Page 62 of Mane Rival in Store

Aspen: Does she need a lawyer? I know people. Fashion lawyers. They’re vicious.

Aspen: Wait. She’s not speaking to you? Why isn’t she speaking to YOU?

He didn’t answer that one. Couldn’t find words in any of his three languages that would make the explanation sound like anything other than what it was: the woman he was falling in love with had looked at him and seen the shape of the man who’d hurt her, because the shape was the same—wealthy, powerful, woven into her business—even if the man inside it was different.

Dekel took his phone gently. Set it facedown on the crate. “Enough screens. Finish the beer.”

At four o’clock, one final notification.

Breezy: She’s going to need help. Not today. When she’s ready, she’ll come to you. Don’t push.

He picked up the phone. Typed carefully, each word a restraint exercise.

Rune: I’ll be here.

Breezy: I know. That’s why I’m telling you.

He set the phone down. Picked up the beer. Drank the last of it.

Across the wall, one wall and one locked latch away, Lark sat with a concert poster and an eviction notice side by side—the gift and the threat, two men with money and access, six inches apart—and her hand on a phone she wouldn’t let herself pick up.

The wall stayed closed.

The afternoon light shifted. The summer heat pressed against the storefront glass. And the Lion King of Scandinavia sat in his stockroom on a packing crate with an empty beer and a still phone and his hair finally, slowly, beginning to settle, and did not make the calls.

TWENTY-SIX

RUNE

Six days.

It had taken six days for the door to reopen.

Not because he’d pushed. He hadn’t. He’d sat on his side of the wall and done what Dekel told him to do: held still, held back, held the three phone calls in his throat like swallowed wire and waited. Six days of silence from the woman whose laugh used to come through the plaster at midnight while she cross-referenced distribution data. Six days of something caged and feral pressing against his ribs with the focused misery of an animal pacing a fence line.

On day four, Breezy had texted Dekel. On day five, Dekel had texted Breezy. On day six, a message appeared on Rune’s phone—Lark’s voice, not her humor, stripped to its functional core:

The forgery trail has a new lead. My Portland buyer flagged two more editions. We need to compare notes.

Professional. Necessary. An opening made for business, not for him.

He’d take it.

They’d resumed the investigation. Late nights in the back office, the service door propped open with a reference binder, the candle relit because she’d left it on his counter and neither of them mentioned moving it. The work was the same. Everything else had shifted. She sat farther from him now. An extra foot of counter space that hadn’t existed before, charged with the voltage of the things she wasn’t saying and the things he wasn’t asking. She called him Rune—not “Your Majesty,” not the nickname that had evolved from mockery to affection across seven weeks. Just Rune. His own name had never sounded so careful.

But she let him walk her to her car.

Every night, when the data blurred and the coffee went cold and one of them finally broke the professional trance by stretching or yawning or checking a phone, they packed up. He locked the store. She locked hers. And he walked her to the corner where she’d parked, three blocks south on Greene. SoHo streets were empty at ten and his lion would not permit her to walk alone. She permitted the company with a silence that was half tolerance and half—he hoped, with the desperate optimism of a man fluent in three languages and illiterate in the one that mattered—gratitude.

Tonight, the walk felt wrong.

He’d been agitated since five o’clock. His lion pacing in tight circles, hackles up, attention snagged on a scent thread he couldn’t identify. Male. Lion. No pride markers—no trace of the communal musk that identified a lion as belonging, as held, as claimed by a group. An unmarked lion in Sterling territory was unusual. An unmarked lion in Sterling territory that smelled familiar was a category of problem he hadn’t considered in years.

The summer night was thick and still, the heat radiating off the cobblestones in waves that blurred the storefronts. Lark walked beside him with her bag over her shoulder and her phone in her hand and a foot and a half of deliberate space between them. She hadn’t spoken since they’d left the store.

Tell her.

Tell her there’s a scent on the air that makes your lion want to shove her behind the nearest wall and stand between her and whatever is out there.