The boardroom burned beautifully.
Flames licked up the chrome table legs and curved along the ceiling like liquid gold. Glass walls spider-webbed and blew outward, shards hanging in the air as if someone had hit pause on gravity. The city outside was a smear of lights and smoke, sirens frozen mid-scream.
At the center of it all stood the man in the ruined suit.
His tie was gone, his white shirt torn open, the collar singed. Blood darkened the fabric over his ribs. Another cut split his lip. He should have looked desperate.
He didn't.
Lucian Valt, Alpha of the Boardroom—Amara's favorite monster—smiled with his teeth.
"Is this it?" he asked the invisible thing fate had become in her head. He pressed his palm, claws half-extended, against the charred conference table. "All those prophecies, all that fear, and this is how you try to kill me? With fire and cowards?"
The flames reflected in his eyes, turning the irises a bright, unnatural gold.
You'll die tonight, Alpha, whispered a caption box Amara had placed at his shoulder.
Lucian laughed in its face. "Then you'll have to earn it."
He bared his teeth at the encroaching fire, shoulders rolling back, body starting to twist—bones lengthening, muscles shifting under human skin as his wolf form pushed to the surface—
"Please… just transform already," Amara muttered.
Her pen scratched across the tablet screen, finishing the last few lines that separated "almost a wolf" from "massive, terrifying werewolf in expensive shredded suit." She zoomed out, checking the lighting, the tilt of his chin, the way the orange glow cut against the cool blue of the city outside.
The boardroom looked perfect. Devastated. Cinematic.
Her eyes burned. A quick glance at the corner of the monitor told her why.
01:57 a.m.
"Okay, Alpha," she sighed. "You get to be dramatic. I get to be unemployed."
She scrubbed at her face with the heels of her hands, then leaned back and stared at the complete episode: twenty-seven panels, three splash pages, five sound effects that she'd re-lettered twice, and one very arrogant, very doomed werewolf CEO.
Episode 67 – When Gods Play With Fire.
Her cursor hovered over the "Upload" button.
For a second, Amara imagined the comments. The same two hundred usernames that always appeared. A handful of new ones. She could practically hear them already: Author-nim you're cruel!!I love this bastard so much.If you kill him I'll sue.
"Join the club," she muttered, then clicked.
The progress bar popped up.
Uploading… 12%
Her stomach growled so loudly it vibrated her chair. She realized she hadn't eaten since… what? Early afternoon? Yesterday? Time blurred when she drew. Rent dates, client deadlines, meals, everything.
Uploading… 48%
She opened another window to check her bank app. The numbers were an insult. Her last payout from the webcomic platform sat in the account like a pity tip, small and lonely. The freelance invoice she'd been chasing for three weeks still hadn't cleared. And at the top of the screen, highlighted in angry red, blinked the reminder:
RENT OVERDUE – 6 DAYS
"Love that for me," she said to the empty room.
The room did not argue. Her studio apartment barely had enough space to be called a room at all. One corner held a single mattress on the floor, its blanket half-crumpled. Another corner belonged to the wobbly wardrobe with one door that never closed properly. The "kitchen" was a strip of counter, an unplugged microwave, and a sink full of paint-stained mugs.
The rest belonged to her desk: a secondhand table, a rickety chair, and the one thing in the room that looked like it belonged to a different life—a decent drawing tablet with a screen, bought on installment and loved more than her exes.
Upload complete.
"Congratulations," the website chirped at her. "Episode 67 is now live."
Amara stared at the confirmation message until the letters blurred. A small part of her waited for magic—for the view count to start sprinting upward, for the fandom to explode, for some miracle to crawl out of the internet and pay her rent.
The number sat at 3 views.
Probably her own test refreshes.
"Of course," she said. "Why would tonight be special? It's just… monumental emotional and physical suffering. Totally normal."
Still, she opened the comment section out of habit. Someone somewhere always stayed up late enough to yell at her in real time.
No new comments yet. The last one under Episode 66 read: If you make Alpha die I will personally claw my screen, Author!!!
Amara smiled faintly.
"Relax, PumpkinSpiceLust," she told the username. "If anybody dies, it's definitely me first."
She hit save on her working files, backed them up to a folder titled PLEASE DON'T CRASH, and pushed the tablet away. Her shoulder made a small, unhappy pop. She rolled it and winced.
The boardroom still burned on her screen as the wallpaper—a paused panel of Lucian standing tall in a storm of fire and glass. She liked keeping him there while she worked, like a warning and a promise.
A monster she could switch off with a button.
The thought gave her a petty little thrill every time.
She shut the monitor down. The room plunged into the softer, yellowish dark of her single ceiling bulb. Somewhere outside, a car alarm chirped twice then fell silent. The city hummed on without her; buses, drunken arguments, a dog barking three buildings away.
Amara stood and nearly tripped over a stack of unopened mail.
"Right," she said, catching herself on the edge of the desk. "Tonight's other boss fight."
She scooped the envelopes up and tossed them onto the bed. One white, two pale blue, one heavy brown. She didn't have to flip them over to know what most of them were: bill, bill, bank, something-important-that-would-give-her-a-headache.
She didn't open a single one.
Her body had crossed a line somewhere around panel twenty-three. Thoughts felt slow, thick. Every muscle wanted the mattress, not more stress.
She changed into an oversized T-shirt, flicked off the light, and let the dim city glow from the window take over. Neon commercials painted faint colors on the ceiling.
She crawled onto the bed and immediately had to shove a sketchbook aside. Another one dug into her calf. There were worse things to be stabbed by, she told herself, flipping onto her back.
The darkness felt heavy, but not suffocating. It was the good kind of tired weight—the kind that came after finishing, not failing.
On the nightstand, her phone buzzed once.
She reached for it, saw the notification from the platform app—Episode 67 is now live!—and snorted.
"Yeah, yeah. Go terrorize my fifteen regulars," she whispered, dropping the phone face-down.
She closed her eyes and saw the boardroom again. Flames, broken glass, her Alpha standing in the middle of it like it was all theatrics put on for his amusement.
Lucian Valt had never once said thank you in sixty-seven episodes. He didn't have to. He had claws and teeth and inherited power. Courtrooms and contracts bowed to him. Enemies fell because he willed it.
Meanwhile, she'd spent the day arguing with customer service about a late payment and calculating the cheapest instant noodles per pack.
Still, when she drew him, he belonged to her.
At least in my story, she thought, turning her cheek into the pillow, someone like me gets to tell the monster what to do. Bleed here. Burn there. Snarl for the camera. Obey.
Her eyelids felt too heavy to lift again.
Somewhere in the blankness between awake and asleep, a small, unimportant number ticked on a server:
3 views became 27.
Then 103.
Then 1.4k.
But Amara Reyes, freelance artist, werewolf-CEO tormentor, and queen of unpaid bills, knew none of that yet.
By the time the view counter exploded, she was already gone, breathing softly, curled on her side beneath a threadbare blanket, dreaming of fire and gold eyes that refused to bow to fate.