LARK
TWENTY
She draped it over his shoulders before he could formulate a rebuttal.
The satin settled across his back. The collar fanned behind his head. The weight of the fabric hung from his shoulders with the gravity of a garment designed to make the wearer feel like they were about to deliver a monologue about world domination.
He hated it.
He hated the way it moved when he turned his head. He hated the swish against his calves. He hated the collar framing his face like a portrait border. He hated all of it with a conviction that was absolute and immediate and completely undermined by the fact that his lion was preening.
Not figuratively. The strands at his temples stirred, rose, arranged themselves with the focused vanity of an animal whose display instincts had been handed a theatrical prop and decided this was the single greatest development in the history of adornment.
His lion didn’t understand irony. His lion understood display, and the cape was display, and the lion was in favor.
“Oh my God.” Lark had her hand over her mouth. Her eyes were enormous. “Your HAIR.”
“We are not discussing my hair.”
“Your hair LIKES it. Your hair is doing a whole—it’s like a lion mane fan. Like a peacock thing but with your—Rune, your hair is showing off.”
“It is a draft from the ventilation system.”
“There IS no ventilation system! We’re in a warehouse! It’s eighty degrees!”
People were looking. A woman in a Catwoman suit raised her phone. A flash fired.
“She took a photo.”
“Multiple people have taken photos.” Lark’s voice was strangled with suppressed laughter. “You’re trending in the cape. I can see it happening in real time.”
He reached for the collar. The cape’s high fan framed his hand in purple satin.
He caught his reflection in the prop maker’s mirror—six-three, charcoal suit, purple cape with the collar spread behind his golden hair, which was, undeniably, inexcusably, presenting—and the image was so profoundly ridiculous that a sound escaped him.
Short. Involuntary. A breath that carried the ghost of a laugh.
Lark’s hand dropped from her mouth. She stared at him.
“Did you—”
“No.”
“You laughed.”
“I exhaled.”
“You laughed at yourself in a cape. Rune Sterling laughed. At a costume party. In a CAPE.”
He should take it off. The evening had been—fine.
Better than fine. The craft was extraordinary, the community was genuine, and the woman beside him was incandescent in this space, vivid and bright and connected to every person in the room in a way that made him ache with a hunger that had nothing to do with admiration and everything to do with the leather pants and the silver earrings and the way she’d introduced him to people like he belonged here.
But the cape was a step too far. The cape was undignified. The cape needed to come off.
He did not take off the cape.
They moved through the warehouse. The cape swished.
His hair remained insubordinate. Lark kept glancing at him and biting her bottom lip against the grin, and every bitten lip hit him square behind the sternum.
A vendor gave him a thumbs-up. The MC caught sight of him from the stage and announced to the crowd: “The mystery judge has COMMITTED. We have a CAPE. Ladies and gentlemen and villains, we have a cape on the floor.”
A scattered cheer went up. Rune stood in the center of a Brooklyn warehouse at midnight in a purple villain cape with six hundred cosplayers cheering his existence and his lion roaring approval and Lark Coleman laughing beside him with her straight hair swinging and her earrings catching purple light.
This is the most absurd night of my life and I do not want it to end.
His phone vibrated. He’d made the mistake of texting Dekel a photo an hour ago—Lark judging the walk-off, the crowd behind her, a slice of the Gotham installation visible in the background. Dekel had responded with twelve messages in rapid succession. The latest:
Dekel: Aspen has seen the cape photo. Someone posted it. She is on a plane. I am not exaggerating. She booked a flight from Stockholm twenty minutes ago.
Dekel: She says, and I quote: “THE MANE. IN A CAPE. I WILL DIE. I WILL LITERALLY DIE.”
Dekel: For the record I also have feelings about the cape but mine are more measured.
Dekel: They are: you look like a Norse god at a costume gala and you are never living this down.
Rune pocketed his phone.
“The rooftop is open,” Lark said. “If you need air.”
He needed air. He needed it urgently, because the warehouse was hot and crowded and the cape was heavy and Lark’s scent—her candle signature mixed with sweat and bourbon from The Nemesis and the sharp sweetness of her skin—was dismantling his higher functions with surgical efficiency.
The rooftop access was a freight elevator in the back corner. Industrial. Graffitied. Lark hit the button and the cage rattled upward through three floors of exposed brick and open ductwork.
The roof opened above them. Brooklyn at midnight.
The skyline stretched across the water—Manhattan’s towers lit against the black, the bridge cables strung with lights, the harbor dark and glittering below.
The air was summer-heavy but moving, a breeze off the water that carried salt and exhaust and the distant bass from the warehouse four stories below.
They stood at the railing. The city was laid out like a display—her kind, not his. Chaotic, saturated, alive.
“Thank you,” he said. “For tonight.”
She leaned against the railing. The wind lifted her hair—the straight, sleek fall that she wore like a blade—and the silver earrings swayed. “You’re thanking me? You wore the cape voluntarily. I was prepared to beg.”
“It was not voluntary. You placed it on my shoulders before I could refuse.”
“You kept it. Forty-five minutes. Nobody forced you.”
“The clasp was complicated.”
“The clasp is a HOOK. It’s a hook and a loop, Rune. A preschooler could operate it.”
“Perhaps I found the construction interesting.”
“You found the construction interesting.” She turned to face him. The bridge lights reflected in her hazel eyes, green shifting to amber in the city glow. “You wore a purple satin cape for forty-five minutes at a costume party because you found the construction interesting.”
He looked at her.
The rooftop. The skyline. The cape still on his shoulders because he hadn’t removed it, because taking it off would mean the night was ending and the night could not end yet.
Lark against the railing with her leather and silver and the wind in her straight hair and the laughter still warm on her face and the two weeks of late nights and coffee orders and distribution data and her candle on his counter and her jacket on his chair and her voice through the wall and the word Lark that he’d said like a diagnosis because it was one—she was the condition, the disruption, the thing his lion had identified on day one and his brain had spent a month denying.
He moved.
Not slowly. Not tentatively. The coiling of something patient and powerful that had reached the end of its restraint.
Two steps that closed the distance between them—the distance he’d been measuring in inches for weeks, across counters, across displays, across that narrowing gap that had been shrinking every night—and his hand found the curve of her waist above the leather, and his mouth found hers.
She inhaled. A sharp catch of breath against his lips.
Then her hands fisted the front of his shirt and she kissed him back.
The kiss was not gentle. It was not a question.
It was the answer to the question the hair-touch had asked two nights ago, the answer to the doorstep and the tie and the Catwoman on the counter and the six mornings of oat milk—every careful, curated gesture collapsed into a single point of contact that burned through his composure like a match through paper.
She tasted like black cherry and bourbon and a sweetness that was hers alone.
Her mouth was warm and demanding and she kissed the way she did everything—with full commitment and zero hesitation and a confidence that obliterated his remaining capacity for strategic thought.
His hand slid from her waist to the small of her back and pulled her closer and she arched into him and her fingers climbed from his chest to his collar to his jaw to his hair—
His lion roared.
Not audibly. Not yet. The internal detonation—the deep, resonant vibration that started in his chest and radiated outward—manifested as a low growl against her mouth that made her grip tighten in his hair.
His strands rose under her fingers. The cape billowed in the wind behind him.
The Brooklyn skyline blazed and the bass from the warehouse thumped four stories below and they were kissing on a rooftop in a villain cape and it was exactly as dramatic as his lion required and twice as dramatic as his dignity would have permitted if his dignity were still operational, which it was not, because her tongue slid against his and his brain went dark.
When they separated—an inch, two inches, her forehead against his chin because the height difference persisted even in heeled boots—they were both breathing hard.
His hand was still on the small of her back.
Her fingers were still tangled in his hair, which was standing in every direction and making no effort to correct itself.
She spoke first. “You kissed me in a villain cape.”
“I’m aware.”
“On a Brooklyn rooftop.”
“Yes.”
“You realize this is the plot of every comic you claim to be too sophisticated for.”
His forehead dropped against hers. Her hazel eyes were close enough to map—green around the iris, amber near the pupil, gold flecks that caught the bridge lights. His thumb traced a slow line against her lower back, over the silk of the camisole, and she shivered.
“I’m choosing not to engage with that observation.”
She laughed. Against his mouth. The vibration traveled through his lips and landed in a place it would never leave.
He kissed her again. Slower this time. Thorough.
His other hand came up to cup the side of her face, his thumb at the hinge of her jaw, and she melted—the fierce, brilliant, unintimidated woman who’d called him Your Majesty on day one and never stopped, who’d put a candle in his office and music in his speakers and chaos in every ordered corner of his life—she melted against him and sighed into his mouth and his lion decided, with the absolute conviction of an apex predator who had finally stopped circling, that this was it.
This was the one. Everything before was preliminary. Everything after started here.
The cape billowed.
The city burned below them.
His phone buzzed in his pocket: Dekel, or Aspen, or the entire Sterling Pride receiving his changed heartbeat through some frequency he’d never believed in before tonight. He ignored it.
“We should go back down,” Lark murmured against his collar. “Before someone sends a search party.”
“In a moment.”
“Rune.”
“One more moment.”
She pressed her face into his chest. His arms closed around her.
The purple satin cape—ridiculous, theatrical, undignified—wrapped around them both in the wind, and he held her on a Brooklyn rooftop with Manhattan blazing across the water and the bass thumping below and his hair refusing to lie flat and his lion settled for the first time in his life.
His phone buzzed again. He pulled it out.
Dekel: Your heart rate spiked on the watch monitor. Either you’re fighting or you’ve finally kissed her.
Dekel: Based on the fact that I haven’t received an emergency alert, I’m going with option B.
Dekel: Congratulations. Your sister lands at JFK in six hours. You have that long to prepare a statement.
Rune turned off his phone.
Lark looked up. “Everything okay?”
“My sister is flying from Stockholm.”
“Because of the cape photo?”
“Because of the cape photo.”
She buried her face against his shoulder. Her shoulders shook. Laughter—full, warm, unstoppable—vibrated against his ribs. He stood in the wind on the rooftop in a purple villain cape with a woman laughing against his heart. I am keeping the cape.
He did not know why.
His lion knew why.