Page 35 of Mane Rival in Store by Milly Taiden

“Furniture arrangement.”

“My mother can express disapproval by repositioning a vase. It’s an art form. Scandinavian emotional compression at its finest.”

She laughed. He watched her laugh the same way he’d studied the Batman edition—with full attention and steady hands handling the irreplaceable.

FOURTEEN

LARK

They finished dinner. He paid before she could argue, which she protested on principle and accepted with grace because the bill would have required her to pretend she hadn’t noticed the wine was two hundred dollars, and she was a poor liar about expensive Barolo.

Outside, Madison Avenue at night—the Upper East Side’s version of nightlife, which meant well-dressed couples and taxis idling at the curb. The June air hit after the restaurant’s conditioned cool, thick and alive against her bare arms.

“I’ll get a cab.” She turned to him on the sidewalk. The streetlight caught his profile—that jaw, that bone structure, the golden hair pushed back from a forehead he’d stopped guarding over the course of three hours and two glasses of Barolo.

“I’ll arrange a car.” He had his phone out. Of course, he was arranging a car. A cab was for mortals.

“A cab is fine.”

“A car is safer.”

“It’s the Upper East Side. The most dangerous thing on this block is a Pomeranian in a stroller.”

His mouth worked. The edge of it. Fighting. She could see the battle—the instinct to insist, to protect, to deploy resources, crashing against the awareness that she’d told him three days ago that she could handle her own logistics and had meant it.

“Fine.” He pocketed the phone. “A cab.”

A taxi materialized. She opened the door. Paused. Turned back.

“Rune.”

He straightened. His name in her mouth did a visible thing to his posture—a fractional lift, a tightening along the spine.

“The vault was—” She searched for a word that wouldn’t crack the evening open. Couldn’t find one that was safe. Settled for the truth. “It was the best first date I’ve been on in years.”

She got in the cab. Closed the door. The driver pulled away.

Through the back window, she watched Rune Sterling stand on the sidewalk on East 73rd Street with his hands at his sides and an expression on his face that she was too far away to read but could feel—the particular frequency of a man realizing, several hours after the fact, that he’d been on a date.

Her phone lit before the cab reached the park.

Breezy: You’ve been gone six hours. Dekel says you went to a vault. He also says Rune took a portable spectrographic unit and a bottle of wine to a subterranean lab. His exact words were ‘He packed the good equipment and the emergency Barolo.’

Lark: The Barolo was at the restaurant.

Sybil: THERE WAS A RESTAURANT???

Lark: Working dinner. Investigation related. Please don’t make it a thing.

Breezy: I have added ‘date debrief’ to tomorrow’s calendar. 6:45 AM. Before the 7 AM session. You’re welcome.

Lark: IT WAS NOT A DATE.

Sybil: A man took you to a private underground vault, showed you his most prized possessions, then fed you pasta and expensive wine by candlelight. That is the dictionary definition of a date. I will find the dictionary entry. Give me ten minutes.

Lark dropped her phone in her lap. Stared out the cab window. Central Park scrolled past in the dark, the trees black against the city’s ambient glow.

The boy in the vault. His hands in cotton gloves. His voice low and running, forgetting himself, forgetting the crown, talking about ink density and countdown clocks and preservation with the urgency of someone who’d spent his whole life protecting things that tried to disappear.