Claiming the Gharial

Chapter One

Kinky Kritters still had half an hour before the club opened for the night, which was the only reason Kyan had shown up when he did.

He stepped off the elevator into a room that smelled almost clean.

The lights were up high, bright enough to show the wear on the leather booths and the scuff marks on the floor, and the music played low enough that even his feline ears had to reach for the lyrics.

It was a different place at this hour. Later it would be packed wall to wall with shifters spreading their musk around and spilling beer.

The bass would be turned up until it pounded through the floor and the walls.

The whole underground space would be thick with heat and want.

He'd never loved it crowded. He'd always preferred it half-lit and quiet, before the place woke up underneath the city.

He hadn't been to Vegas in a long time. Long enough that walking back in felt like opening a drawer he'd told himself he'd cleaned out.

His mother had booked the trip, which meant his mother had a use for it.

Zahara never spent money on a thing unless that thing was going to make her more.

The luxury hotel, the absurd rental car waiting in the valet lot, the open tab she'd probably set up somewhere expensive: none of it was for Kyan's comfort.

It was a setting. He was the jewelry she'd sent ahead to soften up her sister before the real negotiation began.

Sweet-talk Lady Leo. Compare the figures.

Show her why a second club in Chicago made sense on paper, so that his aunt would sign off and his mother could expand her corner of the empire one more notch.

Because that was the math sitting at the middle of his mother's whole life: the empire was Lady Leo's, every club and every city of it, and a lioness did not add so much as a coat of paint to her corner without the head of the family's name on the paper.

The sit-down itself was set for tomorrow, midday, in his aunt's office, on her turf and her terms. Which left Kyan tonight to do what he always did before a negotiation: walk the floor, see what a year away had changed, and remind the family how charming he could be.

He could do it. He was good at numbers and better at charm when he bothered. He just resented being the errand.

Kyan crossed to the bar and took a stool. That was when he spotted Amani, and the resentment went quiet in his throat.

His cousin was behind the counter wiping down glasses, and he was wearing a hoodie.

Sleeves down to the wrists. The last photo Kyan had seen of him, Amani had been in shorts that barely qualified as clothing and nothing at all above the waist, grinning at the camera like the whole room belonged to him.

The lion in that photo had been impossible to miss.

This one stayed covered and held himself calmer than the boy in that photo ever had.

Not diminished. Changed. Whatever had put the long sleeves on him, he'd long since come out the far side of it, and the grin, when it surfaced, was the same grin that had run this bar since he was a teenager.

Kyan knew part of the story. His mother had told him about it a good while back, in the offhand cruel way she delivered everything that wasn't about her.

Something bad had happened to Leo's boy out in the desert.

She'd said it the way she might mention a stain on a tablecloth.

From everything Kyan had heard, Amani had clawed all the way back from it and then some, but a thing like that left its marks, and Kyan was looking at a couple of them.

Mostly, though, Kyan was just glad to see him upright behind his own bar like he owned the world, because by the sound of it there'd been a stretch when that hadn't been a sure thing.

"Your mother didn't say you were in town," Amani said. He hadn't looked up until Kyan was already on the stool, which meant he'd smelled him coming the moment the elevator opened. His voice was even, but the rag moved faster.

"My mother says a lot of things she doesn't mean and forgets the things she does." Kyan pulled a twenty from his wallet, folded it lengthwise so it stood on its edge, and set it on the bar. "She also says you should call her more."

"It's hard to be social when you sleep through the daylight and aren’t sure of other people’s schedules." Amani tucked the rag under the counter. There was a beat where he looked at Kyan and Kyan looked back, and neither of them said the thing sitting between them. "What are you drinking?"

"Scotch." Kyan let the silence stretch one more second, then let it go, because his cousin clearly wanted him to. "Good to see you wearing more than a smile, for once. Last picture I saw, you'd talked yourself out of most of your clothes."

It was the gentlest way Kyan knew to ask the question. Amani heard the whole of it anyway.

"Got a Dom now," he said, reaching for the bottle. "He keeps me decent." And there it was, the grin, the old one that used to run this entire room. "There's a lot you've missed."

Down the bar, a man Kyan didn't recognize was slicing limes with the easy competence of someone who'd done it ten thousand times.

An otter, by the smell of him, small and unhurried, half Amani's presence and not trying to be anything more.

He glanced up, gave Kyan a friendly nod, and went back to his limes without making it a thing.

"Reza," Amani said, following his look. "Came on a while back. Fast hands, never flustered, makes a better old-fashioned than I do." There was real fondness in it, the easy regard of a man who'd found someone he actually liked sharing a shift with. "Best second I've ever had back here."

Kyan took his scotch. Over the rim of the glass he caught the rest of it, now that he was looking.

A man near the mouth of the private-room hallway, broad through the shoulders, brown gaze moving across the empty floor in a slow professional sweep.

A bloodhound, earth and rain. A security badge sat clipped to his belt, and he moved with the unhurried patience of a career cop.

And nearer, half in shadow at the end of the bar, a leaner man with dark eyes who wasn't working and wasn't drinking, just standing where he could see Amani and the elevator at the same time.

A ferret. He hadn't introduced himself. He didn't need to.

Everything about where he'd chosen to stand said whose safety he was minding.

"That your Dom?" Kyan asked, tipping his head a fraction toward the ferret.

"Nero." Amani said the name the way some people touched a wedding ring, without seeming to know he was doing it.

"My mate. Runs security for the whole building.

The big one's Harold, he's on a couple nights a week.

" He tipped his head toward the elevators.

"And Bethany's packing up her office between check-ins, if you can believe it.

Mom's sending her to run the LA club. So, say your goodbyes while she's still ours.

She ships out soon, and the desk's already half handed off to people she trusts. "

"I should go up and congratulate her before she's gone."

"You should. You won't." Amani's mouth tipped. "You never did like the part where you have to be charming to family. But she'd want to see you. We're all a little wrecked about it, in the happy way. She is going to be magnificent out there."

"I save it for people who can sign contracts." Kyan drank. The scotch was good, smooth and warm, and he made himself slow down. He didn't want to be even slightly drunk for what the night might turn into, though he couldn't have said yet what that was.

He was there for figures. He kept reminding himself of that. Figures, and a few days of being pleasant to an aunt he actually liked, and then back to Chicago to hand his mother the win and let her decide what to do with it. Simple. Bounded. In, out, done.

"So," Amani said, in the tone of a man laying down a card he'd been holding the whole time. "Sai's been coming around. If you still care about that kind of thing."

Kyan set the glass down very gently, because the alternative was to crush it.

For a moment the music was the only thing in the room.

He stared at the amber left in the bottom of the glass and kept his face still.

Behind his ribs the lion stirred, ears back, low in its chest. Not anger.

Older than anger. Sai's name in his cousin's mouth, casual as a weather report, after a year of making sure nobody said it around him at all.

He pushed the lion down. People got banned from this club for letting the animal off the leash, and he was not going to be the visiting cousin who lost it at the bar on his first night back.

He was better than that. He'd spent a year being better than that.

"You're an adult," he said when he could. "Find a better word than that kind of thing. He's the man I wanted to spend my life with. He left because he couldn't stand who I am. There's a word for it. It's just not a small one."

Amani had the grace to look apologetic. "Fair. Sorry."

"What's he doing here?" The question came out rougher than Kyan wanted. "Sai doesn't belong in a place like this. He's the least kinky person I've ever met. I spanked him one time, for fun, and he looked at me like I'd grown a second head and then he didn't look at me at all."

"Mostly he gets tied up and spanked, from what I've seen." Amani said it carefully, watching him. "Plays with strangers. He's not very good at it yet."

Kyan's knuckles had gone white on the bar.

He made himself spread his fingers flat against the wood, one at a time, until the urge to do something with his hands went somewhere it couldn't break anything.

Sai. Soft, easily startled, allergic to chaos.

Sai, who'd flinched the one time Kyan had let his hand come down.

Sai, letting men he didn't know tie him to things in a room full of strangers.

"And you let him," Kyan said.

"Let him." Amani's brows went up. "He's a grown man.

If he wants to learn something the hard way, that's his to want.

I'm not his keeper, and I'm not yours." He leaned a hip against the counter.

"But I'll tell you what I've noticed. He comes in, he plays, and he never once leaves looking happy.

He looks like a man trying to teach himself a language by reading the dictionary out loud.

And I've wondered, more than once, who he's trying to learn it for. "

That landed somewhere Kyan didn't want it to. He looked away, at the elevator, at the lights, at anything.

"I don't have his number anymore," he admitted, which was as close as he could get to saying the rest. He'd erased it.

He'd erased all of it, scrubbed Sai out of his phone and his contacts and his recent calls in one brutal afternoon the week he'd packed for Chicago, because keeping any of it had felt like keeping a knife pointed at himself.

At the time it had seemed like the healthy thing.

Most of the worst decisions of his life had seemed like the healthy thing at the time.

"I have it," Amani said.

Kyan's head came up.

"Now, normally," his cousin went on, in the unbothered way that had always made Kyan want to throttle him affectionately, "I would never hand out a patron's number to some lion who wandered in off the elevator.

People trust me with their privacy here.

That matters." He let it hang. "But this isn't some lion.

This is you, and it's him, and the two of you didn't end in fire.

Hurt feelings, sure. No one got hurt the way that needs reporting. Did they."

It wasn't really a question, but Kyan answered it anyway, because the alternative was unthinkable and he needed it said out loud in his own voice. "No. God, no. I never touched him in anger. Not once."

"I know." Amani's voice gentled. "I had to hear you say it.

That's all." He pulled his phone out of the hoodie pocket and held it loosely, thumb hovering.

"So here's what I'll do. I'll text him. I'll tell him his ex is sitting at my bar and he's a stubborn man who doesn't like crowds, so he'd better hurry if he wants to see you before the room fills up.

And then it's out of my hands, and out of yours, and it's his to decide. That work?"

So much for simple.

He should say no. The smart play was no.

See his aunt, run the numbers, charm a signature out of Lady Leo, fly home, and let Sai go on fumbling through a language Kyan could have taught him in a single quiet night if he'd ever been allowed to.

Wanting Sai had cost him a year of his life already.

Wanting him from across a bar would cost more.

"He's got an hour," Kyan heard himself say. "If he wants to see me at all, he's got an hour. I'm not sitting in this crowd past that."

Amani's tawny brows climbed. "Someone's impatient."

"Someone remembers what this place turns into at full volume." Kyan finished the scotch and slid the empty glass across the bar. "Send it."

His cousin was already typing. Across the room the ferret's dark gaze flicked over, registered nothing alarming, and moved on.

The bloodhound started another slow circuit of the floor.

The elevator hummed to life and began delivering the night's first customers, sent down by whichever of Bethany's hand-picked replacements was working the desk upstairs.

Amani thumbed the message away and looked up. He wasn't bothering to hide the hope.

Kyan asked for another scotch, because his hands needed the glass, and turned on his stool to watch the elevator he was already pretending he wasn't watching.