Page 16 of Gagging the Gharial

"Let me be the one who decides what you're worth." Kyan pressed his forehead to Sai's and held it there. "I have spent thirty years handing that woman every decision I ever had to make, the big ones and the small ones, my whole life routed through her like a collar nobody asked if I wanted. I'm done. And the first thing I want to choose for myself, the very first, is you."

Sai sagged into the touch, and for a moment they only stood there, foreheads together on the cold marble, the city burning silent and far below, the empire and all its teeth held off on the far side of a phone Kyan had set facedown on the table.

"We should sleep," Kyan said at last, because he didn't have the next part worked out and he wasn't going to insult Sai by pretending otherwise. "I have to go be the perfect nephew in a few hours, and you’ve barely slept a minute. Come back to bed. We'll figure out the rest of it when it's light."

Sai let himself be led. But as Kyan curled around him under the covers and felt the small unspent tension still held in the body in his arms, he understood, with a clarity the dark only sharpened, that he'd started something that night he was going to have to see all the way through. That finishing it would cost him everything Zahara had ever given him. And that he had never, in his entire managed life, been so certain a price was worth paying.

Chapter Ten

Kyan woke to gray morning light and the warm weight of Sai sprawled half across him, and for a few seconds, before memory caught up, it was the best he'd felt in a year.

Then the rest of it arrived: the meeting a few hours out, where he was supposed to walk into his aunt's office and be the polished instrument Zahara had flown across the country, and charm a third Chicago club out of a woman already carrying more than any one person should have to.

Sai stirred against him, blinked awake, and smiled before he was even fully conscious, soft and unguarded, and it hit Kyan square in the chest. "Morning," he mumbled. "You're still here. I keep expecting to wake up and find out I dreamed the whole night."

"Still here." Kyan kissed his forehead, then the bruise on his jaw, gone yellow-green and nearly healed under his lips. "And I'm not the one of us who vanishes. That was always your move, not mine."

"Low blow before coffee." But Sai said it into Kyan's shoulder, smiling, with no heat in it at all. He propped himself up on one elbow and looked down, and his dark eyes had gone serious. "You're going to see your aunt today. The club thing. The thing your mom wants."

"I am."

"Are you going to do it? Get her the club?"

It was the question Kyan had been turning over since before he opened his eyes. "I don't know yet," he admitted, which was more honesty than he'd have handed anyone but Sai. "I came out here to do exactly that. I'm good at it. A day ago it was a job I resented and nothing more. Now it feels like helping my mother mug her own sister while she's down, and I'm not sure I've still got it in me." He dragged a hand down his face. "But if I walk in there and refuse outright, that's a whole different war with Zahara, on top of the one I started last night. I don't know if I can fight her on two fronts at once."

Sai was quiet a moment. Then he leaned down and kissed him, slow and certain, and drew back just far enough to speak against his mouth. "Whatever you decide in that office, decide it because it's yours to decide. Not because it's hers, and not because it's against hers either. Yours." He smiled. "Listen to me, handing your own kink lesson back to you over morning breath."

Kyan huffed a laugh he hadn't expected to have in him, and pulled Sai down into a real kiss, unhurried, the kind he hadn't been allowed to give in a year. For a minute, he let the meeting and the empire and his mother stay on the far side of the door while he reminded himself exactly what he was about to put on the line. When they finally broke apart, Sai was flushed, breathing a little hard, and looking at him like the answer to a question. Kyan thought, not for the first time, that he would burn down everything he'd been handed before he let anyone make this man feel small again.

"I'm going to head to the club after I shower," Sai said, swinging his legs out of the absurd bed. "Check in with Amani. Say a proper goodbye to Bethany before she's gone for good. I don't want to rattle around a penthouse the size of my entire building while you're off doing the hard thing." He glanced back over his shoulder. "Come find me there after?"

"After." Kyan watched him cross to the bathroom, unhurried and unselfconscious in the morning light in a way he hadn't been at the club in the dark, and stopped hesitating.

The club at midday was a different country from the club at night.

The lobby elevator did not go to the family floors. Those were keyed, and Kyan was not yet a man with a key, so the day man at the front desk sent him the way all business went: down through the closed club, past security, and up the back stairs with eyes on him the whole climb.

The elevator let him out onto a cleaned and empty floor, chairs up on tables, the smell of the night before scrubbed back to lemon and bleach. A bloodhound he placed as Harold lifted a hand in greeting from where he sat reviewing camera feeds on a tablet, and near the mouth of the hallway, a lean man in a crisp pressed shirt looked up from a clipboard and tracked Kyan across the room with flat, unhurried eyes. A snake, by the cool dry scent of him, and very good at the watching, the kind of stillness that didn't miss a thing.

"You'd be the Chicago nephew," the snake said. Not a question. "Lady Leo's expecting you. Go on up." He tipped his head toward the stairs, and a faint, dry amusement moved through him. "Clyce. I'm on loan from Critters on Call while the house is short-handed, so this week the clipboard's mine and the floor is Nero's. When I'm not getting talked into things by a bear who edits a newspaper, anyway. If anybody gives you trouble on your way through, which they won't, it's my name you drop."

"Kyan." He nodded, and meant the respect in it. He knew the type by now, the ones who'd come up hard and landed somewhere safe and turned around to make the place safer for the next person. The whole building was staffed with them, he was starting to see. People Lady Leo had collected out of bad years and given something better, and now, apparently, people she could borrow back when the water rose.

"Sure." Clyce's attention was already drifting back to his clipboard, the cameo over as quick as it came, a man with a floor to run. "Your gharial's downstairs in the back, by the way. Helping Bethany pack and getting underfoot. Nice guy. Way too polite for this place."

Security ran tight here now, Kyan thought as he climbed the stairs. Tighter than it ever had in the old days. That was Nero's doing, and the bad year's, the empire grown teeth around the soft thing at its center.

Lady Leo's office sat at the top, past a door Bethany usually held and that stood open on a half-packed room. Kyan paused in the doorway. His aunt sat behind a broad desk with reading glasses pushed down her nose, a phone tucked against one shoulder, three open folders fanned in front of her, wearing the unmistakable look of a woman holding six things in the air at once and dropping not a single one. She was a few years older than his mother and built nothing like her. Where Zahara was all diamonds and edges and announcement, Lady Leo wore a plain dark suit and the air of a woman who had personally laid every brick of the wall around her. She had built this. The whole empire. Out of a world that wanted its lionesses ornamental and quiet, she had raised all of it, and the word at the center of it was hers.

She held up one finger to him, finished her call in a few clipped words, set the phone down, and looked at him over the top of the glasses.

"Sit, nephew," she said. "And tell me how long my sister imagines I'll take to notice she sent you here to rob me."

Kyan sat. There was, he found, no use in the dance. Lady Leo had never once been the sort of woman anyone ran an angle past and lived to brag about it. "She thinks you're too far underwater to see it coming," he said. "A second Chicago club, while you're stretched thin with Bethany's move and a whole new build out west. She figures a drowning woman signs things she wouldn't normally."

"She figures right about the drowning, at least." Lady Leo took the glasses off and pinched the bridge of her nose, and for one moment she looked every one of her years. "I am lifting my daughter up to run Los Angeles, which is the proudest and most frightening thing I've done since I first opened these doors. I am building her a team out there I'd trust with my own throat, and leaving good people here to hold the desk in the meantime, and I am still awake every single night certain I've thrown her in a year too soon. And the build out there is eating money and attention faster than I can feed either one, and I haven't got a free hand to spare for any of it." She set the glasses down on the desk with a small click. "So. You came to take advantage of every bit of that, on your mother's behalf. The question on the table is whether you're going to."

It was the same question Sai had asked him in bed that morning, in a gentler voice, and Kyan found he'd already known the answer since before either of them said it out loud. He'd known it watching Sai cross a sunlit room without making himself small.