She didn't ask if he was fine. She didn't ask about the glass he'd broken. She knew. Bethany would have told her, or she'd heard the shatter from her office, or she had the omniscience that came with running a building full of people whose worst nights played out in her rooms.
What she said was: "Marco and I have been talking about the security rotation. We're making some changes."
Amani's hands stilled on the glass. "What kind of changes?"
"More coverage on the late shifts. Escort policy for staff leaving after three AM. I'm also bringing someone new in to head the security team. Someone from enforcement."
She said it casually, the way she said everything that mattered, as if it had already been decided and the informing was a courtesy rather than a consultation. But she was watching Amani's face as she said it. Amani understood that this was not casual at all. This was his mother saying: I could not protect you before, but I can change what happens next, and I am going to change it.
"Anyone I know?" he asked, because he already suspected the answer and he needed to hear her say it.
Lady Leo's mouth curved. "The detective who brought you home made an impression. He's good at his job, he understands our world, and—" She paused, choosing her words with care. "He seems to understand you. Which is not a quality I was screening for, but it's not one I'm inclined to overlook."
Amani said nothing. He wasn't sure what to do with the complicated tangle of feelings that formed at the mention of Nero, the relief, the irritation, the memory of falling asleep in the back of an SUV with his face against a stranger's shoulder and feeling, for the first time in days, like nothing in the dark could reach him.
"I haven't offered yet," Lady Leo said. "I wanted to tell you first."
"Since when do you run staffing decisions by me?"
"Since the staffing decision involves a man who carried you up my porch steps."
Amani looked down at the glass in his hands. It was perfectly clean. It had been perfectly clean for two full minutes. He set it on the rack and picked up another one.
"It's your club," he said. "Hire whoever you want."
Lady Leo leaned across the bar and kissed his forehead. It was quick, matter-of-fact, the kiss of a mother who had been kissing this forehead since it was small enough to fit in her palm. "It's your club too. That hasn't changed."
She continued her circuit. Amani watched her go and then he polished the glass until his hands were steady again, which took longer than it should have.
He left at midnight.
Reza could handle closing.
Bethany was closing out the front desk, logging the last of the night's membership check-ins. She looked up when he came out of the elevator. "Ready?"
"Yeah."
They walked out together through the staff entrance, the way they'd walked in. The yellow car was where she'd left it in the staff lot, and she drove him to his apartment, not Lady Leo's, his, because he'd been sleeping there for the past two nights and the three locks on his door were starting to feel like his instead of just a precaution.
She walked him to his door and waited while he unlocked all three and then she hugged him, quick and fierce, her lioness strength compressing his ribs for one sharp second before she let go.
"You did good tonight," she said.
"I broke a glass and scared a wolf."
"You showed up. That's the part that counts."
She left. Amani closed the door. Locked it. Checked it. Checked it again. Stood in his dark apartment and listened to the silence and the distant sounds of the city through walls that suddenly felt very thin.
He didn't turn on the lights. He went to the kitchen and opened the freezer and took out the gelato and sat on the couch with the container in his hands and he didn't eat it. He just held it. The cold seeped through the cardboard into his palms and it was real and immediate and his and nobody was watching him hold it and nobody was going to come up behind him and put their hands on his stomach and whisper about how beautiful he was.
He sat there in the dark for a long time. The gelato melted. He put it back in the freezer. He checked the locks one more time.
Chapter Fourteen
Nero told himself he was going to Kinky Kritters for the case.
It was a reasonable story. There were loose ends: the formal victim statement still needed to be taken, the other three sharks were in various stages of being processed, and Paulie was still in the wind somewhere between Vegas and the California border with Harold tracking his scent through three counties. Nero had legitimate professional reasons to be walking through the lobby of a BDSM club at nine o'clock on a Tuesday night. He told himself this. He almost believed it.
