3. Rune
THREE
RUNE
His hands were tingling.
Moderate the audio. He’d said that. Out loud. To a woman whose hand had sent an electric current through his entire nervous system. He’d stood in a store full of purple neon and villain-themed lipstick and said “moderate the audio” like a building superintendent filing a formal grievance.
Spectrographic analysis requires—
He closed his eyes. Opened them. Adjusted the X-Men by one millimeter to the left.
His hair was doing a thing.
He could sense it—the follicles along his scalp lifting, the thick fall across his forehead refusing to lie flat.
The lion stirred behind his ribs, a low, restless heat that paced through his bloodstream and settled in his fingertips and the back of his neck.
His lion had noticed her before his brain had formed a coherent assessment.
The moment he’d stepped through the door of that violet-lit chaos factory, the lion had surged forward with a gravitational intensity that Rune had spent the entire ninety-second interaction suppressing.
He moved to the next display case. A graded Action Comics #252—first appearance of Supergirl, near-mint, one of only three in private hands on the East Coast. He opened the case with gloved care. Adjusted the edition’s positioning. Closed the case.
Moved to the next case.
“You’ve already done that one.”
Dekel leaned against the back counter with his arms crossed, sandy-blond hair shaggy and sun-bleached, pale green eyes bright with undisguised delight.
He wore a linen shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows and an expression that communicated, with great clarity, that this was the most entertaining morning he’d had in months.
“The light angle was wrong.”
“The light angle was perfect. You set it at six this morning. You rechecked it at seven. You confirmed it at eight.” Dekel pushed off the counter and strolled to the display case with the unhurried gait—he’d been Rune’s second-in-command for twelve years and feared nothing in the known universe, including his alpha’s displeasure. “You’re stress-curating.”
“I’m maintaining standards.”
“You’ve moved the Batman Number One facsimile four times since you came back from next door.”
“The lighting shifted when the clouds moved.”
“There are no clouds. It’s clear skies over SoHo. I checked.” Dekel tapped the display case glass with one finger—a casual, borderline disrespectful gesture that made Rune’s eye twitch. “What happened next door?”
Rune adjusted his cuffs. Straightened the counter display of grading brochures. Aligned the edges. “I introduced myself and requested a reduction in their music volume.”
“And?”
“The request was acknowledged.”
“Was it accepted?”
“The acknowledgment was… conditional.”
Dekel’s grin widened. On another man, the expression would have been friendly. On Dekel, it was tactical reconnaissance. “What does she look like?”
“Irrelevant.”
“You said that fast.”
“I said it at a normal conversational speed.”
“You said ‘irrelevant’ how most people say ‘extremely relevant and I’m panicking about it.’” Dekel strolled to the front of the store where the shared wall ended and the glass began—the same narrow gap that gave a clear view into Villainette.
The purple neon. The rotating mannequin.
The three women visible through the neighboring glass, one of whom was—
Rune stepped into his sight line. An instinctive movement. Territorial. He caught himself doing it and redirected, pretending he’d been reaching for a display cloth.
Dekel noticed. Dekel always noticed. The grin became a full smile. “She’s pretty.”
“She’s a neighboring business owner whose audio levels are impacting our customer experience.”
“That’s the longest way anyone has ever said ‘yes, she’s pretty.’”
“Dekel.”
“What’s her name?”
Lark. The name sat in his chest like a held breath.
Bright. Sharp. A bird’s name—quick and impossible to catch.
She’d said it with the confidence of a woman who had never introduced herself without commanding the room, and she’d extended her hand, and he’d taken it, and her fingers were steady, and her grip was sure, and the lion had roared so loudly behind his ribs that he was certain she’d heard it.
She had not heard it. She had, instead, called him Your Majesty with a smile that bypassed every defense he’d spent twelve years constructing and landed directly in the center of his nervous system.
“Her name is Lark Coleman.” He set down the cloth. “She’s the founder of Villainette. It’s a villain-themed lifestyle brand. Cosmetics, comics, cosplay supplies.”
“I know what Villainette is. They carry Celestial Ronin merch. We share three consignment channels.” Dekel dropped into the chair behind the register. “What did she say about the music?”
“She said she’d consider adjusting it.”
“Consider.”
“After they open.”
“So, no.”
Rune’s teeth set. “She also called my store ‘curated’ as though it were an insult.”
“Your store is curated. You curate it. You’ve built an entire brand on curation.”
“She meant it pejoratively.”
“How?”
“Her tone.”
“Describe her tone.”
Rune stopped polishing. His lion paced. The tingling in his hands had migrated to a low heat in his chest that expanded every time the bass from next door thumped through the wall—a rhythmic reminder that Lark Coleman existed sixteen inches of plaster away and was not, based on the increasing volume, considering adjusting anything.
“Her tone was… disarming.” The word escaped before he could filter it. He pressed his mouth shut.
Dekel sat up in the chair. Slowly. Like a man who has spotted a rare animal in the wild and does not want to startle it.
“Disarming,” Dekel repeated.
“In a challenging way.”
“Disarming in a challenging way.”
“She was being deliberately pleasant to undermine my position. It’s a negotiation technique.”
“It’s called flirting.”
“It is not—” Rune caught himself. Recalibrated. Buttoned and unbuttoned his jacket cuff—a gesture he didn’t realize he was making until Dekel’s gaze tracked to his wrist and the grin threatened to split his face in half. “I need to call Aspen.”
“About the music situation?”
“About the… general situation.”
“The general situation that is warm in a challenging way and has good cheekbones.” Dekel stood. “I’ll hold the floor. Take your time. Tell your sister I said hi.”
Rune retreated to the back office. Closed the door.
The room was small, organized with military precision—authentication equipment on the left wall, reference materials on shelves, a desk that held nothing except a laptop, a phone, and a framed photo of his family that he told himself was for professional ambiance and not sentiment.
He dialed Aspen. She picked up on the second ring, which meant she was between fittings at her Stockholm atelier. Or she’d been waiting for his call. With Aspen, both were equally likely.
“Brother.” Her voice was bright, animated, and carried the faint background noise of scissors on fabric. “It’s eleven o’clock here. At night. This had better be dramatic.”
“The neighboring storefront opened today.”
“The villain lipstick store? Dekel texted me about it. He used the word ‘colorful.’ Dekel never uses the word ‘colorful.’ What happened?”
Rune sat on the edge of his desk. Ran a hand through his hair—the hair that would not lie flat, that had been refusing to cooperate since the moment Lark Coleman’s gaze had met his across sixteen hundred square feet of violet neon.
“The store is… commercial. The merchandise is mass-market. The aesthetic is the opposite of everything we represent. The music is a genuine operational concern. Their bass frequencies are compromising the acoustic integrity of my—”
“Rune.”
“—controlled environment, and the window display is a rotating villain outfit showcase that is generating pedestrian traffic that partially blocks our—”
“Rune.”
“—storefront visibility, which is a zoning-adjacent concern at minimum—”
“What does she look like?”
He stopped. The lion pressed against his ribs.
Caramel skin. Hazel eyes that shifted between green and amber under the neon.
A smile that dismantled him in ninety seconds.
Curves that her leather jacket didn’t hide because she dressed to celebrate, not conceal.
Hair—long, black, blown out straight and swinging when she moved, the kind of hair that people stopped on the street to compliment, and he understood why because he’d watched it catch the light while she leaned against the counter and called him Your Majesty and he’d lost approximately forty percent of his cognitive function.
“She has competent branding instincts,” he said.
Aspen was quiet for three full seconds. An eternity, for his sister. “What was she wearing?”
“A leather jacket over a silk top. Black trousers. Combat boots. Gold earrings—hoops. Statement size. They caught the neon.”
Silence.
“Rune.”
“What?”
“You described her earrings.” Aspen’s voice had gone soft.
Dangerous. The voice she used when she was about to say the thing he didn’t want to hear.
“You noticed her earrings. You registered the way light hit her earrings. You are a man who has never commented on a woman’s accessories in his entire adult life, and you just told me her hoops caught the neon. ”
“They were visually prominent. Any observer would—”
“You’re done.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“You’re done. You’re finished. This is over.” The scissors had stopped. Aspen’s full attention was on him now, and Aspen’s full attention was a force of nature—relentless and impossible to redirect. “How long did you talk to her?”
“Ninety seconds.”
“And you noticed her earrings in ninety seconds.”
“Aspen—”
“I’m booking a flight.”
“Do not book a flight.”
“I’m booking a flight and I’m bringing wine and I’m going to meet this woman and I’m going to—”
“Aspen. There is nothing to meet. She is a neighboring business owner. Our stores have incompatible aesthetics. The wall is inadequately soundproofed. That is the entirety of the situation.”
“You called me at eleven Stockholm time to tell me about inadequate soundproofing.”
The silence between them stretched. Through the office wall, Rune heard the bass from Villainette—louder now, as though Lark had not only declined to moderate the audio but had actively increased it. A low, dark track with a vocal line that vibrated through the plaster and into his sternum.
His hair stood on end.
“The soundproofing,” he said carefully, “is a legitimate concern.”
“I love you, brother.” Aspen’s voice was thick with glee. “I love you, and you are hopeless, and I am booking a flight. Goodnight.”
She hung up.
Rune set the phone on his desk. Stared at it.
Stared at the wall that separated his back office from whatever room existed on the other side of Villainette’s layout.
Through the plaster, muffled but unmistakable, he heard laughter.
Bright, unguarded laughter—the sound of someone who treated joy as a default setting and had no idea it carried through walls.
He ran both hands through his hair. It refused to settle.
He straightened his jacket. Adjusted his cuffs. Checked his reflection in the dark surface of his laptop screen and confirmed that his expression was composed, neutral, betraying nothing—though his lion had not stopped pacing.
He walked back onto the floor. Dekel was helping a customer—an older gentleman examining a graded Silver Age edition through a loupe. The store was quiet. Ordered. Everything in its place.
Through the shared wall, the music thumped.