Page 90 of Bearly Out Loud

Reo appeared at his office door. “The press is calling.”

“Which press?”

“All of them. The Mercer exposé hit this morning. Variety, Deadline, Anime News Network. Someone leaked the criminal charges. The narrative is—” he checked his phone—“‘Billionaire Media Predator Exposed by Voice Actress and Her Bear Shifter Boyfriend.’”

“Bear shifter boyfriend.”

“That’s the headline. Also trending: ‘Protect the Wixx Legacy.’ The fandom is mobilizing. They’re making art. Someone started a petition to get The Forgotten Gate produced. It has two hundred thousand signatures.”

“In how many hours?”

“Six.”

Dojin leaned back in his chair. He settled—not contentment, not yet, but the deep satisfaction of a man who had been patient a long time and finally had the wind at his back.

“Tell the press we’ll issue a statement by end of day. The story is the Wixx family’s to tell. Not ours.”

Reo nodded. Started to leave. Stopped. “Vuzen called.”

Dojin waited.

“One sentence. ‘I read the numbers.’ Then he hung up.”

From Vuzen, that was a concession speech. From Vuzen, that was a white flag planted in the ground with both hands and the cane propped against the wall.

Reo’s phone buzzed. He looked at it. His mouth did a complicated thing. “Your father sent a package to the front desk.”

“And Hana?”

Reo paused. “She’s in the scoring studio. Priya’s team sent over the animation pass this morning.” He checked his phone. “She called me an hour ago. Asked if it was too late to pull the pseudonym.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That it’s her name. Her call. She said yes. Her real name on the credit.”

“Good.”

“And Wevik?”

“Cooperating. The DA is treating him as a coerced asset, not a co-conspirator. He gave up Mercer’s handler chain—names, payments, dates. James says it’s the cleanest witness testimony he’s seen in twenty years. The man was crying when I left.”

Dojin nodded. The grizzly who’d charged through a hotel lobby for a predator who’d used his grief as a leash—broken, not evil. He’d made the right call in that lobby. He’d make it again.

“And Crane?”

“James negotiated the terms himself. Full cooperation against Mercer in exchange for a permanent ban from archival and private estate access, and two hundred hours with a heritage preservation program. A record, not a conviction.” Reo paused. “Crane didn’t get to walk away clean. He got to walk.”

The package was a wooden box, palm-sized, wrapped in cloth. Inside: a small carved bear. Not abstract—detailed. Patient work, done with a knife and decades of practice. The grain was cherry wood, polished to a warm glow. It fit in hishand the way his father’s carvings always did: perfectly, without explanation.

Beneath it, a note in Stellan’s handwriting. The letters were deliberate, unhurried, each one placed with the same care he gave to wood:

For the grandmother who raised a granddaughter worth all this trouble.

Dojin held the carving. His thumb traced the bear’s spine. Stellan had been carving these since Dojin was a child—small animals left on nightstands, kitchen counters, the corners of rooms where someone needed to know they were seen. His father communicated in wood the way his mother communicated in recipes and elaborate dinner theater. The carvings were love letters that never needed stamps.

For Suki.The grandmother who sat in a hotel lobby pressing silk to her granddaughter’s wounds. Who drank tea through a crisis and offered five words of approval that had landed harder than the entire legal case.

He set the carving on his desk beside the one his father had made for Nari—a smaller bear, honey-colored, given without ceremony at the family dinner. Two bears. Two Wixx women accepted into the Keiser orbit through Stellan’s quiet, wordless language of belonging.