Page 67 of Mane Rival in Store

She noticed. Filed it under the new system. And didn’t say a word.

The SUV turned north toward the Upper East Side, carrying a bleeding alpha, a shaking heroine, and a single Tom Ford sleeve in a handbag, and the city swallowed the cracked sidewalk and the scattered suit and the memory of a roar that had rattled every window on the block.

In the front seat, Dekel texted Breezy.

Dekel: Your boss has seen the lion. She made four mane jokes in three minutes. She’s handling it.

Breezy: Adding ‘lion reveal, SoHo sidewalk, four mane jokes, one destroyed suit’ to the log. Requesting hazard pay, retroactive.

Dekel: Welcome to my world.

TWENTY-NINE

RUNE

He came to her the next evening with ten pages of evidence.

Not money. Not lawyers. Not the three phone calls that had been sitting in his throat for eight days. A manila folder containing financial records that Dekel had spent the previous twenty-six hours assembling from public filings, corporate registries, and a forensic accountant in Oslo who owed the Sterling Pride a favor and didn’t ask questions.

The evidence proved a single, devastating thing: Fallon Creed was bankrolling the counterfeiting operation.

The financial trail ran through three shell companies, a payment processor in Delaware, and a consulting fee structure designed to look legitimate from the outside. Creed Capital had been funneling money to Leif Cross’s operation for a year—predating the SoHo building acquisition. The forgeries flooding Sterling & Mane’s consignment network. The building purchase through A.C. Holdings. Kasper Eld’s mercenary contract. Three prongs of the same attack, all originating from the same source, all aimed at the same targets: Rune’s business and Lark’s independence.

He stood outside Villainette with the sun well below the roof lines, a folder in one hand and a speech in the other—a speech he’d written, edited, rehearsed, and was now profoundly uncertain about, because the last time he’d tried to deliver prepared remarks to Lark Coleman he’d been naked and bleeding and wearing her jacket like a doll’s cape.

The store was closed. The purple neon still glowed in the windows, casting violet light across the sidewalk. Through the glass, he could see her at the counter—head bent over a laptop, a coffee at her elbow, Breezy’s voice audible through the speaker phone giving a rapid-fire update on the legal filing.

He knocked on the glass.

She looked up. Their eyes met through the window—hazel and blue, the violet neon between them painting both their faces in color that belonged to neither world.

She didn’t smile. She studied him: the manila envelope, the set of his shoulders, the hair lying deliberately flat (he’d spent ten minutes in the car pressing it down, which Dekel had observed with the resigned patience of a man who understood that his alpha’s romantic life now included a grooming component). Then she crossed to the entrance and unlocked it.

“You brought paperwork.”

“I brought evidence.”

She looked at the pages in his hand. At him. At the pages again. Then stepped aside.

The store smelled like fig and rose.

She led him to the back office. Breezy’s voice continued from the speakerphone: “—the injunction is filed, the judge assigned is Patterson, who has a solid track record on commercial lease disputes. Harrison’s team is reviewing the acquisition deed. We have options, Lark. This is not a replay. We’re ahead of it.”

“Breezy. I have a visitor.”

“The lion?”

Lark looked at Rune. He looked back, his face carefully arranged in what he hoped was a neutral expression and what was, based on the slight twitch at the corner of her mouth, not.

“The lion.”

“I’ll call back in thirty.” The line clicked off.

Lark sat on the edge of her desk. Crossed her arms. The posture was familiar—the same stance she’d held during their first argument about her window display, the same spine-straight readiness she brought to every negotiation. But her eyes were different. The guard was there, the distance of the past week, the walled-off carefulness that had replaced her open study of him. But underneath it—underneath the protective architecture—a question. A willingness to listen that she hadn’t shown since the letter had arrived.

He set the folder on the desk between them. Opened it. Laid out the pages in order—the corporate filings, the payment records, the consulting fee structure.

“Creed Capital has been funding the counterfeiting operation for a year.” He walked her through it. Not performing expertise, not displaying his resources—showing her the work. The hours of tracing. The connections Dekel had found. The pattern that emerged when you laid the financial records side by side. “The same shell structure that acquired the building runs through the same payments processor. It’s one operation. The forgeries damage my authentication reputation. The building acquisition pressures your lease. Kasper provides physical intimidation. Three angles, one architect.”