Page 25 of Mane Rival in Store

Twenty minutes ago, he’d been on the floor of that store eating takeout and forgetting himself. Twenty minutes ago had felt like a reprieve.

He looked at the forgery. Looked at the spectrographic report. Looked at the verification guarantee that bore his name and his Pride’s crest and represented thirty years of Sterling & Mane’s reputation.

The silence was over.

He picked up his phone and called Dekel.

NINE

RUNE

Three more forgeries. Three.

Rune stood over the examination table a couple of hours after dawn with coffee going cold at his elbow and the spectrographic results for editions two, three, and four arranged in a row beneath the examination lights. The lab smelled like old coffee and the particular staleness of a room that had been occupied since midnight without a window cracked open.

Dekel sat on a stool across the counter with his phone in one hand and a half-eaten granola bar in the other, running acquisition records on his laptop with the resigned efficiency of a man who’d stopped expecting sleep around three.

The editions were beautiful. That was the worst part.

A 1963 Avengers #4. A 1974 Wolverine first appearance. A 1939 Batman #1 facsimile that had entered the pipeline as a verified reproduction and turned out to be a forgery of a reproduction—a fake of a fake, which represented a level of audacity that bordered on philosophical.

All three carried the same spectrographic fingerprint as the Silver Surfer. Same paper source, same binding agents, same ink calibration. Same hands.

“Dekel.”

“Yep.”

“How many consignment acquisitions have moved through the SoHo pipeline in the last six months?”

Dekel scrolled. “Two hundred and fourteen. Across seven third-party sellers.”

“How many of those sellers are flagged in our records?”

“None. Clean histories. Verified paperwork. Three of them have been in the seller network for over two years.” He set down the granola bar. “Whoever built this pipeline didn’t rush it. They seeded sellers into our network with clean editions first. Built trust. Then started slipping in forgeries once the relationships were established.”

The lion prowled beneath his sternum—restless, tight loops that matched the cadence of his heartbeat. Territory compromised. His territory. Editions bearing his crest that turned out to be counterfeits. Every forged seal was a claw mark on the Pride’s reputation, and the instinct to track the source and eliminate it thrummed through his body with a physical insistence he had to redirect into analysis before it became audible.

“Pull all two hundred and fourteen.”

Dekel’s eyebrows rose. “The entire pipeline?”

“Full re-authentication. Every edition. Contact Ana—tell her to bring her full team and as many Oslo staff as she needs.”

“That’s a three-week freeze on third-party sales, minimum. The revenue hit alone⁠—”

“The revenue hit from a public forgery scandal would be catastrophic. Three weeks of frozen inventory is a headache. A compromised seal is a funeral.”

Rune picked up the Batman facsimile forgery. Turned it under the examination light. The aging treatment on the cover was flawless—the kind of work that required months of patient chemical application and an intimate understanding of how paper deteriorates across decades. “This person trained in restoration before they crossed into forgery. The craftsmanship alone represents a significant time investment per edition.”

“So we’re looking at someone with professional-grade skills, access to expensive materials, and enough funding to sustain a multi-month production timeline.” Dekel ticked off the points on his fingers. “Professional forger with a patron.”

“Or a professional forger who became their own business.”

“Either way, this isn’t amateur hour.”

No. It was not.

Rune set the edition down. Placed his palms flat on the examination table and stared at the four test profiles lined up on the monitor. Four forgeries. Four editions that had passed through. And if four had slipped through, the number in the broader market could be ten. Twenty. More.