Page 42 of Bearly Out Loud

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

She got in the car. Started the engine. Rolled down the window. Rain was audible from the garage entrance—the steady percussion of a March night washing the city clean.

“Dojin.”

“Yes.”

“The thing I said. About not unpacking this yet.”

“I remember. It was four minutes ago.”

She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “I didn’t say I didn’t want to unpack it. I said not yet. Those are different sentences.”

His lungs expanded. The vibration deepened. He leaned down—hands braced on the car door, face level with hers—and pressed his mouth to her forehead. Brief. Warm. The gentlest thing he’d done all night, and it made her eyes close.

“Different sentences,” he confirmed. “Go home. Eat dinner. You didn’t eat tonight—I can tell.”

Her eyes snapped open. “How can you possibly tell?”

He straightened. Stepped back. “Intuition.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Drive safe.”

She narrowed her eyes. Rolled up the window. Drove away. He watched her taillights climb the parking ramp and disappear into the rain-slicked street, and he stood there for a full sixty seconds afterward, breathing, grounding himself, letting the roar in him settle to a steady thrum.

His phone buzzed again. Reo.

You’re still in the garage. I have the security feed. Go home, boss. Smile like that in a parking structure and someone’s going to call the cops.

Dojin pocketed his phone. Smoothed a hand down his shirt—the one she’d wrecked—and walked to his car in the rain.

He was, in fact, smiling.

TWENTY-THREE

NARI

Green tea and miso and the ghost of sandalwood incense. The Wixx brownstone smelled like every important conversation Nari had ever had.

She spread the documents across the dining room table—the one that seated twelve, the one where Hideo used to sit at the head and draw on napkins during family dinners while Suki pretended to disapprove and kept every single napkin. Saturday morning light angled through the west-facing windows, casting gold bars across the tablecloth. Nari’s hands were steady. Her pulse was not.

Her parents sat across from her. James, in his weekend uniform—rumpled blazer over a henley, reading glasses already on, coffee untouched. Akemi beside him in an ivory silk blouse with the Celestial Ronin kanji pendant resting against her collarbone. She’d come straight from a Foundation board meeting and hadn’t changed. When Nari called and said “I need to show you both something, and you need to not be anywhere else for three hours,” Akemi had cancelled a lunch without asking why.

“On the left.” Nari tapped the Voidborn concept art—the pitch deck pages she’d photographed, printed, and annotatedin red. “Voidborn Requiem. Acquired by Keiser Entertainment last year through a company called Meridian Creative. On the right?—”

She didn’t need to say it. Akemi was already leaning forward, her hand hovering over Hideo’s notebook. The sketchbook was open to the Sora Nightwind character designs—the originals, in her father’s hand, dated 2016. Ink on paper. His handwriting in the margins, mixing Japanese and English the way his thoughts mixed languages.

Akemi’s fingers trembled. She touched the edge of the page—not the drawing itself, never the drawing, you didn’t touch the artwork—and made a sound. Small. Unbidden. A daughter recognizing her father’s hand in a place it had no business being.

“That’s Papa.”

Not a question. Akemi’s eye could identify Hideo’s work from across a gallery, in reproductions, in student imitations she corrected at Foundation workshops. She’d grown up watching those hands draw. She knew his linework the way Nari knew voices—in her bones, below conscious thought.

“The composition is his. The negative space. The way the figure holds the page.” Akemi moved to the next comparison. Her expression had gone still—the artist’s assessment replacing the mother’s shock. “They changed the armor. Hair, weapons, surface details. But the skeleton is his. The proportions. The relationship between figure and background.” She looked up. “Nari. Where did you get the Voidborn materials?”

“The production office. I photographed the pitch deck.”