Page 26 of Mane Rival in Store

His phone buzzed. A text from Aspen in Stockholm: Haven’t heard from you in two days. Either you’re dead or you’re obsessing. Text me back or I’m booking a flight. This is not a bluff. I have the SAS app open.

He typed: “Working. Fine. Do not fly here.”

Her response was instantaneous: “That’s exactly what a dead person would type. Checking flights.”

He pocketed the phone. Aspen would either respect the boundary or appear in his store within forty-eight hours wearing something architectural and demanding a full briefing. History favored the latter.

Through the wall, the first sounds of Villainette’s morning prep filtered in. Staff arriving, displays being restocked, the opening bars of a playlist he’d spent three weeks resenting and now landed with an involuntary attentiveness that irritated him. Voices, muffled—and beneath them, one voice in particular. Quick, bright, directing traffic with the easy authority of someone who ran her operation like a celebration rather than a campaign.

His hair stirred. He smoothed it down with one hand.

Focus.

He focused. He pulled up the seller records and began cross-referencing acquisition dates with the forgery profiles and the broader market data for comparable editions sold in the last twelve months. The work required concentration, and concentration required silence, and silence required not hearing the voice through the wall, which required the wall to be thicker, which it was not, which was a structural deficiency he intended to raise with the building management company at the earliest opportunity.

Dekel watched him from across the counter. “You’re doing the thing.”

“What thing?”

“The thing where you pretend you’re not listening through the wall by typing more aggressively. Your keyboard sounds like a machine gun when she’s talking.”

“I am processing seller data.”

“You’re processing seller data in 4/4 time with her playlist. I can hear the beat match.”

Rune did not dignify this with a response. He typed. The typing bore no rhythmic relationship to the bass line bleeding through the plaster. None whatsoever.

Shortly after eight, the voices through the wall escalated. Not the cheerful bustle of opening prep—a sharper register. Rune’s fingers paused on the keyboard. Lark’s voice, pitched higher than her usual cadence, talking fast. Another voice—Breezy, clipped and rapid. The words were indistinct, but the tone carried: urgent, focused, problem-solving.

Then, clear as a bell through the thin plaster: “—forgeries in the seller network, Breezy. I could hear him talking through the wall. Three more. His whole verification pipeline⁠—”

The voice dropped. Moved further from the shared wall. The words dissolved into a murmur, but the damage was done. She’d heard enough from last night’s phone call to Dekel and this morning’s analysis to piece the full scope of the crisis.

Dekel and Rune locked eyes across the counter.

“She knows,” Dekel observed.

“She overheard fragments. She doesn’t have the full picture.”

“She’s about to come through that door and offer help. You realize that, right?”

“This is an internal Sterling & Mane investigation⁠—”

The service door opened.

Lark stood in the frame with her phone in one hand and a look on her face that split the difference between concern and the particular determination of a woman who had identified a problem adjacent to her interests and had no intention of standing on the other side of a wall while it escalated.

She’d pulled her hair into a high ponytail this morning—the first time he’d seen it up, exposing the full line of her neck and the architecture of a jawline that belonged on a magazine cover. His lion tracked every detail with the speed and thoroughness of a predatory appraisal, and the growl that built in his chest had to be converted into a throat-clearing before it reached his mouth.

“Your walls are embarrassingly thin.” She stepped into the lab. Her eyes swept the room—the four editions under the examination lights, the lab readouts on the monitor, the reference files stacked on the counter, the cold coffee at Rune’s elbow. She took in the scope of the crisis in three seconds and processed it in two more. “Four forgeries. All consignment. And based on the fact that you and Dekel have been in this room since—” she glanced at the collection of takeout cups by the sink—“midnight? Earlier? You think there are more.”

“This is a Sterling & Mane matter.” The words came out on reflex—the alpha’s default territorial response to an incursion, even one that arrived in a ponytail and carried the low-voltage electricity that had been short-circuiting his operational capacity for three weeks.

“If forgeries are entering the market through your seller pipeline, they’re not staying in your seller pipeline.” She set her phone on the counter. Planted her hip against the edge. Made herself part of the room with the ease of a woman who’d been walking into spaces she wasn’t explicitly invited into and making them better. “My buyers handle hundreds of editions a month across twenty-three stores. If your forger is distributing through multiple channels, my people have seen the inventory. They might not have flagged it yet, but they’ve seen it.”

The lab went quiet. The analyzer hummed. Dekel looked at Rune with an expression that said he’d predicted this exact scenario forty-five seconds ago and was exercising heroic restraint in not saying so.

She’s right. The admission arrived before his pride could block it. Sterling & Mane’s verification system caught fakes at intake. Lark’s network operated downstream—in the independent stores, pop-up markets, and online communities where editions lived after their first sale. If the forger had been distributing for months, the trail wound through the secondary market. And Lark’s buyers, who operated at the intersection of high-end collecting and street-level commerce, sat directly on that trail.