Page 31 of Mane Rival in Store by Milly Taiden

She’d offered. More precisely, she’d been in his back office at seven as scheduled—the daily sessions that Breezy and Dekel had calendar-blocked with fictional labels and genuine intent—and he’d mentioned the vault visit that afternoon, and she’d leaned forward on her stool and asked if the collector’s acquisition records might intersect with the distribution channels her network had flagged.

It was a reasonable question. The answer was yes. The invitation was professional.

It was work. He had invited her to a private underground vault that almost no one in the industry had seen because it was directly relevant to the investigation. The vault’s collection—which happened to contain editions that would make her eyes widen, because she loved this world how he did, because her appreciation for the craft was genuine and informed and⁠—

Work.

“You’re quiet.” Her voice cut through his spiral. She’d put her phone away and was watching him with the amused focus she deployed when she’d caught him overthinking.

“I’m reviewing the testing parameters.”

“You’re reviewing the testing parameters in a cab with your jaw doing the tension thing.”

“My jaw does not have a thing.”

“Your jaw has a whole repertoire. Right now, it’s doing number three: ‘I have made a decision I am unable to reverse, and I am recalculating.’” She tilted her head. “What are we walking into?”

He exhaled. Briefed her on Magnus—the collector’s history, the vault’s significance, the suspicious edition. Kept it clinical. She listened the way she always did during their morning sessions—fully, without interrupting, her focus a physical pressure against his left side that he’d stopped pretending not to notice.

“So this collector is the real deal.”

“Magnus Holt’s collection is the most significant private holding I’ve authenticated. If the counterfeiter reached his vault, the operation predates our SoHo pipeline by months. Possibly years.”

“And you’re taking me into a vault that almost nobody gets to see.”

“For the investigation.”

“For the investigation.” Her mouth curved. Not the wide smile, not the weapon—a smaller thing. Private. He looked away before he could classify what lived behind it.

The cab stopped on a residential block between Park and Madison. A limestone townhouse, unremarkable from the street, with a polished black door and no signage. The security was invisible until you looked for it: cameras recessed into the cornice, a biometric panel behind a decorative iron grate, reinforced frames beneath the period-accurate trim.

Rune pressed his thumb to the scanner. The lock released with a soft click. He opened the door and stepped aside.

“After you.”

She paused on the threshold. Looked at the door. Looked at him. “A secret vault behind a biometric lock on the Upper East Side. You know this is a Bond movie, right?”

“I’m testing a comic book, not defusing a weapon.”

“That’s what Bond would say too.” She walked through.

The vault was three stories underground.

An elevator behind a wall panel—Magnus’s paranoia expressed in architecture—dropped them into a corridor of brushed steel and recessed lighting. The temperature shifted as they descended: the June heat vanished, replaced by the controlled cool of climate regulation calibrated to the decimal. Sixty-eight degrees. Forty percent humidity. The air tasted like filtered nothing—sterile, preserved, the atmospheric equivalent of holding your breath.

The corridor opened into the vault itself, and Rune watched Lark stop walking.

The space was a cathedral. That was the only word. Two thousand square feet of underground gallery, every surface designed for a single purpose: the preservation and display of one man’s obsession. Cases lined the walls in tiered rows, each one individually lit, each one containing editions that represented decades of patient, obsessive acquisition. The center of the room held a free-standing display island with the crown jewels—the top-tier grails, the editions that auction houses would fight wars over.

Rune had been here dozens of times. His pulse still quickened.

“Oh.” Lark’s voice was quiet. Stripped of performance. She turned a slow circle, and the cases reflected in her eyes—light and glass and the muted colors of decades-old covers, reds faded to rust, blues deepened to navy, a golden patina of aging paper. “…Oh.”

His lion went very still. The particular stillness of a predator watching its offering land.

“The collection spans 1938 to 1985,” he said, and then the vault did what the vault always did to him: it opened the door he spent his adult life keeping shut.

He started talking.