Page 63 of Mane Rival in Store

He didn’t tell her. Telling her would require explaining what his lion was, and explaining what his lion was would require a conversation he’d been planning to have on his terms—carefully, privately, in the den, with Dekel on standby and a glass of the Burgundy she’d liked at the dinner. Not on a SoHo sidewalk with his hair standing up and his canines itching.

“You’re tense.”

He looked down. She was watching him—not with the open study of before, the running inventory of his tells, but with the guarded attention of recent weeks. Observing from behind glass.

“I’m attentive.”

“You’re tense. Your shoulders are at your ears and your jaw is doing the thing.”

“I don’t have a thing.”

“You have several things. The jaw is the loudest.” She looked ahead. The car was two blocks away. Greene Street stretched empty under the streetlights, the cast-iron facades casting long shadows. “Is this about the investigation? The Portland leads?”

“No.”

“Is this about—” She stopped. The sentence had a destination they both recognized and neither wanted to reach. Not on a sidewalk. Not in the dark. Not while the foot and a half between them crackled with everything unsaid.

“I’m walking you to your car.” He kept his voice level. “The investigation is producing results. The new leads are promising. The evening is productive. I am simply⁠—”

The scent hit him full force.

Close. Not the ambient trace from the afternoon—close. Twenty feet. Fifteen. Coming from the narrow alley between the two storefronts ahead, the gap between a gallery and a closed restaurant where the shadows pooled thick enough to hide a delivery truck. His lion went from pacing to locked, every muscle engaged, every sense dialed to a frequency that turned the summer night from warm to electric.

Male. Lion. No pride markers. And beneath the unfamiliar—beneath the years of foreign soil and foreign fights and the stale tang of a lion who slept alone—a scent he knew. A scent filed in the deepest archive of his memory, tagged with the label of the worst night of his first year as alpha.

No.

The man stepped out of the alley.

Leaner. Harder. Twelve years carved into the planes of his face like erosion—the softness of youth stripped away, replaced by angles that were all function and no grace. Pale blond hair cropped brutally short—short enough to see the scalp, short enough to erase the mane entirely. In Pride culture, a self-cut mane was the equivalent of burning your own flag. A scar ran from his left temple to his jaw, a jagged ridge of white tissue that split his face into before and after. Pale eyes that were too light, almost colorless, the bleached quality of a photograph left in the sun.

Kasper Eld.

The recognition hit Rune in the base of his skull and traveled down his spine and something deeper than language screamed—not a roar, not yet, but the silent, sub-frequency warning that vibrated through bone and made the streetlights feel dimmer.

“Alpha.” The old title. Spoken like a blade being unsheathed. The Norwegian accent was still there, thickened by years of somewhere else—Eastern Europe, Africa, the mercenary circuits where expelled lions went to make their skills profitable. “Your father’s buildings are nice. Your stores are impressive.” His pale eyes moved past Rune. Found Lark. The gaze lingered. “Your mate smells like dark rose.”

Rune’s hand found Lark’s elbow. He moved her behind him in a single, fluid motion that she resisted for half a second before his grip tightened and the look on his face—the look she couldn’t yet interpret—stopped her argument in her throat.

“You were expelled.” His voice came from the place beneath the boardroom, beneath the composure, beneath a decade of enforced stillness. The arctic shelf under everything. “You have no standing here.”

“Standing.” Kasper’s mouth moved. Not a smile. The memory of one, eroded to its foundation. “I had standing once. Before you took it.” He shifted his weight. Casual. A learned performance—ease projected before violence, because violence landed harder when it arrived as a surprise. “I have a patron now. One who appreciates what you threw away.”

The name didn’t need to be spoken. It hung in the summer air between them—Creed—and the two threats that had been circling Rune’s life like separate storms merged into a single front.

“Walk away.” Rune kept Lark behind him. His body angled to cover hers. His canines had extended a fraction—not visible, not yet, but he could taste blood where the points pressed his lower lip. “Walk away and this ends as a conversation.”

Kasper’s pale eyes dropped to Lark’s face one more time. Then back to Rune’s. The calculation was visible: a man weighing the pleasure of the strike against the cost of the damage. He’d always been transparent that way. A decade hadn’t changed it.

“She’s human,” Kasper said. “Your mate is human and you’ve put her on a street corner with no security detail. You always were sentimental, Alpha. Your father’s weakness.” He rolled his neck. The vertebrae cracked in the quiet street. “Let’s see if it’s still in there. The lion your father tried to breed out of you.”

He shifted.

The transformation was wrong in a way that bypassed the eyes and struck the gut. A lion’s shift was supposed to be grand—the mane erupting first, the body following, the visual language of a king putting on his crown. Kasper’s shift was a collapse. The man folded inward and the animal tore outward and the mane that emerged was thin, ragged, pale where it should have been golden—tawny gone almost white, patches missing, the self-inflicted damage of a lion who had cut and cut until the mane was as scarred as the face beneath it. The body was still massive. Still fast. Still built for violence. But the wrongness—the visible, visceral wrongness of a Pride animal without a pride—made Rune’s lion recoil in recognition of what exile looked like when it wore fur.

The pale lion lunged. Not for Rune. For Lark.

Rune’s shift was instant.