Page 8 of Bearly Out Loud

“Don’t tell Obaachan about this yet.”

Nari winced. Grandmother Suki, informed prematurely, would not ask questions. She would make pronouncements. And her pronouncements had a way of rearranging situations before anyone else had finished identifying the problem. Telling Suki early was like deploying a tactical weapon when you weren’t sure which direction the enemy was standing.

“Agreed. When I have the full materials?—”

“Bring them to dinner on Sunday. We’ll review as a family.” She paused. The kind that meant Akemi was adding an observation she considered relevant, and everyone else would consider mortifying. “Keiser Entertainment. That’s Dojin Keiser’s company.”

“Yes.”

“The bear shifter.”

And there it is.

“Yes, Mom.”

“His mother brought the most extraordinary duck to the last Book Club gathering. Seven courses. The woman understandspresentation.”

“We’re discussing potential intellectual property theft, and you’re reviewing a woman’s duck.”

“I can acknowledge potential theft and excellent duck simultaneously. It’s calledrange.”

She gets that from Obaachan. The ability to derail a crisis with a single irrelevant observation delivered with total composure. It’s genetic. I’m immune to it. Mostly. Sometimes.

The cab pulled up to her building. Cobblestones gleamed wet under the streetlights—rain earlier, leaving the street polished and cold.

“I’ll call tomorrow after I’ve reviewed the packet.”

“Do. And, Nari—” There was a shift in her mother’s voice. The composure thinning to reveal the woman beneath the curator, the mother beneath the strategist. “If it is his work. If someone took what your grandfather left for you, we handle it. Together.”

The way he would have wanted.

Which was not with lawyers, at first. Not with rage. Hideo’s first instinct would have been curiosity.Why did they need it? What did they see in it? Who loved it enough to take it?

His second instinct would have been devastation. Not at the theft—at the idea that someone looked at his work and saw a commodity instead of a story.

“Goodnight, Mom.”

“Goodnight. Wear layers tomorrow. The forecast is terrible.”

Even in crisis, she leads with weather. The woman is an icon.

She hung up. Paid the driver. Stood on the cobblestones while February bit through her blazer and the city grumbled around her—a garbage truck on the next block, laughter from a bar somewhere east, the soft, persistent heartbeat of Manhattan refusing to be quiet.

Upstairs, the loft greeted her with the smell of jasmine candles burned to their wicks and the cold coffee she’d abandoned that morning. A corpse and a crime scene. Fitting.

She dropped her keys on the counter, kicked off the heels, and opened her laptop. Faye’s email sat in her inbox. Subject line:VOIDBORN – CHARACTER PACKET – CONFIDENTIAL.

She opened it.

Concept art loaded first. A woman in dark armor, standing at the threshold of a gate that pulsed with void energy—black shot through with violet light, the edges dissolving into nothing. Her sword drawn. Her face turned away from the viewer, looking into the gate instead of out of it.

Nari’s breath caught.

She’d seen this pose before. Not this image—the lines were different, the coloring digital instead of ink-and-brush—but the composition. The emotional weight of a guardian facing the thing she protected instead of the world she protected it from. The turned-away face. The drawn sword held low, not in aggression but in vigil.

She pulled open the drawer in her recording desk. Beneath a notebook of undeveloped character voices and a framed photo of Hideo and young Nari in his studio: a USB drive containing digital scans of thirty-seven sketchbook pages. The entirety ofCelestial Ronin: The Forgotten Gate.Sora Nightwind. The Void Gate. The thirteenth guardian.

She didn’t plug in the drive. Not yet. Sunday. Her parents. Her father’s legal eye. Her mother’s artistic one. The proper way to handle this, with the care and strategy her grandfather’s legacy deserved.