16. Rune #2
“The difference is plausible deniability,” Oliver offered from across the table, thumbs moving beneath the table’s edge. Sybil placed her hand over his phone without looking. Oliver kept typing.
Rune set down his fork. Addressed Vivienne directly.
“Overextension is managed through conservative debt ratios and a diversified revenue base. The Pride’s real estate holdings provide stability independent of the retail operation.
I don’t expand into markets I can’t sustain through a two-year downturn. ”
Vivienne studied him. The examination was thorough, unhurried, and stripped of pretense. She was not playing hostess. She was evaluating whether this man posed a threat to her daughter, and she was doing it with the skill set of someone who had spent thirty years separating truth from testimony.
“You’ve done this before.” Not a question.
“I lead a Pride council that includes a woman who makes your cross-examination look gentle. I’ve had practice.”
The table went still.
Then Harrison laughed—that deep baritone again—and reached for the Brunello. “?Wepa! He compared you to a lion council elder and survived. I like him.”
Vivienne’s mouth twitched. The Coleman version—the microexpression Lark had inherited, the fissure in the composure that signaled genuine reaction beneath the performance. “I haven’t decided yet.”
“You decided when he brought the Brunello,” Harrison countered. “You’re conducting discovery for entertainment purposes now.”
“A thorough examination is never merely entertainment.” But her tone had shifted. A degree warmer. The cross-examination wasn’t over, but the hostility had downgraded from opposing counsel to cautious colleague. Rune recognized the gradient. Yara’s approval moved in the same increments.
Across the table, Lark caught his eye. Her expression was complicated—apology and amusement and pride tangled in the set of her jaw and the brightness in her gaze. She mouthed two words at him: “You’re welcome.”
He almost smiled back. Not the guarded one. The other—involuntary, startled out of him that she’d been cracking open since a stockroom floor and pad thai and a vault full of first editions.
The study smelled like leather, old paper, and cigars.
Harrison had pulled him aside after dessert—flan, perfect, the caramel still warm—with a hand on his shoulder and a “Let me show you something” that carried the conspiratorial weight of someone about to share classified intelligence.
The rest of the family had exchanged a look that Rune couldn’t parse until Lark rolled her eyes and Vivienne sipped her wine with an expression of magnificent forbearance.
The study was Harrison’s sanctuary. Books lined three walls.
Financial journals stacked on the desk beside a Wharton diploma and a framed photograph of a Washington Heights bodega with a young couple standing in front of it—Harrison’s parents, Rune guessed, from the jaw and the smile.
A vintage Omega Seamaster sat in a leather tray.
The room radiated the particular authority of a self-made man’s private archive.
And in the corner, a locked glass cabinet.
Harrison produced a key. Glanced at the study door. Opened the cabinet with reverence, as if approaching a sacrament.
First-edition Marvel. A dozen issues, sleeved in archival mylar, arranged by publication date.
The collection was modest by the standards of Magnus Holt’s vault—no six-figure grails, no museum-tier rarities—but it was personal in a way that vaults weren’t.
These editions had been acquired by a kid from Washington Heights who’d fallen in love with superheroes and carried them through a Wharton scholarship and a banking career and a marriage to a law professor who had found the collection in year one and never said a word.
Rune’s lion went quiet. The particular quiet of recognition. Another man who loved this world and hid it behind a polished exterior.
“This one.” Harrison lifted an edition from the cabinet.
A 1966 Fantastic Four #52—first appearance of Black Panther.
The cover was vibrant, the paper sound, the grade visually strong.
“I bought it when I was fourteen. Saved up for six months. The bodega cashier thought I was buying cigarettes because I hid the bag on the walk home.” He held it out. “Is it real?”
Rune took the edition. His hands moved before his brain gave permission—tilting it toward the desk lamp, running his thumb along the spine, checking the staples and the binding with the muscle memory of twenty years. Harrison watched him the way clients watched surgeons.
He turned to the interior pages. Held them to the light. Set the edition down.
“It’s genuine. Beautifully preserved—whoever stored this knew what they were doing.” He looked up. “In today’s market, it’s worth between forty and fifty thousand dollars.”
Harrison’s eyes went wide. Then flat. Then wide again. His mouth opened. Closed. His hand went to the back of his neck—the gesture of someone who had spent thirty years valuing assets and had never applied the methodology to the thing he loved most.
“Fifty thousand,” he repeated.
“At auction. Private sale could run higher depending on the story. The personal acquisition story adds value—a fourteen-year-old saving for six months is exactly the kind of narrative collectors pay a premium for.”
“?Dios mío!” Harrison took the edition back.
Held it with new hands—the grip of someone who had spent decades treating his collection as a secret indulgence and was now holding a piece of it that was worth more than his first year at Wharton.
“Vivienne is going to—” He stopped. Corrected course.
“Vivienne doesn’t know about this collection. ”
Rune regarded him with the neutral expression he deployed when presented with a statement that was obviously, transparently, comprehensively untrue. “Of course.”
“She has never mentioned it.”
“Understood.”
Harrison studied him. The banker’s assessment, the father’s measure, and beneath both, the recognition of someone who loved comics and had spent years pretending he didn’t, meeting another man who loved comics and had built an empire around it.
“What about this one?” He reached into the cabinet. Pulled out an Amazing Spider-Man #129. “First Punisher appearance. I got this at a garage sale in ’89. Five dollars.”