By two in the morning, Amara's eyes hurt worse than any prophecy migraine.
She should have been asleep. Or meditating. Or doing literally anything other than doomscrolling through the internet with her gala makeup half-smeared and her dress puddled on the floor like a murdered shadow.
Instead she sat cross-legged on her massive, stupidly soft penthouse bed in an over-washed T-shirt, phone glowing inches from her face, watching the world rearrange itself in real time.
Lucian had walked her to her door after the gala, hand warm at the small of her back, wolf simmering just under his skin. He'd paused in the doorway, like he always did, as if an invisible line lay just inside the threshold.
"Get some sleep," he'd said.
"You too," she'd lied.
He'd given her that look—like he could smell the lie and also understood it—and then he was gone, off to debrief with Eira and Zara and whoever else stayed up late planning counters to unsynced specters.
And she was here, in the dark, watching a different kind of war.
Her notifications were a crime scene.
She'd silenced everything hours ago and it still felt loud.
Trending: #GrayReyesGala, #WolfOfInk, #DidSheDrawThisToo, and—because the internet had no mercy—#IsLucianGrayAWerewolf.
"Oh my god," she muttered to the empty room. "No. Go back. Put me back in the quiet timeline."
She thumbed into the trending tag.
The first thing she saw was a photo of herself and Lucian on the dance floor, captured from above: her dress a streak of graphite, his tux crisp black, heads bent close. Someone had edited in speech bubbles.
Lucian: "You're doing great, don't bite anyone."
Amara: "No promises."
12,000 retweets.
Next: a split-screen.
Left side: a panel from her comic—Lucian's fictional analog, head bowed, hand on the heroine's waist, city lights burning behind them.
Right side: a gala photograph from nearly the same angle.
The caption:
"Tell me this isn't deliberate PR."
The replies were a mess.
"WAIT IT'S THE SAME POSE"
"Marketing team of the year"
"No because if my fave webcomic turned out to be an ARG for a billionaire's redemption arc I'd scream"
"Guys they literally went from enemies to 'reluctant gala date' this is fanfic."
"Plot twist: it's not PR, he's just copying the comic because he's a simp."
Amara made a strangled noise and flopped backward.
"This is fine," she told the ceiling. "Nothing is on fire."
Her phone buzzed in her hand—Zara, on video call.
She accepted.
Zara's face appeared upside-down relative to Amara, hair half out of its braid, makeup smudged, sitting in some control room nest of monitors.
"You're trending," Zara said, sounding far too pleased for two a.m.
"I noticed," Amara said. "Please tell me the world has collectively decided this is all a performance art piece and not 'prophetic wolf content.'"
Zara snorted.
"That depends on which group you're reading," she said, and flicked her fingers. The view shifted as she shared her screen.
Multiple windows popped up: forums, social media threads, fandom servers with names like #GrayLore, #BlackSunDiscussion, #LunagraphTheory.
Zara pointed with her stylus.
"Segment A," she said. "The PR Truthers."
A long post filled one window:
Okay but hear me out: the whole "artist sues CEO, then moves into his building and keeps drawing his life" thing is too perfect. This has to be a planned campaign. The comic, the lawsuit, tonight's gala? All seeded beats. They're rebranding him from cold villain to morally complex love interest. We are LITERALLY watching a live-action redemption arc in partnership with a webtoon.
Replies:
"So you're saying capitalism invented enemies-to-lovers?"
"Bro if this is marketing I forgive them."
"Imagine being paid to drag your own boss as PR."
"Okay, gross," Amara said. "But also kind of flattering?"
"Wait for Segment B," Zara said, sliding to another window. "The Monster Believers."
This one was a collage: freeze-frames of Lucian on training days that had somehow leaked, phone videos of him at the gala, her own sharper, stylized panels.
Someone had drawn red circles around his eyes in different lighting, around a blurred outline of his hand when he moved too fast.
The accompanying text was in all caps.
YOU GUYS. You know how in BlackSun's comic the CEO analog is literally a WEREWOLF? Look at these clips of Lucian Gray. The REFLEXES. The EYES. The way he looks at her like he's about to devour her (in several ways).
There have been THREE "gas leaks" at his HQ in the last month, and the Lunar Hope Foundation only funds NIGHT WORKERS in very specific neighborhoods. Coincidence?? Or cover for Something Else?
#IsLucianGrayAWerewolf I'm only half joking.
The replies were an even bigger mess.
"Lmao this is Twilight for people with business degrees."
"I'd let him bite me, idc what species he is."
"Okay but the bite mark discourse aside, the timing around Episode 39 and the real evac is sus."
"Y'all are insane. Go touch grass and stop LARPing."
"You're laughing, but this is how long-form gaslighting works. Normalize the idea as fiction so people dismiss it when it's real."
Amara's stomach twisted.
"That last one," she said quietly. "They're… not completely wrong."
Zara's expression turned rueful.
"Humans are better at pattern recognition than we give them credit for," she said. "They just don't have the context to stick the landing."
Segment C was somehow worse: ship culture.
Hashtags: #GraySun, #CEOOfMyHeart, #MoonScribe x GrayWolf.
Someone had clipped her speech outside the gala—
"I draw complicated men. It would be a shame if the real ones were less interesting."
—and set it to slow piano over a compilation of her and Lucian looking at each other in various frames: courtroom, lobby, rooftop, tonight's dance floor.
"I hate this," Amara whispered.
"You love it a little bit," Zara said.
"I hate this more than I've ever hated anything," Amara corrected. She buried her burning face in a pillow. Her voice came out muffled. "They're going to find the fanart eventually, aren't they?"
"I found it ten minutes ago," Zara said cheerfully. "Do you want the wholesome set or do I keep the cursed folder to myself?"
"Burn the cursed folder," Amara said immediately. "In actual fire."
"Noted," Zara said, clearly not deleting anything.
Amara rolled over again, staring at the ceiling.
"This was supposed to be a 'calm the humans' move," she said. "Smile for the cameras, reassure investors, show everyone I'm not a hostage or a corpse. Instead we started a fandom war."
"To be fair," Zara said, "the fandom war already existed. You just… poured gasoline on it in a nice dress."
Something flickered on one of Zara's side monitors.
A different forum, darker interface. Not public social media—something more private. Usernames she recognized from wolves' chat logs. A thread title:
"Moon-Scribe Goes Public – Analysis"
Zara tapped it.
A wolf someplace else on the planet had posted a breakdown:
We knew she was tied to him. Now every human with a phone knows too. That makes her a shield and a target.
Gray's making a statement: "Come for her, you go through me and the entire Accord."
But it also tells us she's not a ghost in a tower. She bleeds. She breathes. She dances. She goes out in public. That's leverage.
Replies from other packs, some in translation:
"We should be sending her thank-you gifts, not bullets. My nephew survived because of her flood arc."
"Careful. If the stories favor Gray too much, they'll twist her into propaganda."
"What if she's not on anyone's side?"
"She showed up on his. That's enough."
Amara swallowed.
"Great," she said. "So we have three simultaneous communities: humans who think this is PR, humans who think it's a werewolf confession, and actual wolves who know it's a war memo."
"Don't forget the financial bros," Zara said, flipping to a business site.
An analyst had posted a hot take:
"Lucian Gray attending the Lunar Hope gala with controversial artist Amara Reyes is a calculated move to humanize his image amid rumors of internal unrest at Gray Holdings. Expect a short-term volatility spike followed by a stabilizing effect as markets price in his ability to control the narrative."
"Control the narrative," Amara echoed. "Yeah, sure. That's exactly what's happening."
Zara studied her.
"How's your head?" she asked. "Any… pings?"
Amara rubbed her temples.
"Not like a full migraine," she said. "More like static. Buzzing. Like the story is… loud."
She didn't know how else to explain it.
When she'd first started drawing the "wolves in suits" comic, it had been a private noise—her own tangle of ideas and emotions, drawn out so she could see them.
Then the visions started syncing with real events, and the noise shifted: less personal, more like a frequency she was tuning into.
Tonight felt different.
Tonight, the whole world was humming.
Every meme, every comment, every thread—tiny, silly, thirsty, angry, earnest—was a micro-line in a vast communal storyboard.
Most people thought they were just making jokes.
They didn't see that wolves were reading their words as intel.
Or that some wolves were seeding their words as misdirection.
Or that somewhere in between, something unsynced might be surfing the noise, invisible.
"Zara," Amara said slowly. "How much of this can your bots filter?"
"In terms of dangerous words?" Zara asked. "We can flag and bury anything that gets too close to 'real'—specific locations, full names, weirdly accurate pack speculation. We've been doing that for years. But we can't stop humans from frothing about your love life or shipping you with my brother."
"Tragic," Amara said.
"We can't stop them from half-joking about werewolves," Zara went on. "In a weird way, that helps. The more the idea exists as a meme, the less likely anyone is to believe the actual evidence."
"Until someone puts the pattern together," Amara said. "Like that thread you showed me. 'Normalize the idea as fiction so people dismiss it when it's real.'"
Zara grimaced.
"Yeah," she said. "If enough people start treating your comic like a documentary, we're screwed."
Amara scrolled down her own feed again.
She saw edits where fans had color-graded Lucian's eyes gold.
Threads dissecting his body language next to hers: tilt of his head, angle of his shoulders, small smiles.
An unbelievably cursed diagram labeled "CEO definitively down bad for tiny artist".
Jokes about "werewolves on Wall Street."
An essay analyzing the ethics of "romanticizing power imbalances" in her story, complete with citations.
"I didn't sign up for this," Amara said, half to Zara, half to herself.
"You signed up for a standard enemies-to-lovers with corporate garnish," Zara said. "Life upgraded you to multiversal narrative war."
"Can I downgrade?" Amara asked. "I'll take the slow-burn enemies-to-enemies option. No romance arc. Just professional hatred."
"Too late," Zara said. "The fandom would revolt."
As if on cue, a new post popped up with alarming speed:
"Petition for BlackSun to add a disclaimer if any future comic episodes are secretly part of Gray Holdings' PR."
Replies:
"Babe she's as blindsided as we are."
"I don't care, I want a stamp that says 'this panel may be prophetic.'"
"Imagine being her, waking up and seeing people dissect your joke layouts like scripture."
Amara's breath hitched.
Scripture.
Zara must have seen the shift in her face.
"Hey," she said, softer. "Look at me."
Amara dragged her eyes up.
"You are not responsible for the entire internet," Zara said. "You make your art. We manage the fallout. That was the deal."
"Was it?" Amara asked. "Because it feels like I keep breaking things and you keep duct-taping them back together."
Zara's mouth twisted.
"Welcome to being my brother's partner," she said. "That's how he lives, too."
The word partner landed weird in Amara's chest. Too big. Too much implication. She set it aside carefully and focused on the one thing she could control.
"Zara," she said. "Do you have a map of all this? Of how the threads spread?"
Zara blinked, then brightened a little.
"Of course I do," she said. "Do you think I'm new?"
She pulled up a different interface: a web of nodes and lines, glowing faintly against a dark background. Each node was a post, a user, a thread. Lines showed shares, retweets, quote-tweets, cross-posts between platforms.
Certain nodes were bigger, pulsing faintly.
"These are amplification points," Zara explained. "Influencers. Bots. Random posts that went viral. See this one? Some lifestyle blogger with two million followers quoted your 'complicated men' line and turned it into a relationship advice meme. Now half of Instagram is arguing about whether villains deserve love."
One particularly bright node branched heavily into two directions: business media and meme accounts.
"This," Zara said, pointing, "is the clip of you and Lucian leaving the gala with that comment about not drawing your real life. It's being used both to hype the 'PR ARG' theory and to mock it. Every time someone debunks, someone else double-downs. It's beautiful."
"You're terrifying," Amara said.
"Thank you," Zara said.
Amara squinted at the map.
"It looks like…" she began.
"A nervous system," Zara finished. "That's one way to put it."
She thought of the way the bond with Lucian pulsed—like a line drawn between them that reality refused to erase.
She thought of the way her comic had connected packs across continents—little cords of shared reference, emotional shorthand.
Now the same thing was happening on a larger scale.
Every meme, every joke, every conspiracy thread was a synapse.
"We've been treating the war like a physical thing," she said slowly. "Territory, safehouses, patrol routes. But this—" she gestured at the glowing web—"this is a front too. You're fighting here. So are they."
"Information is territory," Zara said. "Belief is cover. If humans think everything is just story and clout, we move easier. If they start believing in monsters in the wrong way, they form mobs. Both are dangerous. The balance is… delicate."
"And now my face is part of it," Amara said.
"Yeah," Zara said. "Sorry?"
Amara set the phone down on her stomach for a moment, staring at the ceiling.
"I used to joke that my fandom was intense," she said. "Death threats over ships, petitions about plot decisions, people writing ten-thousand-word meta about one facial expression. Now it's like… all of that but with live ammunition."
Zara was quiet for a beat.
"We can steer some of it," she said. "Seed harmless theories. Feed the 'PR stunt' narrative just enough that it smothers the 'real monsters' narrative. Quietly boost the ship posts because they're noisy and harmless."
"Harmless," Amara echoed, thinking of what happened when a trap worked too well. "You sure?"
"Okay, relatively harmless," Zara amended. "I mean, worst case, some teenager in Ohio writes porn about you and my brother. That's your own personal hell, not the city's."
Amara groaned.
"I hope the unsynced guy sees that and quits out of sheer second-hand embarrassment," she said.
"Oh," Zara said, glancing at another screen. "Speaking of."
Her expression sharpened.
"What?" Amara sat up.
"We've scraped the gala footage from public feeds," Zara said. "There are at least three angles catching him behind you. Blurry, background, easily ignored if you don't know what to look for. But he's there."
She brought one up.
A grainy zoom of the moment on the dance floor when Amara had felt the chill.
In the far background, near a floral tower, a man in a black suit stood half-turned away from the camera. His face was obscured by someone's shoulder. Only his posture was clear: relaxed, watchful, not participating.
Someone online had circled him and written:
"Every gala photo has one NPC like this and I always wonder what their story is."
A reply below:
"He's the one who knows the plot twist."
Amara's skin crawled.
"They're right," she said.
"They think they're joking," Zara said.
Amara leaned forward until her face was inches from the screen, as if closeness could force clarity.
The image didn't resolve. It stayed fuzzed at the edges, as if reality itself didn't want to focus on him.
Her headache pulsed once.
She pulled back.
"I tried drawing him again," she said quietly. "Before I went to the gala. In a panel. The lines slid off. The page refused him."
Zara's gaze snapped to her.
"You didn't tell Lucian that," she said.
"He was busy," Amara said. "And you were busy. And I didn't feel like saying 'hey, by the way, the story has a favorite child and it's not us.'"
"Amara—"
"I get it," Amara cut in, then softened her tone. "I'll tell him tomorrow. Or whenever he surfaces from Alpha mode."
Zara slumped back in her chair, rubbing her eyes.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. For now, I'll keep tagging any footage with our blur-mask, same as we do with wolves who move too fast. Humans will assume it's compression or a glitch. Wolves will know to be on the lookout for a guy the cameras hate."
"Does he know?" Amara asked. "Does Unsynced know he's… off-page?"
Zara gave a humorless smile.
"If he's half as good as he seems," she said, "he knows exactly what he is."
Amara looked back at her phone, at the endless scroll of strangers laughing and theorizing and thirsting over a story they thought they owned.
She saw fanart of her in the gala dress, stylized: one with Lucian at her back, teeth bared; one with her holding a pen like a sword; one with a shadowy figure behind them both, faceless.
The caption on that last one:
"Every hero, every monster, every muse… and the author you never see."
She shivered.
"The entire world is playing," she said softly.
"What?" Zara asked.
"This," Amara said, gesturing vaguely at the glowing web. "They think they're just posting. Joking. Shipping. But they're feeding something. Feeding us. Feeding them. Feeding whatever this thing is between the panels."
Zara followed her gaze.
For once, the irreverence fell away completely.
"Yeah," she said. "They are."
Amara thought of that ledger she'd started. The one where she tried, in tiny cramped notes, to track cause and effect.
Ep 18 flood — Lakeward moved — lives saved.
Ep 7 alley — Rao's cousins — lives lost.
Ep 39 trap — eight captured, one slipped.
Gala — unsynced sighted — fandom ignition.
She felt, for one dizzy second, like the whole planet had turned into a page and someone was sketching on it in charcoal and light.
"I used to joke that fandom was war," she said. "Ship wars, discourse, cancellation campaigns. Now… I don't think it's a joke anymore."
"It never was," Zara said quietly. "Not really. Stories move people. People move money. Money moves bullets. It's always been war. You're just seeing all the layers at once now."
Amara swallowed.
"So what do I do?" she asked. "As your resident chaos magnet. Do I stop posting? Do I start putting content warnings for 'may alter reality' at the top of every episode?"
"Please don't," Zara said. "I'll have a heart attack."
"So what?" Amara asked again.
Zara hesitated, then reached for the simple answer that wasn't simple at all.
"You do what you've always done," she said. "You draw. But you don't do it alone. You bring us what you see. We bring you what we know. We treat the fandom like what it is: a battlefield we can't control completely, but we can navigate."
She paused.
"And maybe," she added, "you let yourself occasionally enjoy the fact that you look amazing in all these edits."
Amara laughed, the sound a little wild.
"Fine," she said. "Show me the least cursed ship meme. I need to feel something other than existential dread."
Zara grinned and swiped.
A simple fancomic appeared. Four panels.
Panel: In-comic Lucian analog scowling at a laptop. Caption: "Stop drawing me as a monster."
Panel: Amara's in-comic avatar, deadpan, drawing faster. "No."
Panel: Gala photo of Lucian and Amara dancing, traced over with cartoon hearts.
Panel: Real Lucian, looking straight at the camera, with speech bubble: "Maybe monsters aren't the worst thing to be."
Amara bit her lip.
"That one's… kinda cute," she admitted.
"Told you," Zara said.
Her phone buzzed with a new message.
Lucian:Still awake?
She hesitated, then sent a screenshot of the fancomic.
Amara:Your reputation is out of my hands.
Three dots.
Lucian:I didn't know it ever was.
She smiled, a little.
Amara:The world has decided you're a morally complex love interest. Thoughts?
Pause.
Lucian:As long as they don't decide I'm a werewolf, we'll survive.
Almost immediately, another message.
Lucian:…What's that face for.
She realized her expression had probably turned into something between a grimace and a smirk.
Amara:You should check #IsLucianGrayAWerewolf before you say that.
The typing indicator blinked, then stopped.
A full minute passed.
Then:
Lucian:Zara is banned from the internet.
From the background of Zara's video feed came a loud, affronted, "HEY."
Amara snorted.
Her laughter faded slowly, replaced by a quieter feeling.
Not peace. But a kind of exhausted clarity.
The war wasn't just in alleyways and hidden gyms.
It was in stock tickers and gossip columns, in meme threads and fanfic tags, in every joke about romance and every conspiracy diagram about "real monsters."
The whole world was unknowingly playing on a board they couldn't see.
Every post was a move.
Every panel, a potential trigger.
Every rumor, a gust of wind pushing the story's weather one way or another.
And in the middle of it—on a bed in a penthouse, phone glowing in the dark—sat a girl who drew complicated men, holding a stylus that sometimes felt like a sword.
She picked it up.
Her tablet, on the nightstand, blinked awake at her touch.
A blank page waited.
"I can't control all of you," she told the invisible web of voices beyond the walls. "But I can choose my next line."
She began to sketch.
Not a trap.
Not a gala.
Just a city skyline at night, windows lit like scattered stars, tiny, anonymous lives behind each one.
On a rooftop, she drew a small figure sitting alone, knees pulled to chest.
Herself.
Next to her, she drew a second figure: gold-eyed, tired, staring out over the lights. Lucian, reduced to a quiet silhouette without tux or title.
And in the far corner, half-hidden by a vent, a third shape leaned in the shadows.
Unsynced.
Watching.
The line fought her, but this time she didn't try to define him. She let him be suggestion, not detail. Presence, not portrait.
The headache stayed low and manageable.
In the panel's margin, in tiny letters only she would ever see, she wrote:
Everyone is writing. Not everyone knows they are.
She saved the page to the private folder no one else could access.
The fandom could have their memes.
The wolves could have their strategies.
Unsynced could have his quiet corners.
This—this little rooftop, this one moment of three silhouettes under the same indifferent moon—was hers.
For now.
Outside, the city scrolled through its own restless feed.
Inside, Amara drew, the glow of her tablet the only light, feeling the weight of a million unseen eyes and hoping—fiercely, stubbornly—that somewhere between the jokes and the conspiracies, between the stock reports and the secret councils, she could still sneak in something true.
The world was participating in a narrative war it couldn't see.
She was determined not to let it be the only one writing.