Page 56 of Bearly Out Loud

Takumi:I need a minute.

Takumi:Okay I’m back. That’s the most romantic thing that’s happened to anyone I know and I once watched a man propose during a live orchestral recording of a Ghibli soundtrack.

Nari:It wasn’t romantic. It was honest.

Takumi:Nari. Honey. Those are the same thing. Those have ALWAYS been the same thing. That’s the whole point.

She locked her phone. Pressed it against her chest. The cab crossed Houston, heading south toward Tribeca, and the city streamed past in its indifferent, luminous beauty.

The evidence folder sat beside her on the leather seat. Truth and warmth.

She pulled the collar up. Breathed in.

Honest and romantic are the same thing.

He might be right. And if he’s right, then I am in far more trouble than a stolen legacy and a pending lawsuit and a grandmother who already invited the bear for tea.

She was still in trouble. But it was the good kind.

TWENTY-NINE

NARI

The door was open.

Not ajar. Not cracked. Open. Three inches of gap between the frame and the reinforced steel she’d paid a small fortune to install because a contractor told her Tribeca lofts were easy targets, and she’d laughed and said, “Install it anyway. I like overkill.”

The lock wasn’t broken. Picked. She could tell by the scratch pattern on the faceplate—a faint arc of silver where the picks had scraped the brass. Nari stared at those scratches for four seconds before her brain started moving.

Four seconds. That’s how long it took. Four seconds of nothing—no thoughts, no sarcasm, no observations. Four blank, airless seconds where every sound in the hallway went dead.

Then her brain caught up to her eyes and everything happened at once.

She pushed the door open with her elbow. Not her hand—fingerprints, contamination, chain of evidence. Her father was a lawyer. Some training went bone-deep before you turned ten.

The loft looked like a body after surgery. Same shape, same bones, but opened and handled by hands that didn’t belongthere. Couch cushions pulled from the sectional and stacked against the wall. Bookshelves emptied in sections—manga volumes pulled forward, fanned open, reshelved crooked. The kitchen drawers were all open an inch. Not rifled. Searched. By people who knew how to put things back and chose not to bother.

Her feet carried her to the booth before her mind gave the order.

The glass door was closed but the light was on—she’d left it off. Inside: her scripts had been sorted through. The stack on the music stand was taller than she’d left it, which meant they’d been removed, examined, and replaced by someone who didn’t know the order. Her desk drawer—the one with Hideo’s digitized voice notes—was shut. But the cassette case on top had been moved two inches to the left. She knew this because the dust ring didn’t match.

They went through my recording booth. Four months to get the acoustic calibration right. If they touched my condenser mic?—

She checked. The Neumann sat untouched on its shock mount, pop filter at the correct angle, cable undisturbed. Relief punched through her ribs so hard, she grabbed the doorframe.

Fine. It’s fine. The mic is fine.

She made herself breathe. Made herself look. The production cels on the living room wall—three original Celestial Ronin pieces from Hideo’s personal collection, worth more than the furniture combined—hung straight. Untouched. The frames hadn’t been moved. The glass wasn’t smudged.

First-print cels. Museum-grade. Worth six figures apiece. And they left them on the wall.

That’s when the fear sharpened into focus. Because a thief who ignores six-figure art isn’t a thief. A thief who searches arecording booth, opens a desk drawer, and sorts through scripts isn’t looking for valuables. They’re looking for information.

They wanted the Sora Nightwind originals.

The sketchbooks. The unpublished arc. The proof that Voidborn was built on stolen bones. They’d come for the evidence—and the evidence wasn’t here. It was in the Wixx family archive on the Upper West Side, behind a fire-rated vault door that James had installed in 2003 because he treated his father-in-law’s work like classified documents.

Thank you, Dad. Thank you for being the most paranoid lawyer in Manhattan.