Page 83 of Mane Rival in Store by Milly Taiden

“Rune. I’m okay. I’m dramatic but I’m okay.”

Aspen pulled her coat off and draped it across his shoulders. A woman’s size 4 on a six-foot-three alpha lion. The sleeves ended above his elbows. The fabric stretched across his back like a napkin on a dining table.

He didn’t notice.

Sybil arrived from the comms van—she’d been there with Breezy, monitoring, and she’d sprinted the moment the fighting stopped. She surveyed the scene: the busted asphalt, the restrained exile, Lark bleeding on the ground, Rune kneeling in a tiny coat. Her face cycled through seven expressions in two seconds—horror, relief, assessment, shock, tenderness, fury, determination—and then settled into calm clarity.

“I’m going to need a much larger first aid kit than I brought.”

Breezy’s voice came through the earpiece that was still lodged in Lark’s left ear—loud enough for everyone in proximity to hear: “Incident report filed. Property damage estimate pending. I’ve added ‘lion fight—warehouse district’ to the insurance claim. I want it noted for the record that I predicted catastrophe and was ignored, and that my operational planning is the only reason we have evidence, extraction capability, and a medical kit. This is my life now.”

Lark laughed. It hurt. She laughed anyway.

Dekel materialized from the perimeter—moving like smoke when the situation called for it, like a Viking at a beach party when it didn’t. His gaze swept the scene. The color left his face. In thirty-four years of shared catastrophe, he’d never seen Rune like this.

“Status.” Rune’s voice was raw. Wrecked.

“Hostiles contained. Kasper Eld restrained in shifted form—he hasn’t shifted back, which means he’s either processing or planning, and either way, he’s not going anywhere. Fallon’s two operatives fled on foot. I have a team tracking. Leif Cross was still upstairs—no evidence he knew about the ambush. NYPD has not been contacted. Shifter incident protocol is in effect.” He looked at Lark. At the blood. At the way Rune’s hands were hovering, shaking, unable to land. “Medical team is three minutes out.”

“Three minutes,” Rune repeated. His voice cracked on the second word. Dekel, who had watched him build the crown and the mask and the entire regal architecture piece by piece and had never seen all of it come down at once, put a hand on his alpha’s shoulder and gripped.

“She’s here. She’s talking. She’s making jokes. She’s going to be fine.”

“She’s bleeding because she protected my sister.”

“Yes. She is.” Dekel’s grip tightened. “And when she’s stitched up and resting, you’re going to tell her that what she did tonight is the bravest thing anyone in the Sterling Pride has done in my lifetime, and I’ve been alive for every minute of it.”

From the ground, restrained, finally shifted back to human form, Kasper Eld spoke. His voice was rough—the aftermath of submission, the vocal cords still raw from the fight. He was looking at Lark. At the blood on her shoulder. At the woman who had thrown herself between a lion and a Sterling with nothing but her body and her nerve.

“She’s not even pride.”

Rune turned. The words landed like a slap—not because of the dismissal but because of the confusion underneath it. Kasper couldn’t process what he’d witnessed. A human. Protecting a lion. Bleeding for a family that hadn’t claimed her.

“She’s everything the Pride should be.”

Lark, from the ground, her voice stripped to its edges by pain but steady enough to cut:

“You loved them and you’re punishing them for it. That’s not strength. That’s a tantrum.”

Kasper flinched.

The flinch was small. Eyes tightening. Jaw shifting. Words from a bleeding woman in a weed-infested parking lot, and his armor cracked. He said nothing. His pale eyes held hers for a long moment—long enough for Lark to see past the scar and the rage and the years of exile to the thing underneath. Grief. Love that had curdled. The simple, devastating truth that Kasper Eld had never stopped loving the Sterling Pride—he’d just spent every day since his expulsion trying to forge that love into a weapon, because weapons hurt less than the thing they replaced.

He looked away first.

Dekel’s team moved him. The lot cleared. The medical unit arrived. Sybil held Lark’s hand while a Pride physician stitched the claw wounds—a trio of parallel gashes, deep enough to scar, the marks that would stay on her skin as proof of the moment she had chosen Rune’s family before the Pride had chosen her.

Aspen sat against the warehouse wall, knees drawn up, tears tracking silently down her face. She was on the phone with Erik in Norway—a rapid, low stream of Norwegian that carried the cadence of a daughter telling her father that she was safe and that someone had bled for her.

The summer night pressed against the asphalt. The halogen lamps buzzed. The city hummed beyond the fence.

Rune sat beside Lark on the dock’s edge, his body pressed against her uninjured side, Aspen’s tiny coat still stretched across his shoulders, and held her hand while the physician worked. His hair lay flat. Not because he was controlling it. Because the lion had gone quiet—truly quiet, for the first time since the scream—and what remained was a man sitting next to the woman who had shielded his world, and the silence was not absence. It was peace.

They went to the den.

Dekel drove. Sybil sat in the back with Lark and Rune, applying pressure to the bandaged shoulder every time Lark shifted position. Aspen sat in the front passenger seat, no longer crying, texting Astrid with the steady focus of a woman who had processed her crisis and moved into operational mode. Breezy followed in the second vehicle with the evidence, the equipment, and the beginnings of what she described on the phone to Harrison Coleman’s legal team as “the most comprehensively documented criminal conspiracy case I’ve ever had the displeasure of assembling.”

The den was quiet. The formal receiving room, the Pride quarters, the upper floors—all still, all dark except for the security lighting. Rune carried Lark up the stairs to his private floor. She protested. He ignored the protest. She protested louder. He continued ignoring it with the placid determination of a man whose mate had three fresh claw marks and was not going to walk anywhere under her own power if he had a say in the matter, which he did, because he was carrying her.