For a few seconds after Lucian finishes talking about packs and wars and propaganda, the studio is weirdly quiet.
Amara can still feel the ghost of his gold eyes on her skin, the weight of the word weapon hanging in the air. Her brain is full, overflowing, done. She is at maximum revelation capacity for the evening.
"Okay," she says, mostly to herself. "So. You're a werewolf. I'm a glitch in the timeline. We're accidentally co-running a very illegal news network. I think that's enough existential horror for one—"
"There's one more thing."
The way he says it makes her stomach turn over.
"Of course there is," she mutters. "Why wouldn't there be. A punch card, get your tenth nightmare free—"
"Amara."
She shuts up.
Lucian is standing with his back half to the skylight. Moonlight edges him in silver, fuzzing the corners of his suit-wolf silhouette. His eyes are mostly human again, brown with just a faint ring of gold, but the wolf is not far.
He looks… wary.
Not of her power. Of what he's about to say.
"That night in the studio," she says slowly, trying to joke, "when you walked in on me drawing you as a maid café waitress—if you're about to say that gave you trauma, join the club—"
"This started before the studio," he interrupts.
She stops.
Before the studio.
Her brain scrolls backward through every encounter with him like panels in a comic: Zara shoving a phone in her face, the first meeting in the glossy conference room, the awkward contract negotiations, the wolf-blood panic on the balcony, the red moon.
"Before… what?" she asks.
Lucian's jaw tightens. He looks away for a heartbeat, like he's trying to find a less terrible version of the next sentence.
"I knew your scent," he says quietly, "before I knew your name."
Something about the way he says scent makes goosebumps race up her arms.
"In the TED talk comments?" she tries weakly. "Was there a 'scratch and sniff' feature I missed?"
His gaze snaps back to her, sharp.
"You remember the courthouse," he says instead.
She blinks. "The… what?"
"A year and a half ago," he says. "Downtown. You were there for a copyright hearing. Some no-name studio trying to steal your early designs."
She does remember the courthouse: the too-bright lights, the buzzing fluorescent hum, the scratchy blazer she'd borrowed for "being taken seriously." The panic that she'd done something wrong even though she was the one being stolen from.
"I thought I was just going to throw up in public and then lose," she says. "What a fun day. Why?"
"Because I was there too," he says.
Her brain supplies a vague memory: a tall guy in a dark suit walking past with too many lawyers, a cluster of expensive cologne and tension in the corridor.
"That was you?" she demands. "You walked right past me and didn't even—"
"I couldn't," he cuts in. His voice is muted, like the words are dragging claws on their way out. "If I'd stopped, everything would've… changed. I wasn't ready for that. Not there. Not then."
Her heart beats faster, for reasons she does not like.
"What do you mean, everything?" she presses.
Lucian inhales slowly. When he speaks again, his voice has gone softer, rougher. There's more wolf in it.
"I was coming out of a hearing for one of my wolves," he says. "A stupid fight, wrong witnesses, too many cameras. I was tired, angry, hungry. My control was… thin."
He glances toward the door, as if remembering those fluorescent-lit corridors instead of the penthouse hall outside.
"And then I smelled vanilla," he says.
She blinks. "This is a weird time to mention cake."
"Not vanilla," he corrects, eyes on her. "You. Ink and coffee. Cheap detergent. That strawberry chapstick you were chewing on until your lip almost bled. And under all of that, the thing that's just… you."
Heat prickles her cheeks. "Wow," she says. "Okay, stalker."
"I didn't know it was you yet," he says, ignoring that. "I just knew that my entire body stopped."
He steps closer as he talks, unconsciously, like the memory pulls him forward.
"The corridor was full of people," he says. "Judges, clerks, lawyers. Voices echoing. Phones ringing. And then this scent just—cut through everything. Like a line drawn across a page."
He looks at her like he's still standing there, in that corridor.
"My wolf went very, very quiet," he says. "And then it said one word."
He doesn't look away.
"Mate."
The word lands like a dropped elevator.
Amara actually makes a sound, a weird little gape-noise she will never admit to later.
"No," she says immediately. "Nope. Absolutely not. Return to sender. Wrong address."
Lucian's mouth curves, but there's no amusement in it. "It doesn't ask," he says. "It tells."
Her chest is tight suddenly. Too tight.
"You smelled me," she says slowly, like she's translating from Martian, "in a hallway, and your inner dog decided I was… what? Pre-approved girlfriend material?"
His expression shutters. "It's not a choice. It's a recognition. Wolves have… bonds. Ties. Some are made. Some are decided for us before we're born." His throat works. "We call it the mate bond."
She recoils like he's shoved something sharp into her hands.
"Don't," she says. "Do not use that word on me like it's a job title."
"It's not a job," he says. "It's a fact."
"Facts can be wrong," she snaps. "Is this like a superstition thing? A religious ritual? Can we just… opt out? I would like to unsubscribe from your wolf newsletter."
"Amara," he says, and there's a note of pain in it now. "You think I haven't tried to ignore it?"
She opens her mouth, closes it. She doesn't know what she was expecting—defensiveness, maybe, or smugness. Not this raw, tired honesty.
He scrubs a hand over his face.
"I smelled you and my wolf went insane," he says bluntly. "It wanted to find you. Bite the throat of anyone who got too close. Throw you over my shoulder and never let go."
"Wow, okay," she says, backing up a step. "Let's not do that trope."
"I didn't," he says sharply. "I walked past. I locked my jaw so hard I thought my teeth would crack. I pretended I didn't hear the way my heart changed rhythm."
She remembers: a tall suit, a brief flare of cologne, a sense of someone dangerous passing too close. She'd pressed her back to the wall without knowing why.
"I spent weeks after that tracking down every case file from that day," he admits. "Looking for any name that made sense. But all I had was a scent, and the knowledge that somewhere in the city was someone who could ruin me without trying."
Her chest feels too small, like someone tightened it with a wrench.
"And then," he says, "Zara burst into my office with her tablet, shoving a webcomic in my face and yelling, 'Holy shit, she drew us, and she's so good.'"
She almost laughs. Almost.
"You recognized me from a drawing," she says.
"I recognized you from the way my wolf reacted," he corrects. "The same jolt. The same silence. Even through a screen, even in black lines and color. And when you walked into the conference room the first time, it was like that corridor again, only worse."
He steps closer, close enough now that she can actually smell him: soap and spice and something darker, wilder, familiar in a way that makes her want to shake herself.
"My wolf didn't say, 'oh, maybe,'" he says. "It said, 'Finally.'"
She backs into the desk. Her hip bumps it.
"Stop," she says. It comes out thin.
"We've been dancing around this from the beginning," he says, voice low. "Every time I've been too harsh. Every time I've been too gentle. Every time I've overreacted to your injuries or distractions or phone calls from unknown numbers. It's because half of me is trying to be your boss and strategist."
"And the other half?" she whispers.
He doesn't soften it.
"The other half is a beast that decided you were its home the second it smelled you," he says. "And it doesn't care about HR guidelines."
Her palms are slick against the edge of the desk.
"So what?" she demands, panic sharpening her words. "I'm just… stuck with this? With you? Because your wolf decided my shampoo smells like commitment?"
He flinches.
"It's not your shampoo," he says quietly.
"I never agreed to this," she says, louder. "I didn't sign any magic bond contract. I didn't swipe right on 'werewolf mate for life.' I just drew some wolves on the internet."
"I know," he says. "You don't owe me anything. You never will."
"Then why tell me?" she fumbles. "Why not just… keep pretending this is one-sided, or temporary, or—"
"Because it's not," he says. "Because the bond is real whether you like it or not. Whether I like it or not."
Her breath stutters.
"What do you mean, 'real'?" she demands. "Define your terms, wolf man."
He looks at her for a long moment, then lifts his hand to his chest, right over his sternum.
"When you get a migraine from rewinding, I feel it," he says quietly. "Not the pain itself. The… echo. A pressure at the same time, even if I'm in another building. When you're about to pass out from pushing yourself too hard, my heart rate spikes, even if I'm sitting calmly in a meeting. When you laugh, really laugh, it's—"
He cuts himself off, jaw tight.
"It's like moonlight in my ribs," he finishes roughly.
She hates that part of her melts at that. Hates it.
"What happens if I walk out that door and never come back?" she asks.
He doesn't hesitate.
"It will hurt," he says. "For me. For you, maybe less, because you're human. It will feel like something is missing every time you pass a certain street, or hear a certain song, or smell coffee in a certain way. You'll dream of a voice you can't place."
He looks suddenly, brutally tired.
"And I will wake up every day fighting the urge to tear the city apart until I find you," he says. "And I won't. Because if you leave, that's your choice. And I won't cage you."
She stares at him.
Her pulse is so loud she can barely hear her own voice.
"So you're saying," she says, carefully, "that I can walk away from you, from this, from all of it. But it won't… undo anything. The strings stay, they just hurt."
"Yes," he says.
She laughs, high and a little wild.
"You know what that sounds like?" she says. "Fate. Destiny. All the things I've been trying to rewrite my whole life."
"Fate doesn't care if you like it," he says. "But it doesn't make your choices for you. The bond exists. What you do with it is still up to you."
She latches onto the one thing that burns.
"It doesn't matter whether I accept it," she repeats, his words thick in her mouth.
He steps back, realizing too late how it sounded.
"I meant—"
"No," she says. Her voice comes out hoarse. "No, I heard you."
Amara has spent weeks, months, realizing that the universe is not a neutral canvas. There is a story, and it wants to tell itself through her hands, through her body, through nosebleeds and headaches and little punished rebellions every time she tries not to draw.
Now there's another story. One her skin recognizes when he steps too close, one her bones hum to when he says her name. A bond she did not choose, stamped into her the second a wolf inhaled her in a stupid government building.
It feels like every script she never wrote is closing around her.
"I'm not a destiny," she says, breathing too fast. "I'm not… a prize, or a home, or whatever poetic wolf metaphor you've got loaded next. I'm just a girl who wanted to make rent drawing fictional people kiss."
"Amara—"
"I didn't ask for this," she says. "Any of it. The power. The war. You."
Something breaks across his face. For a second he looks like she's slapped him.
"Then don't ask," he says, voice low. "Take your time. Hate me if you need to. Just—don't pretend the bond isn't there. I can't lie to you about that."
Her vision tunnels.
The studio feels too small, too high, too full of him and moonlight and the smell of something she now knows is home to half of his soul.
She needs out.
Now.
"No," she whispers. "Nope. I can't—"
He reaches out, maybe to steady her, maybe to stop her. His fingers brush her wrist.
It's like grabbing a live wire.
Heat shoots up her arm, not painful, but overwhelming: a burst of images that aren't hers—him standing in that courthouse corridor, knuckles white, muscles locked, the scent of her hitting his senses like a door slamming open. Her drawing at her crappy kitchen table, unaware. His wolf pacing the bars of his ribs, snarling mine, mine, mine.
She yanks her hand back with a sharp gasp.
Lucian curses under his breath.
"The bond is waking up," he says, strained. "You feel that?"
"Too much," she chokes.
She does the only thing she can think of.
She runs.
"Amara!" Lucian's voice snaps after her as she bolts for the door.
She doesn't stop.
The studio door flies open, banging against the wall. She sprints into the hallway, bare feet slapping against polished wood. The penthouse around her is too sleek, too controlled, all marble and glass and tasteful art she suddenly hates.
She doesn't know where she's going. She just knows she has to move until the feeling of him fades, until the tug in her chest stops yanking every time he breathes.
Her heart hammers. The corridors form a maze: long stretches of recessed lights and giant windows showing the city sprawled below. Every reflection in the glass flashes her own wide eyes, her hair flying, like a girl running from a ghost that's inside her skin.
She tears past a silent living room, all white couches and black metal shelves. Past Zara's neon-chaotic media den, door half-open, screens still glowing in standby. Past a glass-walled gym smelling faintly of rubber and sweat. Everything is too clean. Too curated. Like a showroom for a life that doesn't belong to her.
"Amara, stop," Lucian calls again, somewhere behind her.
She runs faster.
Her breath saws in and out. Panic claws at her ribs. Every inhale carries a whiff of him, faint but inescapable: cedar and expensive soap and wolf, like the air itself is reminding her you're not alone.
She doesn't want not-alone. Not if it comes with the word forever stapled to it.
She cuts down another hallway at random. Doors blur past: guest bedroom, linen closet, someone's office with the door ajar and a laptop casting a blue square onto the floor.
She grabs a handle, any handle, and yanks it open.
Storage. Shelves. Boxes.
Not out.
She slams it shut and runs on.
Another door. She flings it wide.
A small balcony, but the glass is shut, locked. City lights drip beyond it like glitter spilled on black velvet, taunting her.
She fumbles with the latch. It doesn't move.
"Seriously?" she gasps. "You lock your sky?"
"Security," Lucian's voice says, closer now. "Amara, stop."
She spins and bolts the other way, shoulder clipping the doorframe hard enough to send sparks of pain down her arm. The ache is distant under the roar of adrenaline.
Her power thrums under her skin, a fizzing urge: Draw an exit. Draw a fire escape. Draw a door that opens to street level, please just let me redraw this scene—
"No," she says out loud, half sob, half snarl. "No more cheats. Not for this."
If she draws her way out of this conversation, she'll never stop. Every uncomfortable truth, every terrifying revelation, every inconvenient person will get edited out of her life. She'll be a goddess of denial with a migraine.
She wants a real door.
Her bare feet skid on polished tile as she takes a hard left and slams into a heavy metal door with a glowing EXIT sign above it. Emergency stairwell.
She shoves the bar down with both hands.
Blessedly, it gives.
The fire door swings open with a hiss and a rush of cooler air. The stairwell smells like dust and concrete and faint cleaning chemicals. No wolf, no cologne.
She throws herself into it like she's diving into water.
The door swings shut behind her, cutting off the softer sounds of the penthouse. For a second it's quiet except for the thunder of her own pulse.
Then—thump.
Lucian hits the door on the other side. She can feel it all the way through the metal.
"Amara," his voice comes, muffled but clear. "Don't run down."
"Why?" she yells back, already clattering onto the first flight of stairs. "Is there a secret basement dungeon I should know about?"
"There are security locks," he says. "You'll just—"
She takes the stairs two at a time, ignoring him. Her breath burns. Her legs scream. She keeps going.
Three floors down, she hits the first landing with an exit door. She slams the bar.
Nothing.
A red light blinks at her accusingly.
"Of course," she gasps. "Of course we're in a very fancy cage."
She rattles it anyway, like that'll change how electronic locks work.
Behind her, above her, she hears the fire door open.
Lucian has come into the stairwell.
His steps are quiet, but not quiet enough to hide from her. Maybe the bond is already doing little GPS pings, locating him by the way her spine prickles.
"Amara," he calls down. His voice echoes in the concrete shaft. "If you keep running, you're going to faint on a landing and then I'm going to have to carry you back up. Neither of us wants that."
"Stop being reasonable," she shouts back, tears stinging her eyes. "You just told me my entire love life has already been decided by your nose."
She barrels down another flight, hand skimming the rail.
Her chest hurts. She can't tell if it's the stairs or the bond.
She tries the next door. Another blink of red. Locked.
The next. Same.
"Come on," she pleads, as if the building cares. "Just give me one way out."
Her power buzzes louder now. Tiny phantom panels flash at the edges of her vision: an exit door opening, a street full of cars, her in a hoodie slipping into the crowd.
All she has to do is stop, pull out the tablet she left upstairs, and draw it.
She squeezes her eyes shut, nails biting into her palms.
"No," she whispers. "No edits. Not for this."
She runs again.
Her body is done long before she is. Her lungs feel like someone poured bleach into them. The stairwell blurs. On the landing between two floors, her foot misses a step. She grabs the rail at the last second, swinging dangerously over the gap.
For a heartbeat, she sees herself falling, body hitting concrete, skull cracking.
Her power surges, a desperate, instinctive flinch.
The world… holds.
No rewind. No double-take.
She catches herself, muscles screaming, and hauls her body back onto the steps.
"Amara." Lucian's voice is closer now. "Enough."
"Go away," she croaks.
"I can't," he says simply. "You know that now."
She hates that a tiny, traitorous part of her believes him—not because of the bond, but because she's seen the way he hovers at the edge of her pain, the way he watches her nosebleeds like they're gunshots.
"What do you want from me?" she chokes, not sure if she's asking him, the bond, or the universe.
No answer comes, unless you count the groan of the building.
She staggers onto another landing, legs jelly, and slams the bar on the next exit door with what feels like the last of her strength.
This one clicks.
She stumbles forward, almost falling through as it swings outward.
Cold air hits her skin like a slap.
For a wild second she thinks she's outside, on the street. Then her vision clears.
She's on a rooftop terrace.
It's technically out, in the sense that there's sky and wind and no ceiling. But there's also a glass wall all around, chest-high, and twenty-odd stories of nothing between her and the streetlights below.
The city stretches out on all sides, a glittering circuit board. Cars move like pulses along the veins. A siren wails somewhere far off. No one looks up.
Of course.
Of course this is the door that opens.
She stumbles toward the glass wall until her hands press flat against it. It's cold under her palms.
Her breath fogs the surface.
She leans there, forehead against the glass, gulping air, trying to slow the hysterical flutter of her heart.
Behind her, the door to the stairwell opens with a soft hiss.
She doesn't have to turn around to know it's him. The bond hums, tuning itself to his presence like a radio finding its station.
"Careful," Lucian says quietly. The wind carries his voice to her. "The railing is safe, but you're shaking."
"I'm fine," she lies.
He steps closer, footsteps slow, deliberate. She feels him stop a few feet back, giving her space. The moon hangs above them, thinner now, a silver shard. It reflects faintly in the glass in front of her, right next to her own ghostly face.
"Don't jump," he says, soft. "I'm very attached to you not dying."
She lets out a breath that's almost a laugh.
"You're not that lucky," she says. "If I die, your bond drama becomes a tragic backstory and you know it."
"True," he says. "I'd weaponize the grief."
He comes to stand beside her, not too close, hands resting lightly on the railing. In the reflection, their shoulders are almost touching. In reality, there's a small gulf of air between them that feels bigger than the city.
For a while, neither of them speaks.
Wind tugs at her hair. The city hums. Up here, the war feels far away. So does the comic, the comments, the deadlines, the prophecies. It's just her and a man who is also a beast, and a bond hanging between them like another invisible pane of glass.
"I never agreed to this," she says again, quieter this time. The anger has been burnt out by running, leaving something rawer beneath. "To the mate thing. To the war. To being important."
"I know," he says.
"I don't want my life to be already written," she whispers. "By your wolf. By my power. By some script in the sky. I want to choose."
He looks at her reflection instead of her face.
"You still can," he says. "The bond is a… gravitational pull. Not a prison. You can orbit as close or as far as you want. You can slingshot away. You can ignore it until it's just a strange ache on rainy days."
"That's not how gravity works," she mutters.
"You're the one who edits physics," he says. "Figure it out."
She huffs, a sound that might someday become a laugh when it's not wrapped in panic.
"What if I can't?" she asks. "What if every choice I make from now on, I have to ask: is this me? Or the bond? Or the story trying to push me somewhere?"
He doesn't answer right away.
When he does, his voice is low.
"Then we learn to spot the difference," he says. "Together. We draw lines. We test. We see when it hurts for the right reasons and when it hurts because something else is pulling the strings."
She closes her eyes.
The idea of "we" is almost as terrifying as the bond itself. But standing here alone with her panic hasn't magically made the strings vanish either.
The wind lifts her hair. The city keeps going.
She presses her forehead harder against the glass, feeling its unyielding chill.
She came looking for a door that led out—street level, anonymity, an easy exit.
Instead she got sky. Height. The impossible distance between where she is and where she could run.
Everywhere she looks, the story is still there.
Behind her, in her chest, in the way the world might stutter if she gives in and draws.
There is no simple door that takes her back to before.
Lucian's voice cuts softly through the wind.
"I won't touch you unless you ask," he says. "I won't call you 'mate' again if you don't want me to. I won't use your bond as leverage."
She opens her eyes, staring at the city.
"But," he continues, "I also won't pretend you're just my employee. Or just my artist. Or just an asset in this war. You are all of those things and more, and lying about any of it will get us killed."
The honesty is a weight and a handhold at the same time.
"Then what am I?" she asks, so quietly she's not sure he hears.
There's a long pause.
When he answers, his voice is very gentle.
"You're Amara," he says. "You are the only one of you. Power or no power. Bond or no bond. War or no war. Everything else is context."
Her throat tightens.
The city lights blur.
She doesn't turn around. Doesn't take his hand. Doesn't forgive him for having a wolf that decided things without asking her.
But she doesn't jump.
She stands there, breathing, shaking, her palms flat against cold glass, a scared girl on a rooftop with a monster who insists on telling her the truth, and feels the terrifying, infuriating fact of her own existence pressing back.
Somewhere far below, a siren wails and fades.
Somewhere inside, a line of dialogue takes shape, sharp and stubborn:
This story is not done. It's just no longer mine alone.
In the reflection, the man beside her lowers his head, eyes closing briefly as if he hears it too.
Every door she tried tonight led her deeper into the same story.
Maybe, she thinks miserably, the only way out now is through.