Page 94 of Mane Rival in Store

The photograph showed a man in a charcoal suit and a purple cape, surrounded by cosplayers, his hair standing in a golden wave that was both dignified and catastrophically insubordinate. The man’s expression was caught between mortification and a smile he was losing the battle to suppress. Beside him, a woman in leather pants and silver earrings was laughing with her head thrown back, and the contrast between the two of them—his reluctant glory and her unrestrained joy—was so perfectly composed that it looked staged. It was not staged. It was the most honest photograph ever taken of him.

“You hung a photograph.”

“I hung a photograph.” Lark was behind the register on her side. Her voice carried through the arch with the bright innocence of a woman who had planted a surprise and was enjoying the detonation. “In your store. Without asking.”

“In my store.”

“Beside your illustration. Which is lovely, by the way. Very distinguished. Very on-brand. The cape photo adds dimension.”

“It adds a cosplay event.”

“It adds you. Having fun. In a cape. On the wall of the most prestigious rare-comics gallery in the Western Hemisphere.” She walked through the arch. Stopped in front of the photograph. Tilted her head. “I think it’s my best work.”

He stood beside her. Close—his arm brushing hers, the automatic proximity his body had adopted since the rooftop. Optimal distance from Lark Coleman: zero. His eyes moved from the photograph to her and back.

“You’re not taking it down.”

“I’m not taking it down.”

His mouth twitched. The smile fought to surface—fought through years of arranging his environment with gallery-grade precision, now cohabitating, aesthetically speaking, with a woman who hung cosplay photographs beside antique prints and thought it added dimension.

She’d taken his world apart. She’d rearranged it. And the rearrangement was better than the original.

His phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen.

Erik Sterling. Calling.

He stepped to the back of the store—the authentication room, the quiet. He answered on the third ring.

“Pappa.”

The voice on the other end was low and unhurried, carrying the deliberate pace of a man who had built an empire without raising his voice. Norwegian first—the language of home, of the den and Oslo and childhood, the one that bypassed the alpha’s register entirely and found the boy underneath.

“She doesn’t run,” Erik said. “Aspen told me. I wanted to hear it from you.”

“She doesn’t run.”

A silence that was not empty. His father’s version of consideration—the pause he had been watching across boardroom tables and breakfast tables his entire life, the one that meant the decision was already made and the words were being chosen with care.

“Good.” The word carried the weight of a man who said little and meant everything. Another pause. “Your grandmother’s ring is in the safe at the farm. It’s been there since she passed it to your mother. I always thought I’d know when it was time to pass it on.” His father’s voice carried the Norwegian farmer’s particular relationship with sentiment: enormous, unexpressed, unmistakable. “Tell the girl to come to the farm. The ring is hers when she’s ready for it.”

The line went quiet. Rune stood in the authentication room with his phone against his ear and his hair risen and his eyes doing something they had not done since his father had called him home from Oslo for the last time.

He went back out to Lark.

“The lux levels,” he started.

“Are four percent off on the left side. I read the email. Breezy summarized the email. The email had footnotes, Rune. Footnotes about lighting.”

“Proper display illumination requires⁠—”

“Proper display illumination requires you to stop writing three-page emails about four-percent variations and start trusting that Marco knows what he’s doing because Aspen vetted him and Aspen has an eye that could rival yours on your best day.”

His hair rose. Not the defensive lift or the arousal spike. The amused one—the newest addition to the involuntary vocabulary his lion had developed since Lark entered his life, a gentle rise at the temples that said you are infuriating and I adore you in a language he hadn’t known his body spoke.

“Speaking of Aspen.” Lark crossed to the Villainette register and returned with the garment bag. Unzipped it. Held up the cape.

Purple silk. Gold thread. The structured collar that spread behind the neck like wings.