10. Lark
TEN
LARK
Rune Sterling worked how he stood in his store—still, focused, and with a physical intensity that made the air around him feel ten degrees warmer.
Lark had been in his back office for two hours. She’d made eleven calls to buyers across her network, identified six stores with suspicious inventory matching the forgery profile, and compiled a preliminary distribution map on her notepad.
She’d also cataloged, against her will and better judgment, the following: the way his sleeves pulled across his forearms when he reached for a reference binder.
The pen he kept between his teeth while reading analysis data.
The lock of hair that fell across his forehead every four minutes and twenty seconds—she’d timed it, because she’d lost all dignity and might as well be thorough—only for him to push it back with an absent gesture that did not improve the situation because the gesture itself involved his hand moving through his hair, which was a problem she had not anticipated when she’d volunteered for this investigation.
Four minutes, twenty seconds. Hair falls. Hand pushes. Forearm flexes. I am in hell.
She turned back to her notepad. Drew a line between two distribution points. Drew it again when she realized the first line was shaky because her hands were.
“Your distribution analysis.” His voice arrived from her left, low and focused.
He’d leaned closer to study her notes, and the movement brought him into the edge of her space—close enough for her to catch his scent beneath the coffee and preservation chemicals.
Clean. Cold air and good soap and an undertone she’d been leaning into for weeks without identifying.
“The pricing pattern is consistent across all six stores?”
“Just below market.” She kept her voice level.
Work mode. A woman discussing distribution data and not the fact that his shoulder was six inches from hers and radiating heat like a furnace.
“Enough to attract bargain-hunters without triggering suspicion. The forger—or whoever’s running the distribution—understands collector psychology. ”
“You think the forger and the distributor are separate.”
“Forgers are craftspeople. Distributors are strategists. The overlap is rare.” She tapped her pen against the notepad.
“The production quality you described—months of aging per edition, professional materials, knowledge of verification chains—that’s an artisan.
But the distribution? Multiple channels, geographic spread, strategic pricing, seeded sellers with two years of clean history?
That’s a businessman with capital and a timeline. ”
He leaned back. Crossed his arms. The movement created distance that her nervous system processed as both a relief and a loss. “Two operators. A counterfeiter producing the editions and a financier orchestrating the distribution.”
“And the financier chose your pipeline as the entry point because your authentication seal is the most trusted in the industry. A forgery that passes Sterling & Mane becomes gospel. It can be resold indefinitely without scrutiny.”
A muscle worked along his jaw. Not irritation—she’d learned the difference over three weeks of proximity. This was a man absorbing the full scope of a threat that had infiltrated the infrastructure he’d spent a decade building.
“Your reputation is the laundering mechanism,” she finished, quieter. “They’re not targeting your inventory. They’re exploiting your credibility.”
Silence. The equipment hummed. Through the wall, Villainette’s mid-morning playlist thumped softly—her staff running the floor while she sat in a rival’s back office helping him trace an attack on the thing he’d built his identity around.
“Thank you.” Two words. Stripped of the formal register. The voice beneath the voice—the one she’d heard on the stockroom floor when he’d stopped performing and started talking. “For the analysis. And the network access. You didn’t have to offer either.”
Don’t make it a thing, Lark. He’s grateful for the help during a business crisis. That’s all this is.
“Your crisis is my crisis.” She capped her pen. “Forged editions in the market hurt every dealer, not just you. This is self-preservation disguised as altruism. Don’t give me too much credit, Your Majesty.”
The corner of his mouth moved. The seismic warning. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Her phone lit up. The group chat.
Sybil: Update please. It’s been two hours.
Lark: Working. Forgery investigation. Very professional.
Sybil: How close are you sitting to him?
Lark: I’m going to pretend this chat doesn’t exist.
Sybil: That close. Got it.
She pocketed her phone and turned back to the distribution map, and for the next hour, they worked side by side in a silence that was neither his kind nor hers.
Not the reverent hush of a gallery. Not the energized noise of a store in full swing.
A third option—the focused, absorbed quiet of two people solving a shared problem, punctuated by the click of keys and the scratch of her pen and the occasional exchange of data that required leaning into each other’s space in ways that were entirely the investigation and absolutely not the reason her pulse had been elevated since walking in.
He handed her a reference binder without looking up. Their fingers brushed on the spine.
His hair lifted. Subtle. If she hadn’t been watching—and she had been, because she was a traitor to her own interests—she’d have missed it.
The golden strands lifted a quarter inch, held, then settled as he redirected his attention to the monitor with a jaw tension that suggested significant internal negotiations.
The hair reacts to physical contact. Noted. Filed. I will not be examining why I’m keeping a file.
At noon, Breezy arrived.
She came through the service door with her tablet, her backup phone, and the energy of someone who had spent the morning monitoring her boss’s emotional trajectory via text message and had concluded that direct intervention was necessary.
Her blazer was charcoal. Her bun was immaculate.
Her expression said, “I am here to impose operational order on whatever chaos you’ve wandered into. ”
She surveyed the lab in four seconds. Equipment. Forgeries. Provenance files. Two coffee cups side by side on the counter—Lark’s with a lipstick print, Rune’s untouched—and her gaze lingered on that detail for one beat too long before moving on.
“Breezy Vega. Villainette operations.” She extended her hand to Rune. “Lark mentioned a counterfeiting issue with market-wide implications. I’m here to coordinate cross-network data sharing and compress your investigation timeline.”
Rune shook her hand. His expression cycled through recognition (Lark had mentioned Breezy), assessment (the handshake was firm and her posture suggested she did not waste time), and a recalibration so subtle only someone who’d been studying his face for three weeks would have caught it. “Rune Sterling.”
“I’m aware.” Breezy released his hand and turned to the analysis data. “Re-authentication timeline?”
“Three weeks, minimum—”
“Too long.” Breezy opened her tablet. “If forgeries are circulating in the secondary market, the story breaks in days. You need to control the narrative before it controls you. ‘Sterling & Mane catches counterfeiting ring’ is a press win. ‘Sterling & Mane sold fakes’ is a reputation collapse. The difference is speed.”
Rune blinked. It was brief—a flicker of recalculation behind the composed exterior—but Lark caught it and stored the image for the personal collection of moments Rune Sterling lost the thread that she was curating with increasing dedication.
Dekel appeared in the doorway. He’d gone out front to handle the morning’s store operations and returned with a fresh coffee and an alert posture—his second-in-command radar had detected a new variable.
His eyes moved from Breezy to Lark to the tablet Breezy was already using to cross-reference data with Rune’s seller files. He took three steps into the room. Extended his hand.
“Dekel Dahl. I run his operations.”
Breezy shook it without looking up. “You run his logistics?”
“You run hers?”
They looked at each other—two people who had spent their careers translating their boss’s vision into functional systems, keeping trains running while the conductors forgot there were tracks at all, absorbing the operational chaos of brilliant, oblivious leaders and converting it into spreadsheets.
“You have my sympathies,” they said in unison.
Lark pressed her lips tight. Rune’s brow furrowed. Dekel broke first—a grin, full and genuine, the Norwegian beach-kid version that surfaced when he was delighted by a situation rather than managing one. Breezy’s mouth twitched. On Breezy, a mouth twitch was a twenty-one-gun salute.
“I like her,” Dekel announced to the room at large.
“She’s efficient.” Rune’s tone suggested he hadn’t decided whether this was a compliment or a threat assessment.
“I’ll take it.” Breezy was already pulling Lark’s buyer data into a cross-referencing matrix on her tablet. “Dekel, I need your seller records sorted by acquisition date, region, and edition era. If the forger specializes in a period, the distribution will cluster.”
“Already pulling it.” He crossed to the office terminal. “You want seller payment structures too?”
“Payment structures, shipping timelines, and provenance template formatting. If the documentation comes from the same source, we’ll see pattern matches in the metadata.”