Rune #2
“No.” He held her gaze. The neon made her hazel eyes glow—green and amber shifting in the violet light, sharp and focused on him with an attention that his lion interpreted as a challenge and his nervous system interpreted as a full-body event.
“Your eye is flawless. The comics wall—organized by arc, not alphabet—that’s brilliant.
And everything in here speaks the same language.
The lipstick, the displays, the layout. It all tells the same story. ”
“Rune.”
“Yes.”
“You’re reviewing me like I’m a quarterly report.”
Heat crept up the back of his neck. “I’m offering a professional assessment.”
“You’re complimenting me, and it’s physically painful for you.” The corner of her mouth lifted. Not the wide one. The one from—the one she’d given him after the Gerald incident, close and devastating. “Try it in human language. Pretend you’re not wearing a tie.”
He wasn’t wearing a tie. He’d loosened it an hour ago.
It hung undone around his collar—a detail she’d noticed, he realized, because her gaze had tracked to his throat when she’d said it, and the brief dip of her eyes sent a jolt of heat down his spine that had nothing to do with professional assessment.
“Your store is good,” he said. Stripped clean. “It’s very good. The Harley Quinn display is the best character-arc showcase I’ve seen in any retail space, and I’ve evaluated hundreds.”
That smile widened. Half an inch. A tectonic event on a face he’d been studying for three weeks.
“Thank you, Your Majesty.” Soft. Warm. The nickname wrapped in velvet. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“It was excruciating.”
She laughed. Not the performative laugh she deployed for customers and cameras.
A real one—bright, startled, bouncing off the walls of her empty store and landing in his rib cage like a lit match.
Her curls shook. Her bare shoulder caught the neon.
He stared at the curve of her collarbone against the violet light and his lion surged with a possessive hunger that he contained through twelve years of practice and what remained of his dignity.
“You should eat,” he said, because his options were saying that or saying the other things his lion was suggesting, and the other things were not appropriate for a neighboring business owner he’d known for three weeks. “Your food is getting cold.”
“Have dinner with me.” She said it easily.
Naturally. As though inviting a six-foot-three Scandinavian billionaire to share takeout in a closed villain store at eight at night was a normal Tuesday activity.
“I ordered too much. There’s a second container in the back.
Sybil was supposed to come but she bailed for date night with Oliver—my brother—and the pad thai will go to waste. ”
“I should—”
“Eat pad thai in a store full of commercial garbage and tell me what you think about the article.” She raised an eyebrow.
“Because I read it, and I read your PR statement, and I know that’s not you.
That statement has the personality of a fax machine.
The real Rune Sterling has opinions. I’ve seen them.
They live behind the corporate voice and they come out when he’s holding a first edition or defending women from condescending customers. ”
His chest expanded. A deep, involuntary breath that his lion accompanied with a low vibration he had to actively suppress. She’d read the article, and her first instinct was to find the distance between what it said and who he was.
She saw him.
“Pad thai,” he said. “In the store.”
“In the store. On the floor, specifically. I eat dinner on the floor behind the beauty bar. It’s the best seat in the house—you can see the neon reflections on the ceiling. Bring your opinions. Leave the corporate voice at the door.”
He followed her. Through the violet shadows and the displays he’d studied with a collector’s eye and the scent that his lion had decided, sometime in the last fifteen minutes, constituted home.
They sat on the floor behind the beauty bar.
She handed him a takeout container and chopsticks.
The neon reflections painted the ceiling in purple and gold.
She tucked her bare feet under her and started eating with the ease of someone who did this every night and had never once considered that the floor of her store was an unconventional dining room.
He sat on the floor in a suit that cost four thousand dollars and ate pad thai with a woman whose curls caught the light like a private galaxy, and for the first time in three weeks—for the first time in longer than that, if he was honest—the noise in his head went still.
Not the silence of an empty store. The silence of arrival.
They talked for two hours.
Not about the article. Not about the rivalry or the music or the competing window displays or the internet’s fascination with their storefronts.
They talked about comics. About the industry.
About the first edition that hooked them—his was a Thor #337, found in a used bookshop in Oslo at age eight; hers was a Catwoman standalone she’d pulled from her father’s hidden collection at eleven and read under her blankets with a flashlight.
“Your father collects?” Rune set down his chopsticks.
“My father has a locked cabinet in his study that he opens when he thinks nobody’s watching.” Lark grinned. “He’s an investment banker. First-edition Marvel. My mother found the collection in year one of their marriage and has never mentioned it. She considers that romantic.”
“It is romantic.”
“It’s deeply weird is what it is. But it’s their thing.” She twirled a noodle. “He doesn’t know I know. Or he does know, and we’re all pretending, which is basically the Coleman family operating system.”
He laughed—the version Dekel had texted Aspen about, and here it was again, drawn out of him by a woman sitting cross-legged on a retail floor in the purple dark, telling him about her father’s secret Marvel addiction.
She watched him laugh with close attention, her expression carrying the specific focus of a woman cataloging a rare find.
“You should do that more,” she said.
“Eat pad thai?”
“Laugh. It changes your whole face. The royal court dissolves. You look like a person instead of a portrait.”