Page 43 of Mane Rival in Store

“You’ve been staring at the same screen for three minutes.”

“I’m cross-referencing.”

“You’re staring at a pie chart. You hate pie charts. You told me pie charts were the ‘visual equivalent of lying to oneself about proportional data.’”

He had said that. On night two. She’d laughed for thirty seconds, and he’d spent the next hour replaying the sound while pretending to review seller timestamps.

He closed the pie chart. “I was considering the data’s implications.”

“Uh-huh.” The pen rotated between her teeth. She turned back to her screen.

The candle on his counter caught the overhead light—black glass, Villainette’s logo embossed in gold. She’d brought it on night three. “Your office smells like preservation chemicals and regret,” she’d informed him, setting it next to the testing equipment with the casual authority of a woman rearranging territory she’d decided was partially hers. “This is a humanitarian intervention.”

The candle was dark fig and rose, and it had been burning for four hours now, and his entire back office smelled like her store, and he had not objected because objecting would require admitting he’d noticed, and noticing meant acknowledging that she was changing the scent of his territory and his lion was not merely tolerating it but leaning into it with a fervor that bordered on pathological.

The USB drive was worse. She’d slid it across the counter on night four. “Playlist. For working. Because the silence in here is aggressive and I refuse to die of acoustic boredom.” He’d plugged it in out of courtesy. The music was—he didn’t have the vocabulary for what it was. Low, rhythmic, R&B that moved through the room like a slow current. It didn’t disrupt his concentration. It reorganized it. He worked better with her music on, and he was absolutely not going to examine what that meant.

Her jacket was draped over the back of his chair. She’d left it two nights ago, peeled it off and hung it on his seat back when the office got hot from the equipment running. She’d gone home without it. It was still there. He hadn’t moved it. Its presence behind his shoulders when he leaned back was a low-grade disruption to his operational capacity that he’d categorized as “ambient” and would not be investigating further.

She is colonizing your space in soft increments and you are permitting it and your lion is arranging the furniture.

His phone buzzed. Dekel, from his apartment in the East Village, where he monitored Rune’s descent into emotional catastrophe with the enthusiasm of a naturalist documenting a rare migration pattern.

Dekel: Quick question. Did you move the authentication binder to the high shelf?

Rune glanced at the shelf. The binder—a heavy reference volume he consulted daily—was on the top rack. He’d moved it yesterday to clear counter space at Lark’s station. Her notes kept spreading and the binder was in the way.

Rune: The counter configuration needed adjustment.

Dekel: The binder you reach for fifteen times a day is now above your head. She has three inches more elbow room. That’s not efficiency. That’s furniture-based courtship. You’re nesting. In your own store. For a woman who brought her candle.

Rune set the phone down.

Across the counter, Lark stretched—arms overhead, spine arching, the twist in her hair shifting and releasing a curl against her neck. The movement pulled her shirt taut across her shoulders and his vision narrowed to the line of her collarbone and the shadow beneath it and the way the lab light turned her skin to honeyed amber.

He picked up a seller file. Read the same line four times.

Distribution anomaly in the tri-state pop-up market. Focus.

The distribution anomaly. He forced his attention back. Three weeks of data had painted a picture that was resolving from static into clarity. The forgeries weren’t being sold through established dealers—that would invite scrutiny. They were moving through transient channels: pop-up shops in Brooklyn and Queens, online marketplaces with zero oversight, third-party sellers at small conventions. The channels shared a profile: high turnover, no questions asked, cash up front.

“I’ve got the pop-up data mapped.” He pulled up the spreadsheet. “Fourteen confirmed sales across six temporary locations in the past two months. The shops operated for three to five days each, never repeated a neighborhood, and dissolved before anyone could trace the seller.”

Lark rolled her stool closer. Her knee brushed his under the counter and his leg went rigid. His lion surged forward, and he covered the reaction by pulling the laptop six inches to the right, angling the screen toward her.

“Show me.” She leaned in. Close enough that the fig-and-floral scent intensified and the warmth of her skin registered against his forearm like a sunburn.

He pointed to the cluster pattern on the map. “Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx. No Manhattan, no high-traffic collector neighborhoods. The sellers are avoiding areas where knowledgeable buyers would spot the discrepancies.”

“Smart. They’re selling to enthusiasts, not experts.” She studied the map. Her finger traced the cluster pattern, hovering over the screen. “The timing—three to five days is a weekend run. Set up Friday, sell through Sunday, pack out Monday. That’s event retail. That’s someone who knows how pop-ups work.”

“You see this in your industry?”

“All the time. Villainette did pop-ups for the first two years before I could afford permanent locations.” Her eyes tracked the data with the same razor focus she’d brought to his seller files in the first week. “The difference is, legitimate pop-ups build brand recognition. They leave a trail because they want to be found. These—” She tapped the screen. “These are built to disappear. No social media, no repeat locations, no customer follow-up. It’s a distribution network designed for deniability.”

He watched her work through the implications. The speed of her pattern recognition was⁠—

His phone lit. Another text from Dekel, because Dekel possessed the supernatural ability to sense when Rune’s composure was structurally compromised.