Page 73 of Mane Rival in Store by Milly Taiden

“I gathered.”

“He’s texting in all caps.”

“I heard the enthusiasm from here.”

“Tomorrow he’s going to look you in the eye at a family dinner and you’re going to have to sit across from him knowing that he knows.”

Rune’s hair, which had been settling into a peaceful, post-purr calm, rose sharply at both temples.

“That’s a problem for tomorrow.” She pulled him back down. “Tonight, you’re mine.”

Something in his chest made a sound—not the hum, not the growl. A chuff. Low, pleased, the feline equivalent of a laugh. His arms folded around her and his hair settled against her cheek and the night folded around both of them, and the city glittered through the windows, and somewhere in a stockroom in SoHo, Dekel’s phone lit with a single text from Breezy:

Breezy: She’s staying at the den tonight.

Dekel: I know. His security detail confirmed thirty minutes ago.

Breezy: Are you monitoring your boss’s romantic life through his security infrastructure?

Dekel: Are you monitoring yours through her iPhone location?

Breezy: …Touché.

THIRTY-TWO

RUNE

The coffee was wrong. She’d added cinnamon.

He drank it anyway. He’d drink battery acid if she handed it to him with that particular half-smile—the one that said I know you hate cinnamon and I did it on purpose and you’re going to finish every drop—and the worst part was she knew it. She’d watched him take the first sip yesterday morning, register the cinnamon, and keep drinking, and the look on her face had been the smuggest thing he’d witnessed outside of a corporate acquisition.

From Villainette’s side of the open door, her voice carried over the music: “—no, the shipment goes to the Williamsburg location first. If SoHo gets the new Poison Ivy line before Brooklyn, the Brooklyn manager will stage a coup. She’s been asking for two weeks. Breezy, I love you, but if you schedule my emotional breakdowns, I’m going to start having them off-calendar out of spite.”

Breezy’s response was inaudible but the tone carried. Crisp. Unimpressed. Efficient.

He turned back to the spectrographic results. The analysis had taken forty-eight hours—two full days of running the five confirmed forgeries through every authentication tool Sterling & Mane owned, plus two pieces of equipment he’d borrowed from the Oslo lab. The results were spread across his monitor in layered imaging: paper composition, ink chemistry, binding adhesive, printing pressure patterns.

The forgeries were extraordinary.

He’d said this before—to Dekel, to his authentication team, to the forensic accountant. But examining them at this depth made the word insufficient. The man who had produced these editions possessed restoration-grade knowledge of mid-century printing techniques. The paper stock was custom-milled to match period composition. The ink formulations replicated chemical signatures that most modern printers couldn’t identify, let alone reproduce. The binding—hand-stitched, historically accurate, aged with a precision that fooled visual and tactile inspection—was the work of someone who understood comics as physical objects at a molecular level.

He wasn’t a criminal who had learned to forge. He was an expert who had chosen to cross a line.

“You’re making the face.”

She was leaning in the service doorway. Arms crossed, hip against the frame, her hair blown out straight and swinging past her shoulders. She’d been in the store since seven—earlier than him, which was a phenomenon he’d noticed three days running and filed alongside the cinnamon coffee as evidence that Lark Coleman at full operational capacity was a force that required witness protection.

“I don’t make faces.”

“You make exactly one face, and it’s the face you’re making now.” She crossed to his workstation. Her hand found the back of his neck—casual, warm, proprietary. His hair shifted under her touch, and he let it, because three days had taught him that fighting the reaction was an exercise in public humiliation and accepting it was an exercise in private surrender and the second option involved her fingers in his hair, which the part of him that wasn’t a CEO considered a perfectly acceptable trade for dignity. “What’s the face about?”

He angled the monitor. “The binding adhesive. It’s a proprietary formula that went out of production in 1987. Only three restoration labs in the world still have the recipe. Two of them are in Europe. One is⁠—”

“Here.”

“Here.” He pulled up the database he’d been cross-referencing since dawn. “The American lab is Prestige Restorations in the Bronx. They were the gold standard for comics restoration for twenty years. Their master restorer—” He tapped the screen. A staff page from a now-defunct website, archived. A photo of a man with thinning hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and the kind of face that disappeared in crowds. “Leif Cross. Left Prestige eight years ago. No public employment record since.”

She studied the photo. “He looks like a substitute teacher.”