Page 42 of Mane Rival in Store

Sybil caught Rune’s eye from the armchair. Smiled—the genuine version, stripped of assessment. “You survived. For the record, most people don’t make it past the tostones.”

Harrison reappeared from the kitchen with cafecitos for the table and a hand on Rune’s shoulder that communicated, in one squeeze, everything the study hour had established. “You’re coming back next Sunday. Bring that portable authentication equipment. I have questions about Spider-Man’s history.”

Lark walked him to the door at nine-thirty. The brownstone was still glowing behind her—noise and candlelight and her family’s voices carrying through the hallway. She stood on the stoop in bare feet, her curls lifting in the June night air, and looked at him with that expression again. The tender one. The one that bypassed every defense he’d built and landed in a place he’d walled shut twelve years ago.

“Thank you for coming.”

“Thank you for the invitation.”

“My dad is going to talk about you for weeks. You realize that.”

“He has a remarkable collection. The Fantastic Four alone⁠—”

“Rune.” She stepped closer. The stoop put her two inches higher than usual, closing the gap between them. Her scent cut through the June air—her signature candle and the lingering heat of her family’s kitchen. “Thank you for being kind to my dad. About the collection. He’s been hiding it for years and you treated it like it mattered.”

“It does matter. The provenance is⁠—”

“Not the provenance.” One step closer. Her hand came up, and for a moment, he thought she was going to touch his chest, his arm, his face. Instead, she straightened his tie. A small, domestic gesture. Her fingers brushed the fabric at his collar, and his hair lifted and his lion surged forward and every nerve in his body narrowed to the half-inch of air between her fingertips and his throat.

“The person.” She smoothed the tie. Released it. Stepped back. “Goodnight, Your Majesty.”

She disappeared into the brownstone. The door closed.

Rune stood on the stoop on a Sugar Hill street in June with his tie straightened and his hair disobeying and his lion roaring an opinion he could no longer pretend to disregard.

His phone vibrated. A text from Dekel, who was on security detail in the car at the curb: You’ve been standing on that stoop for ninety seconds. Get in the car or I’m texting your sister.

He got in the car.

Dekel didn’t say a word for the entire drive downtown. He didn’t need to. His grin said everything.

SEVENTEEN

RUNE

Night six.

The back office at Sterling & Mane had acquired a second personality. Before closing, it belonged to the store—authentication equipment under examination lights, seller records in orderly stacks, the quiet hum of climate control maintaining sixty-eight degrees for the preservation of inventory worth more than most Manhattan apartments. After closing, it belonged to whoever was still sitting at the counter with cold takeout and a laptop and the stubborn conviction that the next cross-reference would crack the pattern.

Tonight, both of them.

Rune sat at his workstation with three weeks of distribution data on his screen and the particular silence of SoHo after closing—no foot traffic, no tourists, no playlist thumping through the shared wall. The service door between the stores stood open. It had stayed open for four days straight now, the latch propped with a doorstop that Breezy had produced from somewhere and wedged into place with the efficiency of someone resolving a logistical friction point. Neither Rune nor Lark had discussed the doorstop’s arrival. It appeared. They walked through the open door. The conversation seemed unnecessary.

From her workstation—the one he’d set up adjacent to his in the first week of the investigation, the one that had acquired her phone charger, a pen cup with Villainette branding, and a growing stack of notes in her handwriting—Lark was cross-referencing his seller data against her buyer network’s flagged acquisitions. She’d kicked off her shoes twenty minutes ago. Her feet were tucked under her on the stool, her hair pulled up in a twist held by a single pen, and her focus was absolute. She read data the way she read rooms: fast, instinctive, pattern-seeking.

He’d learned this about her over six nights of late sessions. She didn’t analyze in linear sequences. She scattered data across surfaces—printed pages, sticky notes, her phone propped against the reference binder—and then sat back and stared at the constellation until the shape emerged. It was the opposite of his approach. He worked methodically, edition by edition, timestamp by timestamp. She worked like a hawk circling a field, waiting for movement.

It drove him insane. It was also, grudgingly, devastatingly effective.

On the counter between their stations: two takeout containers from the Thai place on Spring Street. Her contribution tonight. Sybil’s recommendation, apparently—Sybil, who had a mental catalog of every restaurant in a twelve-block radius sorted by cuisine, quality, and “post-crisis comfort rating,” which was a metric Rune hadn’t known existed until Lark quoted it on night three while unpacking dumplings.

The containers sat next to a coffee cup—his contribution from this morning. Oat milk. One sugar. He’d picked it up from the corner barista at six-forty-five, alongside his black drip, and set it on her counter at Villainette before she arrived for the day. He hadn’t announced this. She hadn’t thanked him. The cup appeared. She drank it. On morning two, she’d glanced at it, glanced at the shared wall, and said nothing. On morning three, she’d texted him a single emoji: a crown. He’d stared at it for four minutes, trying to determine if this was mockery or gratitude and had settled on both.

Six mornings of her coffee order. You memorized her coffee order the first time she told you, and you have carried it from the corner every morning since, and you have filed this under “operational efficiency” because filing it anywhere else would require confronting the fact that you are courting a woman with oat milk.

“Rune.”

He blinked. She was watching him over the top of her laptop, pen between her teeth, one eyebrow lifted.