Page 28 of Mane Rival in Store

Her phone lit up. The group chat.

Sybil: Update please. It’s been two hours.

Lark: Working. Forgery investigation. Very professional.

Sybil: How close are you sitting to him?

Lark: I’m going to pretend this chat doesn’t exist.

Sybil: That close. Got it.

She pocketed her phone and turned back to the distribution map, and for the next hour, they worked side by side in a silence that was neither his kind nor hers. Not the reverent hush of a gallery. Not the energized noise of a store in full swing. A third option—the focused, absorbed quiet of two people solving a shared problem, punctuated by the click of keys and the scratch of her pen and the occasional exchange of data that required leaning into each other’s space in ways that were entirely the investigation and absolutely not the reason her pulse had been elevated since walking in.

He handed her a reference binder without looking up. Their fingers brushed on the spine.

His hair lifted. Subtle. If she hadn’t been watching—and she had been, because she was a traitor to her own interests—she’d have missed it. The golden strands lifted a quarter inch, held, then settled as he redirected his attention to the monitor with a jaw tension that suggested significant internal negotiations.

The hair reacts to physical contact. Noted. Filed. I will not be examining why I’m keeping a file.

At noon, Breezy arrived.

She came through the service door with her tablet, her backup phone, and the energy of someone who had spent the morning monitoring her boss’s emotional trajectory via text message and had concluded that direct intervention was necessary. Her blazer was charcoal. Her bun was immaculate. Her expression said, “I am here to impose operational order on whatever chaos you’ve wandered into.”

She surveyed the lab in four seconds. Equipment. Forgeries. Provenance files. Two coffee cups side by side on the counter—Lark’s with a lipstick print, Rune’s untouched—and her gaze lingered on that detail for one beat too long before moving on.

“Breezy Vega. Villainette operations.” She extended her hand to Rune. “Lark mentioned a counterfeiting issue with market-wide implications. I’m here to coordinate cross-network data sharing and compress your investigation timeline.”

Rune shook her hand. His expression cycled through recognition (Lark had mentioned Breezy), assessment (the handshake was firm and her posture suggested she did not waste time), and a recalibration so subtle only someone who’d been studying his face for three weeks would have caught it. “Rune Sterling.”

“I’m aware.” Breezy released his hand and turned to the analysis data. “Re-authentication timeline?”

“Three weeks, minimum⁠—”

“Too long.” Breezy opened her tablet. “If forgeries are circulating in the secondary market, the story breaks in days. You need to control the narrative before it controls you. ‘Sterling & Mane catches counterfeiting ring’ is a press win. ‘Sterling & Mane sold fakes’ is a reputation collapse. The difference is speed.”

Rune blinked. It was brief—a flicker of recalculation behind the composed exterior—but Lark caught it and stored the image for the personal collection of moments Rune Sterling lost the thread that she was curating with increasing dedication.

Dekel appeared in the doorway. He’d gone out front to handle the morning’s store operations and returned with a fresh coffee and an alert posture—his second-in-command radar had detected a new variable.

His eyes moved from Breezy to Lark to the tablet Breezy was already using to cross-reference data with Rune’s seller files. He took three steps into the room. Extended his hand.

“Dekel Dahl. I run his operations.”

Breezy shook it without looking up. “You run his logistics?”

“You run hers?”

They looked at each other—two people who had spent their careers translating their boss’s vision into functional systems, keeping trains running while the conductors forgot there were tracks at all, absorbing the operational chaos of brilliant, oblivious leaders and converting it into spreadsheets.

“You have my sympathies,” they said in unison.

Lark pressed her lips tight. Rune’s brow furrowed. Dekel broke first—a grin, full and genuine, the Norwegian beach-kid version that surfaced when he was delighted by a situation rather than managing one. Breezy’s mouth twitched. On Breezy, a mouth twitch was a twenty-one-gun salute.

“I like her,” Dekel announced to the room at large.

“She’s efficient.” Rune’s tone suggested he hadn’t decided whether this was a compliment or a threat assessment.

“I’ll take it.” Breezy was already pulling Lark’s buyer data into a cross-referencing matrix on her tablet. “Dekel, I need your seller records sorted by acquisition date, region, and edition era. If the forger specializes in a period, the distribution will cluster.”