LARK
TWENTY-SEVEN
Aman had become a lion.
The mane. It had erupted first—dark bronze, massive, nothing like the hair she’d been cataloguing for seven weeks. She had known he was a lion. She had been briefed, introduced to Pride members, eaten lamb at his family’s table and discussed council politics. She had known.
Knowing was not this.
The suit was gone—destroyed, shredded, the remnants of a charcoal Tom Ford scattered across the cobblestones.
In its place: a lion. Not the abstract concept of a lion shifter that she had been quietly integrating since he’d opened his front door and said “relevant.” A creature that was to her intellectual understanding what a hurricane was to a weather report.
Bigger. Denser. Built with the muscular economy of something designed to end arguments permanently.
And the eyes. Same ice-blue. Identical. Looking at her from a face that was not a face, and the eyes were his, and that was the detail that broke through every rational framework she possessed—because the lion was looking at her with Rune’s eyes and the expression in them was the same expression he’d worn on the rooftop, the one that said you are the most important thing in my field of vision.
She was shaking. Her brain assembled. The mane. The size. The eyes. The tail—he had a tail, thick and golden—that swished once against the cracked flagstone. The difference between understanding a fact and standing three feet from a six-hundred-pound version of it turned out to be considerable.
The lion made a sound. A low, vibrating chuff she felt through the soles of her boots. If she didn’t know better—and she increasingly felt she knew nothing at all—she’d say he was embarrassed.
Then the shift reversed.
It happened fast—fast as the initial transformation, the body contracting, bones reshaping, the mane receding until it was hair again, golden and disheveled and standing in multiple directions.
And then it was Rune. Standing on the sidewalk.
Breathing hard. A shallow claw rake across his left shoulder bleeding through—
Through nothing, because the suit was confetti on the ground, and Rune Sterling was standing naked on a SoHo sidewalk.
Lark’s brain stalled.
Then rebooted.
Then organized.
Okay, so that’s—yeah. That’s—nope. Filing that under Do Not Process Until Alone With Wine.
She shrugged off her jacket. Held it out to him.
He took it. The jacket was a size small. Lark was five-six. Rune was six-three. The jacket covered approximately one shoulder and dangled across his torso like a washcloth on a refrigerator. It concealed nothing. It arguably drew more attention to the nothing it failed to conceal.
“This doesn’t fit.”
“I’m aware. It’s all I have.”
He pulled the jacket across his shoulders with a dignity that was admirable given the circumstances, which were: naked, bleeding, surrounded by the remains of a two-thousand-dollar suit, on a cracked sidewalk, with a tourist recording from across the street.
“I knew.” Her voice was thin. “I knew what you were. I had dinner with your family. Yara talked about Pride succession.” She exhaled. “Knowing and—” she gestured at the cracked flagstone, the scattered suit, the golden mane still lifting at his shoulders, “seeing are not the same thing.”
“No.”
“Your mane is bigger than I expected.”
He closed his eyes. Opened them. The same blue—human now, but catching the light at an angle that wasn’t entirely natural. She’d seen that flicker before. She’d blamed the fluorescents because the other option was inhuman visual phenomenon and she hadn’t been ready for that category.
“We are not discussing my mane.”
“We are absolutely discussing your mane. That thing has its own zip code. It has square footage. You could rent it out as a studio apartment in this market.”
Her voice was climbing. She could hear it—the pitch rising, the jokes accelerating, the comedy engine redlining because the alternative was processing the fact that the man she’d been kissing and then not-kissing and then walking to her car with in loaded silence had turned into a lion and fought another lion on a public street and was now standing naked in front of her with a jacket the size of a cocktail napkin and blood on his shoulder and those eyes, those same eyes, and her ribs were tight and her hands were shaking and her filing system was running out of columns.
She was shaking. He saw it. He always saw it—the real thing beneath the performance, the tremor under the jokes, the way she built walls out of humor, the way he built them out of control.
He closed the distance. Two steps. Her jacket slipped off his shoulder and neither of them reached for it.
His arms came around her—careful, because the claw rake was bleeding and because she might pull away, she’d been pulling away for six days, the door between them had been a wall—and she didn’t pull away.
She pressed her face into his bare chest and her hands fisted against his sides and the shaking traveled from her body into his and he held her on the broken flagstone with the car alarm still screaming and the tourist still recording and his hair refusing to lie flat and the blood drying on his shoulder.
She was crying. She was laughing. Both. The sounds vibrated against his ribs interchangeably, the gasping exhale that could be either or both, and she let him hold her because the world had rearranged itself and he was the only fixed point in it and the fact that the fixed point had recently been a six-hundred-pound cat was a problem she would address later.
“Kasper Eld.” His voice rumbled through his chest and into her cheek. “Former member of the Sterling Pride. I expelled him twelve years ago after he challenged my authority when my father retired. He’s been gone ever since.”
“And now he’s back.”
“He’s working for someone. Someone with resources and a reason to threaten me through—” He stopped. Restarted. “Through the people near me.”