Page 33 of Mane Rival in Store

“There’s a restaurant near here. We can review the expanded timeline and plan the next phase of the investigation.” He was describing a dinner meeting. The words were describing a dinner meeting. His lion was not describing a dinner meeting.

“A working dinner.”

“Precisely.”

“With wine?”

“If you prefer.”

She studied him. “Lead the way, Your Majesty.”

THIRTEEN

LARK

The restaurant was a tiny Italian place on a side street off Madison—twelve tables, white linen, candles in amber glass, and a host who greeted Rune by name and led them to a corner booth with the hushed deference reserved for royalty.

This is a date.

The realization had arrived in the vault, somewhere between the 1939 Batman and the fifteenth minute of Rune Sterling forgetting he was a king and becoming a boy who loved comics, and it had not left.

This is a date, and he doesn’t know it’s a date.

She watched him study the menu with the focused intensity he brought to lab readouts. He held it at a slight angle to catch the candlelight—the same tilt he’d used to examine the Batman edition in the vault, and the memory of his hands in cotton gloves, his voice low and reverent, his whole body unlocking as he’d walked her through sixty years of comics history—that memory was going to be a problem. A significant, ongoing, structurally unsound problem.

Because she’d seen him. Not the boardroom version. Not the stiff Scandinavian who sent cease-and-desist letters and described her store as an assault on curation. The man underneath—the one who talked about ink density with his hands and called paper degradation a countdown and said “we’re preserving things that are trying to disappear” with the quiet urgency of a man who understood loss.

That version was devastating.

“The carbonara is good here.” He set the menu down. Straightened his silverware. Adjusted the angle of his water glass by a centimeter.

“Have you eaten here often?”

“A few times. After vault visits. Usually alone.”

Usually alone. She filed that. The Scandinavian billionaire eating carbonara by himself in a twelve-table restaurant after spending hours underground with first editions. The image landed somewhere tender and refused to move.

She ordered the rigatoni. He ordered the carbonara. A bottle of Barolo appeared without either of them requesting it—the host’s doing, another indicator of how often Rune came here and how generous a tipper he must be.

“So.” She poured wine into both glasses. “The counterfeiter has been operating for at least eleven months. Private collections first, then retail channels. That’s not a forger with a side hustle. That’s a business plan.”

“With infrastructure and patience.” He accepted the wine. Their fingers didn’t touch on the glass. She noticed the distance he maintained—precise, deliberate—and filed that too. “The financier behind this has a long-term objective. Counterfeiting is the method, not the goal.”

“What’s the goal?”

“I don’t know yet.” The admission cost him. She watched his shoulders tighten a fraction—the alpha acknowledging a blind spot. “But the target is specific. My seller network. My verification seal. This is personal or strategic. Possibly both.”

“You have enemies?”

The left edge of his mouth shifted. “I run a multinational conglomerate and lead one of the oldest lion prides in Northern Europe. I have a list.”

She laughed. His eyes tracked the sound—a fractional shift in focus, a stillness that she’d started recognizing as the predator paying attention. Whenever she laughed, his gaze sharpened. As if the sound drew him like a specific frequency.

“Tell me about the list.”

“That would be a security breach.”

“I’m already in your vault, your back office, and your investigation. The security breach has sailed. Give me the highlights.”