Page 18 of Gagging the Gharial

Sai stared at him. "That is almost word for word what I said to him last night."

"Yeah. I know the words." Amani took a slow drink. "Because I said them too. To my own mate, more than a few times, back in a stretch I don't talk about much, when I could not come up with a single reason a man like Nero would chain himself to a wreck like the one I was. So, I know that fear from the inside of it, not the outside." He set the glass down on the desk, deliberate. "Here's what I've got for you. You can keep it or leave it on the floor with the newspaper. The right person does not experience loving you as a cost they're paying. They experience it as the thing they'd been putting money aside for the whole time. Nero didn't choose me in spite of the wreckage. He climbed down into the wreckage on purpose and started lifting boxes out, and he has never once acted like that was a sacrifice, because to him it wasn't one. It was just what wanting me looked like up close." He tipped his head toward the ceiling, toward the office above them. "And this family business. Listen close, because it took me a long time to learn it. Some families are worth keeping and some are just a cage with nice furniture in it. My mother brought Nero into this place like he'd been missing from it all along. Vetted him down to the bone first, sure, that's her, but then she put the keys to everything she loves in his hands. That's a family. Zahara wanting to mate Kyan off to a jaguar to fatten the portfolio? That is a transaction with a family's name stuck on it. A man is allowed to walk out on a transaction. So's the man he picks instead."

Sai had to look down into the mug in his hands for a moment, because his eyes had gone hot and full. Amani, who had clearly been to some private hell and walked back out of it carrying this, was sitting in a half-wrecked office handing Sai the exact thing he'd needed somebody to say out loud for a year, and meaning all of it.

"How are you wise now," Sai said thickly. "You used to give me dating advice that was the single word 'communicate' followed by a wink, and that was the whole consultation."

"I went away for a while," Amani said, light as anything, "and came back with new material." He didn't explain past that, and Sai didn't push at the edges of it, and Bethany reached over and squeezed her brother's hand without a word, the small fierce gesture of someone who knew the entire story and had loved him through all of it.

A shadow filled the doorway, and Sai looked up to find the lean ferret from the bar last night, the one Kyan had pointed out, the one Amani had just spent five minutes turning into a thesis on love. Nero took in the wrecked office, the mugs, the newspaper, his mate lounging in the stolen desk chair like a king of garbage, and one corner of his mouth moved.

"You're supposed to be helping," he told Amani.

"I'm supposed to be supervising. There's a difference, and it's seniority." But Amani was already up and crossing to him, and Nero's hand came to the small of his back the second he was close, automatic, like it lived there. They didn't make a show of it. They didn't have to. The whole thing was just visible in the way Nero angled his body a half-degree toward his mate without seeming to decide to, the way the watchful set of him eased a notch the moment Amani was under his hand. Sai watched it and understood he was looking at the thing Amani had just described, the man who'd climbed into the wreckage and stayed.

"Front desk needs you for the LA inventory before the end of your shift," Nero said to Bethany. Then his dark eyes settled on Sai, brief and unbothered and somehow kind under the flatness. "You're the gharial. Whole bar watched you wait out way too long for somebody, for what it's worth. Glad he finally had the sense to show up." He pressed a kiss to the top of Amani's head, entirely unselfconscious about it, and stepped back toward the hall and his floor. "Don't let him pack anything. He'll cost the family a fortune in broken ceramics."

And he was gone, back to the watching, leaving the warmth of him behind in the room like heat off a stone.

That was the moment Kyan appeared in the doorway.

Sai knew before a word was said that something had turned over. Kyan had crossed the floor that morning wearing the face of a man marching to a fight he hated. He was wearing something else entirely. Lighter. Settled. The look of a man who'd set down a weight he'd carried so long he'd stopped feeling it as separate from his own body.

"Found you," Kyan said, and crossed the room.

Sai scrambled up off the floor with newspaper still clinging to one knee to meet him halfway.

"How'd it go? With your aunt? Did you do the club thing, did you—"

"I didn't get her the club." Kyan took Sai's face in both hands, right there in front of Amani and Bethany and a leaning tower of hideous mugs. "I told her the truth instead. That my mother sent me to rob her blind while she's struggling, and that I wasn't going to do it." He was almost smiling, rare and unguarded, the way Sai had seen maybe a handful of times in his whole life. "And then, Bethany, your mother looked at me and offered me a job. Here. In Vegas. Running numbers for her instead of for my mother. Building this place up instead of carving it apart for Zahara's collection." His thumbs moved slow over Sai's cheekbones. "I'm staying. If you'll have a lion underfoot in that studio of yours. I'm staying, Sai."

For a second Sai couldn't make a single word work. Behind him he heard Bethany breathe "she did not" in pure delight, and Amani answer "she absolutely did, that is the most Mom thing I have ever heard in my life," but all of it reached him from a long way off, because Kyan was watching his face with his whole self open and waiting for an answer.

"Your mother is going to lose her entire mind," Sai said, which was nowhere near what he meant.

"My mother is going to cut me off clean at the knees," Kyan agreed, almost cheerful about it. "The allowance, the condo, the car, every thread of it. By this time tomorrow I'll be a man with a job and a duffel bag and not one inch of safety net under me. And I have honestly never in my life wanted anything less than I want that net, not if the price stitched into it is a jaguar and a future I never got a vote in." His voice dropped, gone soft and just for Sai. "I let that woman decide every single thing for thirty years. This is the first thing I have ever chosen all the way down to the bottom. You. This city. This work. You were never the thing costing me my life, Sai. You're the reason I finally went out and got one of my own."

That broke the last of Sai's composure clean in half. He surged up and kissed Kyan hard, newspaper, ugly mugs and a thoroughly delighted audience be damned, and Kyan caught him around the back and held on like he meant it. Somewhere behind them Bethany started a slow clap and Amani joined in whooping, and for one bright suspended moment the whole half-packed room felt like standing inside something good and whole.

But even with Kyan laughing against his mouth, even holding the best thing to happen to him in a year, Sai felt the cold edge of the rest of it waiting just past the warmth. Because Zahara hadn't had her say yet. She'd hung up the phone last night with the worst of it held in reserve, and a woman built like that did not spend it long-distance. A woman built like that came to do it in person, where she could stand close enough to watch it land.

"She's going to come here," Sai said quietly, drawing back just far enough to find Kyan's eyes. "Isn't she. Your mom. She's not the type to take this lying down from a thousand miles away."

The laughter eased out of Kyan's face, and what replaced it was steadier and grimmer, the expression of a man who knew his own mother far too well to lie to himself about her.

"Yeah," he said. "She is. And when she does, I'm going to need you to remember every single word I just said, in front of these two as witnesses." He pressed his forehead to Sai's, the whole city going about its business somewhere overhead. "Because she is going to use every breath in her body trying to convince us both that you're not worth what I'm giving up. And she is going to be wrong about it, start to finish."

Chapter Twelve

Zahara didn't call ahead. She never did. Warning people was for women who weren't sure of their welcome.

Kyan was three hours into his second day of work. The offices upstairs belonged to the moving boxes this week, every flat surface stacked with the packed-up pieces of Bethany's old job, so she'd been walking him through her handoff files at a borrowed desk at the end of the bar, right up until a vendor call pulled her off to the back rooms and left him alone with a spreadsheet and a coffee going cold at his elbow. Which was when the floor staff went quiet. Reza stopped wiping the bar. And then his mother walked off the elevator like she'd built it, and the whole room remembered to be afraid of something.

She looked immaculate. She always did. White suit, dark glasses she didn't take off indoors, enough diamonds at her throat to fund the club for a month. She'd flown across the country to do this, and she'd done her hair for it.

"There's my son," she said, "playing employee." She pulled the glasses off and looked around the cleaned daytime floor with open contempt. "In my sister's funhouse. How far you've come."

"Mom." Kyan stood. He kept his hands loose and his voice level. "You could have called."