Come for brunch tomorrow. I'll make pancakes.
Chapter Four
He came back to consciousness the way people come up from deep water, slowly, with pressure behind his eyes and a roaring in his ears that might have been his own blood or maybe the van's engine. He couldn't tell. Everything hurt. His left shoulder throbbed where the needle had stabbed him. When he tried to roll off it, he discovered two things at once: he was in a metal cage, and he couldn't move his arms.
Rope. Around his wrists, behind his back, then down to his ankles where they were cinched tight enough that he couldn't straighten his legs. Whoever had tied him knew what they were doing. The knots were efficient and the tension was distributed so that struggling would tighten rather than loosen them. Amani recognized the technique. One of the sharks had been into rope play at the club before they'd been banned. He'd tied a sub to the St. Andrew's Cross once with knots so clean that even the rope specialists had been impressed.
That knowledge did not make Amani feel better about being tied up by him in the back of a van.
A thick cloth had been shoved into his mouth and tied behind his head. It was tight enough to make his jaw ache and his breathing shallow. He forced himself to breathe through his nose. Slow. Steady. The way he'd been trained.
Then he felt the collar.
It sat heavy and close around his throat, a band of metal that burned where it touched his skin. Not hot-metal burn. Worse. A sick, creeping burn that sank through his skin and into the muscle underneath, low and constant, like a headache that had settled into his neck and refused to leave. He knew what it was before his brain finished forming the thought. Every shifterknew about silver. It was the thing parents warned about. The bogeyman of kids who could turn into animals. Silver stops the shift. Silver traps, silver makes shifters human and keeps them there.
He'd never felt it before. He'd never had reason to. Silver was something that happened to shifters in cautionary stories. In the dark histories Lady Leo sometimes referenced, when she talked about the old days before the councils. It had never really been more than a fairy tail. Not to him. Not to a lion in Las Vegas.
The burn was relentless. It didn't spike or fade. It just sat there, a constant low throb against his throat, impossible to ignore, impossible to adjust to. Every swallow pressed the metal tighter against the raw skin beneath it, and every breath reminded him it was there. His lion paced somewhere deep inside him, agitated and muffled, like hearing an animal through a thick wall. Present but unreachable.
Because he had been trained. Not for this, no one trained for this, but his years as a sub at KK had given him something that was keeping him alive: the ability to be still when everything in him wanted to thrash. To assess when his instincts said panic. To comply when compliance was the only strategy that kept options open.
He opened his eyes.
The cage was small, barely big enough for him to lie on his side with his knees pulled up. A cage meant for large dogs, metal bars, a latch on the front. Through the bars he could see the interior of the van. Dark. No windows in the back. Four shapes sitting around him on the floor, their smell thick and unmistakable. Salt water and decay. Sharks.
One of them noticed his eyes were open. "Look, the cub is awake."
Another laughed. A third was on his phone, not paying attention. The fourth, the driver, was invisible behind the seats. The radio played something with a heavy bass line, low enough to be a murmur.
He tried to speak around the gag. "I'm in pain." It came out garbled and incomprehensible.
"What did he say?" one shark asked another.
"He wants Shane?"
"Who's Shane?"
"I dunno. Maybe that's his Dom."
"Not anymore it's not. After we sell him to the crane, that'll be his Dom. And we'll be filthy rich."
They all laughed and Amani growled at them through the cloth. Low and deep, from the place in his chest where the lion lived. It wasn't a sound his human vocal cords should have been able to make, and two of the sharks flinched.
Good. Let them remember what he was, even tied up and caged and gagged and collared. He was still a lion. He was still dangerous.
Except the silver said otherwise. He could feel it every time the lion surged forward, the shift pressing against the inside of his skin and then hitting something, a wall that hadn't been there before, and falling back. Like trying to scream underwater. The instinct was there. The power was there. But the silver sat between him and his animal like a locked door, and every time the lion threw itself against it, the burn in his throat ratcheted up a notch and his skull throbbed.
Amani closed his eyes and forced himself to think.
He was in a cage, in a van, bound and gagged, with a silver collar burning into his neck, being transported by at least four sharks to be sold to someone they'd called "the crane." His phone was gone. He'd felt it crack under his hip when they tackled him, the screen shattering against the sidewalk. It waslying on the concrete two blocks from the club with his mother's location tracker pinging a dead signal, and no one would find it until morning, and when they did they'd know something was wrong but they wouldn't know where he was because the phone hadn't made it into the van.
His mother didn't know where he was. She'd see his text in the morning, the one about heading home, and she'd assume he was sleeping. She wouldn't worry until he didn't show up for work, and he wasn't scheduled until eight. That was sixteen hours from now. Sixteen hours before anyone even started looking.
Unless Bethany called. Bethany sometimes called him in the mornings when she was bored, and when he didn't answer she'd call again, and then she'd text, and then she'd call their mother. But that assumed Bethany called. That assumed she wasn't busy or sleeping in or assuming he was just sleeping off a long shift.
Amani lay in the cage and breathed through his nose and waited and tried not to calculate how many hours he had before someone realized he was gone.
***
