Page 65 of Mane Rival in Store

She shrugged off her jacket. Held it out to him.

He took it. The jacket was a size small. Lark was five-six. Rune was six-three. The jacket covered approximately one shoulder and dangled across his torso like a washcloth on a refrigerator. It concealed nothing. It arguably drew more attention to the nothing it failed to conceal.

“This doesn’t fit.”

“I’m aware. It’s all I have.”

He pulled the jacket across his shoulders with a dignity that was admirable given the circumstances, which were: naked, bleeding, surrounded by the remains of a two-thousand-dollar suit, on a cracked sidewalk, with a tourist recording from across the street.

“I knew.” Her voice was thin. “I knew what you were. I had dinner with your family. Yara talked about Pride succession.” She exhaled. “Knowing and—” she gestured at the cracked flagstone, the scattered suit, the golden mane still lifting at his shoulders, “seeing are not the same thing.”

“No.”

“Your mane is bigger than I expected.”

He closed his eyes. Opened them. The same blue—human now, but catching the light at an angle that wasn’t entirely natural. She’d seen that flicker before. She’d blamed the fluorescents because the other option was inhuman visual phenomenon and she hadn’t been ready for that category.

“We are not discussing my mane.”

“We are absolutely discussing your mane. That thing has its own zip code. It has square footage. You could rent it out as a studio apartment in this market.”

Her voice was climbing. She could hear it—the pitch rising, the jokes accelerating, the comedy engine redlining because the alternative was processing the fact that the man she’d been kissing and then not-kissing and then walking to her car with in loaded silence had turned into a lion and fought another lion on a public street and was now standing naked in front of her with a jacket the size of a cocktail napkin and blood on his shoulder and those eyes, those same eyes, and her ribs were tight and her hands were shaking and her filing system was running out of columns.

She was shaking. He saw it. He always saw it—the real thing beneath the performance, the tremor under the jokes, the way she built walls out of humor, the way he built them out of control.

He closed the distance. Two steps. Her jacket slipped off his shoulder and neither of them reached for it. His arms came around her—careful, because the claw rake was bleeding and because she might pull away, she’d been pulling away for six days, the door between them had been a wall—and she didn’t pull away. She pressed her face into his bare chest and her hands fisted against his sides and the shaking traveled from her body into his and he held her on the broken flagstone with the car alarm still screaming and the tourist still recording and his hair refusing to lie flat and the blood drying on his shoulder.

She was crying. She was laughing. Both. The sounds vibrated against his ribs interchangeably, the gasping exhale that could be either or both, and she let him hold her because the world had rearranged itself and he was the only fixed point in it and the fact that the fixed point had recently been a six-hundred-pound cat was a problem she would address later.

“Kasper Eld.” His voice rumbled through his chest and into her cheek. “Former member of the Sterling Pride. I expelled him twelve years ago after he challenged my authority when my father retired. He’s been gone ever since.”

“And now he’s back.”

“He’s working for someone. Someone with resources and a reason to threaten me through—” He stopped. Restarted. “Through the people near me.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

LARK

She pulled back. Looked up at him. The streetlight caught her face—the tear tracks, the smudged lipstick, the hazel eyes that were doing the thing they did when she was processing at high speed: green and amber in rapid alternation, like a traffic signal trying to decide.

“He’s working for Fallon.”

Not a question.

“I believe so.”

“So my ex-boyfriend hired your ex-pride member to intimidate me.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand. “This is the most dramatic breakup sequel in history. This needs a subtitle. Fallon Creed 2: The Grudge Match. Starring a lion.”

“Lark.”

She stopped. Pressed her hands to her face. She’d been to the den. She’d sat at the council table. She’d known. “I attended a Pride event in an emerald dress eating lamb and I still was not remotely prepared for this.”

“You were magnificent.” The words came out raw, unfiltered, stripped of every layer of composure he’d ever constructed. “You walked into my Pride and you were magnificent and Yara gave you the single tap and my mother chose the Burgundy and none of it—none of it changes. I will not use my resources against you. I will use them with you. Now the resources include—” he gestured at himself. Naked. Bleeding. Standing on broken stone with her jacket at his feet, “—this.”

She stared at him. The shaking had subsided. The tears had dried. Her brain was catching up to her mouth and the processing was happening in real time—every tell she’d collected over seven weeks being recategorized, relabeled, refiled. The hair. The growl. The stillness before movement. The eyes catching light. Not a condition. Not a quirk. A species.

“Your mane really is ridiculous, by the way.”