf": Inside Valtor Group's Cutthroat Rise
Billionaire Lucian Valtor Donates Record Sum to Children's Hospital
Is Lucian Valtor Too Ruthless for His Own Board? An Investigation
A row of images lined the top of the page.
Amara tapped the first one.
The photo was probably from some glossy magazine shoot. A man in a dark, perfectly tailored suit stood against a blurred city backdrop. His hair was a little longer than her Alpha's, slicked back instead of tousled. Clean-shaven jaw. No blood, no fire, no snarling.
But the bones were the same.
The same high cheekbones, the same precise line of the jaw. The same mouth that looked like it was used to giving orders, not smiles.
Her stomach dropped.
She swiped to the next image. This one was paparazzi-style, grainier. Him leaving a car at night, rain sheeting down, the collar of his coat up. A streetlight caught the side of his face.
There—just at the corner of his mouth—was a faint, pale line.
A scar.
Her fictional alpha had a scar in the exact same place.
Amara zoomed in until the pixels blurred, as if the screen were made of sand instead of glass. Her heart hammered so hard her hands shook.
"Coincidence," she whispered. "It's just—men with suits. Men all look the same when they're rich, right?"
There were millions of dark-haired guys in suits. Millions with sharp features. Surely more than one of them had a scar in a dramatic spot.
Still, her breath turned thin.
She flipped through more photos. Press conference. Award ceremony. Charity gala. In some shots, the scar was barely visible under makeup. In others, like a candid of him turning away from a camera, it stood out more clearly. The same length she'd drawn. The same angle.
Her alpha's name in the comic was Lucian Valt.
She'd chosen it months ago because it sounded ruthless and vaguely villainous. Lucian like "light," twisted. Valt like "vault," something locked and guarded.
The man in the photos was Lucian Valtor.
"I did not do that on purpose," she said, as if the empty apartment had accused her.
Had she seen him before without registering it? Some news article in passing on a subway ad? Background noise on a TVs in a bar? Her brain could've stolen his face and stitched it into her character without telling her. Creative theft by subconscious.
She opened one of the articles out of morbid curiosity.
At thirty-two, Lucian Valtor controls an empire of subsidiaries, from tech to logistics to luxury real estate. Colleagues describe him as "relentless," "strategic," and in some cases, "inhumanly focused."
Inhumanly.
Her eyes snagged on the word.
Another sentence leapt out: His critics call him a corporate wolf: always circling, always ready to bite.
Amara blew out a shaky breath that was almost a laugh.
"Great. Fantastic. I invented a werewolf CEO and the universe said, 'Hey, guess what, one already exists.'"
She flicked back to the images and froze on one.
Lucian Valtor at a boardroom table. A dozen other executives sat around him, blurred by the camera's shallow focus. He leaned forward slightly, hands steepled, expression unreadable.
Behind him, the city glowed through an endless window of glass.
She pulled up her own panel on her tablet with trembling fingers, the one she'd drawn last night of Alpha Lucian in his burning boardroom before the fire really took over. Same angle. Same posture. Even the particular pattern of lights outside looked too similar.
It was like she'd traced him.
Except she hadn't. She would swear that on whatever gods watched over overdrawn bank accounts and broken artists.
Her phone buzzed again. A message bubble from the comic app popped up over the browser.
[You have 99+ new comments.]
She opened it, heart climbing into her throat.
The comment section was worse now that she'd seen his real face.
author you based him on Valtor right? right???
HAHAHAHA this is a lawsuit waiting to happen
I just sent this to my group chat, they're all screaming
I work at Valtor Group, if my boss sees this you're DEAD 💀
this is literally lucian valtor's villain origin story and I support it
A new thread was climbing to the top fast, upvoted into visibility.
@InkSpiral (Author), did you do this on purpose???
the scar?? the building?? the way he stands at the window?? this is too specific
if he sues we riot. we have your back
no offence but his lawyers have more money than all of us combined
Her thumb hovered over the reply box, empty.
What could she possibly say? No guys, I didn't know I was accidentally summoning a real billionaire's likeness out of the void, haha, my bad?
Her gaze flicked back to the top of the app, to the number that had seemed like a gift mere minutes ago.
Episode 67 – 213,491 views
Every second, it climbed. People sharing, recommending, yelling. How many of them were sending links with captions like "this author is brave/stupid"? How many were tagging their friends who worked in finance or law or—worse—in Valtor Group itself?
A cold sweat broke along her spine.
Her rent was still due. Her cupboards were still nearly empty. Her tablet was still owed two more payments. She should have been grateful for the sudden flood of attention.
Instead she felt like someone had pulled the fire alarm inside her life.
Amara locked her phone and pressed it flat to her chest, staring at the cracked paint on her ceiling.
"This is fine," she told the universe. "I just accidentally drew a real man as a bleeding, snarling werewolf-suit-wearing tyrant. It's fine. People do worse on the internet every day."
The universe did not answer.
Her phone buzzed again, insistent.
She didn't look.
The boardroom in her imagination, the one she'd filled with fire and defiance and fictional ruin, suddenly felt a lot less safe.
Because somewhere out there, in a glass tower that probably looked a lot like hers, a real Lucian Valtor might pick up his own phone.
And if he ever opened her comic, if he ever scrolled through panel after panel of his stolen face shifting into a wolf—she had the horrible feeling his first reaction would not be laughter.