Page 44 of Mane Rival in Store

Dekel: You’re doing the face.

Rune did not respond to this because he was not doing a face. He was reviewing distribution data with a colleague during a professional investigation.

Dekel: You’re doing the face right now. I can sense it from the East Village.

He silenced the phone.

EIGHTEEN

LARK

She saw it just before midnight on a Tuesday, and the clarity hit like a cold glass of water.

The pricing.

She’d been staring at it for three nights without the pattern resolving—the sale prices from the pop-up shops, scattered across Breezy’s tracker spreadsheet like confetti. No two editions at the same figure. No obvious formula. Breezy had run a statistical analysis looking for clustering, for algorithmic pricing, for any mechanical pattern, and came up empty.

But Lark wasn’t looking at the prices in isolation. She was looking at them against the market.

She pulled up Sterling & Mane’s public price list—the authenticated editions that Rune’s stores sold at verified grade pricing. Then she overlaid the pop-up data.

There. Every single forgery priced twelve to fifteen percent below the Sterling & Mane equivalent.

Not random. Not profit-maximizing. Strategic.

A forger working alone would price for maximum return. A skilled counterfeiter with particular abilities could command near-market rates—the forgeries were that good. There was no financial reason to undercut by fifteen percent unless the goal wasn’t profit. Unless the goal was damage.

“Rune.”

He looked up from his screen. The light caught the angles of his face and she ignored that because she’d been ignoring it for six nights and she was very good at ignoring things that made her stomach flip.

“Look at this.” She turned her laptop toward him and waited for his brain to do what it did—the methodical, line-by-line intake that turned raw data into architectural understanding.

He scanned the overlay. His eyes moved left to right, top to bottom. His fingers stilled on his keyboard.

“They’re pricing against our catalog.”

“Every edition. Twelve to fifteen percent under your verified rate. Consistent margin.” She let that land. “A forger pricing for profit goes as high as the market will bear. A forger pricing to undercut a specific competitor is working for someone else.”

The back office went quiet. The candle flame on the counter wavered in the draft from the air system. His playlist—her playlist, the one she’d given him on a USB drive and he’d been playing every night since without comment—cycled to a low, pulsing track that filled the silence between them with rhythm.

“A weapon.” His voice was different. Lower. Tighter. The boardroom voice stripped of its polish, running on raw processing power. “Someone is using the forgeries as a delivery system.”

“To damage Sterling & Mane’s market position. Flood the secondary channels with near-perfect counterfeits at below-market prices, and suddenly your verified editions look overpriced. Buyers start questioning why they’re paying a premium when the ‘same’ edition is available for less at a pop-up in Bushwick.” She pulled up the timeline. “The pricing isn’t about making money on the forgeries. It’s about making your authenticated stock harder to sell.”

He stared at the data. She watched the recognition move through him—not a single moment of shock, but a slow, grinding recalibration as the scope of the threat shifted from criminal nuisance to corporate sabotage.

“Just like we originally guessed; this requires capital.” Each word measured.

“So, who understands market disruption? Who has enough money to fund a counterfeiting operation without needing the profits? Who benefits from Sterling & Mane losing credibility?”

The silence stretched. His gaze stayed on the screen but she could see the wheels turning—the tactical mind behind the regal bearing, running scenarios, mapping threats, calculating vectors of attack.

“This isn’t about comics,” he said. “This is about the business.”

“This is about you.”

Their eyes met. The overhead hummed. The candle flame held steady. She watched him absorb the personal dimension—the realization that someone had invested significant resources not in a forgery scheme but in a targeted assault on his empire—and she saw the moment it landed. Not as fear. As fury. Quiet, controlled, Scandinavian fury that manifested as absolute stillness and eyes that caught the light at an angle that wasn’t entirely human.