Page 57 of Mane Rival in Store

Lark almost missed it. She was at her desk in the Villainette back office, balancing a coffee in one hand and a phone call with her Portland franchise manager in the other, her laptop open to the quarterly numbers that Breezy had flagged as “aggressively optimistic, verify by noon.” The morning had been good. Better than good. She’d woken up smiling, which was a development she’d been tracking with the wary alertness of a woman who understood that smiling before coffee meant she was in trouble.

She was in trouble. She’d been in trouble since a Brooklyn rooftop and a purple cape and the sound of her name in a voice that turned a single syllable into a thing with weight and consequence. She was in trouble because Rune Sterling had left a third gift on her desk this morning—a vintage concert poster from a 1993 Sade show at Radio City Music Hall, framed in simple black, with a handwritten note on the back in his sharp, angular script: Dekel informed me this is your favorite. The provenance is verified.

She’d stared at the note for three minutes. He’d written a note this time. He’d never written a note. The Catwoman edition, no note. The lithograph, no note. Now eleven words in handwriting so controlled, it looked like it had been raised in a Swiss boarding school, and her ribs ached with the stupid, reckless tenderness of falling for the Lion King of Scandinavia without guardrails, without a net, without the basic self-preservation instincts God gave a lemming.

She hung up with Portland. Set down the coffee. Reached for the mail stack.

The envelope was cream-colored. Heavy stock. The return address was a law firm she didn’t recognize: Helder, Mott & Associates. She slit it open with her thumbnail and unfolded the single page inside.

RE: LEASE RENEGOTIATION—VILLAINETTE, LLC

NEW TERMS: Effective 90 days from notice…

Her eyes skipped to the number.

Triple. The new rent was triple her current rate.

The number sat on the page like a grenade with the pin already gone. She read it twice. Triple. For a SoHo retail space she’d signed at a competitive rate months ago, with a five-year lease and standard escalation clauses. No landlord tripled rent mid-lease unless the building had changed hands, the terms had been restructured, and the new owner wanted you gone.

She turned the page over. Read the second paragraph.

…acquired by A.C. Holdings Group on behalf of the principal investor…

A.C. Holdings Group.

Her hands went still. Her blood went cold. The name was nothing on its own—a bland corporate shell, the kind of empty suit that held real estate at arm’s length from the person writing the checks. But she knew how to read a shell company the way Rune knew how to read a forged binding. She’d learned that particular skill the hard way, three years ago, sitting across from a man who smiled while he pulled the floor out from under her.

She opened her laptop. Typed the name into the corporate registry database Breezy had taught her to bookmark—because Breezy believed in reconnaissance the way other people believed in prayer, and she’d been right, and Lark owed her a spa day. Three clicks. Two subsidiary layers. A board filing from six weeks ago.

Principal investor: Creed Capital.

The room tilted. Her inner ear lost its grip, and the fluorescent lights swam, and the concert poster on the wall—the Sade poster, the one with the handwritten note, the one that had made her smile before coffee—blurred at the edges. She pressed both palms flat on the desk. Hard. The wood was solid beneath her hands. The wood was not going to wait until she was happy and then renegotiate the terms.

Fallon.

She stood. Crossed to the window that overlooked the sales floor. Her staff moved through the morning routine—restocking, adjusting displays, Manny at the beauty bar testing a villain-themed latte with purple foam art that looked like Maleficent’s horns and tasted, according to his last three samples, like regret. Normal. Her store. Her brand. Her seventeen employees at this location who depended on a lease that had tripled while she was kissing a lion on rooftops.

Don’t.

Don’t connect those two things. One has nothing to do with the other.

But her brain was already connecting, because her brain had been trained by experience, and the experience was this: powerful men with financial stakes in your business will use them. Fallon had. Fallon was doing it again. And Rune⁠—

Rune’s conglomerate ran distribution channels that three of her stores depended on. Sterling & Mane’s consignment network carried inventory for Villainette’s rare-edition sections in Portland, Chicago, and the SoHo flagship. His company distributed the Celestial Ronin merchandise that accounted for eight percent of her annual revenue.

He was woven into her supply chain the way Fallon had been woven into her financing—not by design, but by the inevitable orbit of men with empires. And she’d let him in. She’d opened the service door. Accepted the gifts. Kissed him on a rooftop. Let his sister link arms with hers. Drank Burgundy at his mother’s table. Let his hand find the small of her back while his Pride assessed her worth. And the whole time, the architecture of her independence had been sitting on a foundation she didn’t control.

That’s not fair. Rune isn’t Fallon.

Fallon wasn’t Fallon either, until he was.

She could hear the muted sounds of Sterling & Mane’s morning through the wall—quiet footsteps, soft classical music, the low murmur of staff. Rune’s world, one wall away. She crossed to the service door. Stood there for a full five seconds with her hand on the frame.

She closed it.

The latch clicked with a sound that was too small for the weight it carried.

Her phone buzzed. The group chat.