Page 82 of Bearly Out Loud

Priya waited until his footsteps faded down the hall.

“He brought you a personalized lunch box with honey from his personal bees, kissed your head in my production room, and stole your food.”

“Yes.”

“The alpha of the Keiser Sleuth stole your rice ball.”

“He does this. It’s a whole thing. Do not engage or he’ll bring you food, too, and then you’re in the ecosystem.”

“I would like to be in the food ecosystem.”

“Everyone says that. Then he learns your comfort meal and brings it during a crisis, and suddenly you’re emotionally dependent on a man who keeps bees.” Nari bit into the onigiri he hadn’t stolen. “It’s a trap.”

“The honey trap.”

“Priya.”

“I’m putting that in the production notes.”

Hana arrived at three.

She came in through the studio entrance carrying a laptop bag and the quiet composure she wore like armor in professional spaces. But underneath it—Nari had learned to read her, the same way she’d learned to read Dojin, by watching for fractures in the stillness—underneath it, Hana was humming. Not a song. A low, steady note, the bear sound that ran in the family, and it meant she’d found what she’d been looking for.

“I need to show you what I found.” She set the laptop on the production table, opening it between the storyboards and the red-circled character sheets. Nari leaned in. Priya leaned in. The screen showed a spreadsheet cross-referencing production companies, creative credits, and timeline overlaps.

“Vance Reeves.” Hana’s voice was steady. Deliberately so—she was speaking the name of the man who had stolen her music, her trust, and two years of her creative life, and choosing to use it as a weapon instead of a wound. “Vance was connected to Mercer’s network. Not directly—through two intermediary companies—but the money trail is there. Same payment structure. Same timeline patterns. Same method: find an artist with unpublished work, acquire it through a trusted intermediary, launder it through a shell company, and commercialize it under a new brand.”

She scrolled down. Names, dates, dollar amounts. Three other artists whose original work had been acquired through the same pipeline. Not coincidence—architecture. A system designed to strip-mine creative people and sell the ore.

“It’s a pattern.” Hana looked up. “Mercer doesn’t do one-offs. He runs a factory.”

Nari stared at the spreadsheet. The scope of it—not one theft, not two, but a repeating machine—sat behind her ribs with an anger so clean it was almost calm.

“Your brother’s going to lose his mind.”

Hana closed the laptop. Folded her hands on top of it. Her armor was intact but her eyes were bright, lit with focused fire—her worst experience turned into a key that unlocked someone else’s prison.

“My brother lost his mind weeks ago. Over you. I’m merely providing supplementary evidence.”

Nari laughed. The sound was sharp and surprised and warm, and she reached across the table and pulled Hana intoa hug that the younger woman stiffened against for one second before leaning in. Hana’s arms came up slowly—uncertain, recalibrating—and then tightened. When they pulled apart, Hana’s guard had cracked by exactly one fraction, and through the crack: relief. The relief of a person whose worst story had been given a second act.

Priya, watching from her chair, said nothing. But she pulled up an empty document on her tablet and typed a single line at the top:

The Trap.

FORTY-TWO

NARI

They built it in four hours.

Nari called James. James called Reo. Reo called Dojin. Dojin walked into the production room carrying a fresh pot of coffee and an expression that said he’d been waiting for exactly this kind of fight his entire professional life.

He sat beside Nari. Not across from her—beside her. His knee touched hers under the table. His hand found the back of her chair. The contact was casual, automatic, the physical language of a couple whose bodies had stopped negotiating proximity and settled into it. Nari leaned into the warmth of his leg. Didn’t move her chair away. Didn’t comment. Let him anchor her left side while her right hand annotated the evidence map.

The strategy was elegant in its simplicity: do nothing different. Continue production. Continue recording. Let Mercer believe his stolen goods were being converted into content that would eventually benefit him. Meanwhile, James would compile the authentication reports, Reo would secure Crane’s testimony, and Hana’s pattern analysis would be filed with the legal team as supplementary evidence proving systemic fraud.

“We don’t tip our hand until the case is airtight.” James’s voice came through the speakerphone with crisp authority—he tried cases like architects built bridges, load-bearing, no decorative elements. “Mercer’s strength is his legal team. If he gets wind of the case before we’re ready, he’ll bury the evidence in a legal motion we’ll be fighting for three years.”