Page 59 of Mane Rival in Store

“Lark.”

“Not yet, Breezy.”

Breezy looked at her. Read the full text of what “not yet” meant—the fear, the recognition, the wall going up. Breezy had been there for the first time. She’d found the new location. Renegotiated the terms. Held Lark’s hair back while she threw up from stress in a Tribeca bathroom and then handed her a mint and drove her to the next meeting.

“Twenty-four hours. Then I’m saying the thing.”

“Noted.”

“Logged. Timestamped.” Breezy left.

Lark sat in her office with the Sade poster and the eviction notice in the same drawer and her hand on a phone she wouldn’t let herself pick up.

The group chat buzzed again.

Oliver: soufflé pancakes acquired. They’re tall. Like, structurally ambitious. Should we bring you one? We can drop it off at the store.

Sybil: We’re not dropping off pancakes. She said she’s busy.

Oliver: She said “work stuff” which in Lark-speak means she’s processing an emotion she hasn’t named yet. We’re bringing a pancake.

Lark: I’m fine. Eat the pancakes. Don’t bring anything to the store.

Oliver: Too late. Already in the car. Sybil is carrying the pancake. I’m carrying emotional support.

She almost laughed. Almost. The text hovered at the edges of her composure, chipping at the ice she was building between herself and the rest of her life. Her brother was a menace. Her brother was exactly what she needed and the last thing she could handle, because Oliver was perceptive in the way their mother had trained him to be—he’d see her face and he’d know, and then he’d want to drive to the Financial District and do permanent damage to Fallon Creed’s dental work, and she loved him for it and she could not let it happen.

Lark: DO NOT come to the store. I mean it. I have meetings until three.

Oliver: Fine. But I’m on record as available for pancakes and violence.

She closed the chat. Put her phone in the drawer. Closed the drawer.

The afternoon stretched ahead of her, long and sharp.

TWENTY-FIVE

RUNE

The service door was closed.

He noticed when he walked to the back of his store to check on a consignment delivery and found the latch engaged. He tested the handle. Locked from her side.

Three weeks of it standing open. Her music drifting through, her laugh carrying over the threshold, the fig-and-rose of her candle reaching his counter. Three weeks of a boundary dissolving by degrees—accident, then habit, then intention. And now the latch was closed and the wall between them was a wall again.

He called her at 11:45. Voicemail. Her recorded greeting—bright, professional, the undertone of humor that lived in everything she said—played into his ear and he hung up without leaving a message because the silence on the other end was a language he didn’t know how to translate.

He texted at one. Is everything all right?

Read receipt at 1:04. No response. She’d seen it. She’d chosen silence.

His lion paced. Not the lazy patrol of the past weeks—the agitated, circling prowl of an animal that sensed a threat it couldn’t locate. His hair was restless—the strands at his temples kept lifting and resettling, a cycle he couldn’t suppress.

He found Dekel in the stockroom, running inventory with a scanner and a coffee and the posture of a man who lived in a world where doors stayed open and lions didn’t circle their own stores like zoo animals.

“The service door is closed.”

Dekel looked up. Read his face. Set down the scanner.