Page 88 of Mane Rival in Store by Milly Taiden

“You’re hovering.” She pointed a chopstick at him.

“I’m not hovering.”

“You’ve adjusted my collar three times. You repositioned my water bottle. You put a cushion behind my back that I did not request.” The chopstick waved in a circle that encompassed his general person. “That is hovering. You are a six-foot-three hovering Scandinavian.”

“The counter is hard.”

“The counter is a counter. Counters are hard. That’s their defining characteristic.”

He moved the cushion a millimeter to the left. She watched him do it. Her hazel eyes—green in this light, the late-afternoon sun hitting the display case glass and bouncing warm reflections across her face—tracked the movement with delighted attention. She found his fussing endlessly entertaining and had no intention of discouraging it.

“How did it go?” He leaned against the case beside her. Close—his hip against her knee, his arm behind her back without quite touching. The proximity was automatic now. Three days since the claiming and his body had recalibrated its default settings: her radius was home. Outside it, the world was tolerable. Inside it, the world was correct.

“Margaux presented the evidence. Breezy’s documentation is airtight—the financial trail, the recording, Kasper’s testimony. Fallon’s attorneys did the math. Their client funded a criminal enterprise to manipulate a real estate acquisition, and the criminal enterprise resulted in an assault that left physical evidence on a civilian.” She stole a piece of his salmon roll. “My father used the phrase ‘load-bearing wall’ as a metaphor for fraud architecture. It was magnificent.”

“Harrison is a gifted analyst.”

“Harrison is a Dominican immigrant’s son who built a banking empire and just dismantled a venture capitalist’s entire financial structure using metaphors from construction.” She ate the salmon roll. Stole another. “He’s been wanting to do that for three years. Since the first time Fallon’s name came up at dinner and my dad’s coffee cup stopped moving.”

“I would have liked to be there.”

“You would have hated it. Conference rooms. Fluorescent lighting. Lawyers in expensive suits arguing about shell companies.” She nudged his knee with hers. “But my mom was there, and she didn’t say a single word the entire meeting, and Fallon’s lead attorney checked on her four times without speaking to her. She won the meeting by sitting.”

The corner of his mouth pulled up. The smile came easier now. Not the diplomatic version—the one that arrived without permission, triggered by her proximity and the way she made the world sound worth listening to. “Your mother is a remarkable woman.”

“My mother is a weapon of mass litigation. She sends her regards, by the way. She asked me to tell you that your posture during the Pride dinner was” —Lark adopted Vivienne’s measured cadence— “‘commendable for a man under cross-examination. He held his own. I’ve seen seasoned attorneys fold under less pressure.’”

“That’s… high praise?”

“From Vivienne Coleman, that’s a marriage blessing.”

The store was closed. The gallery lighting cast warm pools across the cases, turning the rare editions into artifacts under glass. Through the archway—the service door had been propped open permanently, the threshold widened by the contractor they’d hired last week—Villainette’s purple neon bled into Sterling & Mane’s golden warmth. Two aesthetics meeting at the border. Two worlds learning to share a wall.

Dekel appeared from the back office with his phone raised. “Update. Fallon’s attorneys have requested an extension on the response deadline. Margaux denied it. Criminal referral moves forward in—” he checked the screen “—sixty-eight hours.”

“And the building?”

“Challenge filed. Breezy got the paperwork to the court before lunch. Between the fraud documentation and the acquisition structure, Margaux gives it a ninety percent chance the deal gets voided.”

“Kasper?”

“Pride custody. Yara convened a disciplinary hearing—formal exile confirmed, handed over to the shifter tribunal for the assault charges. He’s not coming back.” Dekel’s voice carried the neutral delivery of a man reciting facts he’d already processed. “Leif Cross cooperated with Margaux’s team in exchange for a reduced sentence. Turns out he didn’t know about Kasper or the violence—he thought it was a straight counterfeiting arrangement. He’s facing charges, but he’ll likely serve minimal time.”

“The Navy Yard facility is in NYPD custody. Cross’s operation is sealed.”

“The distribution network—the pop-up and online channels Cross named in the warehouse recording—has been referred to federal authorities. Margaux’s team is coordinating with the platforms directly. The forgeries already in circulation are harder to recover, but the supply line is severed.”

He tucked the phone away. Leaned against the opposite case. Assessed the scene: Rune standing guard beside Lark on the counter, his hand resting on the small of her back, her legs swinging beside a case of Golden Age first prints. “You two look disturbingly domestic for a pair of people who were at war eight weeks ago.”

“Seven weeks.” Lark held up a chopstick. “The war ended in week two. Week three was denial. Weeks four through six were what Breezy calls ‘the excruciating slow-motion romantic collapse.’ Week seven was capes and rooftops. Week eight is… this.” She gestured between herself and Rune with the chopstick.

“This being?”

“Mated. Takeout on a counter. Matching scars.” She touched Rune’s side—the place where the gash from the fight was healing under his shirt. His muscles contracted under her fingers. Not pain. Awareness. “It’s very us.”

“It’s very something.” Dekel’s gaze lingered on Rune’s face for a second longer than casual. The beta reading the alpha. Thirty-four years of shared history distilled into a glance. What he saw—Rune leaning into contact, Rune smiling without strategic purpose, Rune allowing a woman to steal his food and sit on his display counter and narrate his love story with chopstick gestures—was new enough to register as remarkable and familiar enough to recognize as the man Rune had been before the crown had buried him.

“You look like your father.” Dekel’s voice dropped. Quiet. Uncharacteristically still.