Page 8 of Mane Rival in Store

He stared at her. She held the stare. The playlist cycled to a new track—slower, darker, a woman’s voice layered over a synth line that vibrated through the floor.

“Enjoy your opening, Ms. Coleman.” He turned on his heel—a crisp, military pivot that had no business being as graceful as it was—and walked out.

The brass bell chimed behind him.

Lark moved to the glass gap and watched him step next door into his own entrance. Through the sliver of shared visibility, she could see him pick up his white cotton gloves. Resume arranging editions in the display case. As though the last three minutes hadn’t happened.

“I take it back,” Sybil said from the glass gap, her view straight into Sterling & Mane. She had her phone out. She had recorded at least part of the exchange. Lark was going to kill her. “He’s not pretty. He’s devastating.”

“He’s my neighbor and a noise complaint.” Lark picked up a stack of Morally Gray lipsticks and started restocking with crisp, precise motions. “That’s all.”

“You called him Your Majesty.” Breezy’s voice was flat. Clinical. The voice of a woman adding a line item to a spreadsheet she’d label later. “Within ninety seconds of meeting him.”

“It’s not a nickname. It’s an observation.”

“Observations don’t come with that smile.” Breezy glanced up from her tablet. Her green eyes were calm, assessing, utterly without mercy. “You used the smile.”

“I use the smile on everyone.”

“You use the customer smile on everyone. You used the other smile. The one that gets you in trouble.”

Lark opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “We open in three hours. Sound check. Now. And turn it up.”

Breezy’s mouth twitched. “Copy that.”

The bass thumped louder through the wall.

THREE

RUNE

His hands were tingling.

Rune stood behind the counter of Sterling & Mane SoHo, white gloves back on, a 1963 first-print X-Men positioned under the display case light at the precise angle that showcased the cover art’s color depth, and his hands were tingling in a way that had nothing to do with preservation chemicals and everything to do with the woman next door.

Moderate the audio. He’d said that. Out loud. To a woman whose hand had sent an electric current through his entire nervous system. He’d stood in a store full of purple neon and villain-themed lipstick and said “moderate the audio” like a building superintendent filing a formal grievance.

Spectrographic analysis requires⁠—

He closed his eyes. Opened them. Adjusted the X-Men by one millimeter to the left.

His hair was doing a thing.

He could sense it—the follicles along his scalp lifting, the thick fall across his forehead refusing to lie flat. The lion stirred behind his ribs, a low, restless heat that paced through his bloodstream and settled in his fingertips and the back of his neck. His lion had noticed her before his brain had formed a coherent assessment. The moment he’d stepped through the door of that violet-lit chaos factory, the lion had surged forward with a gravitational intensity that Rune had spent the entire ninety-second interaction suppressing.

He moved to the next display case. A graded Action Comics #252—first appearance of Supergirl, near-mint, one of only three in private hands on the East Coast. He opened the case with gloved care. Adjusted the edition’s positioning. Closed the case.

Moved to the next case.

“You’ve already done that one.”

Dekel leaned against the back counter with his arms crossed, sandy-blond hair shaggy and sun-bleached, pale green eyes bright with undisguised delight. He wore a linen shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows and an expression that communicated, with great clarity, that this was the most entertaining morning he’d had in months.

“The light angle was wrong.”

“The light angle was perfect. You set it at six this morning. You rechecked it at seven. You confirmed it at eight.” Dekel pushed off the counter and strolled to the display case with the unhurried gait—he’d been Rune’s second-in-command for twelve years and feared nothing in the known universe, including his alpha’s displeasure. “You’re stress-curating.”

“I’m maintaining standards.”