By the next morning, the number on her dashboard had climbed again.
Total views: 612,094.
Every time she refreshed, it twitched upward—like watching a heart monitor for a patient she didn't know how to treat.
She closed the tab.
Staring at it wasn't going to make the email go away.
The message from [email protected] sat in her inbox like a landmine. She hadn't replied. She hadn't deleted it either. It just… glowed there, bold and unread-looking even after she'd scrolled through it three times.
"Fine," she told the laptop. "You want a responsible adult? I'll get one."
She opened a new tab and typed with stiff fingers:
free legal advice creative copyright help
Enter.
Results poured in: government resources, sketchy ads, forums where other artists swapped horror stories about stolen designs and unpaid invoices. She narrowed her search, added her city, fiddled with keywords until something useful appeared:
"S. Patel & Associates – Affordable Legal Support for Creatives & Startups."
Copyright, contracts, trademarks, online harassment, content disputes.
Affordable. It was an ambitious word. But the office address was on the bus line. That counted for something.
Amara checked her banking app again, did some mental math, and accepted that whatever she spent on this would be paid for in oxygen and noodles later.
She screenshotted the Valtor email, saved a handful of her own panels, and grabbed her jacket.
The bus ate the coins out of her hand without mercy. She dropped into a cracked plastic seat and hugged her bag to her chest.
Outside, the city flowed by in tall, gray chunks. Cafés yawned open; people in suits held cardboard cups like armor; kids in uniforms dragged more enthusiasm than she felt. Somewhere up in those glass towers, actual lawyers were probably already drafting paperwork with her name on it.
She watched a group of teenagers huddled around a phone at the back of the bus, laughing loudly. For a brief, paranoid second, she imagined her panels on their screen, Lucian's scarred smirk looking back at her through their laughter.
Get over yourself, she told her brain. The entire world is not watching you.
…Yet, her notifications whispered smugly.
She got off three stops later and followed the little blue dot on her map down a street lined with laundromats, discount furniture stores, and a nail salon with a hand-painted sign. The building she needed looked like it had once been an apartment block and never quite committed to the conversion.
A peeling directory by the door listed the names of various small businesses in uneven fonts. Half were taped over with new names. On the third floor:
S. PATEL & ASSOCIATES – Legal Services.
She climbed the stairs because the elevator made a noise she did not trust.
The office door was open a crack. A bell above it jingled when she stepped in.
The first thing that hit her was paper. Not the clean, minimalist stacks she'd imagined real law firms had, but honest chaos: files spilling from metal shelves, boxes half-filled, a printer blinking "OUT OF TONER" with the patience of a dying soldier.
A woman at the front desk glanced up from behind a monitor. Her hair was in a messy bun held by a pen, her lipstick slightly smudged at one corner. Mid-thirties maybe. Tired eyes, sharp gaze.
"Hi," Amara said, clutching her bag strap. "Um. Do you take walk-ins?"
"Sometimes." The woman flipped a page on a notepad. "What's the issue?"
"Copyright. Maybe defamation. Maybe—" She caught herself before she spiraled into "possibly being eaten by a billionaire in a different sense." "Online content," she finished. "Someone sent me a scary email."
"Join the club." The woman's mouth quirked. "You're a…?"
"Artist," Amara said. "Webcomic. Freelance."
That seemed to land in a specific box in the receptionist's brain. She nodded. "You picked the right kind of trouble. Mr. Patel handles a lot of creatives. Do you have any appointment?"
"No. I just—" Amara held up her phone helplessly. "It felt urgent."
The woman studied her face for a beat, then the tight way she was holding the phone, then sighed. "You look like you haven't slept and like you're not making this up, so that's already better than half the people who show up. I'll see if he can squeeze you in."
She gestured to a pair of plastic chairs against the wall. "Sit. Try not to read anything on that table, those magazines are from another century."
Amara sat, knees bouncing despite herself. The magazines really did look ancient. The top one had a headline about "The Exciting Future of DVDs."
She tried to breathe. In, out. The fluorescent lighting overhead hummed quietly, too bright compared to her dim apartment.
After a few minutes, the inner door opened and a man stepped out, tugging his suit jacket straight. He looked mid-forties, clean-shaven, with the kind of tired smile that lived permanently on the edges of his mouth. His tie was crooked. His eyes, however, were awake.
"Amara Reyes?" he asked.
She stood so fast her bag hit her knee. "Yes. Hi. Sorry. Yes."
"I'm Sanjay Patel." He offered a hand. His grip was firm but not crushing. "Come in."
His office was only marginally less chaotic than the outer room. Bookshelves lined one wall, groaning under thick law volumes and thinner, more colorful things with titles like Artist's Guide to Contracts and Your IP and You. A dying plant drooped in the corner, bravely clinging to life.
He gestured to a chair across from his desk. "So. Online content, you said?"
She sat, putting her bag in her lap like a shield. "I… got an email from a big company's legal department. About my comic."
"Company name?" he asked, picking up a pen.
"Valtor Group."
The pen stopped mid-air.
He blinked once, slowly. "As in Lucian Valtor, Valtor Group?"
"Yes." She swallowed. "Apparently my main character, uh, resembles him."
Patel set the pen down and leaned back slightly. "All right. Start from the beginning. Tell me what you do, what you made, what they sent you. Don't leave out anything you think sounds silly."
She took a breath and did her best.
About the comic, about Alpha of the Boardroom, about the viral spike overnight. About the comments saying THIS IS LITERALLY LUCIAN VALTOR. About Googling, the scar, the building, the email.
She found herself babbling more than she meant to—dropping in asides about rent and noodles and how she was absolutely not a billionaire hunter. Patel listened without interrupting, fingers occasionally tapping his desk in a soft rhythm.
When she was done, she dug her phone out and handed it to him with the email open. "Here. They said a lot of words. I understood approximately three of them."
He read it quickly, eyes moving the way they probably did when he devoured contracts for breakfast. Every now and then he made a small low sound, like "Mm" or "Hn."
"Do you have your work?" he asked. "Screenshots, links?"
She pulled up a few panels, the burning boardroom, the Alpha's smirk, the profile shot that looked far too much like the magazine photo she'd found. Patel swiped carefully, comparing.
"I swear I didn't know," she blurted. "I never picked his face on purpose. If my brain stole it, it did it without asking me."
"I believe you," he said distractedly. "Intent matters for some things. Not as much for others."
He set the phone down and steepled his fingers, mirroring a pose her Alpha used when he was about to psychologically destroy someone in a meeting. Her stomach clenched.
"All right," Patel said. "Short version, not law school: there are two main issues here. One is defamation. The other is use of likeness."
"Okay," she said, because what else was there to say?
"Defamation is when you make false statements of fact about someone that damage their reputation," he explained. "Calling a public figure a blood-sucking monster in a fantasy context is usually okay. Turning that blood-sucking monster into a one-to-one recognizable version of a real person and making him commit crimes you can't prove? Less okay."
Her mouth went a little numb. "So I'm… on the less okay side."
"I'm not saying you've committed defamation," he said. "These cases are tricky. You haven't named him in the work itself. It's not called Lucian Valtor: The Murder Wolf. That helps you. But the resemblance is strong, and your readers have clearly noticed. That helps him."
She thought of the meme. Canon vs IRL. Her throat tightened.
"Use of likeness," he went on, "is a different question. Some places have laws against commercially exploiting someone's image or persona without permission—especially if you're profiting from it."
"I barely profit," she said weakly. "I have three hundred regulars. Had. Until yesterday."
"Doesn't matter if it's millions or pennies," Patel said gently. "The principle is the same. If his side can convince a judge that you deliberately based this character on him to ride his notoriety, they can make your life… complicated."
"Complicated as in…?" she asked, afraid of the answer.
"As in: they can sue for damages, demand you take the work down, maybe go after any income you made from it," he said. "And you'd have to defend yourself. Which costs money whether you win or lose."
He didn't say ruin. He didn't have to.
She stared at a coffee stain on his desk, her voice small. "Can he really do that? Just… crush me because my art accidentally looks like him?"
Patel sighed, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his temples. "Can he? Legally, he can try. Practically, yes. A man like Valtor has an army of lawyers and more resources than you. They can file motions until you drown in paperwork. Even if your case is defensible, the weight alone is the problem."
"So that's it," she said. "I'm dead."
"Not necessarily." His tone softened a fraction. "Remember what the email said: they'd 'prefer to resolve this amicably.' That's not just politeness. Lawsuits are expensive for everyone. If they can scare you into a quick settlement, or into changing your work, they might prefer that."
She thought about "amicably" again, about the way the word had looked on her laptop screen—as if they were offering tea and biscuits, not a guillotine with a smiley face drawn on it.
"What do I do?" she asked.
"First, don't reply to them when you're panicking," he said. "You did well by not answering yet. Anything you write impulsively can be used later. Second, we look at options."
He grabbed a scrap of paper and began jotting notes.
"Worst-case, they demand you take down the comic entirely and agree not to publish anything with that character again. They may ask for an apology, maybe some token money. Best-case, they accept changes that make the character less identifiable and let it go. There's also a chance they're bluffing and never follow through, but I wouldn't gamble on that with someone at his level."
"And… you?" she asked hesitantly. "What can you…?"
"I can write back on your behalf, negotiate, argue that your work is transformative fiction, that any resemblance is coincidental or protected parody," he said. "I can cite cases. Push back if they overreach. But I won't lie to you—that takes time. Time is billable."
He named his hourly rate.
It wasn't the worst number she'd ever heard, but it might as well have been infinity.
She tried to keep her face neutral and failed halfway. "I… I don't have that. I can maybe… half of maybe… a consultation."
Patel watched her for a beat, then glanced toward the door where the receptionist sat. His jaw worked for a moment.
"Look," he said more quietly. "I started doing creative work because my cousin had her designs stolen and couldn't afford anyone to help her. I try to be flexible. We can talk about a limited engagement—just a letter or two. But I can't promise full representation all the way through a court case for free. I have rent too."
The words "limited engagement" sounded like describing a last meal before execution.
"So best case," she said hollowly, "I pay you money I don't have so you can politely ask a billionaire not to kill my comic and my bank account."
"Best case," he said, "we convince them you're not worth the bad press or the headache."
She let out a short, humorless laugh. "I've been not worth the headache my whole life. This is the first time it might save me."
He smiled, just a little. "There it is. The artist brain."
He tapped the email on her phone again. "What you need to understand, Ms. Reyes, is that this isn't about whether your story is good or bad, original or derivative. It's about power. He has a lot. You have very little. That doesn't mean you automatically lose. But it does mean you need to stop thinking of this as fan drama and start thinking of it as—"
"Business," she finished, recalling her landlord's voice.
"Exactly."
They sat in silence for a moment. Traffic hummed faintly below, muted through the thin office window.
"Can I ask you something?" she said softly. "If I were your… sister, or your friend. What would you tell me to do?"
He studied her, the joking edge gone. "Honestly?"
She nodded.
"I'd tell you to stop digging deeper," he said. "Take the comic down temporarily, at least the episodes that look the most like him. Don't post new ones featuring that character until this is resolved. Talk to them through counsel if you can manage it. Keep as much fuel away from the fire as possible."
Her throat tightened. The idea of taking the comic down felt like reaching into her own chest and ripping out a piece of herself. Alpha of the Boardroom wasn't just panels on a screen. It was nights of drawing until her wrist ached, the only place she got to make someone like Lucian obey her.
She thought of the comments, the sudden influx of readers, the messages saying this saved my day or I've never related to a stressed assistant more. The little community she'd built out of late nights and caffeine.
And over all of that, like a dark watermark, the knowledge that the real Lucian Valtor existed and had noticed her enough to send legal wolves after her.
"I'll…" Her voice came out rough. She cleared her throat. "I'll think about it."
"Good." Patel pushed a cheap business card across the desk. "You don't have to decide everything today. Go home. Breathe. Don't answer any emails or DMs that look official without letting me see them first, if you can help it. And whatever you do, don't tweet about this. The last thing you need is a screenshot of you cracking jokes about a legal threat floating around."
"Right." She took the card. It was simple: his name, number, an email address, a small logo of a scale that looked slightly off-center. "No jokes. I can be serious. Sometimes."
"I believe that… sometimes," he said dryly. "We'll mark today as one of them."
At the door, she hesitated. "Do you… think he'll actually sue?"
Patel's eyes softened in a way she didn't like at all. "I think someone in his organization wants to make an example," he said. "Whether he personally cares yet is another question. But if this continues to go viral with his name attached? It'll be hard for him to ignore."
She swallowed. The knot in her stomach pulled tighter.
"Thank you," she managed.
Outside, the hallway felt longer than it had on the way in. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, merciless. The air smelled faintly of old coffee and copy toner.
She descended the stairs in a daze, clutching the business card so hard the edges bit into her palm.
On the sidewalk, the city pressed in around her—buses wheezing, people talking into phones, someone laughing too loud. A street vendor shouted about fresh samosas. Life went on, uncaring.
Her comic, the thing that had lived in the safe, glowing square of her screen, suddenly felt like it had grown legs and run straight into traffic.
She had always liked writing scenes where her Alpha sauntered into courtrooms and boardrooms, untouchable, unbothered by consequences. She'd given him claws and charm and impossible confidence and called it catharsis.
Now those same places had doors her work might be dragged through, not as fiction, but as evidence.
As she waited for the bus back home, phone heavy in her pocket, Amara had the distinct, creeping sensation that she'd drawn a line on paper one night—just a harmless panel border—and somehow, without noticing, stepped over it.
Out of her comfort zone.
Out of anonymity.
Straight into someone else's world.