Page 47 of Mane Rival in Store

Breezy: I’m adding “autonomous hair event” to the growing incident log. This is denial at a clinical level.

Lark put the phone down. Started the car. The engine hummed.

She pressed her palm flat against her own thigh, where the warmth of his hair still lingered on her skin.

A condition.

She drove home through empty SoHo streets, and the word Lark—the way he’d said it, low, raw, like it cost him—played on repeat in her chest.

Through the wall of the building behind her, a light was still on. And somewhere in the back office of a rare comics store, a man sat alone at a counter that smelled like her candle and her perfume, and his hair was still refusing to lie flat, and he was not reading the screen in front of him.

He was listening to her playlist, and the door between them was still open.

NINETEEN

LARK

The warehouse in Red Hook smelled like fog machine fluid and bad decisions, and Lark loved it immediately.

She’d been coming to Midnight Villain since its second event three years ago—a Brooklyn institution born from a cosplayer’s loft party that outgrew the loft, then the bar, then the community space, and now filled a converted warehouse off Van Brunt Street four times a year with six hundred people in villain costumes, three DJs rotating on a raised platform, and themed cocktail bars built into immersive set pieces. An energy vibrated through the floorboards like a living pulse.

Tonight’s theme was Rogues’ Gallery. The warehouse had been transformed: a Gotham City alley installation along the south wall, a Hydra command center bar in the northeast corner, a Magneto-inspired magnetic sculpture garden near the stage, and—her personal favorite—a villain walk-off runway through the center of the floor with actual judges and a rotating spotlight. The lighting was low, purple, shifting. The bass from the DJ platform hit her sternum. Someone in a flawless Mystique bodysuit crossed her path and she caught herself reaching for her phone to take a photo before remembering she had a guest.

A guest who was standing six feet behind her in a charcoal suit and no costume, scanning the warehouse with the expression of a man who had taken a wrong turn into a dimension governed by different physical laws.

“Breathe, Your Majesty.”

Rune’s gaze tracked from the Magneto garden to the Gotham alley to a seven-foot Bane in full latex emerging from the fog near the bar. A muscle in his neck tightened. “You said this was an industry event.”

“It is an industry event. The industry is villainy.”

“There are six hundred people in costumes.”

“Approximately.”

“I am not in a costume.”

“You’re in a three-thousand-dollar suit at an underground costume party in Red Hook at midnight on a Saturday. That IS a costume. You’re going as ‘menacing European billionaire.’” She patted his arm. The bicep beneath the charcoal wool registered against her palm and she removed her hand before the registration expanded into a full sensory audit. “Come on. You survived my mother’s cross-examination. You can survive a Rogues’ Gallery.”

You invited him to your favorite event because you wanted to see him in your world the way he showed you his in the vault. That’s a date, Lark. That is a date and you organized it and you’re wearing the leather pants.

The leather pants were relevant. She’d spent forty minutes on the outfit: black leather pants, a silk camisole under a cropped jacket with silver hardware, heeled boots that put her closer to his chin than usual, and earrings—long, articulated silver daggers that caught the purple light and threw it back in fractured lines. Her hair was blown out straight tonight, sleek and swinging, because this was a performance and she dressed for war. Breezy had taken one look at the outfit when she’d swung by the loft for pre-event logistics and said, without inflection: “Those are date pants.”

“They’re event pants.”

“They’re the pants you wore to the Costume Institute Gala when you were trying to get the buyer from Barneys to stock Villainette. They are objective-specific pants. What is tonight’s objective?”

Lark had not answered, which was itself an answer, and Breezy had noted it in her phone with the quiet efficiency of a woman updating a dossier.

The warehouse swallowed them. She led Rune through the crowd, and the contrast between him and the room sharpened with every step. Cosplayers in elaborate builds, face paint, prosthetics, wigs—and then Rune, tall, golden, immaculate, moving through the chaos like a marble column in a hurricane. He didn’t belong here. He was also, infuriatingly, the most striking person in the building, because the severity of the suit against the color and madness of the event made him look like a villain who’d arrived without the courtesy of a costume.

He drew eyes the way a first edition drew collectors.

“You have fans,” Lark told him.

“I have a headache.” But his eyes were moving—not with discomfort anymore but with the systematic cataloging she’d learned to recognize. He was reading the room the way he read a display case, assessing the craft, the construction, the artistry. She watched his gaze snag on a Poison Ivy build near the Gotham installation—hand-sewn vines, real flowers woven through the bodysuit, a headdress that must have taken weeks.

“That’s a two-hundred-hour build,” she said. “Minimum. The vine work alone⁠—”