Page 46 of Mane Rival in Store

Neither of them spoke.

She turned back to her laptop. He turned back to his screen. The playlist cycled to a new track—slow, bass-heavy, thrumming through the quiet office like a second heartbeat. The candle burned. The lights hummed. The service door between their stores stood open and the silence was not empty. It was full. Dense with every unspoken observation, every indexed reaction, every inch of counter space that had shrunk over six nights from professional distance to the kind of proximity that generated its own gravity.

She worked for seven more minutes. Read exactly zero data points. Her entire attention was mapped to the periphery of her vision, where Rune Sterling was sitting motionless with his hair slightly disarranged and his breathing two clicks too controlled and his screen displaying a spreadsheet he wasn’t reading.

At eleven-forty, she closed her laptop. “I should go.”

“I’ll walk you out.”

They gathered their things in silence. She unplugged her charger. He capped his pen. She left her jacket on his chair because taking it would acknowledge she’d been leaving things in his space and acknowledging it would require a conversation she wasn’t equipped to have at eleven-forty with the ghost of his hair still warm on her palm.

He walked her to the front of his store. Unlocked the door. The SoHo street was empty, summer-warm, the streetlights casting long amber pools across the cobblestones.

“Goodnight.” She hitched her bag on her shoulder.

“Goodnight. The pricing analysis was—” He stopped. Started again. “You saw the pattern before I did.”

“Your skill set and mine are different.”

“Yours is better. In this context.”

“That’s the closest thing to a compliment you’ve ever given me.”

“I’ve complimented your—” He halted. His brow contracted. “I complimented your inventory selection.”

“You said my inventory selection was ‘aggressive.’ In the tone of a museum docent describing a biohazard.”

“It was intended as recognition of strategic boldness.”

“Rune.”

“Yes.”

She hesitated in the doorway. “For what it’s worth, I think Magneto’s moral framework does hold up under utilitarian analysis. Consequentialist case, strong precedent.” She watched his chin lift a fraction—the debate instinct, the flicker of the argument forming. “There’s a cosplay event in Red Hook on Saturday. Midnight Villain. It’s an industry thing—villain and collector community crossover. I think you’d find the craft work interesting. If you wanted to come.” She said it lightly. Watching his face.

He was quiet for three seconds. “What time?”

“Eleven. Red Hook warehouse. You’ll be the only person in a bespoke suit.”

“That seems likely regardless of the venue.”

“Goodnight, Your Majesty.”

She walked to her car. Didn’t look back. Knew—with the bone-deep certainty of a woman who tracked reactions for a living—that he was watching her from the doorway. That his hair was still misbehaving. That the word Lark was still reverberating in the space between them with a resonance she was going to be hearing for a very long time.

She got in the car. Locked the door. Pressed her forehead to the steering wheel.

Then she picked up her phone.

Lark: Emergency debrief. His hair moved. INVOLUNTARY. I touched it by accident, reaching for a binder. It stood up ON ITS OWN.

Breezy: Clarify. What did he do?

Lark: Froze. Said he had a “condition.” I asked if the condition had a name. He said my name.

Sybil: Lark, that man is GONE for you. He said your name like it was a MEDICAL DIAGNOSIS.

Lark: It’s nothing. It’s a scalp thing.