Page 59 of Bearly Out Loud

Then:Mercer’s people. Mobilizing full team. ETA thirty minutes.

Dojin put the phone down. Steadied himself.

She’s fine. She said she’s fine. She wasn’t there when it happened.

He didn’t care about fine. He wanted to be in that loft, between her and the door, facing whatever had been there and making sure it never came back.

He closed his eyes. Saw her—on the sidewalk, her hand in his, four blocks of warm silence. The taste of sake and yuzu when she’d kissed him outside the cab. The sound she’d made against his mouth, small and wrecking, stored in the center of his rib cage where he hoarded the things he refused to give back.

Someone walked into her home. Touched her things. Sat in her booth. Breathed her air.

His fingers curled hard into the vinyl.

The driver glanced in the rearview. Dojin unclenched his hands. Breathed.

Cobblestones under the tires. He was out of the cab before it stopped, leaving cash on the seat without counting it. Her building’s front door was propped open—no doorman this late, intercom system only—and he took the stairs three at a time because the elevator would take forty seconds he didn’t have.

Her door was open.He pushed it wider, and the loft’s air hit him—jasmine, coffee, the lemon cleaning solution she used on the recording equipment. And underneath: strangers. Two of them, male, hours old. A sharp chemical scent that registered immediately asthreatbefore his conscious mind finished processing the door.

His eyes swept the space in seconds. Cushions restacked. Shelves disrupted. Kitchen drawers ajar. No structural damage. No blood. No Nari in the living room.

A massive orange cat sat on the kitchen counter, watching him with the measured hostility of a bouncer at an exclusive club.

She was at the kitchen island, legal pad in front of her, pen moving. Writing. Her hair was pulled back in a knot she hadn’t been wearing when he’d last seen her—a utilitarian thing, all business. She was wearing a hoodie, leggings, and sneakers, and she looked furious and focused and so viscerally alive that the vibration in his chest doubled. Her hoodie had slipped off one shoulder.

She’s safe. She’s here. She’s writing on a legal pad and you need to focus.

She looked up. Their eyes met across the kitchen.

She stopped three feet away, legal pad in hand, and faced him head-on—unflinching, direct, with an edge of annoyance that he was beginning to understand meant she was scared.

“You’re rumbling.”

“I’m not?—”

He closed his mouth. She was right. The vibration was audible—a deep, rolling hum that he couldn’t have stopped if he’d welded his ribs shut. He’d walked into the space where someone had touched her things, smelled her papers, invaded her territory, and the response was primal and total and zero percent interested in subtlety.

“It’s a bear response.” The closest to honesty he could manage without explaining what bears did when someone threatened their mate. “I can’t turn it off.”

“I didn’t ask you to.” Quiet. Not sarcasm. Not a joke. A statement of fact that landed in the center of the room and stayed.

Three feet between them. He could close it in one step. Wanted to—with a force that bordered on gravitational. Pull her against his chest, press his face into her hair, let the rumblesay what his mouth couldn’t:They came into your home and I wasn’t here and that will never happen again.

He didn’t. Because she was standing in a ransacked loft with a legal pad and bare feet and the last thing she needed was a man who couldn’t control the distance between his instincts and his hands.

But she took a half step closer. Not to him—toward the kitchen. Coincidental trajectory. Except her arm brushed his on the way past, and neither of them flinched, and the contact lasted one second too long to be accidental.

The skin on his forearm burned where she’d touched it. Burned and stayed burning.

He looked around the loft. Let his senses work: mapping the intrusion, tracing the paths the strangers had walked, indexing what they’d touched. The booth. The desk. The bedroom closet. A systematic sweep by trained operatives looking for specific documents.

“They were after the Sora Nightwind materials.”

Nari held up her legal pad. Three pages of notes, tight handwriting, numbered items. “Already inventoried. Scripts examined, desk drawer opened, voice recording archive checked. Nothing taken. Nothing here to take.”

She turned the violation into a report. Organized the chaos into columns and row numbers while waiting for help to arrive.

The anger that moved through him was slow and deep and had roots. Not the hot, immediate kind—the kind that settled into bedrock and stayed. Mercer. Mercer had sent people into her home. Into the space where she recorded and slept and walked barefoot on hardwood and talked to her dead grandfather’s voice notes.