Page 32 of Mane Rival in Store by Milly Taiden

Not the way he talked in boardrooms. Not the measured, strategic register of an alpha managing a conglomerate and a pride and a reputation built on discipline. The other voice. The one that surfaced when he was alone with editions and no audience—the voice of the kid who’d organized his first collection by publication date at nine, who’d taught himself provenance research at thirteen from his father’s reference library, who had loved this world before the world had demanded he become a king.

He walked to the first case. A 1938 Superman debut. “This is the holy grail of the golden age. Fewer than a hundred copies in verifiable existence. Magnus acquired this from a private estate in 1987—the family didn’t realize what they had, kept it in a cedar chest in the attic. The paper preservation is remarkable because cedar has natural insecticidal properties. No silverfish, no moisture damage, no foxing. Sixty years in a chest, and it looks like it came off the press.”

He moved to the next case. And the next. His hands traced the outlines of displays without touching the glass. His voice shifted—lower, quicker, the cadence of someone who had forgotten that talking fast about things he loved was a vulnerability he’d trained himself out of a decade ago.

“This printing run used a Miehle flatbed press—you can tell from the ink density variations at the margins. See how the color bleeds heavier at the top left? That’s the press calibration. Every machine has a fingerprint. I’ve seen enough flatbed output from this era to identify the facility within a twenty-mile radius based on margin bleed alone.”

He picked up a pair of cotton gloves from the examination station. Pulled them on. Lifted a Batman #1 from its case with the practiced tenderness of a man handling a living thing.

“The cover design is Bob Kane, but the interior inking shows three distinct hands—see how the line weight changes between panels? Collaborative production. They were building an industry. They didn’t have time for consistency.”

He held the edition angled toward the light. The overhead spots caught the cover—the colors still vivid beneath the aging, Batman’s cape in deep indigo, the cityscape behind him in blocks of black and gray.

“The paper is wood-pulp, which means it’s acidic, which means it’s self-destructing. Slowly. Every first edition from this era is a countdown. We’re preserving things that are trying to disappear.” He turned the page with the edge of one gloved finger. “That’s what makes this work matter. It’s not collecting. It’s⁠—”

He stopped. Realized he’d been talking for fifteen minutes straight without pause. Realized his voice had dropped to the unguarded register he reserved for Dekel and Aspen and his father’s farmstead in Norway and no one else. Realized Lark was standing two feet away with her arms folded across her chest and an expression on her face that he couldn’t read because it didn’t match any of the categories he’d built for her—not the teasing, not the challenge, not the professional assessment.

Her eyes were bright. Not with amusement. With attention. The same full, unwavering focus she brought to everything, except this time it was aimed entirely at him, and his ribs compressed with an urgency that had nothing to do with paper preservation.

“Sorry.” He set the edition back in its case. Straightened. Rebuilt the distance. “I got carried away.”

“Don’t.” One word. Quiet. “Don’t apologize for that.”

The vault was very silent. Filtered air. Recessed lights. Two thousand square feet of comics history, and the only sound was his heartbeat and the faint shift of her boots on the concrete floor as she stepped closer.

“Show me the suspicious edition.”

He did. The 1941 Captain America #1, pulled from its case at the far end of the vault. He placed it on the examination station, adjusted the overhead light, and ran through the initial visual inspection while the portable spectrographic unit warmed up. Lark leaned in beside him—close, focused, her shoulder near his arm—and asked the right questions. Paper weight. Binding adhesive. Ink density baselines for the Timely Comics printing facility.

The test results loaded in ninety seconds.

Paper composition: inconsistent with 1941 printing stock. Same modern binding agents. Same calibration signature.

Another forgery. Same hands.

“This entered Magnus’s collection eleven months ago.” Rune’s voice had returned to the controlled register. The investigation demanded it. “Five months before the first forgery hit our retail pipeline. The counterfeiter was seeding private collections before targeting retail. Building a reputation for the fake provenance.”

“High-level collectors validate the documentation, and then the same documentation gets cited when the forgeries enter commercial channels.” Lark’s jaw set. “They’re using people like Magnus as credibility laundering. Placing fakes in respected collections so the provenance trail leads to real vaults instead of fabricated histories.”

Rune set down the analysis report. Stared at the forged edition under the examination light. Five months of lead time. Infrastructure. Strategy. A forger with the skill to fool Magnus Holt’s forty years of handling experience, and a financier with the patience to build a credibility pipeline before going commercial.

This is larger than we thought.

Lark stood beside him at the examination station. Her scent cut through the vault’s sterile air—warm, alive against the temperature-regulated nothing. She studied the forgery with the same concentrated focus she’d given his fifteen-minute lecture on printing presses and paper degradation.

“They’re targeting the ecosystem,” she said. “Not one store. Not one collector. The entire verification chain.”

“Yes.”

“Then we trace the entire chain. Your verification records. Magnus’s acquisition history. My buyer network. Cross-reference everything.”

We. She’d said we without hesitation. Not an offer of assistance. A declaration of alliance.

His hair lifted—a subtle movement at the crown, the golden strands rising as if caught by static that wasn’t there. She noticed. Her mouth did a dangerous thing. He chose not to acknowledge the dangerous thing.

“Dinner,” he said, and the word exited his mouth before his brain had authorized it.

She blinked.