The first time it happens, she doesn't notice.
It's one of those days that feels like a smear: supervised chapter in the morning, legal check-in with Adrien at noon, PR briefing in the afternoon about how to "lean into mystery without admitting anything." Her head buzzes with too many voices, too many tabs open in her brain.
In the studio, the new episode comes together in fits and starts.
Rheon—no longer Alpha, at least on paper—sits in his office after the fire, stripped down to shirtsleeves, bandage peeking under his cuff. In the panel, he leans back in his chair, staring out at the city, fingers tapping a rhythm on the armrest.
She adds a small detail to make the scene feel real: a glass of water on the desk, condensation sliding down the side, a ring of moisture forming on the wood. He reaches for it mid-thought. In the next panel, distraction and anger tangle; his hand clips the edge of the glass. It tips, water spilling, the glass rolling and falling to the floor.
CLINK in a little jagged sound effect bubble.
Tiny shards scatter across the panel in the last frame—nothing dramatic, just a mundane mess. She leaves it there, a quiet symbol of control slipping.
When she finishes the episode and they do the ritual—Lucian's presence like pressure behind her eyes as she hits Publish—she forgets about the glass.
The day drags on.
By evening, her brain feels sanded raw.
She wanders out to the main living area, drawn by the faint smell of something edible. Ms. Kwan has left food on the kitchen island: grilled vegetables, rice, some kind of perfectly cooked fish that looks like it belongs in a magazine.
She eats standing up, fork in one hand, phone in the other, scrolling through reader comments despite Lucian's advice. Her wrist buzzes once, disapprovingly, when she skims too far into conspiracy territory.
She's still reading when she hears it.
A soft, heavy tap of glass on wood. The creak of leather.
She glances up.
Lucian is in the living room, seated on the long couch near the windows. The city behind him is a dark sea of lights. He's in shirtsleeves again, tie loosened, the first two buttons undone. His posture is almost identical to the panel she just drew that morning—one arm draped along the back of the couch, the other resting near a short crystal tumbler on the low table.
Whiskey, probably. It's the right color.
She watches, caught by the familiarity, as he leans forward slightly, attention drawn by something in the news stream on the wall display.
His fingers move toward the glass.
She knows—before he touches it—that he's going to hit it wrong.
He does.
His hand clips the rim; the tumbler wobbles, trembles, then tips. The amber liquid arcs out in a shimmering line. The glass rolls, hits the table edge, and drops.
It doesn't shatter completely; it bounces once on the rug, then falls sideways and cracks, one clean split. A shard breaks off and skitters across the floor, stopping near his foot.
The sound it makes—glass on wood, muffled by fabric, a small brittle clink—is exactly the one she lettered hours ago.
Her fork stops halfway to her mouth.
Lucian swears under his breath, a soft, human annoyance, and reaches down to pick up the pieces. He doesn't bark for staff, doesn't snap his fingers; he just crouches, fingers deft, and gathers the shards into his hand.
"Careful," she hears herself say.
He looks up, as if he'd forgotten she was there.
"I'm not completely uncoordinated," he says, but his lips twitch.
She can't unsee the overlay—panel and reality, one drawn over the other. The angle of his wrist. The tilt of his head. The way the city light stripes his face.
"You okay?" she asks, stepping closer.
He glances at his fingers. There's no blood. He's too precise for that, apparently.
"Fine," he says. "The glass isn't."
She makes a small sound that might be a laugh. "You have a million of them," she says. "I'm sure the loss will be mourned at quarterly glassware review."
He huffs, stands, sets the pieces on the table with careful clicks.
"It's always the good ones," he says.
Something about the line hits her—a precise echo of the internal monologue she'd written for Rheon, cursing that it was his last decent tumbler.
Her smile fades.
"You okay?" he repeats, noticing the shift.
"Yeah," she says too quickly. "Just… long day."
She doesn't tell him that she's already seen this moment once today, in lines and grayscale, before it happened. That she could pencil his movements from memory, panel by panel.
Coincidence, she tells herself as she goes back to her room.
She's spent years crafting scenes based on real life. Sometimes life is going to loop back and imitate what she's drawn. That's normal. That's art. That's pattern-seeking brains.
She falls asleep with that rationalization wrapped around her like a blanket.
It doesn't hold.
—
It keeps happening.
Small things at first. So small she almost misses them.
In one episode, she sketches Rheon loosening his tie in a particular way—one hand tugging the knot down while the other pulls his collar open with his thumb. She adds a detail: his thumb brushing a barely visible mark on his throat, a scar she's never drawn before.
That same afternoon, heading into a strategy meeting, she glances up from her notes and sees Lucian in the glass reflection of the elevator doors, loosening his tie in the exact same rhythm.
One hand tugging down the knot.
The other brushing his collar open with his thumb.
He touches his throat briefly, right where she added the faint scar in the panel.
She freezes, breath catching.
He doesn't look back. The doors slide open; he steps out, all polished calm, and she follows, heart hammering, telling herself: you've seen him do this before. You've been watching him for days. That's all.
But she hadn't, not that way. Not that precise.
Another time, she writes a throwaway scene between Rheon and his head of security—a man with a buzzcut and sharp eyes who complains about the new surveillance system beeping when nothing's wrong. In the panel, the alert light blinks yellow, and they discover it's just a malfunctioning sensor near the south stairwell.
That evening, while she's sketching late in the studio, a soft beep interrupts her fog.
The little security monitor on the side desk flashes yellow on one of the quadrants: hallway outside, south side.
Seconds later, her phone vibrates. A message from the Valtor Access app:
Minor sensor fault detected – Guest Wing South Corridor. Security notified. No immediate threat.
Her wrist hums, as if responding to the system.
She stares at the tiny screen, at the yellow blinking icon, at the words she'd written in the comic that morning.
She tells herself it's the opposite this time. Reality first, inspiration second. Maybe she'd glimpsed a similar alert before and filed it away unconsciously.
Memory is tricky. She knows that. She's written characters who misremember things for a living.
She keeps drawing.
In Episode 119, she adds something small entirely by instinct: Rheon pausing at the threshold of his office, running his fingers along the doorframe, tapping twice on a particular patch of wood before entering. A ritual. A way of grounding himself.
The detail feels right. She doesn't question it.
Two days later, she happens to be in the hallway when Lucian returns from a trip outside the building. The elevator doors slide open; he steps out, shoulders taut, expression darker than usual. His phone is pressed to his ear; whoever's on the other end is not making him happy.
He walks toward his study.
As he reaches the door, still listening, still half in whatever call he's on, his fingers brush the frame.
Tap. Tap.
Same spot she drew. Same rhythm.
She actually stops mid-step.
He hangs up, exhales once as if shedding the conversation, and goes inside.
The door closes.
She's left in the hallway, staring at the wooden frame, the exact area his fingers touched.
Her skin crawls.
The rationalizations she'd used the first two times feel thinner now, like paper left in the rain.
It's not that she never paid attention to people's habits before. Artists are vultures; they pick up ticks and rituals and feed them into their work.
But this feels… misaligned.
Out of order.
The cause and effect are wrong.
She's drawing things first—things she thinks she's inventing—and then watching them spool out in front of her, as if reality is running a few steps behind her panels.
Except that's not right either, because she knows, deep down, that something in her is pulling from somewhere. The dreams, the binding, the way her skin buzzes when she leans too close to certain truths.
She starts testing it.
Not consciously, not at first.
In a quiet morning, half an hour before a scheduled "creative review" with Lucian, she sketches a tiny panel in the margins of a notes file: Rheon pausing by a window, touching the glass with his fingertips as he looks down at the city, leaving faint prints there.
She doesn't put it in the main draft. She doesn't ink it. It's just a little scribble on a digital sticky note.
Later that day, passing the living room, she sees Lucian standing at the window.
It's not unusual; he spends a lot of time staring at the city.
But this time, his hand lifts.
His fingers press lightly against the glass.
Exactly five fingertips. Exactly the way she drew them.
She watches as he pulls his hand back, leaving the faintest smudges behind.
She laughs, a short, too-loud sound.
He turns, brow furrowing. "Problem?" he asks.
"Nope," she says. "Just… déjà vu."
Her voice sounds wrong in her own ears.
She spends the rest of the afternoon second-guessing every impulse.
Is that joke she wants to write in Episode 120 going to come out of Adrien's mouth tomorrow? Is that offhand line of dialogue going to appear in a headline? If she draws Rheon tripping over his own feet, will she see Lucian stumble for the first time in his carefully choreographed life?
She starts censoring herself not just for legal safety, but for… reality contamination.
The binding at her wrist doesn't always buzz when these echoes happen. Sometimes it's silent, as if whatever force is tied to it considers this… acceptable. Maybe even necessary.
The thought makes her feel like she's inside one of her own storylines: the one where the heroine's art literally rewrites her world.
It had always been metaphor before.
Now, she isn't sure.
—
The glass is what finally rattles her.
Not the first glass. The second.
The first incident with the tumbler stays with her, a weird overlap she can't quite shake, but she files it under "people knock things over sometimes" and tries to move on.
Then, weeks later, she writes a new scene.
Rheon is in his kitchen at home—she's given him a private residence now, something separate from the office tower, even though the readers never see much of it. She's careful not to make it look anything like the penthouse she's in; no glass walls, no specific layout, just a suggestion of high ceilings and expensive appliances.
In this scene, he's tired.
She shows it in the little things: the way his shoulders sag, the way he leans against the counter, the way his hand wraps around a glass of water instead of whiskey. He's thinking about calling the protagonist—the artist analogue she's only just introduced now, a pale reflection of herself—but doesn't.
As she thumbnails the page, she adds a tiny beat: his hand tightening on the glass as his thoughts spiral, his grip slipping, and the glass knocking against the sink.
She doesn't script it falling this time. It just hits the side, a loud, sharp knock. Enough to startle. Enough to break his trance.
She draws the motion lines carefully, changing the sound effect to a more abrupt KLANG, metal and glass.
The next night, she can't sleep.
The studio feels claustrophobic, her room too big. The city outside is loud with weekend energy, a constant hum of traffic and distant sirens and people living lives that don't involve magical contracts.
She drifts into the kitchen for water.
The penthouse is mostly dark, only a few recessed lights up. The skyline outside is a smear of neon and white dots. The refrigerator hums softly when she opens it.
As she closes the door, glass of water in hand, she hears it.
A sharp, unexpected clink of glass against metal, followed by a muttered curse.
She turns toward the sound.
Lucian is there, standing on the other side of the island, back to her, one hand braced on the counter, the other near the sink. His hair is slightly mussed, as if he's run his fingers through it one too many times.
He's holding a glass under the tap. His grip slips.
The glass knocks hard against the stainless steel.
KLANG.
She freezes.
Time seems to slow.
The angle of his wrist.
The way his shoulders jolt.
The way his head drops, eyes closing for a second as if the sound shook something loose inside.
It's the panel.
Not just similar.
The same.
He turns the tap off, sets the glass down with exaggerated care, and exhales. Only then does he glance up and notice her.
"Restless?" he asks.
Her heartbeat thuds in her ears. Her wrist tingles.
"Couldn't sleep," she says. "You?"
"Apparently neither of us listens to our own advice," he says. He lifts the glass; the water catches the under-cabinet light.
She can't stop staring.
"You're doing it again," she blurts.
"Doing what?" His tone is wary now.
"Echoing," she says. "My panels. The glass, the window, the doorframe… all of it. I draw something and then you…" She waves a hand. "You do it."
He watches her quietly.
"That's… a reach," he says. "We share a limited set of gestures. I loosen my tie, I look out windows, I drink from glasses. Those are not exactly bespoke events."
"Not the things," she says. "The way. The timing. The sound." She mimics the knock against the sink, her voice brittle. "You know what artists do? We notice patterns. And this is—"
She cuts herself off, realizing she's rambling.
He sets his glass down, more gently this time, and steps around the island until they're facing each other across the open space.
"How many examples?" he asks.
She blinks. "What?"
"You said 'again,'" he says. "Plural. How many incidents are we talking about?"
She hesitates, then rattles them off before she can second-guess herself.
"The first glass," she says. "The one in the living room. The tie thing in the elevator. The doorframe taps. The window handprint. The sensor alert. And now this."
As she lists them, they sound flimsy. Coincidental. Like the kinds of things a stressed mind would string together in a conspiracy-board collage.
His expression stays neutral, but she sees something tighten at the corners of his eyes.
"And you're certain you drew each of those before you saw them?" he asks. "Not after? Memory is… flexible."
"Trust me, I've interrogated that," she says. "I checked time stamps. File history. The panels were drafted, saved, and backed up before each event. I even have auto-save logs. I know artists are unreliable narrators, but I'm not mixing this up."
She pauses.
"And even if I am," she adds, "the binding seems to think it's real."
She lifts her wrist slightly.
His gaze drops there.
"Explain," he says.
She exhales shakily. "It buzzes," she says. "When I get too close to certain lines. When I try to draw something that would violate the contract. I thought it was just about content—scars, claws, explicit secrets—but it's started… reacting to the echoes too. Sometimes. Not always. But enough that I notice."
"That's not possible," he says.
"You said a lot of things weren't possible before trying to eat my neck in a courthouse," she says.
A corner of his mouth twitches despite the mood.
He goes quiet, thinking.
The kitchen feels smaller with him standing so close, shadows pooling around the edges of the room. The hum of the fridge is suddenly very loud.
"You've been dreaming," he says. It's not a question.
"Yes," she says warily.
"About me. About this. About things that haven't happened yet," he continues.
"Sometimes," she says. "Sometimes it's just stress. Sometimes it's… sharper. Like the hallway. The claws. I saw that one before it happened. I thought it was just… anxiety. Then it wasn't."
"And you draw them afterwards," he says. "Turn them into panels."
"That's the job," she says. "Take the mess and make it legible."
He nods slowly, more to himself than to her.
"When we bound the contract," he says, "we linked it to certain… currents. The magic doesn't just track your compliance. It tracks… proximity. Entanglement. It may be amplifying whatever… connection… already existed between your work and my world."
The word connection makes her heart skip.
"So I'm… what," she says. "Accidentally syncing with your life in real time?"
"Not real time," he says. "There's a lag. And a lead."
He studies her face.
"How precise are the echoes?" he asks. "Be honest."
"Precise enough that if I drew you tripping over air and breaking your nose, I'd be afraid to let you near stairs," she says.
His eyes flash, not gold this time but sharp.
"Don't," he says.
"I'm not going to," she snaps. "I'm not an idiot. I've been avoiding anything too… specific. The glass scenes were background details. I didn't think—"
"Your background details have teeth," he says.
"So do yours," she retorts.
They stand there, tension vibrating in the space between them.
"This could be nothing," she says, softer. "Stress. My brain trying to make sense of being stuck in your tower by turning everyday moments into foreshadowing."
"It could," he says.
"It doesn't feel like nothing," she adds.
"No," he agrees quietly. "It doesn't."
He looks… unsettled.
She realizes, with a twist of something that isn't quite satisfaction, that he doesn't have a neat framework for this either. Whatever rulebook he's been following for his world, it doesn't have a chapter titled "When the Fanfiction Starts Calling You."
"What happens," she asks before she can stop herself, "if I draw something big?"
His attention snaps back to her.
"Define 'big,'" he says.
She swallows. "I don't know," she says. "A meeting you haven't had yet. A deal going bad. You… shifting. Here."
The word hangs between them.
Shift.
He goes very still.
"Don't," he says again. There's something raw in his voice this time.
"I'm not saying I will," she says quickly. "I'm saying… what if I can't help it? What if it comes in a dream and I wake up with it already half-drawn in my head? The binding can zap my wrist all it wants, but it doesn't erase images. It just hurts."
He closes his eyes briefly, something like pain crossing his features.
"You will tell me," he says. "If that happens. Immediately. Before you draw. Before you write. That was one of the rules."
"I remember," she says. "I just didn't realize the rules might be about more than legal risk."
"They always were," he says.
He runs a hand through his hair.
"For what it's worth," he adds, "this isn't entirely unexpected."
She stares. "I'm sorry, you're only telling me that now?"
"The specifics are new," he says. "The fact that your work would… resonate… with my reality was always part of the risk assessment. That's why you're here, not out there. It's easier to monitor echoes when the source is in the same cage."
She laughs, short and sharp. "You could have said that in the brochure," she says. "'Move into our penthouse, enjoy our amenities, and try not to accidentally predict your landlord's death.'"
His jaw tightens. "This isn't a joke," he says.
"I know," she says. "That's why I'm joking."
They fall quiet again.
The city glows beyond the windows. The moon is a pale smear tonight, half-hidden behind clouds.
He picks up his glass.
"Stop drawing for tonight," he says. "Sleep. We'll… look at this tomorrow. See if there's a pattern we can track. If there is, we find a way to blunt it."
"And if we can't?" she asks.
He hesitates.
"Then we adapt," he says. "Or we outrun it."
"You can't outrun your own story," she murmurs.
He meets her gaze, something haunted flickering in his eyes again.
"Can't I?" he asks.
He leaves before she can answer, glass in hand, shoulders set.
She stands in the kitchen for a long moment after he's gone, listening to the echo of the KLANG in her memory.
Back in her room, she opens her sketch files.
She scrolls past the Rheon panels, past the doorframe taps and window hands, past the first glass shatter. Each one feels like evidence now, not of guilt but of… entanglement.
In a fresh document, she writes a single sentence in the notes margin.
Where do the echoes start—on the screen or in the world?
Her wrist buzzes once, a soft acknowledgment.
She doesn't draw anything else that night.
When sleep finally comes, it drags her under hard and fast.
In the dream, she sees panels.
Not hers.
Not yet.
Scenes she hasn't drawn but knows she will: a balcony under a blood-red moon, a table scattered with torn contracts, a hand reaching for hers in a room full of glass.
Each image feels like a future waiting to be inked.
She wakes with her heart pounding and her wrist burning faintly, the invisible ink there humming like it's just heard a song from far away and recognized the melody.
Echoes on the screen.
Echoes in the penthouse.
Echoes in her veins.
She isn't sure which one will hit first.