Page 22 of Mane Rival in Store by Milly Taiden

“Go home,” Dekel said again. Gentler this time. “Tomorrow’s a new day. The article doesn’t define us.”

Rune nodded. Dekel left. The front door locked. The store sank into its after-hours hush—the deep, climate-controlled quiet that had always comforted him and tonight made him restless.

Leave. Go home to his apartment at the top of the den, where the silence was a choice and the solitude was a habit and neither had bothered him before three weeks ago.

He stood. Gathered his jacket. Walked through the darkened store, past the display cases glowing under their individual gallery lights, past the graded editions and the reference volumes and the thirty years of comics history arranged with precision on every surface.

He stopped at the shared wall.

There was a door here. A service door—industrial gray, flush-mounted, the kind of door installed when two commercial spaces shared infrastructure. It opened into the back area on Villainette’s side. He’d noticed it during construction but had never tested it. The door was hers to lock from her side, and he’d assumed she had.

He pressed the handle. It moved.

The door opened.

The scent hit him first. Dark rose and fig—her candle, her world—flooding through the open doorway with an immediacy that his lion processed as a physical embrace. Heat followed. Then the visual: Villainette after hours, with the overhead lights dimmed to the purple neon glow of the window displays, the store cast in violet shadow, every surface catching light differently than it did during the day.

It was beautiful.

He crossed the threshold before the analytical part of his brain could file an objection.

The store surrounded him. He moved through it slowly, how he moved through private vaults—with the instinct of a man who recognized craft when he saw it, regardless of the medium. His footsteps were silent on the dark hardwood (the lion’s inheritance; he couldn’t walk loudly if he tried). The neon cast his shadow in violet across the display fixtures.

He stopped at the comics wall. Studied the organization by universe, then by character arc, then by thematic resonance. Not alphabetical. Not chronological. Emotional. She’d arranged the villain titles so that a browser would experience a narrative journey: redemption arcs first, then moral ambiguity, then the unapologetic villains at the end. A customer would walk that wall and take a journey without realizing it. That took instinct. That took someone who understood her buyers the way he understood his collectors.

She organizes by narrative. By emotion. She treats her stock the way I treat editions—as stories that deserve context.

He moved to the beauty bar. The lipstick display—which he’d dismissed on first encounter as commercial novelty—revealed itself under closer examination as a masterclass in brand storytelling. Each shade was named with specificity that communicated character: Morally Gray wasn’t a random label, it was a color that split the difference between charcoal and silver, and the packaging featured a brushstroke design that evoked moral ambiguity without spelling it out. Main Character Energy was a deep, confident burgundy. Revenge Red was exactly the shade of lipstick a woman would wear to a confrontation she intended to win.

He picked up the Revenge Red tube. Turned it over. The weight was premium. The packaging was matte black with gold foil text. The shade name was printed in a font he recognized—a modified serif with Art Deco influences, chosen for its association with classic villain aesthetics.

She built this. Every shade, every name, every detail. Her brand spoke with the same discipline as his—but where his said “sacred,” hers said “fun.” And joy was harder to pull off than reverence. Reverence hid behind formality. Joy took nerve.

His lion dropped to a low, steady hum behind his ribs. Not the restless pacing of the last three weeks. A different frequency. Recognition. The lion recognizing a mind that operated on the same wavelength as his own, tuned to a different station.

He set down the lipstick and moved to the centerpiece display: the Harley Quinn showcase. A vintage Harley Quinn first-appearance issue displayed alongside modern interpretations—art prints, a designer jacket with Harley’s diamond motif, a custom cosmetics collection themed to the character’s evolution from sidekick to anti-hero. The display tracked a character arc across media, fashion, beauty, and comics, weaving them into a single visual argument that Harley Quinn wasn’t a joke. She was a cultural icon.

The display was flawless. The eye-level positioning drew the browser’s gaze along a diagonal that moved from vintage to contemporary, from comics to lifestyle, creating a bridge between the world his store represented and the world hers had invented. A bridge that said: these aren’t separate things. They’re the same love, expressed differently.

He was studying the Harley Quinn first appearance—a strong copy, not graded but well-preserved, displayed with a reverence that matched anything in his own cases—when the lights shifted.

“You’re admiring my commercial garbage.”

He didn’t startle. Lions don’t startle. But his hair rose—a sharp, involuntary surge that he suppressed three seconds too late—and he turned to find Lark Coleman standing at the entrance from the back hallway, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed and an expression that contained multitudes.

She’d changed since the workday. The leather jacket was gone. She wore a loose black T-shirt that slipped off one shoulder and joggers, and her hair was different—not the sleek blowout he’d cataloged during business hours but natural curls, thick and voluminous and unapologetic, falling past her shoulders in a way that transformed her entire silhouette. She was barefoot. She was carrying a takeout container and a pair of chopsticks.

She was still here. Working late. Eating dinner in her store.

“The service door was unlocked,” he said. It came out stiffer than he intended. Defensive. Caught somewhere he shouldn’t be.

“I know it was unlocked. I left it unlocked.” She pushed off the wall and walked toward him, bare feet on dark hardwood, chopsticks balanced between her fingers. “On purpose? By accident? The world may never know. But here you are, standing in my store at eight o’clock, holding my lipstick, looking at my Harley Quinn display with the expression of a man who’s been proven wrong about a few things.”

“I haven’t been proven wrong.”

“Your face says otherwise.” She stopped three feet from him. Close enough that her scent—the candle, and cocoa butter, and underneath it a brightness that was purely her—filled his chest and made the lion purr. Vibrate. The lion did not purr. Lions did not purr. “You’ve been in here for at least fifteen minutes. I heard you come through the door. I wanted to see how far you’d get before the commercial garbage offended your sensibilities.”

“It didn’t offend my sensibilities.”