Bethany was at the front desk. She looked up when he came in and her face did a complicated thing, relief and wariness and gratitude all competing for the same real estate, and then she settled on professional.
"Detective. We weren't expecting you tonight."
"Just a check-in. I wanted to see how your brother's doing and go over a few things for the case file."
Bethany's eyes flickered toward the elevator. Just for a second, but Nero caught it because catching things was his job. "He's behind the bar. He just came back a few nights ago. Mom isn't thrilled about it but—" She stopped herself. Reconsidered how much to share with a near-stranger who happened to have carried her brother out of a ranch house in the desert. "He's behind the bar."
"Got it."
She buzzed him through. He rode the elevator into the main room of Kinky Kritters and took a moment to orient himself, because the last time he'd been here it had been daytime and empty and frantic with Lady Leo's controlled fury. It was evening and full. The room had the low-lit, leather-and-woodwarmth of a place that had been designed to make people feel both safe and dangerous at the same time. Good lighting. Clean sight lines. Private rooms off a central hallway. A stage area. And running the length of the far wall, a bar.
Two steps in, Nero spotted Amani and his feet checked. Just for a half-second, a hitch in his stride that he caught before anyone else could.
The kid was different.
Not in the ways that would be obvious to a stranger. He was behind the bar, moving with efficiency, pouring drinks, exchanging words with customers. He looked functional. He looked like a bartender doing his job. But Nero had spent three years in enforcement reading people who were trying to look functional, and what he saw behind that bar was a man in an oversized gray hoodie with the sleeves pulled past his wrists and loose jeans and soft-soled sneakers, standing in the exact center of a three-foot-wide workspace, and never, not once in the five minutes Nero watched him, moving to either end where the bar opened and the room began.
The hoodie was new. Nero had looked at the photo of Amani that Bethany had given him a dozen times during the investigation, the kid grinning behind the bar in tiny black shorts and nothing else, all amber eyes and bare chest and the absolute confidence of someone who knew exactly how good he looked and enjoyed the knowledge. That person was gone. The person currently behind the bar was covered from neck to wrist to ankle, and the hoodie was big enough that his hands disappeared into the sleeves when he wasn't actively pouring. He was using it like armor.
Nero understood armor. He'd worn his own versions of it for years: the dry humor, the professional distance, the I-don't-care energy that kept people from looking too closely at what a ferret actually felt in a world built for bigger predators. Armorwas what people wore when the alternative was being seen, and being seen was something that used to be safe and wasn't anymore.
He walked to the bar.
Amani saw him coming. Nero could tell because the kid's hands stilled on the glass he was polishing, just for a second, a hitch in the rhythm that someone less observant would have missed. Then he resumed polishing, looked up with an expression that was trying very hard to be casual.
"Detective."
"Amani."
They looked at each other. The last time they'd been face to face, Amani had been in Lady Leo's living room at two in the morning with his sister asleep on his shoulder, watching Nero with eyes that looked like a light left on in a dark room. At that moment, they were in a bar with eighty people and a sound system and leather furniture and the distance between that night and this one was measured in days but it felt like the distance between two different countries.
"How are the feet?" Nero asked, because it was clinical and safe and gave them both something to talk about that wasn't the other thing.
"Better. Miriam says another week before the deeper cuts close fully. The infection's clearing up. She thinks the infection may be why shifting doesn’t help the healing."
Nero wasn’t a shifter doctor, but had seen other cases where that was the case. "You're standing on them."
"I'm a bartender. Standing is part of the job description."
"How long have you been on them tonight?"
Amani's jaw tightened. The bratty edge that Nero had seen flickers of, in the car after the rescue, in the way the kid cataloged and dismissed him, surfaced. "Are you my doctor now?"
"No. But I was an EMT before I went into enforcement, and those cuts on your arches need another week before you should be putting full weight on them for more than thirty minutes at a stretch. When's your next break?"
"I just had one."
Nero glanced at the stool behind the bar. It was pushed into the corner, clearly unused. "When?"
Amani held his gaze for a beat too long. Then: "Forty-five minutes ago."
"So you're fifteen minutes past due."
"I'm fine."
Nero leaned against the bar. He didn't push. Pushing was what big predators did. Bears shouldered through, wolves pressed with eye contact, lions roared. Ferrets didn't push. Ferrets waited in the space between what someone said and what they meant, and eventually the gap got wide enough that the truth fell through.
"Sit down, Amani."
