Page 37 of Bearly Out Loud

The room tilted.

Nari closed the laptop. Opened it. Closed it again.

Mercer Global.

Brent Mercer. One of the three largest media conglomerates on the East Coast. Acquisition-driven. Aggressive. Known in the industry for buying content libraries and wringing them dry. Her father had mentioned him once at a dinner party—James Wixx didn’t waste words on people he disliked, and he’d used four: “Creatively bankrupt. Professionally dangerous.”

She stood. Paced the length of her loft—south windows to kitchen and back, bare feet on hardwood, her brain doing what it did when information arrived faster than she could organize it: sorting, connecting, discarding, ranking.

Meridian pitched Voidborn to Keiser. Meridian traces back to Mercer Global. Voidborn is built on Grandpa’s work. Which means Mercer’s people stole it. But Keiser bought the pitch. Did Dojin know what he was buying? Did he know where it came from?

She stopped pacing.

Did the man who brought her rooftop honeycomb and sat on a studio floor in the dark because she was sad—did he know he was profiting off a dead man’s stolen legacy?

Her chest tightened. Not anger—or not only anger. The specific ache of wanting an answer she wasn’t sure she’d survive hearing.

She picked up Hideo’s notebook from the coffee table. Ran her thumb over the leather. The cover was soft from sixty years of handling, the spine cracked in three places from where he’dopened it flat to draw. It smelled like old paper and ink and the sandalwood incense Suki burned in the brownstone study.

I’m going to find out. And I’m not going to be gentle about it.

The studio smelleddifferent at night. Without bodies filling the rooms, without the coffee machine running and the hum of monitors and the chatter of production assistants who treated caffeine as a personality—the building stripped down to its bones. Acoustic foam and cold air, and the faint chemical tang of animation supplies drifting up from the floor below.

Nari was in the recording booth. Not performing—reading. She’d booked a late session to work on Episode Ten’s monologue, but the monologue had ended an hour ago, and now she was sitting in the producer’s chair with Hideo’s notebook and the Voidborn bible side by side, making notes in the margins with a red pen she’d stolen from Priya’s desk.

The hallway door opened. She heard him before she saw him—footsteps too heavy for anyone on the production team, the faint creak of a man who took up more space than most doorways planned for.

Dojin stopped in the doorway of the control room. He’d lost the blazer somewhere between his office and here. Shirt untucked, sleeves pushed up his forearms, tie absent. His eyes found her immediately—always did, every room, like a compass she hadn’t given permission to install.

“You’re here late.”

“You’re here later.” She closed Hideo’s notebook. Slid it under the Voidborn bible. Casual. “Does the CEO do bed checks, or is this a special occasion?”

He leaned against the doorframe. Crossed his arms. The position made his forearms do unreasonable things, and she noted this with the studied detachment of a woman who’d been noting unreasonable forearm behavior for weeks.

“I saw the studio lights from the street.”

“You were walking past the studio. At eleven p.m. On a Thursday.”

“The tower’s three blocks away.”

“Three blocks in the wrong direction from your apartment.”

“I was checking on the building.”

“You were checking on me.”

“The building includes you.”

Smooth. Annoyingly smooth.

She stood from the chair and moved to the mixing board, putting distance and professional equipment between them. Needed the barrier. Needed her brain to stop registering the way his presence reorganized every room he entered—making it smaller, warmer, harder to breathe in.

“I have a question.”

His expression shifted. Attentive. Patient. Bear-steady, if she’d known to call it that. “Ask.”

“Voidborn. Where did the concept come from?”