41. Rune
FORTY-ONE
RUNE
He noticed the photograph first.
The cosplay event print, hung beside the antique illustration he’d selected himself during the store’s original design—chosen with obsessive precision three years ago, with the expectation that nothing would change without his explicit authorization.
Something had changed without his explicit authorization.
The photograph showed a man in a charcoal suit and a purple cape, surrounded by cosplayers, his hair standing in a golden wave that was both dignified and catastrophically insubordinate.
The man’s expression was caught between mortification and a smile he was losing the battle to suppress.
Beside him, a woman in leather pants and silver earrings was laughing with her head thrown back, and the contrast between the two of them—his reluctant glory and her unrestrained joy—was so perfectly composed that it looked staged.
It was not staged. It was the most honest photograph ever taken of him.
“You hung a photograph.”
“I hung a photograph.” Lark was behind the register on her side. Her voice carried through the arch with the bright innocence of a woman who had planted a surprise and was enjoying the detonation. “In your store. Without asking.”
“In my store.”
“Beside your illustration. Which is lovely, by the way. Very distinguished. Very on-brand. The cape photo adds dimension.”
“It adds a cosplay event.”
“It adds you. Having fun. In a cape. On the wall of the most prestigious rare-comics gallery in the Western Hemisphere.” She walked through the arch. Stopped in front of the photograph. Tilted her head. “I think it’s my best work.”
He stood beside her. Close—his arm brushing hers, the automatic proximity his body had adopted since the rooftop. Optimal distance from Lark Coleman: zero. His eyes moved from the photograph to her and back.
“You’re not taking it down.”
“I’m not taking it down.”
His mouth twitched. The smile fought to surface—fought through years of arranging his environment with gallery-grade precision, now cohabitating, aesthetically speaking, with a woman who hung cosplay photographs beside antique prints and thought it added dimension.
She’d taken his world apart. She’d rearranged it. And the rearrangement was better than the original.
His phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen.
Erik Sterling. Calling.
He stepped to the back of the store—the authentication room, the quiet. He answered on the third ring.
“Pappa.”
The voice on the other end was low and unhurried, carrying the deliberate pace of a man who had built an empire without raising his voice. Norwegian first—the language of home, of the den and Oslo and childhood, the one that bypassed the alpha’s register entirely and found the boy underneath.
“She doesn’t run,” Erik said. “Aspen told me. I wanted to hear it from you.”
“She doesn’t run.”
A silence that was not empty. His father’s version of consideration—the pause he had been watching across boardroom tables and breakfast tables his entire life, the one that meant the decision was already made and the words were being chosen with care.
“Good.” The word carried the weight of a man who said little and meant everything.
Another pause. “Your grandmother’s ring is in the safe at the farm.
It’s been there since she passed it to your mother.
I always thought I’d know when it was time to pass it on.
” His father’s voice carried the Norwegian farmer’s particular relationship with sentiment: enormous, unexpressed, unmistakable.
“Tell the girl to come to the farm. The ring is hers when she’s ready for it. ”
The line went quiet. Rune stood in the authentication room with his phone against his ear and his hair risen and his eyes doing something they had not done since his father had called him home from Oslo for the last time.
He went back out to Lark.
“The lux levels,” he started.
“Are four percent off on the left side. I read the email. Breezy summarized the email. The email had footnotes, Rune. Footnotes about lighting.”
“Proper display illumination requires—”
“Proper display illumination requires you to stop writing three-page emails about four-percent variations and start trusting that Marco knows what he’s doing because Aspen vetted him and Aspen has an eye that could rival yours on your best day.”
His hair rose. Not the defensive lift or the arousal spike. The amused one—the newest addition to the involuntary vocabulary his lion had developed since Lark entered his life, a gentle rise at the temples that said you are infuriating and I adore you in a language he hadn’t known his body spoke.
“Speaking of Aspen.” Lark crossed to the Villainette register and returned with the garment bag. Unzipped it. Held up the cape.
Purple silk. Gold thread. The structured collar that spread behind the neck like wings.
His hair stood up fully.
“She designed it.” Lark turned the cape so the lining caught the light. The embroidery glinted—Villains do it better—and her expression was pure, radiant mischief. “Custom. Silk-lined. Reinforced collar for, and I quote, ‘wind resistance or whatever.’”
“She is never allowed to design for me again.”
“She didn’t design it for you.” Lark draped the cape over her own shoulders.
The purple silk fell to mid-calf, the collar fanning behind her neck, the fabric catching Villainette’s neon through the arch and Sterling & Mane’s gallery light at once.
She looked like a queen in a comic book—powerful, beautiful, ridiculous, and completely serious about the ridiculousness. “She designed it for me.”
He stared.
She turned slowly. The cape swished. The gold embroidery flashed.
“Well?” Both eyebrows up. The full Lark Coleman challenge—the expression that dared him to be honest, that refused to let him retreat behind formality or diplomacy, that had been dismantling his defenses since the day she’d walked into the store next door and called his inventory “commercial garbage” and upgraded his insult into a compliment.
“You look…” He searched for the word. His vocabulary—three languages, a lifetime of boardroom eloquence—failed him with the same consistency it had failed him since the first day. “…magnificent.”
“Magnificent.” She grinned. “Not ‘aggressive’? Not ‘commercial’? Not ‘an assault on curation’?”
“I may have… revised my assessment.”
“You revised your entire personality, Your Majesty. The assessment was the easy part.”
He pulled her in by the cape’s lapel. Gentle.
Deliberate. The silk slid through his fingers and she came toward him, laughing, her hands landing on his chest. He kissed her—slow, thorough, with the focused attention he’d once reserved for editions under glass—and her laughter dissolved into the kiss and his lion settled into a deep, purring contentment that only surfaced when she was close and warm and entirely, impossibly his.
“The stockroom,” she murmured against his mouth.
“We’re in a public retail space.”
“We’re in a CLOSED public retail space. The preview ended an hour ago. The doors are locked. Breezy went home. Dekel went home. The stores are empty.” She pulled back enough to meet his eyes. Hers were green in this light—the hazel shifting warm. “And I’m wearing the cape.”
The stockroom of Sterling & Mane was a climate-controlled vault of organized shelving, unprocessed inventory, and the faint chemical scent of preservation materials.
It was also—after hours, with the overhead fluorescent replaced by the spillover glow from the gallery lights—surprisingly intimate.
Small. Enclosed. Surrounded by boxes of merchandise that represented both of their lives’ work, stacked in organized rows that she’d helped reorganize last week in a session that had turned into a debate about classification systems that had turned into a kiss against the shelving that had turned into Dekel texting from the front: I’m going home. Lock up. Don’t damage the merchandise.
Tonight, the shelving held a mix: Villainette candles beside Sterling authentication kits.
Villain lipstick shipments beside rare-edition storage boxes.
The physical merger of two inventories, two businesses, two people who had started as rivals and ended as mates and were now standing in a stockroom with a cape.
She kept the cape on.
He didn’t ask her to. He wanted to. The impulse surfaced—a need he hadn’t known existed until the cosplay event, a hunger that had nothing to do with the fabric and everything to do with what the fabric represented: joy.
Ridiculousness. The radical act of a serious man embracing the absurd because the woman he loved had taught him that dignity and delight could share the same room.
But she was already wearing it. And the look on her face—the warmth, the mischief, the confidence of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing and what it did to him—meant the ask was unnecessary.
“You’re staring at the cape.”
“I’m staring at you.”
“I’m wearing the cape. The cape is relevant.”
“The cape is secondary.”
“The cape is SILK, Rune. Custom. Your sister designed it. Show some respect.” She backed against the shelving. The purple silk pooled around her shoulders, framing her in the soft light. Her fingers found the top button of her blouse. Popped it. “Or show some disrespect. I’m flexible.”
He laughed. The sound surprised him—not because it was involuntary (it was) but because of where it landed.
Not in his chest or his throat but somewhere deeper, in the place where the boy who had collected comics at age nine still lived.
Lark didn’t make him laugh despite his seriousness.
She made him laugh because of it—because the contrast between who he had been and who she revealed him to be was the funniest thing in the room, and she understood the joke, and she loved both versions, and that was the most erotic thing he’d ever experienced.