Page 45 of Mane Rival in Store

She filed that. Added it to the mental catalogue she’d been keeping: every tell, every micro-reaction, organized by what triggered them and how badly each one wrecked her. The catalogue was growing daily. She chose not to examine what that meant.

“I’ll have Breezy run the financial modeling tomorrow.” She pulled her laptop back. “If we can establish the capital outlay required for this production volume, we narrow the suspect pool. This isn’t a lone forger with a grudge. This is an investor.”

He nodded. One sharp dip of the chin. His hand moved to the reference binder on the high shelf—the one he’d relocated without explanation, which she’d noticed because she noticed everything he rearranged, which was a problem for a different night—and pulled down the binding analysis reference.

“The paper sourcing could narrow it further. The stock used in all fourteen confirmed forgeries originates from the same supplier. If we identify the supplier⁠—”

“We identify the buyer.” She reached past him for the secondary reference—the one wedged between a price guide and the equipment manual on the shelf behind his workstation.

Her arm crossed his space. Her wrist moved through the close air between his shoulder and his jaw. Her fingers found the spine of the binder.

And her hand, the outside edge of her palm, brushed his hair.

She didn’t mean to. The shelf was behind him, and the binder was at the back. The geometry of reaching required crossing the territory of his head, and she was already mid-reach when her skin made contact with the thick golden strands above his ear.

He stopped.

Not paused. Not hesitated. Stopped. Every molecule in his body halted mid-function. His hand froze on the counter. His breath suspended. His shoulders locked into a stillness so total, it crossed the line from human restraint into something older, something with claws and territory instincts and the absolute zero of a predator holding itself motionless while its entire nervous system rewired.

And his hair moved.

Not in a breeze. Not from the brush of her hand. After the brush of her hand. The strands she’d touched rose— outward, like iron filings responding to a magnet, standing on end in a slow, visible wave that spread from the point of contact across his temple and into the thick golden fall above his forehead.

She stared.

His jaw locked. A tendon flickered in his neck. He stared at his screen with the focused intensity of someone attempting to teleport through sheer will.

“Did your hair⁠—”

“No.”

“It definitely⁠—”

“It did not.”

“Rune, your hair is standing up.”

The strands above his forehead were vertical. Not wind-tousled. Not static. Standing. As if the follicles had received a directive from a part of his brain that predated language and elected to display it in the most conspicuous way possible.

“I have a condition.”

She blinked. The binder hung forgotten in her hand. “A condition.”

“Drop it.”

“Does your condition have a name?”

The silence that followed was three seconds long and contained an entire geological era of internal processing. His teeth stayed clenched. His hair remained upright. His eyes did not move from the screen.

“Lark.”

He said it like the answer. Like the name itself was the diagnosis—the clinical term for whatever physiological event she’d triggered by brushing his hair with the heel of her hand.

Two interpretations arrived simultaneously. One: he was telling her to stop. Her name as a period at the end of a sentence. Drop it, Lark.

Two: he was telling her the truth.

She sat back on her stool. The binder landed on the counter with a soft thud. His hair was settling—slowly, reluctantly, the strands lowering by degrees like a flag at half-mast, still agitated, still broadcasting a signal she didn’t have the frequency to decode.