Page 87 of Mane Rival in Store by Milly Taiden

Fallon’s eyes held hers. The smile was gone. What replaced it was the thing underneath—the hunger, the calculation, the raw insecurity of a man who had clawed his way into rooms like this and lived in terror that the rooms would realize he didn’t belong.

“You’ll need protection eventually.” His voice was quiet. The attorneys on both sides went still, because a defendant speaking directly to a plaintiff during a legal proceeding was either very brave or very stupid, and the consensus in the room was forming rapidly. “The world you’re in—the retail, the real estate, the money—it doesn’t stay clean.”

“I have protection.” Lark’s chin lifted. Her shoulder ached. The mark beneath the gauze—the one opposite the scars—pulsed with a warmth that had nothing to do with injury. “The difference is he asked if I wanted it instead of deciding I needed it.”

Fallon’s jaw tightened. The micro-expression traveled through his face like a fault line—the crack spreading, the composure splitting, and for one unguarded moment, she saw him as he was: a scholarship kid whose whole life was walls built from money and control, who couldn’t understand why a woman born inside those walls would choose to walk through them to stand in the open.

The moment passed. The mask returned. But Lark had seen the foundation, and it was exactly what she’d suspected three years ago when she’d left: hollow.

“We’ll review the evidence.” Fallon’s lead attorney placed a hand on his client’s arm—the universal legal gesture for stop talking. “Our response will be forthcoming.”

“You have seventy-two hours to accept terms.” Margaux snapped her briefcase closed with the efficiency of a woman who billed in six-minute increments and had no intention of wasting a single one. “After that, the criminal referral proceeds independently of any civil settlement.”

Lark gathered her things. Harrison stood beside her—his hand at her back, brief, fatherly, the banker receding behind the father. Vivienne rose with the unhurried grace of a woman who had won without speaking and intended to leave the same way.

In the hallway outside the conference room, the fluorescent light gave way to the glass tower’s lobby. Manhattan glittered through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Harrison’s arm came around her shoulders—careful of the left, pulling her against his right side.

“You did good, mija.”

She leaned into him. The Spanish landed the way it always did—warm, grounding, the language of his parents’ kitchen translated into the language of his daughter’s victories. Her eyes stung. She blinked hard.

Vivienne paused at the elevator. Turned. Studied Lark with the gaze that had made thirty years of students and opposing counsel feel seen and dissected in the same breath.

“The line about protection.” One eyebrow rose. “You improvised that?”

“Yes.”

“It was effective.” The elevator arrived. Vivienne stepped in, held the door. Her expression softened by a degree that most people wouldn’t notice and that Lark, who had been reading the finest adjustments of her mother’s face since childhood, recognized as pride. “I would have phrased it differently. But yours was better.”

Lark stepped into the elevator. Harrison followed. The doors closed on the glass tower.

Her phone buzzed.

Breezy: Meeting concluded. Legal follow-up initiated. Criminal referral timeline: 72 hours. Building acquisition challenge filed. I have updated the master operational tracker. Current status: winning. I am still requesting hazard pay.

Sybil: How are you feeling? Oliver is pacing. He’s been pacing since 8 AM. He wore a hole in my rug.

Oliver: DID HE CRY? TELL ME HE CRIED. I WILL ACCEPT WATERY EYES.

Lark typed with one hand, her other arm threaded through her father’s.

Lark: He didn’t cry. But his hand curled. If you know, you know.

Oliver: I KNOW. THE HAND CURL. THAT’S HIS TELL. THAT’S BETTER THAN CRYING.

Lark: How do you know his tell?

Oliver: Fallon and I went to the same prep school, Lark. I’ve been studying that man’s weaknesses since the eighth grade. The hand curl means he knows he’s losing and he’s calculating his next move. Except THIS time there IS no next move because our father just dissected his entire financial structure at a conference table and I am SO MAD I wasn’t there to watch.

Lark laughed. Her shoulder protested. She laughed anyway.

THIRTY-EIGHT

RUNE

The mark on her shoulder was warm under his fingertips.

Rune traced the edge of the bandage on her left shoulder—the claw marks, the ones that would scar—and then moved his hand across to the right, where the claiming mark pulsed gold beneath her skin. Two marks. Two stories. The woman who had shielded his sister and the woman who had chosen his bite, and both were the same woman, and she was sitting on his counter in Sterling & Mane at four in the afternoon, eating takeout with her legs swinging and her hair brushing the edge of a display case worth more than his car.