Page 34 of Mane Rival in Store

He drank his wine. Set the glass down with the deliberation of someone who positioned objects the way other people breathed—unconsciously, perfectly. “Competitor conglomerates who’d benefit from a Sterling & Mane scandal. Disgruntled sellers I’ve blacklisted. A council member who objects to approximately eighty percent of my decisions on principle.”

“Yara?”

His brow rose a millimeter. “You’ve been reading the business press.”

“Breezy compiles dossiers on all adjacent businesses. Yours came with footnotes.” She leaned back against the booth. The candlelight caught the wine in her glass, turning the Barolo to liquid garnet. “Yara Vender-Lindgren. Senior council member. Old guard. Scandinavian purist. Described in three separate profiles as ‘formidable.’”

“Formidable is generous.”

“Is she a suspect?”

“No. Yara opposes my methods, not my mission. She’d never compromise Sterling & Mane’s verification reputation—she helped build it.”

“So the threat is external.”

“Almost certainly.”

The pasta arrived. The carbonara was beautiful—perfect egg-silk sauce, guanciale cut with the respect it deserved. Lark’s rigatoni was aggressive with garlic and chili and a shower of pecorino that made her close her eyes on the first bite.

“Good?” His voice carried a note she hadn’t heard before. Not the formal register or the vault voice. Lower. Almost tentative.

“This is obscenely good. The chili ratio alone is grounds for a marriage proposal.” She opened her eyes. He was watching her with an expression she was rapidly losing the ability to categorize. “Do you cook?”

“I can. I rarely do.”

“Why not?”

“Cooking for one seems—” He stopped. Recalibrated. “Inefficient.”

Lonely, she heard. He’d said inefficient. He’d meant lonely.

“My father cooks,” she said. “Dominican recipes from my grandmother. He does this thing where he talks to the food in Spanish while he’s stirring. Full conversations. ‘Mijo, you are not reducing fast enough.’ The sofrito gets a pep talk.”

He made a sound. Brief. Almost involuntary. The closest thing to a laugh she’d heard from him outside the stockroom pad thai moment, and her pulse kicked because the sound was different here—in candlelight, in a quiet restaurant, with wine between them and the vault’s intimacy still hanging in the air.

She kept going. Told him more about Harrison’s secret comic collection in the locked cabinet. About Oliver texting live updates from every family dinner. About Breezy’s filing system for Lark’s emotional crises, complete with timestamps and priority levels.

And Rune Sterling—the Lion King of Scandinavia, the man who wore his composure like armor and his formality like a second skin—laughed.

Not the careful version he offered press cameras. Not the measured smile he gave Dekel’s jokes. A real, surprised, full-bodied laugh that broke across his face and transformed it—the severity dissolving into something younger, brighter, a flash of the boy in the vault who’d talked about printing presses with his hands. The laugh changed his voice. Changed the lines around his eyes. Changed the entire architecture of his face from monarch to mischief, and he clearly had no idea it did this, which made it worse.

Oh. Oh, I am in so much trouble.

“Your father talks to sofrito.”

“Full Dominican pep talks. Volume and hand gestures included.”

“And your mother—a law professor—found his comic collection and said nothing.”

“Decades of silence. The longest cross-examination stay in legal history.”

He shook his head. The laugh lingered in the lines around his eyes, in the relaxed set of his shoulders, in the way he’d leaned forward over the table without seeming to notice. “Your family sounds⁠—”

He stopped. The word he’d been reaching for hung between them, visible in the shift of his expression—the half-second where the laugh met longing, and she understood with a clarity that bypassed logic and landed in her bones that Rune Sterling was not a man who lacked emotion. He was a man who’d been told that warmth was a crack in the wall, and he’d spent years filling every crack.

“Loud,” she finished for him. “The word you’re looking for is loud. The Colemans are constitutionally incapable of an indoor voice.”

The tension broke. He picked up his wine. “My family communicates primarily through silences and strategic furniture arrangement.”