Page 50 of Mane Rival in Store by Milly Taiden

He did not take off the cape.

They moved through the warehouse. The cape swished. His hair remained insubordinate. Lark kept glancing at him and biting her bottom lip against the grin, and every bitten lip hit him square behind the sternum. A vendor gave him a thumbs-up. The MC caught sight of him from the stage and announced to the crowd: “The mystery judge has COMMITTED. We have a CAPE. Ladies and gentlemen and villains, we have a cape on the floor.”

A scattered cheer went up. Rune stood in the center of a Brooklyn warehouse at midnight in a purple villain cape with six hundred cosplayers cheering his existence and his lion roaring approval and Lark Coleman laughing beside him with her straight hair swinging and her earrings catching purple light. This is the most absurd night of my life and I do not want it to end.

His phone vibrated. He’d made the mistake of texting Dekel a photo an hour ago—Lark judging the walk-off, the crowd behind her, a slice of the Gotham installation visible in the background. Dekel had responded with twelve messages in rapid succession. The latest:

Dekel: Aspen has seen the cape photo. Someone posted it. She is on a plane. I am not exaggerating. She booked a flight from Stockholm twenty minutes ago.

Dekel: She says, and I quote: “THE MANE. IN A CAPE. I WILL DIE. I WILL LITERALLY DIE.”

Dekel: For the record I also have feelings about the cape but mine are more measured.

Dekel: They are: you look like a Norse god at a costume gala and you are never living this down.

Rune pocketed his phone.

“The rooftop is open,” Lark said. “If you need air.”

He needed air. He needed it urgently, because the warehouse was hot and crowded and the cape was heavy and Lark’s scent—her candle signature mixed with sweat and bourbon from The Nemesis and the sharp sweetness of her skin—was dismantling his higher functions with surgical efficiency.

The rooftop access was a freight elevator in the back corner. Industrial. Graffitied. Lark hit the button and the cage rattled upward through three floors of exposed brick and open ductwork.

The roof opened above them. Brooklyn at midnight.

The skyline stretched across the water—Manhattan’s towers lit against the black, the bridge cables strung with lights, the harbor dark and glittering below. The air was summer-heavy but moving, a breeze off the water that carried salt and exhaust and the distant bass from the warehouse four stories below.

They stood at the railing. The city was laid out like a display—her kind, not his. Chaotic, saturated, alive.

“Thank you,” he said. “For tonight.”

She leaned against the railing. The wind lifted her hair—the straight, sleek fall that she wore like a blade—and the silver earrings swayed. “You’re thanking me? You wore the cape voluntarily. I was prepared to beg.”

“It was not voluntary. You placed it on my shoulders before I could refuse.”

“You kept it. Forty-five minutes. Nobody forced you.”

“The clasp was complicated.”

“The clasp is a HOOK. It’s a hook and a loop, Rune. A preschooler could operate it.”

“Perhaps I found the construction interesting.”

“You found the construction interesting.” She turned to face him. The bridge lights reflected in her hazel eyes, green shifting to amber in the city glow. “You wore a purple satin cape for forty-five minutes at a costume party because you found the construction interesting.”

He looked at her.

The rooftop. The skyline. The cape still on his shoulders because he hadn’t removed it, because taking it off would mean the night was ending and the night could not end yet. Lark against the railing with her leather and silver and the wind in her straight hair and the laughter still warm on her face and the two weeks of late nights and coffee orders and distribution data and her candle on his counter and her jacket on his chair and her voice through the wall and the word Lark that he’d said like a diagnosis because it was one—she was the condition, the disruption, the thing his lion had identified on day one and his brain had spent a month denying.

He moved.

Not slowly. Not tentatively. The coiling of something patient and powerful that had reached the end of its restraint. Two steps that closed the distance between them—the distance he’d been measuring in inches for weeks, across counters, across displays, across that narrowing gap that had been shrinking every night—and his hand found the curve of her waist above the leather, and his mouth found hers.

She inhaled. A sharp catch of breath against his lips.

Then her hands fisted the front of his shirt and she kissed him back.

The kiss was not gentle. It was not a question. It was the answer to the question the hair-touch had asked two nights ago, the answer to the doorstep and the tie and the Catwoman on the counter and the six mornings of oat milk—every careful, curated gesture collapsed into a single point of contact that burned through his composure like a match through paper.