Page 86 of Bearly Out Loud

Mercer’s lead attorney closed his folder.

Nari stared at Reo. James stared at Reo. Hana stared at Reo. Dojin did not stare at Reo because Dojin had known that his best friend’s reading habits would one day become legally useful, and the only surprise was that it had taken this long.

Suki, from the head of the table, set down her untouched tea. “Volume 23 was Hideo’s favorite. He said the Gate Oath was the best thing he ever wrote.” Her eyes found Reo. “He would have liked you.”

Reo’s jaw worked. His shoulders shifted back a fraction. The fandom trying to escape. “I read manga.”

The room held. Then Nari stepped forward.

She didn’t raise her voice. She used her studio voice—low, placed, every word set down with intention. The voice she used for queens and warriors and women who did not negotiate. The voice Priya called her brick-layer: each syllable mortared into position, immovable once placed.

“My grandfather spent fifty years building a world that matters.” She held Mercer’s gaze. His smile was still there—fixed, automatic, the last defense left standing after forty minutes of demolition. “You spent fifty million stealing it. The math doesn’t work, Mercer.”

Mercer looked at her. The smile didn’t drop. It sharpened. A blade being resheathed. He stood. Buttoned his jacket. Gathered his team with a glance.

He conceded nothing. Admitted nothing. Said nothing that could be quoted in a filing. He simply stood, nodded at the room as though he’d been mildly inconvenienced by a traffic delay, and walked toward the door.

As he passed Hana, he paused.

One second. Less. A break in his stride that could have been accidental. But his eyes found her face, and the look he gave her was not a smile, was not a threat, was not anything Nari couldname exceptcold.Specific. Targeted. The look of a man taking inventory of what had hurt him and filing it for later.

Hana didn’t flinch. Her hands tightened on her laptop, knuckles going pale, but she didn’t flinch.

Mercer left. His lawyers followed. The door clicked shut.

Nari exhaled. The controlled breath she’d been holding for forty minutes released in a rush, and she turned to find Dojin already reaching for her—his hand on her hip, pulling her close, his chin on the top of her head. The contact lasted five seconds. Public and unhesitating, and exactly what she needed.

FORTY-FOUR

DOJIN

Something had been wrong all day.

Not restless. Wrong. A dissonance under his ribs that had started in the elevator that morning and hadn’t stopped—a low-grade alarm he’d learned to trust twenty years ago when his father first taught him to read his own instincts.The bear knows before you do. It doesn’t analyze. It scents. It feels. When it tells you to pay attention, you listen.

He’d listened. All day. Through the conference room, through James’s presentation, through Reo’s revelation and Nari’s perfect, lethal quiet. The wrongness hadn’t faded. It had sharpened.

Now, in the lobby, it had a scent.

Wild bear. Male. No sleuth markers—no den scent, no alpha’s claim, no pack signature. A rogue. And he was close.

The Langham’s lobby was marble and crystal and soft lighting, populated by the midafternoon crowd—business travelers, tourists, a concierge on the phone. Nari walked beside Dojin, her hand in his, still buzzing from the conference room. James and Suki were three steps ahead, James’s phone already at his ear, filing the first motions. Hana walked with Reo, her laptop bag over one shoulder. Takumi was outside with the car.

The scent intensified. Dojin’s hand tightened around Nari’s.

“Dojin?” She looked up. Read his face. “What’s wrong?”

Not a question. She knew.

“Reo.” One word. Low. A pitch below normal hearing—the command that bears carried in their chests, the one that bypassed conversation and hit bone. Reo’s head snapped up. His body shifted from escort to intercept in a heartbeat, scanning the lobby, reading the same wrongness Dojin was reading but from a different angle.

The glass doors exploded inward.

Not opened. Not broken. Exploded—the reinforced panels blowing off their frames in a shower of safety glass as a scarred, pale-brown grizzly tore through them at a dead charge. The bear was enormous—not Kodiak-scale, but dense, thick with muscle and scar tissue, built like a weapon. Old claw marks ran down the left side of his face. His eyes were flat gray and locked on one target.

Hana.

The lobby erupted. Screaming. A bellhop dove behind the concierge desk. A woman with a rolling suitcase dropped it and ran. The marble floor cracked under the grizzly’s weight as he charged through the wreckage of the doors, scattering glass, heading straight for the woman who had connected the pattern that exposed Mercer’s machine.