Lady Leo was standing on the porch when they pulled up.
It was nearly two in the morning. The house was lit up like a ship at sea, every window blazing, the porch lights on, the front door open. Her hair was down, falling past her shoulders. Without the heels and the high bun, she looked less like the woman who ran an empire and more like a mother who had been standing on her porch for hours waiting for a car to appear at the end of her street.
Bethany was behind her. The yellow sports car was in the driveway with the driver's door still open, as if she'd pulled in and hadn't bothered to close it. She was gripping the porch railing with both hands. Her face was doing the thing that Amani's face had done, the pressed lips, the locked jaw, the absolute refusal to cry until it was safe to cry.
Harold stopped the SUV in the driveway. Nero opened the back door carefully, one hand on Amani's shoulder. The kid had slept for most of the drive but woke when the engine changed pitch. He was sitting up with the blanket around his shoulders and his bandaged feet delicately pulled up on the seat, blinking at the lights of his mother's house like someone surfacing from deep water.
"We're here," Nero said.
Amani looked at the porch. At his mother. At his sister. His face did something complicated, a sequence of emotions too fast to catalog, relief and shame and love and fear all moving through him in the space of a breath, and then he said, very quietly, "I can't walk."
Nero got out and came around to his side. "You don't have to."
He lifted Amani out of the SUV the same way he'd carried him out of the ranch house, easily, steadily, as if carrying a full-grown lion shifter were something he did every day and not something that should have been impossible for someone built the way Nero was built. Amani's arm went around his shoulders and his face turned into Nero's neck and he held on. Nero carried him up the porch steps and into the light.
Lady Leo met them at the top of the stairs. She didn't reach for Amani. She stood very still and looked at her son in a stranger's arms, the bandaged feet, the borrowed blanket, the linen shirt and cotton pants that weren't his, the raw ring around his throat where the collar had been, the hollowed-out look of someone who had been gone for four days and come back lighter in ways that had nothing to do with weight, and her face did not change. Her composure held the way a dam holds. Perfectly, until it doesn't.
"Hi, Mom," Amani said.
The dam broke.
Lady Leo made a sound that Nero had heard exactly once before in his career, a lioness on a domestic call whose cub had been found after three days missing. It was not a human sound. It came from somewhere older than language, somewhere in the animal architecture of a mother's body, and it lasted one second before she swallowed it and reached for her son with hands that were shaking for the first and possibly last time in her life.
Nero transferred Amani into her arms. She was strong enough to hold him. Lady Leo was stronger than she looked, which seemed to be a family trait in the opposite direction, and she pulled him against her chest and put her hand on the back of his head and held him the way you hold something you thought you'd lost.
Bethany lasted about four more seconds before she broke too. She crashed into both of them, her arms going aroundAmani from the side, her face pressed against his shoulder. The sound she made was less controlled than her mother's, a full, messy sob that she didn't try to hide because she was twenty-two and her brother was home and she was done pretending to be strong.
Nero stepped back. This was family. This was theirs. He stood on the porch with Harold and watched the three of them hold each other under the porch light, and his hands were in his pockets and his throat was tight and he looked away because looking felt like trespassing.
Harold, beside him, cleared his throat. "You want me to wait or come back?"
"Wait. I need to brief Lady Leo and make sure his feet get looked at tonight."
Harold nodded. He leaned against the porch railing, crossed his arms, and said nothing else, because Harold was a good partner and good partners knew when to be quiet.
***
Miriam arrived within the hour.
Lady Leo had called her, the raccoon shifter who'd been patching up the shifter community's messes for longer than most of them had been alive. Retired nurse, unofficial healer, a woman who made house calls at two in the morning without complaint and arrived with a medical bag that looked like it could stock a small emergency room. She was brisk, compact, and had clearly been briefed on the situation because she didn't ask Amani a single question about how the injuries happened. She just unwrapped the gauze and looked at his feet and her mouth went into a thin line that said everything her voice didn't.
They were in Lady Leo's living room. Amani was on the couch with his feet elevated on a cushion. Lady Leo sat beside him with her hand on his arm. She hadn't stopped touching him since the porch, small points of contact that saidI'm here, you'rereal, you're home. Bethany was in the kitchen making tea that nobody had asked for because she needed to be doing something with her hands.
Nero stood near the doorway. Close enough to be present. Far enough to not crowd the family. He watched Miriam work and kept his mouth shut because this was her area, not his.
"Multiple lacerations, both feet," Miriam narrated for her own notes as much as for anyone else. "Deep cuts on the arches and heels. Cactus spine puncture, left heel, partially extracted. I'll need to clean that out properly. Embedded gravel in several wounds. Early signs of infection in two of the deeper cuts." She looked at the raw band around Amani's throat, red, weeping in places, the skin angry and damaged in a perfect ring where the collar had sat for four days. She didn't touch it. She just looked, and her mouth went thinner. "Silver contact dermatitis. I'll leave a topical for the neck. It'll scar." She turned back to his feet. "You ran barefoot across desert terrain?"
"I tried to escape," Amani said. His voice was flat. Factual. The voice of someone giving a report.
Miriam nodded as if this were the most ordinary thing she'd heard all day. "Shifter healing will help, but these are significant injuries. You're looking at two to three weeks before you can stand comfortably for any length of time. No prolonged walking. No running. If you insist on working—" She glanced at Lady Leo, who raised an eyebrow. "Thirty-minute shifts maximum, with fifteen-minute breaks off your feet. If the wounds reopen or you see fresh bleeding, you stop for the night. Non-negotiable."
"I understand," Amani said.
"You understand but you won't listen." Lady Leo knew her son.
Amani almost smiled. Almost. The corner of his mouth moved a fraction of an inch and then stopped, as if the muscles had forgotten how to complete the gesture. "I'll try."
Miriam cleaned the wounds properly, flushing, debriding, removing the rest of the cactus spine and two pieces of embedded gravel that Grainger's first aid had missed. Amani held still through all of it. He didn't flinch, didn't hiss, didn't make a sound. His hands were tight in the couch cushions. His jaw was locked. He stared at a point on the ceiling with the thousand-yard focus of someone who had learned, recently and at great cost, how to be still when everything in him wanted to scream.
