Page 30 of Mane Rival in Store by Milly Taiden

“Fine. Seven.” She gathered her notepad. Stood. The stool scraped the floor, and the sound broke a tension she hadn’t realized had been building. “Good coffee, though. Not that battery acid from the corner cart.”

“I’ll make an effort.”

“Scandinavian effort? Or actual effort?”

“There’s a difference?”

“Scandinavian effort involves an expensive machine and zero conversation. Actual effort involves asking how I take it.”

He turned to the monitor. “How do you take it?”

“Oat milk. One sugar. The barista on the corner will judge you, but she judges everyone. It builds character.” She paused in the service doorway. “Goodnight, Your Majesty.”

She pulled the door closed behind her. Did not lock it.

In Villainette’s back office, she pressed her shoulders against the wall and stared at the ceiling. Rune’s voice carried through the plaster—low, commanding, directing Dekel through the next phase of the investigation. She could feel it in her spine.

Her phone glowed.

Breezy: I’ve added the joint investigation to your calendar. Seven AM daily. I’ve labeled it ‘Market Analysis.’ You’re welcome.

Lark: I didn’t ask you to schedule anything.

Breezy: And yet. Dekel has confirmed from his end. He’s labeled it ‘Authentication Review.’ We are both aware the labels are fictional.

Sybil: So you’re seeing him every morning? At seven? In his office? With coffee he’s making for you?

Lark: IT IS A FORGERY INVESTIGATION.

Breezy: I’ve blocked 7:15 for ‘denial management.’ Fifteen-minute window. Should be sufficient.

Sybil: Make it thirty.

Lark closed her eyes. Pressed her head against the wall. On the other side, the steady rhythm of Rune’s voice continued—a low current she could feel in her teeth.

Tomorrow at seven. That deliberate gap between them. His hands on the keyboard, his voice doing things to the air that the air did not deserve.

TWELVE

RUNE

The cab uptown took twenty-six minutes, and Rune spent every one of them reconsidering.

Beside him, Lark scrolled through her phone with her knees angled toward the window and her hair swinging against her jaw every time the driver took a corner. She’d dressed for the field today—dark jeans, leather jacket, boots with a heel that added two inches. Bold lip. A villain-branded tote bag slung over one arm that contained, as far as he could tell, her notepad, two backup phone chargers, and a tube of the lipstick she’d been testing from the new Villainette line.

She looked like she was heading to a gallery opening, not an underground lab.

Stop cataloging.

He turned to the window. The Upper East Side scrolled past in limestone and shade trees—a quieter Manhattan than SoHo, old money architecture holding its breath against the June afternoon. The cab had been his idea. So had the destination. A private collector on East 73rd—Magnus Holt, Norwegian-American, seventy-one, reclusive, paranoid about security, and the owner of one of the three finest private comics collections in the Western Hemisphere.

Magnus dealt exclusively with Rune. Had for nine years, ever since Rune authenticated a 1938 Action Comics #1 that two other experts had dismissed as a reproduction. The edition turned out to be genuine. Magnus had never trusted anyone else.

Two days ago, Magnus had called. An acquisition from six months back—a 1941 Captain America #1—had triggered a concern during his annual inventory review. The paper weight seemed off. The binding adhesive smelled wrong. Magnus had forty years of handling original stock, and his fingers disagreed with the documentation.

Rune needed to see it. He needed to authenticate it with his own hands and his own equipment, because if Magnus Holt’s vault contained a forgery, the counterfeiting operation was larger, older, and more ambitious than the SoHo pipeline suggested.

He had not needed to bring Lark.