Page 81 of Mane Rival in Store

Two minutes was a lifetime.

Kasper’s pale eyes moved past Lark. Found Aspen. And his expression—blank, mercenary, the professional mask of a man paid to deliver messages—changed. His gaze locked onto Rune’s sister with the precision of a predator selecting its target, and the calculation was visible: not hatred. Strategy. This is the one that will break him.

“Aspen.” Lark’s voice was steady. Her body was not. “Get behind the vehicle.”

“Lark—”

“NOW.”

Kasper moved.

Not toward Lark. Past her. The two operatives fanned to the sides—flanking, cutting off the path to the SUV—and Kasper drove straight for Aspen with years of grief sharpened into a single trajectory.

Aspen froze. Her eyes went wide, her body locked in place the way prey locks when the threat is too fast and too close and the distance between running and not running has collapsed to nothing. She was a lion—a shifter born into one of the oldest prides in Northern Europe—but she was a designer, not a fighter, and the violence bearing down on her was paralyzing in its speed and its intent.

Lark didn’t think.

She moved.

Her body crossed the fifteen feet between her and Aspen on instinct—not courage, not calculation, the pure neurological override of a woman who saw a threat aimed at someone she loved and whose muscles responded before her brain finished processing the input. She hit Aspen at the waist, tackling her sideways, both of them crashing to the concrete in a tangle of limbs and leather and hair.

Kasper’s shift happened mid-lunge. The man dissolved and the lion erupted—pale, scarred, ragged-maned—and his claws, extended for the strike that should have caught Aspen across the torso, raked across Lark’s left shoulder and upper arm instead.

Three parallel gashes. Deep. Immediate.

The pain was white. Not red—white, the overloaded circuit of nerve endings firing at once, the kind of sensation that bypassed the body’s normal processing and went straight to a place beyond language. She screamed. The sound was torn from her, involuntary, echoing off the warehouse wall and the chain-link fence, and it carried across the dock and into the night.

THIRTY-SIX

RUNE

Rune heard the scream from inside his SUV.

His lion didn’t hear it. His lion absorbed it—the sound entering through his ears and traveling down his spine and detonating in the center of his chest like a charge that had been building since the day he’d first caught her scent. His mate was screaming. His mate was in pain.

The SUV door came off the hinges.

He didn’t remember opening it. He didn’t remember the sprint across the pavement. He didn’t remember the moment his body stopped being a body and became a weapon. What he remembered—what would stay with him for the rest of his life, burned into the backs of his eyelids like a brand—was the image that met him when he rounded the SUV.

Lark on the ground. Blood on her shoulder. Blood pooling beneath her. Her body draped over Aspen’s—shielding, covering, her arms wrapped around his sister’s head—not trained, not calculated, just the raw refusal to let Aspen Sterling get hurt on her watch.

The pale lion was circling. Regrouping for a second strike.

The shift that hit Rune was not grand. It was not theatrical. It was not the king-putting-on-armor display that his Pride knew, not the bronze mane erupting in visual grandeur, not the transformation designed to signal dominance and authority.

It was violence.

The man came apart and the animal tore free and the sound that ripped from his throat was not a roar in any language the word could contain. It was a declaration broadcast on a frequency that every shifter in a five-mile radius heard and understood: an alpha’s mate has been harmed and the being that harmed her is still breathing.

Windows in the warehouse shuddered. The chain-link fence vibrated. The halogen lamps swung on their mounts. Fallon’s two operatives—the human security, the professionals—broke and ran. They sprinted for the perimeter fence without looking back, because whatever they’d been paid, it wasn’t enough for this. It wasn’t enough for the sound pouring from the bronze-maned lion, and it wasn’t enough for the look in his eyes, which was not anger and not rage and not fury but an imperative older and simpler and infinitely more dangerous: the total, annihilating focus of an apex predator who had found his purpose.

He hit Kasper at full sprint.

The impact drove both lions across the ground, claws screeching on the broken asphalt, sparks flying where their combined mass scraped the metal drainage grate. Kasper twisted—the mercenary instinct, the dirty-fighting reflex honed, in years of combat without rules—and his jaws snapped for Rune’s throat. Rune’s mane caught the bite. The thick ruff of fur absorbed what would have been a killing strike, and he drove his shoulder into Kasper’s chest and sent the exile skidding backward into the base of the dock.

Kasper rolled to his feet. Fast. The mercenary survival instinct overriding the pain. He circled left—always left, an old habit from their sparring days, a pattern Rune’s body remembered before his mind cataloged it—and lunged for Rune’s exposed flank.

The claws found purchase. A gash opened across Rune’s left side—deep enough to bleed freely, shallow enough that it wouldn’t slow him. He didn’t register the pain. His lion had narrowed the world to a single imperative that left no bandwidth for sensation: the threat was still standing. The threat had drawn blood from his mate. The threat would be ended.