Page 46 of Bearly Out Loud

The thought hit differently from the anger. Softer. Worse. Because it meant she’d weighed the evidence against the man and decided the man was worth the risk, and that kind of trust—given in the middle of an active investigation, given despiteevery reason to withhold it—was not a gift he could afford to waste.

“What do we know about the concept’s creative origins?” He turned from the window. Controlled. His eyes had settled back to brown. “The pitch said original IP. We did standard verification. But if Mercer’s behind Meridian, the concept wasn’t original. It was sourced. From where?”

Reo opened his laptop again. “The Voidborn mythology. Thirteen-gate structure, zodiac guardians, celestial ronin archetype?—”

He stopped himself. Too quickly. A visible clamp of the jaw, a hard stop that suggested more knowledge than the sentence accounted for. Dojin had seen it before—small moments over the past weeks where Reo’s professional neutrality cracked against personal territory lurking underneath.

“Finish that thought.”

Reo’s jaw worked. “The mythology. It’s not original. It’s—” Another pause. His fingers drummed once on the laptop’s edge. “It’s derived from an existing property.”

“Which property?”

Reo stared at his screen. The silence stretched. Then his posture shifted—a resignation, like a man stepping off a ledge he’d been balancing on for weeks.

“Celestial Ronin.”

Dojin blinked. “The Wixx property.”

“Created by Hideo Saito. The thirteen-gate structure was introduced in Volume 23, Chapter 141. The zodiac guardians, the celestial ronin archetype, the exile mythology—all Wixx original. It was said that unpublished materials from the final arc were in the estate archives when Wixx died in 2019.”

The room was very quiet.

TWENTY-FIVE

DOJIN

Dojin stared at his head of security. His best friend. The man who ran background checks and threat assessments and filed mission reports in clipped, military shorthand. Who had delivered that last paragraph with the fluency of a doctoral thesis.

“Reo.”

“Yeah.”

“How do you know the volume and chapter number?”

Reo’s ears turned red. The same shade Dojin’s had gone in a studio hallway two nights ago. On a different man. For entirely different reasons. But the same color, because apparently the men in Dojin’s life shared the trait of betraying themselves through ear pigmentation at the worst possible moments.

“Research.”

“Research?”

“For security purposes. Background on the IP.”

“You cited a specific chapter number from a manga that ran for twenty-eight years. For security purposes.”

Reo closed his laptop. Stood. Walked to Dojin’s bookshelf—the one that held industry reports, financial reviews, and a smallcarved bear Stellan had made for Dojin’s twenty-first birthday. He straightened the bear. He did not turn around.

“I may have read the series.”

“The entire series.”

“It’s culturally significant.”

“You’re a Celestial Ronin fan.”

“I am a security professional who maintains comprehensive knowledge of culturally significant IP relevant to his employer’s business interests.” Reo turned around. His face was the careful blank of a man fighting for his dignity. “The fandom is incidental.”

Dojin’s anger—at Mercer, at himself, at the entire web of corporate theft he’d been unknowingly enabling—didn’t disappear. But it made room. Because his best friend, his scarred-knuckle ex-MMA head of security, his stone-cold second-in-command, was standing in his office with red ears trying to explain away an encyclopedic knowledge of a twenty-eight-year manga run, and the absurdity of it cracked Dojin’s fury open just enough for a laugh to escape.