Page 49 of Bearly Out Loud

Okada-san made a sound. A single syllable of Japanese dismissal that needed no translation. She turned to Nari and switched to accented but precise English: “Sit. I decide what you eat. You have allergies?”

Nari slid onto a stool. “No allergies. Full trust.”

Okada-san’s eyes narrowed. A micro-smile—the mouth barely moved but the eyes softened three degrees. Approval earned. She turned back to her daikon.

Nari leaned toward him. Close enough that her scent reached him, warm and specific and already memorized.

“How did you find this place?”

“I bring the owner honey.”

“Is there anyone in Manhattan you don’t take honey to?”

“Brent Mercer.”

The name landed on the counter between them. He hadn’t planned to start there. He’d planned small talk, sake, the slow approach—let the meal build trust, let the warmth of the room lower defenses. But the name had been sitting on his tongue for days, corrosive, and seeing Nari in this space—a place that mattered to him, a place stripped of performance—made performance impossible.

Nari’s hand, reaching for a water glass, stopped mid-air.

“Was that a joke?”

“It was a fact. But I understand the confusion.”

She set her hand down. Flat on the counter. Fingers spread. The position of a person bracing for impact. “You didn’t bring me to a hidden restaurant to make honey jokes about Brent Mercer.”

“No.”

Okada-san placed two cups of sake before them. Unfiltered, cloudy, served cold. She glanced between them—the practiced radar of thousands of meals in this room, the ability to spot a conversation that mattered at twelve paces. She retreated to her cutting board. Gave them the gift of turned shoulders.

Dojin picked up his cup. Didn’t drink. “After you asked about Voidborn’s origins, I started digging. Meridian Creative Partners—the company that pitched us the concept—is a shell. Three layers of corporate insulation tracing back to a holding company whose registered agent works for Mercer Global Media.”

He watched her face. Not for surprise—he wasn’t expecting surprise. He was looking for the specific quality of a person hearing confirmed what they’d built in the dark, alone, without anyone to verify.

He found it. Her jaw tightened. Her eyes went bright—not with tears, with the hard shine of vindication. She’d been right. She’d known she was right. And now someone else was saying it.

“The probability,” he continued, keeping his voice level, not softening it, because she didn’t want softness and he wouldn’t insult her with it, “is that the Voidborn concept was built on materials connected to your family. Stolen from your grandfather’s estate and laundered through Meridian to look like original IP.”

Silence. Nari stared at her untouched sake. Her lips pressed into a line. Her nostrils flared once—the inhale of a person absorbing a blow that hurt less than expected because she’d been braced for it so long, the bruise had already formed.

Then she reached into her bag.

The folder was manila. Thick. Tabbed with colored flags—the organized output of a mind that processed information through categorization and did not do anything halfway. She set it on the counter between the sake cups, and the sound of paper hitting cypress was louder than it had any right to be.

“You’ve been investigating.” His voice came out quieter than intended.

“For weeks.”

“While performing my project.”

Her eyes met his. Direct. Unflinching. She’d been carrying this alone for weeks, and she was done.

“While performing YOUR project built with MY grandfather’s stolen work.”

The words hit him low. Not anger directed at him—he could hear the distinction, the line she was drawing between the crime and the man. But the possessive landed.My grandfather’s.The claim was personal, familial, blood-deep. She wasn’t talking about intellectual property. She was talking about a dead man’s hands and the drawings they’d made and the fact that thosedrawings were now generating revenue under a different name in his studio.

“Fair.”

Nari opened the folder. Pages spread across the counter—annotated, highlighted, cross-referenced. She talked him through it with the precision of her father and the heat of her own voice: corporate filings, managing member chains, the Kenneth Pruitt link. Tomas Crane’s six-year tenure as archivist. The side-by-side comparisons she’d been building since before her first recording session.