Page 89 of Bearly Out Loud

The grizzly had shifted back.

Gregor Wevik. Forty-one. Scarred face, shaved head, gray eyes holding nothing except the flat aftermath of a fight he’d known he would lose. Reo’s team had him restrained and sitting against the lobby wall, wearing a hotel bathrobe someone had retrieved from a storage closet. He hadn’t resisted the restraints. Hadn’t spoken. He sat with a stillness that had nothing to do with compliance and everything to do with a man waiting for consequences he’d stopped caring about years ago.

Reo crossed to where his team held Wevik and looked at him for a moment without speaking. Then, to Dojin: “The contractor I flagged. He moved faster than the timeline suggested. Mercer panicked.”

Wevik spoke. “He told me it was about the art.”

The voice of a man who had believed something for five years and was watching it dissolve. “Said the estate was sitting on work that deserved an audience. That the family wouldn’t release it. That I’d be giving it to the world.” The gray eyes went somewhere distant. “I lost my sister two years before I met Mercer. She was an artist. Her work died with her.”

Charm abandoned years ago. Justification abandoning him now, in real time, in a hotel lobby wearing a bathrobe. What remained was the truth he’d been avoiding: that he had let a corporate predator use his grief as a leash, and the art had never been the point.

Nari, from the floor, bleeding, Suki’s scarf going dark with her blood, looked at him. The pain had grayed her face. Her voice was thinner than it had been in the conference room, stripped of performance, stripped of brick-laying precision, stripped down to the raw truth: she knew what it meant to love an artist’s work and watch it weaponized by people who didn’t understand it.

“It’s never about the art with men like him.”

Gregor looked at her. His expression—that flat, weaponized blankness he’d worn since the restraints went on—fractured. Not a collapse. A crack. The briefest visible evidence that somewhere beneath the scar tissue and the grief and the five years of doing a predator’s dirty work, a man who had once found solace in Hideo Saito’s manga heard the truth he’d been running from.

He didn’t speak again.

James closed his phone. His face was drawn, the controlled fury of a father watching his daughter bleed, channeled into the only weapon he trusted: the law. “District Attorney’s office is sending an investigator. This isn’t civil anymore. Mercer sent a shifted bear into a public building. Criminal charges.”

Dojin knelt beside Nari. His shoulder had stopped bleeding—the wound already knitting, shifter healing doing its work—but his hands still shook. She was human. Her wounds would not close in minutes. They would scar. Three parallel lines from a grizzly’s claws, carved into her back because she had chosen, without thinking, without hesitating, to put her body between a broken bear and his sister.

She protected Hana. She protected my family with her own skin. And I will tear apart anything that threatens her for as long as I am breathing.

Sirens in the distance. The hotel manager had emerged from a back office and was staring at the destroyed lobby with the expression of a man calculating insurance premiums in real time. Reo directed his team with quiet efficiency, the tablecloth sarong not diminishing his authority by a single degree. Hana had stopped crying. She sat beside Nari, their fingers intertwined, and had not let go.

Nari’s eyes found his. Gold meeting brown. The pain was visible—she wasn’t hiding it, wasn’t putting on a brave face, was letting him see exactly how much it hurt because she trusted him with the unperformed version of herself.

“You didn’t kill him.”

“No.”

“You wanted to.”

“More than I’ve wanted anything in my life.”

Her hand found his face. Her palm against his jaw. The touch was light—she didn’t have the strength for more—but it steadiedhim like her voice steadied a recording, like her presence steadied a room. Gravity. The center everything else fell toward.

“The man who doesn’t kill a broken bear in a hotel lobby.” Her thumb traced his cheekbone. “That’s the man I chose.”

He turned his head. Pressed his lips to her palm. Closed his eyes. Let himself have this—three seconds of her hand on his face, her blood on the marble, sirens getting closer, his sister safe beside his mate—and the gold in his eyes began, slowly, to recede.

FORTY-SIX

DOJIN

He killed Voidborn on a Monday.

The announcement went out at nine in the morning—a company-wide memo, brief and final. Voidborn Requiem: production halted, contracts dissolved, all associated materials quarantined pending legal resolution. Fourteen months of development, two hundred employees’ work, and a flagship property built on a dead man’s stolen legacy—gone.

The criminal charges, filed the morning after Wevik’s attack, had made the ‘continue production’ strategy moot—there was nothing left to protect and everything to win. The memo was three paragraphs long. Dojin had written it at four in the morning, sitting in his kitchen, drinking coffee from Nari’s blue mug because she was asleep in his bed with three healing claw marks across her back and he needed to hold a piece of her while he buried the project she’d bled for.

By ten, the replacement was on the table.

Celestial Ronin: The Forgotten Gate.Hideo Saito’s original vision. The Sora Nightwind arc as he’d imagined it, built from his sketchbooks, his voice notes, his story outlines—produced with full Wixx family creative involvement, directed by Priya,scored by Hana—her real name, her choice, her credit—and voiced by Nari.

He committed Keiser’s best resources. Top animation team. Expanded budget. An accelerated timeline that would put the first episode in production within the month. The project wasn’t a replacement—it was a resurrection. Hideo’s unfinished masterwork, finished by the people who loved it most, produced by a studio that owed the old man a debt it could never fully repay.