Page 33 of Subduing the Shark

"Hi." Jack looked at him. Harold's brown eyes were red-rimmed. His jaw was tight. He smelled like earth, rain, and exhaustion. Underneath all of it, faintly, the metallic tang of blood. Jack's blood, from carrying him. "You shifted. You ran."

"Thirty minutes. Across the city." Harold's thumb moved on his cheekbone. "You were on the concrete when I got there. You weren't moving."

Jack scrunched his nose up. He hadn't been completely out of it when Harold came in. "I was moving a little."

"Barely."

Jack looked from Harold to Amani and back. A bloodhound and a lion on the other, both of them touching him, both of them here because they'd chosen to be. The morning light came through the window and caught the gauze on Jack's arms and the amber in Amani's eyes.

"The shiver?" Jack asked.

Harold sat down on the floor beside the couch. He didn't take his hand off Jack's face. "Dresden and Lichen are in council custody. Lady Leo's people got them at the house. The other two houses cleared out the moment word spread. Leaderless, exposed, the council asking questions they didn't want to answer, so they ran. Scattered for whatever territory would take them. The shiver you knew is done, Jack. Whoever's left isn't coming back here."

The shiver was done. The words that collapsed the architecture of Jack's entire life. The house, the rules, the challenges, the ocean currents on the television. The fights. The after. The blankness. The ritual that had given his life structure even when the structure was built on violence. All of it, gone. Dresden in a cell. Lichen in a cell. Rashe dead because of him.

And Jack, on a couch in Lady Leo's apartment, with bandaged arms and a cracked rib and people holding him who had no reason to do so.

"I killed him," Jack said. His voice cracked on the second word and the crack opened something underneath it and the something was a sound Jack hadn't made in years. A rough, wet, broken noise that came from his chest and not from his throat, the kind of sound his body had been trained not to make because making sounds was weakness and weakness in the shiver meant you were next.

He was crying. He was lying on a couch with bandaged arms and a cracked rib. He was crying, and he couldn't stop. The sound coming out of him was ugly, raw, and completely withoutcontrol. Tears ran sideways into his hair because he was lying down and couldn't sit up. His whole body shook with it, the rib screaming, the cuts pulling, and none of the pain was enough to stop what was happening because what was happening wasn't about the pain. It was about the years. All of them. Every challenge, every floor, every blank face. Every name on the list in his pocket. Every night he'd gone still and let his body be used or hurt and called it normal. Every time he'd hurt someone else and called it the rules.

He cried and Amani held his hand and Harold's thumb moved on his cheekbone. Neither of them said a word because there was nothing to say that would make his past hurt less.

When it stopped, Jack's face was wet and his chest hurt worse than the rib and the room was very quiet.

"I don't deserve this," Jack said.

Amani's hand tightened on his. "You don't get to decide that."

"I helped kidnap you. I tied the rope. I drove the van. I knew what the crane would do."

"I know." Amani's voice was steady. Not hard, not soft. Steady the way the bartop was steady when Amani gripped it during a crowded shift, a surface that held because it had to. "I know what you did. I also know you walked out of that house tonight and called Harold and sat on the steps and told my mother everything because you decided you weren't going to let it happen again. I also know that Rashe came to kill you for doing it. You're lying on my mother's couch with stitches in your side because you chose us over them."

Jack stared at him. The tears were still on his face, cooling. Amani's hands were still holding his. The lion was looking at him with an expression that was not forgiveness but was adjacent to it. The same neighborhood. Close enough to see.

"This doesn't fix what you did," Amani said. "Nothing fixes it. But it changes what happens next and where we go from here."

Harold's hand was still on Jack's face. Jack turned his head slightly, pressing into the touch. Harold let him. Let him rest his cheek against Harold's palm, the warmth of it, the steadiness.

"Rest," Harold said. "We'll figure out the rest when you wake up."

Jack closed his eyes. Amani's hand around his. Harold's palm against his cheek. The smell of lions and earth and coffee. The morning light warming the room.

He slept.

Chapter Nineteen

Later that week Lady Leo handed Harold a credit card.

"Take care of him," she said. She was standing in the hallway outside her apartment in a silk blouse and heels, looking like she was on her way to a board meeting rather than managing the aftermath of a dead shark in a rented pool and two more in council custody. "Food, clothes, whatever he needs. The apartment on the fourth floor is empty. It's his until he has somewhere else to go."

Harold looked at the card. It was black and felt like metal, the name on the front was a business entity he didn't recognize. "He might not accept this."

"He'll accept it from you." She turned and walked toward the elevator, heels silent on the carpet. "He won't accept it from me because he still thinks he owes me. You'll have to explain the difference."

Harold pocketed the card and went downstairs to check on Jack.

The shark had been sleeping on Amani's couch for two days. Not Lady Leo's apartment, where he'd woken up, but Amani's one he sometimes used when he wanted to be closer to his mom and sister. His apartment was one floor down. The relocation had happened without Harold's involvement. He'd come to check on Jack the morning after the pool and found the couch empty and Amani standing in his doorway down the hall saying "He's in here. The couch in my mother's apartment smells too much like us lions. He kept waking up." Harold hadn't asked how Amani knew Jack kept waking up, or how a shark who'd been unconscious for three hours had ended up in the apartmentof the person he'd helped kidnap. Some things between Amani and Jack were theirs, and Harold was learning to respect that.