Page 45 of Bearly Out Loud

Nari pocketed her phone. Looked at Hideo’s notebook, still open on the table. His handwriting. His drawings. His ideas, stolen and repackaged and sold to a man who kept bees on a Manhattan rooftop and kissed her in a hallway and might be either the answer to this problem or its architect.

Find the truth first. Weapons second.

She picked up her father’s pen. Started her own list.

TWENTY-FOUR

DOJIN

The coffee had gone cold twice.

Dojin sat in his office on the thirty-eighth floor of Keiser Tower with two monitors open, a legal pad full of notes, and a splinter in his brain that had been there since Thursday night. Nari’s question. Casual, innocent, asked over a mixing board at eleven p.m. with his jacket on her shoulders:

Where did the concept come from?

Professional curiosity, she’d said. The words had been right. The eyes hadn’t. He’d been replaying the conversation in his head for two days—her face when he said Meridian Creative, the micro-pause before she’d repeated the name, how she’d tucked her grandfather’s notebook under the production bible like she was hiding evidence rather than organizing a desk.

Something had been restless in him ever since. Not the warm, gravitational pull toward Nari that had become background noise in his life—a different current. Alert. Suspicious. Every instinct raised against a threat it couldn’t yet see.

He pulled the Meridian file and spent an hour with it that confirmed only what his instincts had already decided. Then he picked up the phone. “Reo. My office. Bring your laptop.”

Reo appeared in four minutes.He always appeared in four minutes when Dojin used that voice—the clipped, no-padding tone that meant the boss had found a problem and the problem was about to have a very bad day.

He dropped into the chair across from Dojin’s desk, opened his laptop, and waited. Dark henley, cargo pants, a fresh scar across his left knuckles from a training session Dojin had told him to ease off on and he’d ignored because Reo eased off on nothing.

“Meridian Creative Partners.” Dojin turned his monitor toward Reo. “The company that pitched us Voidborn. I need their corporate structure traced to the source.”

Reo didn’t ask why. He started typing.

“Meridian traces back to…” He turned the laptop. The screen showed a Nevada business filing. Halloran Consulting Group. Registered agent: Kenneth Pruitt. And beside the name, Reo had opened a second tab—a LinkedIn profile. Senior Vice President of Business Development.

Mercer Global Media.

Silence.

Dojin’s vision sharpened. The gold flecks in his irises flared—not a choice, not a performance. The surface of his desk was mahogany. His fingers dug into the edge. The wood creaked.

Brent Mercer. The name hit with a clarity that bypassed thought and went straight to instinct. Mercer, who built his media empire on acquisition and extraction. Mercer, whose reputation in the industry was polished steel over a predator’s appetite. Mercer, who had pitched Dojin a flagship propertythrough a chain of shell companies designed to make the concept look independent.

He sold me stolen work. Wrapped it in paperwork, dressed it in a pitch deck, and sold it to me like a gift. And I bought it. I put my studio’s name on it. My team’s work. My company’s reputation.

Nari’s voice. In my booth. Performing a character built on materials that were taken from her family.

The desk creaked louder.

Reo looked at the desk. Looked at Dojin’s hands. Looked at Dojin’s eyes.

“You’re about to snap your own desk in half. That’s an eleven with good posture.” Reo closed the laptop. Placed his hands flat on the surface. “We can’t build a legal case from a jail cell.”

“Who said jail?”

“Your face.” Reo leaned back. Crossed his arms. His expression was calm—the professional calm of a man who’d pulled Dojin back from ledges before and knew the terrain. “Your face is currently planning three felonies.”

Dojin released the desk. Stood. Walked to the window. Midtown spread below him—glass and steel and the Saturday afternoon hum of a city that didn’t care about corporate theft or stolen legacies or the quiet rage building behind his ribs.

He thought about Nari’s question. The careful tone. The way she’d tucked the notebook under the production bible. She’d already known. She’d been testing him—looking for the lie, the flinch, the giveaway that he was complicit.

She kissed me in that hallway, carrying a suspicion I might have stolen from her grandfather. She kissed me anyway.