Page 73 of Bearly Out Loud

“Everyone’s smaller than his.”

“Fair point.” She watched Reo open the first-aid kit. Watched his hands—scarred knuckles, steady fingers—clean Dojin’s shoulder wound with iodine and gauze. The practiced speed of someone who’d patched up bears before. “How many times have you done this?”

“Patched him up?” Reo didn’t look up. “This makes four.”

“Four.” She looked at Dojin. He was pulling a shirt over his head—a dark henley from the duffel, one arm through, the other being bandaged by Reo mid-motion. “You’ve been in FOUR fights.”

“Three were territorial disputes. This was the first—” He paused. Met her eyes over Reo’s head. “This was the first time I shifted for someone.”

The words landed in the parking structure’s cold acoustics and sat there, unadorned, true. First time. For someone. Forher.

Takumi’s cab screeched into the structure ninety seconds later. He emerged at a run, Emi’s carrier banging against his leg, his face a masterpiece of competing emotions—terror, excitement, vindication.

He took in the scene. Dojin, half-dressed, bandaged. Nari, glass-cut, arms crossed. Reo, first-aid kit open. The destroyed cars. The unconscious operative. The still-screaming alarms.

“Bear Daddy confirmed.” He set the carrier down. Emi’s eyes tracked Dojin through the mesh with the fixed intensity of a cat whose suspicions had been validated.

Nari looked at Dojin. She had questions. Hundreds. About sleuth politics and shifting biology and whether Gerald the sourdough starter was also a bear thing. About what “mate” meant and whether she got a say in it, and what happened next. About the sounds his bear made and whether she’d been hearing a love song or a lullaby or both.

But the questions could wait.

“Take me home.” She squeezed his hand. “We’ll deal with the Honda in the morning.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

NARI

She brought the sketchbooks to Keiser Tower on a Thursday morning, wrapped in the linen cloth Suki kept them in, carried against her body like a newborn.

Dojin was in his office. Standing, not sitting, because the man was incapable of receiving news from a chair. He watched her come through the door, watched the bundle against her ribs, and his expression shifted—not curiosity, not confusion. Recognition. He understood she was carrying cargo that cost more than anything in this building.

“These belonged to my grandfather.” She laid the bundle on his conference table. Unfolded the linen. Three sketchbooks, their covers worn soft with handling, their spines cracked from years of being opened to the same pages. Hideo’s handwriting on the labels—dated, meticulous, each one covering a specific story arc. 1987. 1991. 1994. “The unpublished Sora Nightwind material. Everything Mercer built Voidborn from.”

Dojin didn’t reach for them. His hands stayed at his sides. He looked at her—a question.

“You can touch them.”

He picked up the first sketchbook like a museum curator handling an original manuscript. Both hands. Fingers along thespine, not the pages. He opened it slowly, letting the binding settle into its natural angle instead of forcing it flat. His thumb didn’t cross into the margin of any illustration. He turned pages with the edge of his nail, not his fingertip, so the oils from his skin wouldn’t transfer to the paper.

He knows how to handle original art. Not because someone taught him for this moment. Because he’s handled originals before. Because he cares about the thing itself, not what the thing is worth.

She watched his face as he read. The shift was gradual—brow drawing in, jaw setting, the stillness in him deepening degree by degree as he turned pages and the scope of what Mercer had stolen became visible in ink and graphite and her grandfather’s steady hand.

“These are extraordinary.” His voice had dropped. Not quiet dense. Compressed. Carrying more weight than the two words were built for. “Your grandfather was a master.”

“I know.”

He set the first sketchbook down. Picked up the second. Opened to a spread she knew by heart—Hideo’s mythology laid out in ink and annotation, Japanese and English filling the margins. The architecture of a fictional world, built with the precision of an engineer and the soul of a poet. Dojin’s jaw flexed. His hand on the page was rigid.

“Mercer stole this.” His voice had gone dangerous. “From him. Fromyou.”

“The bear thing?”

“The bear thing.”

She’d been braced for a range of reactions. Skepticism—these could be recreations. Diplomacy—let’s verify before we assume. Caution—we need to be strategic about this. She had not been braced for rage on her grandfather’s behalf, delivered throughtrembling hands and a jaw rigid with the effort of not closing into fists.

“The dates are authenticated.” She kept her voice level. One of them needed to be the steady one right now, and he was busy having a species-appropriate fury response. “Three independent experts. We have voice notes from 2017 where Hideo describes these storylines in detail. And James has the chain of custody documented back to Tomas Crane.”