The bad nights were Tuesdays and Thursdays, the nights Amani closed the bar alone, when he was in the club at two AM doing inventory and the silence reminded him of other silences. Those nights, Amani would show up around four fifteen, which meant he'd gone home first and tried to sleep and failed and spent an hour staring at his ceiling before giving up and walking to Nero's house. The walk was twelve blocks. Nero had measured it. Twelve blocks at four in the morning through a neighborhood that was mostly dark, along with the fact that Amani was willing to walk twelve blocks in the dark, to get to a couch he claimed to hate, said more than either of them were ready to discuss.
The worse nights had no pattern. Something would trigger him: a smell, a sound, a word someone said at the bar that landed wrong, and he'd spiral. Those nights he showed up earlier, sometimes before midnight, and his body would bevibrating at a frequency Nero had learned meant don't touch me, don't ask, just be here. Nero would be there. He'd cook whatever he had: quiche if he'd planned ahead, eggs if he hadn't, toast if the night was bad enough that even eggs felt like too much production. He'd set a plate down and go to his end of the couch. The house would hold them both. Eventually Amani's breathing would slow. The vibration would ease. He'd say something, usually an insult, which meant the worst had passed.
The quiche became a thing. Nero had made it on accident the third visit. He'd had the ingredients for a division potluck he'd forgotten about, and quiche was the only dish in his repertoire that qualified as real cooking. Amani had eaten two slices without comment, which for Amani was the equivalent of a standing ovation. After that, Nero kept the ingredients stocked. Eggs, cream, cheese, whatever vegetables were in the crisper. He got better at it. He started experimenting, spinach and feta one week, mushroom and gruyere the next. Amani never complimented any of them, but he always finished his plate, and once Nero caught him scraping the dish with his fork to get the last of the crust. The look on Amani's face when he realized he'd been caught was so mortified that Nero had to turn away to keep from laughing.
"Your couch is terrible," Amani said one night, around week three.
"You've slept on it nine times."
"Nine times on a terrible couch. That doesn't make the couch less terrible. It makes me desperate."
"Would you like a pillow?"
"I'd like a couch that wasn't purchased from a discount furniture store in 2019."
"It was 2018, and I'll have you know it was full price."
Amani almost laughed. The almost-laugh was getting closer to an actual laugh with each visit, the muscles rememberingmore of the gesture each time, like a door being eased open inch by inch. Not there yet. But closer.
Nero bought a pillow. Not an expensive one. He wasn't going to make a production of it. Just a decent pillow from the Target on Flamingo, firm enough to support a head and soft enough to be worth using. He left it on the couch without mentioning it.
The next time Amani came over, he stopped in the doorway of the living room. He looked at the pillow. He looked at Nero. His mouth opened, and Nero braced himself for the insult, the comment about the thread count, the color, the presumption of it.
Amani said nothing.
He used the pillow. He fell asleep with it tucked under his head and his hand curled around the corner of it and his face slack and unguarded in a way that Nero had never seen when he was awake. The hoodie had ridden up on one side, showing a strip of brown skin at his hip, and his socked feet hung off the end of the couch because the couch was too short for him but he'd never complained about that, only the quality, and his breathing was even and deep and the house was quiet around them both.
Nero sat in the kitchen with a cold cup of coffee and watched the strip of light under the living room windows and listened to Amani breathe and thought about nothing. About everything. About a pillow on a couch and a kid who wouldn't say thank you but who curled around it in his sleep like it was the first safe thing he'd touched in weeks.
He was in trouble. He knew he was in trouble. The percentage of this that was about Amani was no longer a percentage he could pretend was professional, and the four AM visits were building something between them that had no name yet, but had weight, substance, the gravity of two people who kept ending up in the same room at the same hour because thealternative was being alone with the dark and neither of them wanted that anymore.
But Amani wasn't ready. Nero could read that as clearly as he could read a crime scene, the flinch that was still there, the armor that went back on every morning, the "this doesn't mean anything" that he said less often but still said. The kid was healing. The kid was finding his way back to something. And Nero was not going to be the person who rushed that, because rushing it would make him no different from every other person who had ever wanted something from Amani without waiting for Amani to offer it.
So, he waited. He made quiche. He bought a pillow. He sat in his kitchen at four in the morning and drank cold coffee and listened to a lion breathe on his couch and he waited, because waiting was what ferrets did best, and this particular wait was going to be worth it.
Chapter Sixteen
Nero had been to Kinky Kritters twice times before he started working there. Once as a cop confirming a kidnapping. He’d never made it into the elevator and down to the bar. Once to check on a victim.
None of those visits had prepared him for seeing the place during the day.
The overall atmosphere of club was vastly different at two in the afternoon. The low amber lighting was off, replaced by the flat fluorescent overheads that the cleaning and prep crew used. Under their unforgiving glare the place lost its mystique and became what it actually was: a large, well-maintained basement with expensive equipment and very good soundproofing. The leather on the St. Andrew's Cross was scuffed in places. The bar top had a dull spot near the service well where years of wiping had worn through the finish. The private room doors, which looked sleek and anonymous at night, had small scratches around the handles from rings and cuffs catching on the hardware.
It was, Nero thought, like seeing a beautiful woman without makeup. Not worse. Just honest.
Lady Leo met him in her office, which was upstairs in the part of the building that actually looked like an office building. The room was immaculate: cream walls, mahogany desk, two chairs positioned so that the visitor's was slightly lower than hers, which was either an accident of furniture or the most deliberate power move Nero had seen since his last interrogation. Knowing Lady Leo, it was the furniture.
"The position is security chief." She slid a folder across the desk. "Salary, benefits, and expectations are outlined. You'llreport to me. You'll have authority over all security staff, camera systems, door policy, and incident response. You won't have authority over club operations, membership decisions, or my bartenders."
The last item was not in the folder. Nero noted it and moved on.
"The job is real," Lady Leo continued. She was watching him with the steady, unblinking focus of a predator assessing whether something in her territory was a threat or an asset. "I'm not offering you a position so you can be near my son. I'm offering you a position because a man walked into my building with a badge and found my son missing and brought him home, and that man has a skill set I need. The fact that you've also been feeding Amani quiche at four in the morning is—" She paused. Chose her word. "Noted."
Nero held her gaze. He'd stared down wolves, bears, a crocodile shifter who'd bitten a chunk out of a conference table during questioning. Lady Leo was harder to hold than any of them, because she wasn't trying to intimidate him. She was reading him. And she was very, very good at it.
"I'll take the job," he said. "And for the record, the quiche is none of your business."
"Everything that happens to my children is my business, Detective. That is not a statement I expect you to challenge."
