Page 24 of Mane Rival in Store by Milly Taiden

“It’s deeply weird is what it is. But it’s their thing.” She twirled a noodle. “He doesn’t know I know. Or he does know, and we’re all pretending, which is basically the Coleman family operating system.”

He laughed—the version Dekel had texted Aspen about, and here it was again, drawn out of him by a woman sitting cross-legged on a retail floor in the purple dark, telling him about her father’s secret Marvel addiction.

She watched him laugh with close attention, her expression carrying the specific focus of a woman cataloging a rare find.

“You should do that more,” she said.

“Eat pad thai?”

“Laugh. It changes your whole face. The royal court dissolves. You look like a person instead of a portrait.”

He held her gaze. The neon above them shifted through its programmed cycle—purple to deep violet to a warm amber that caught the gold of his hair and the hazel of her eyes and the narrow space between them that had been three feet when they sat down and was less than that now, though neither of them had consciously moved.

“Your curls,” he said. And stopped. The observation had begun without a destination and now sat exposed between them like a card played too early.

“My curls?” Her voice dropped half a register.

“They’re—” He reached for an adjective. The lion offered several. None were appropriate. “Different. From the workday.”

“I wear it straight for the store. The curls are me when I’m not performing.” She tucked a spiral behind her ear. The gesture exposed the line of her neck, and his vision sharpened—the lion’s focus, predatory and precise—tracking the movement with an attention that he pulled back from with physical effort. “Do you have a preference, Your Majesty?”

Both. Either. Every version of you, in every light, for as long as you’ll let me look.

“I don’t have a preference,” he said. “Your hair is—” He stopped again. Adjusted his cuffs. A tell she’d clocked already. He was sure of it. “Your hair is your concern. Not mine.”

“That’s the worst compliment anyone has ever not given me.” She smiled. The full one. The weapon. “I’m keeping it.”

He exhaled a sound that, in a less controlled man, might have been a laugh, and in Rune Sterling was the closest he’d come to emotional surrender in the presence of another human being in years.

The neon cycled. The pad thai grew cold. The two stores sat side by side in the SoHo dark, one wall and one unlocked door between them, and neither of them moved to leave.

He returned to Sterling & Mane at ten fifteen, through the service door she didn’t lock behind him, and found the message waiting on his desk.

An email from the authentication department. Flagged urgent.

A customer had returned a graded edition to the SoHo flagship that morning. A 1968 Silver Surfer #1, purchased through the third-party consignment network six weeks ago, presented with full documentation and a CGC grade of 7.0. A strong edition. Valuable. But not the kind of seven-figure acquisition that triggered full lab analysis at intake.

Consignment editions moved through the network in volume—pre-graded by CGC, visually verified against the grade by the receiving store, logged into inventory. The CGC grade was the safeguard. The provenance chain was the backup. For an edition at this tier, visual verification was standard procedure. Both had been flawless.

The customer had taken the edition to an independent appraiser for insurance purposes. The appraiser—a former restoration specialist with three decades of handling original stock—had noticed an irregularity in the binding. Not visible. Tactile. The kind of detail only fingers that had spent a career on period-accurate paper would catch. She’d flagged the anomaly. The customer had demanded a full review.

Rune pulled the edition from the returns safe. Carried it to the authentication lab in the back office. Placed it under the analyzer—the equipment that had been calibrated to detect printing variations invisible to the human eye, the same equipment he’d cited to Lark as being sensitive to vibration, which had been true and also a transparent excuse to stand in her store.

The results loaded in ninety seconds.

Paper composition: inconsistent with 1968 printing stock. Chemical signature: modern binding agents present in trace amounts beneath the aging treatment. Ink density: .03 percent deviation from established baseline for the Marvel printing facility used in that era.

A forgery.

A very, very good forgery. The kind that passed visual inspection, passed provenance review, carried documentation convincing enough to fool a CGC grader, and would have lived undetected in a collector’s vault for years if not for an independent appraiser with better equipment than standard.

Rune set down the report. Stared at the edition under the lab light. The forgery was exquisite—the paper aging was masterful, the ink reproduction was nearly flawless, and whoever had created the documentation had an intimate knowledge of the verification chain.

One forgery was a mistake. A bad acquisition, a missed flag, a breakdown in the vetting process. One forgery could be explained, corrected, absorbed.

If there were more, it would be a crisis.

His phone sat on the desk beside the report. Through the wall—through the unlocked service door and the plaster and the narrow gap where glass met glass—he heard music. Faint, now. The closing playlist. The last sounds of Villainette settling into its nightly quiet.