Page 58 of Bearly Out Loud

Her stomach dropped. Not fear—she’d already processed the fear, filed it, put it in the inventory column. This was different. This was the sound of a man saying her name with his whole chest and her body responding before her brain had time to argue. A heat low in her abdomen. A loosening in her spine. Pavlovian. Humiliating. Exquisitely timed.

My loft was broken into and his voice is making my knees unreliable. Priorities, Wixx.

“Someone broke into my loft.”

Silence. Two seconds. When he spoke again, the warmth was gone. What replaced it was low and flat and had edges.

“Are you hurt?”

“No. I wasn’t here. I came home, and the door was open. Picked.”

“Are you inside?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t touch anything else. I’m on my way.”

The line went dead. She stared at the screen. Twenty-three seconds. The entire call had lasted twenty-three seconds and he hadn’t asked a single unnecessary question.

Takumi raised one eyebrow. “That was either a phone call or an emergency dispatch. Hard to tell the difference.”

“He’s coming.”

“Of course, he is.” Takumi leaned against the counter. Emi headbutted his elbow. “You called the bear before the cops. You know what that means.”

“It means he has security resources the NYPD doesn’t.”

“It means you trust him more than the city of New York.”

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked at the cels on the wall—Hideo’s art, still hanging, still safe—and let the truth sit where it landed.

“I’m going to document what they touched.” She picked up a pen and a legal pad from the kitchen drawer. “Make yourself useful. Check the bedroom. Tell me if anything’s missing from the closet.”

Takumi saluted. Emi stayed on the counter, watching the door, ears still forward.

Good cat.

She pulled up a stool at the kitchen island. Picked up the pen. And started documenting everything they’d touched, everything they’d moved, everything they’d looked at and left behind—turning the violation into evidence one line at a time. The scratch of pen on paper was the steadiest sound in the loft, and she held onto it like a script before a difficult take: one word, then the next, then the next, until the shaking stopped.

THIRTY

DOJIN

The cab driver ran two red lights and Dojin didn’t notice. He was already calculating: Tribeca from Midtown, eleven at night, on a Tuesday, FDR to Canal would be fastest but construction on Worth might?—

He didn’t care about routes. He’d heard her voice on the phone—steady, controlled, the forced calm of a person holding herself intact by will alone—and the response was immediate. Skin prickling along his shoulders. Jaw tightening. Every instinct narrowing to a single point: get there.

He called Reo from the cab.

“Break-in. Nari’s loft. Tribeca. I need a security sweep and I need it twenty minutes ago.”

Reo didn’t waste words. “Team’s mobilizing. Building address?”

Dojin gave it. Reo hung up.

The cab turned onto Canal and Dojin’s phone buzzed. Reo, again:Entry method?

Lock picked. No forced entry. Professional.