RUNE
TWENTY-FIVE
The service door was closed.
He noticed when he walked to the back of his store to check on a consignment delivery and found the latch engaged. He tested the handle. Locked from her side.
Three weeks of it standing open. Her music drifting through, her laugh carrying over the threshold, the fig-and-rose of her candle reaching his counter.
Three weeks of a boundary dissolving by degrees—accident, then habit, then intention.
And now the latch was closed and the wall between them was a wall again.
He called her at 11:45. Voicemail. Her recorded greeting—bright, professional, the undertone of humor that lived in everything she said—played into his ear and he hung up without leaving a message because the silence on the other end was a language he didn’t know how to translate.
He texted at one. Is everything all right?
Read receipt at 1:04. No response. She’d seen it. She’d chosen silence.
His lion paced. Not the lazy patrol of the past weeks—the agitated, circling prowl of an animal that sensed a threat it couldn’t locate. His hair was restless—the strands at his temples kept lifting and resettling, a cycle he couldn’t suppress.
He found Dekel in the stockroom, running inventory with a scanner and a coffee and the posture of a man who lived in a world where doors stayed open and lions didn’t circle their own stores like zoo animals.
“The service door is closed.”
Dekel looked up. Read his face. Set down the scanner.
“Since when?”
“This morning. She closed it. She’s not answering calls or texts.”
Dekel leaned against the shelving. “Did the dinner go wrong? After I left?”
“Nothing went wrong. The dinner was—” He stopped.
The dinner had been good. Better than good.
She’d handled Yara. Earned the single tap.
Raised her glass across the room and he’d raised his and the exchange had carried more weight than any words he’d managed in thirty-four years of speaking three languages. “The dinner was successful.”
“And this morning?”
“I left a gift. The Sade poster. She—” His hand went to his hair. Pressed it flat. A futile gesture; the strands rose immediately. “She hasn’t acknowledged it.”
“You wrote a note this time.”
“How do you—”
“I know you wrote a note because I’ve been watching you draft notes on your desk blotter for a week and throw them away. The handwriting practice alone has consumed four legal pads.” Dekel pulled out his phone. Typed. Waited. The response came in twelve seconds.
“Breezy.”
“You have Breezy’s number?”
“We exchanged contacts during the forgery investigation. She’s efficient. I respect efficiency.” Dekel read the screen. The amusement drained from his face like water through sand. “Sit down.”
“I don’t—”
“Rune. Sit.”
He sat. On a packing crate in the stockroom of his own store.
“Fallon Creed bought the building.”
The words took a moment to arrange themselves. Then the arrangement completed and his vision contracted.
“Through a shell company called A.C. Holdings. He’s tripling her rent.
Ninety-day notice.” Dekel pocketed the phone.
“Breezy read the filing this morning. Lark traced it to Creed Capital within the hour. The forgery operation runs through the same capital structure—same payment channels, same shell layer. The name has to be mixed in there somewhere. We’re pulling the full financial thread now. ”
He stood. The packing crate scraped concrete.
His body was already moving—toward the wall, toward her, toward the threat that had materialized in a lease letter and aimed itself at the woman who’d earned the single tap and the cape and the handwritten note and every unguarded minute he’d spent showing her who he was behind the crown.
“Rune.” Dekel stepped into his path. Six-one blocking six-three, which would have been comical in any context that didn’t involve the low, sub-audible vibration currently emanating from Rune’s sternum and making the inventory on the lower shelves rattle.
“He’s targeting her.”
“Yes,” Dekel said.
“He bought the building she operates in and he’s using the lease to force her out.”
“Yes,” Dekel repeated.
“I can end him.” The words came from a place that predated boardrooms and negotiations and twelve years of performed restraint.
The predator in him was coiled and the growl pressing through his ribs was the kind that preceded decisions that couldn’t be undone.
“Three phone calls. I call the Sterling legal team, I call our real estate division, I call the Scandinavian consortium. We buy the building from under him. We outbid whatever he paid. We void the shell and we void the renegotiation and Creed Capital dissolves its position in this property before the end of the week.”
Dekel didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink. Stood in the narrow aisle and held his ground with the calm he’d been practicing since they were eight and Rune had lost a chess match and shifted for the first time in rage.
“You can do all of that. You’re right. Three calls. Maybe four. By Friday, the building is yours and Fallon Creed is a footnote.”
“Then—”
“And then she leaves you.”
The words landed like a slap.
“If you nuke her ex from orbit, you become her ex.” No warmth.
No humor. The unflinching honesty that was the reason Rune had made him beta and never once regretted it.
“She’s afraid of men with money controlling her life.
You stomping in with your checkbook—buying her building, restructuring her lease, solving her crisis with Sterling resources—is the thing she’s running from.
Doesn’t matter that you mean well. The shape of it is the same. ”
“I’m not him.”
“I know that. She needs to learn it. And the way she learns it is by watching you not do the thing every cell in your body is screaming to do.” Dekel gripped his shoulder.
Hard. “The toughest call you’ve made as alpha was sparing Kasper during the challenge.
He wanted the Pride for himself when Erik stepped down—thought he could take it by force because your father was old and you were new.
He was wrong. You spared him anyway. This is tougher.
This is watching Creed hurt the woman you love and choosing restraint because that’s what she needs from you. Not force.”
His hands were fists. His hair was vertical—every strand standing at full attention, a display so uncontrolled that Dekel glanced at it.
“Your hair looks like a blond porcupine having a panic attack.”
“Not the time.”
“It’s slightly the time. You look unhinged.
” Dekel squeezed his shoulder once more, then released.
“You want to help her? You wait. You let her come to you. You do not buy the building. You do not call the lawyers. You do not deploy a single resource without her asking. And when she’s ready—and she will be, because that woman is too brilliant and too stubborn to let Creed win twice—you offer your help.
Not your rescue. Your help. There’s a difference. ”
Rune closed his eyes. The animal beneath the composure fought the restraint—fought it hard, the growl rising and falling in his throat like a tide, his body vibrating with the suppressed need to act, to strike, to wrap his resources around her like a wall and dare anyone to breach it.
He breathed. Pulled the animal back by inches.
She closed the door.
She closed it because the last man with money and access made her afraid of what proximity costs.
Be the exception.
“How long.”
“As long as it takes.” Dekel crossed to the stockroom fridge—the one that was technically for staff holiday party supplies—and pulled out two beers.
Handed one to Rune. “Drink this. Don’t call anyone.
Don’t go next door. Don’t do anything except sit here and be the kind of man who can hold still when holding still is the hardest thing in the world. ”
“That’s a terrible motivational speech.”
“It’s an accurate one.” Dekel sat on the opposite crate.
Opened his beer. “Besides, Breezy and I have already started a secondary channel. Intelligence sharing. She’s handling the legal response; I’m monitoring the Creed Capital filings from our end.
We’re the two people who run their lives, and we’ve decided to pool resources.
Think of it as the support staff taking matters into their own hands while the principals have their emotional crisis. ”
“You and Breezy have a secondary channel?”
“She texts in complete sentences with correct punctuation. I find it strangely attractive.” Dekel took a sip. “We’re handling it. You’re handling yourself. Lark is handling Lark. Everyone has their assignment.”
They sat in the stockroom and drank in silence while the afternoon light shifted through the high windows and the wall between the stores stayed closed.
At three-thirty, his phone lit. Aspen.
Aspen: Something is WRONG. Lark’s Instagram has been silent all day.
She posts DAILY. She has NEVER gone this long without a story.
I’ve checked six times. Also her last post was a photo of a concert poster and the caption was three heart emojis and now the post is GONE. She deleted it. RUNE. What happened?
He stared at the screen. The poster. She’d posted it.
Photographed it and shared it with her audience and then—when the letter arrived—she’d taken it down.
She’d removed the evidence of his gift because the gift was next to the threat now, the Sade poster and the eviction notice in the same drawer, and she couldn’t look at one without seeing the other.
Rune: I’ll handle it.
Aspen: HANDLE WHAT? WHAT IS HAPPENING?
Aspen: Rune Aleksander Sterling if you don’t tell me what’s going on I am getting on the subway and coming to the store RIGHT NOW and I will make a SCENE.
Dekel, reading over his shoulder: “Tell her or she’ll show up. You know she will.”
He typed.
Rune: Fallon Creed bought the building. He’s tripling Lark’s rent. She’s not speaking to me.
The typing indicator appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. A long pause—extraordinary for a woman who typed at the speed of adrenaline.
Aspen: I am going to destroy him.
Aspen: With my HANDS.
Aspen: Does she need a lawyer? I know people. Fashion lawyers. They’re vicious.
Aspen: Wait. She’s not speaking to you? Why isn’t she speaking to YOU?
He didn’t answer that one. Couldn’t find words in any of his three languages that would make the explanation sound like anything other than what it was: the woman he was falling in love with had looked at him and seen the shape of the man who’d hurt her, because the shape was the same—wealthy, powerful, woven into her business—even if the man inside it was different.
Dekel took his phone gently. Set it facedown on the crate. “Enough screens. Finish the beer.”
At four o’clock, one final notification.
Breezy: She’s going to need help. Not today. When she’s ready, she’ll come to you. Don’t push.
He picked up the phone. Typed carefully, each word a restraint exercise.
Rune: I’ll be here.
Breezy: I know. That’s why I’m telling you.
He set the phone down. Picked up the beer. Drank the last of it.
Across the wall, one wall and one locked latch away, Lark sat with a concert poster and an eviction notice side by side—the gift and the threat, two men with money and access, six inches apart—and her hand on a phone she wouldn’t let herself pick up.
The wall stayed closed.
The afternoon light shifted. The summer heat pressed against the storefront glass. And the Lion King of Scandinavia sat in his stockroom on a packing crate with an empty beer and a still phone and his hair finally, slowly, beginning to settle, and did not make the calls.