Chapter Seven
The shop was three doors down from the restaurant, a place Kyan had walked past hundreds of times in his Vegas years without ever giving it a second thought. Sai stopped on the sidewalk in front of it and didn't reach for the door.
"I've wanted to go in here," he admitted, hanging back a half step like the door might bite. "For about a year. I'd get as far as the window and then find a reason to keep walking."
"You've got an escort tonight." Kyan held the door open and let the warm light spill out onto the pavement. "Different thing entirely. Nobody in here is going to do anything but ring you up."
Inside, the lighting was low and gold and the shelves climbed all the way to the ceiling, and Kyan watched wonder and alarm cross Sai's face in quick succession as he took it in.
A wall of paddles, floggers, and canes hung in tidy rows like instruments in a music shop.
There was a rack of harnesses, a long glass case of things that gleamed under the lights, and a bored clerk behind the register reading a paperback who didn't so much as lift an eye when the bell rang.
Sai had the look of a man who'd opened a door expecting a broom closet and found a cathedral.
"Breathe," Kyan said, and steered him with a hand at the small of his back, away from the wall of impact toys and toward a quieter corner near the rear of the shop.
There was no sense starting a beginner in front of a rack of canes.
"We're not here for any of that tonight.
The whole wall of things that sting can wait until you've decided you even want them. We're here for one thing."
He stopped them in front of the gags.
There were dozens. Ball gags and bit gags and soft panel ones, rubber and silicone and polished steel, in every color a person could possibly want a thing in their mouth to be. Sai stared at the array like a man handed a menu in a language he couldn't read.
"What do you think?" Kyan asked, because the asking was the lesson as much as anything.
"I think there are a lot of them, and I don't know what most of them do." Sai reached out anyway and took down a soft purple panel gag, the sort that sat flat over the mouth with a strap around the back of the head. "This one looks the least frightening. It's soft. It doesn't look like it'd hurt."
"It wouldn't hurt. It also wouldn't survive you.
" Kyan said it gently, taking it from his hands and hanging it back on its hook.
"Your bite force would go through that before I got the strap buckled.
You'd chew it to ribbons without meaning to, just from your jaw clamping down the way a gharial's does under pressure.
So would I, for what it's worth. Lions aren't any easier on a piece of rubber.
They're just not built for mouths like ours. "
Sai's brow creased, half-fascinated. "Who are they built for, then?"
"Something with a gentler bite. Humans basically.
A ferret would be perfectly happy with that one.
" Kyan smiled at the thought of telling Nero so, and reached past Sai for a different model, a slim bit gag, rubber sheathed snug over a core of steel.
"This is the one for us. The metal core means you can't bite through it no matter what your jaw decides to do.
The rubber means it stays kind against your teeth instead of cold and hard.
Best of both. It'll take everything you've got and give your mouth something soft to hold. "
Sai took it and turned it over in his hands, running his thumb along the give of the rubber, pressing until he found the hardness underneath. He held it up to the light, frowning at it, turning it the way he'd turn a tool he hadn't learned the use of yet.
"So it goes in my mouth," he said. "Like a bit on a horse."
"Like that. Behind the teeth, strap at the back of your head, snug but never so tight it hurts your jaw.
" Kyan kept his voice even, because this was the part that mattered and he had no intention of overselling it or letting Sai guess at it.
"And I want to be clear about what it's actually for, because I never want you wondering in the moment.
It isn't about taking your voice for the night.
It is not about silencing you, not ever, not even a little.
It's about taking away your ability to direct things while I'm inside you.
You won't be able to tell me to go faster, the way you always, always want to.
You won't get to drive." He held Sai's eyes until he was sure he had them.
"What you will be able to do is tap me. Anywhere on my body, anytime, and everything stops, the gag comes out, and we talk.
And you keep your word the whole time. Lioness works gagged.
Mouth it, tap it, trace it on my skin with one finger.
Any version of it counts, and I will be watching for all of them.
The gag never once touches the brakes. It only ever touches the steering wheel.
You understand the difference between those two things? "
Sai's cheeks had gone a dusky color. He nodded slowly.
His fingers tightened on the gag in a way Kyan read as interested rather than afraid.
"Yeah. I get it. And I think I'd actually like that.
The not-being-in-charge-of-the-pace part.
" A small laugh. "We figured that one out already, didn't we.
Back at the club. Apparently I like being slowed down and made to wait, which I would not have guessed about myself a year ago. "
"You'd be amazed what a year teaches a man about himself.
" Kyan let himself enjoy, for a second, how far they'd traveled from the man who'd flinched off a stranger's hand at the bar three hours back.
This Sai was holding a gag he intended to use and asking smart questions about it.
"Top of your list, then. We'll keep building it out. "
Sai's gaze had drifted, though, sideways to the long case beside the gags, where a row of collars hung on velvet pegs.
Leather and chain and braided cord, and one absurd thing crusted in fake gems that caught the light like a chandelier had a baby with a dog tag.
"Can I ask you a kink question," he said.
"While you're being patient with me and we're standing right in front of them. "
"Always. That's the whole point of tonight."
"Collars." Sai touched the glass over them, not quite reaching for one.
"Guys at the club have offered to collar me.
More than one of them, actually. I never said yes, I don't even know what it really means, it just felt like a thing you should give somebody more than four minutes to agree to.
But what is it? Underneath the leather. What's the actual thing. "
Kyan felt the growl start low in his chest before he could head it off, an old animal objection to the mental picture of some stranger buckling anything at all around Sai's throat.
He breathed it back down, because Sai was watching his face for exactly that reaction and he didn't want to be that predictable.
"Which guys," he said, more level than he felt.
"You don't get to do that." Sai's mouth twitched, pleased despite himself. "We were broken up. You don't get to be jealous about the broke-up part. Those are the rules. I made them up just now but they're binding."
"Fine. I won't ask." He would keep wondering until the heat death of the universe, but he wouldn't ask.
"A collar means different things to different people.
The way I think about it, though, a collar is a claim on somebody's whole life, not just their bed.
It's a way of saying I want a hand in how your days go.
When you sleep. How late you stay out with friends.
Whether you get ice cream on a given night.
The big decisions and the small ones, all of it routed through one person.
" He shook his head. "And that's not what I'm built for.
I've never once wanted to run another man's entire life.
I want what I can do to you behind a locked door.
I want to decide how slowly you're allowed to fall apart.
I do not want to decide what you have for breakfast."
"Huh." Sai looked at him sideways, his face gone soft and a little stunned.
"That's actually a relief. I spent the whole last year half-scared that being kinky meant signing my whole self over to somebody.
Like the cost of getting to want this was turning into a thing that gets told what to do all day, every day, forever.
That's part of why I kept freezing up out there.
I thought yes to one thing was yes to losing all of me. "
"For some people that total handover is exactly the deal.
They adore it. It's a gorgeous thing when it's real and freely chosen.
" Kyan lifted one of the necklaces off its peg without quite deciding to, a heavy plain gold chain, and the weight of it in his palm dragged up a memory whole.
"I gave you a chain like this once. For our six months.
I wasn't thinking collar at all, I just liked the idea of something of mine sitting against your skin.
But you could shift in it without losing it, so it would have worked, if either of us had owned the word for what we were circling back then. "
"I still have it," Sai said quietly. "I have all of them. Every single thing you ever gave me. I couldn't make myself get rid of one."
Kyan let that be true for a moment without touching it. Then he hung the chain back on its peg before it could become a conversation he wasn't braced to have standing in a sex shop at one in the morning with a clerk twelve feet away turning pages.
"Amani's mated now," Sai offered, lighter, steering them both back off the cliff's edge.
"To Nero. The ferret who runs all the security at the club.
They're disgustingly good together, honestly.
He looks at Amani like the building's on fire and Amani's the exit.
" He hesitated, then went on. "Would your mom have been strange about that?
A lion mated to a reptile, or a lion with anything that isn't another big cat? "
The question was innocent. It landed square on the one nerve in Kyan's whole body that had never fully closed over.
"Lady Leo wasn't strange about it at all," he said, which was true and also not the question Sai had asked.
"She vetted Nero like a forensic accountant and then she handed him a keycard and a security budget.
That's how that side of the family does things.
You earn the lioness's respect, on her terms, and then you're family, and species doesn't enter into it. "
"And your side?"
"Not right now," Kyan said. "Maybe later."
He turned toward the register with the gag in hand, and Sai caught his elbow, light, not pulling, just stopping him in place.
"Hey." Sai's voice had gone careful. "What did that mean. Your side, not right now."
Kyan turned back. He could have deflected. Sai was visibly leaving him the door to. But they'd spent a whole night learning to say the true thing out loud to each other, and it felt cheap to start lying again on the easy stuff.
"You know how every kind of shifter runs itself differently," he said.
"Wolves and their packs, bears off being solitary, all of that.
With lions, the females hold the power. Flat out, no asterisk.
The males follow what the females decide.
I can argue with my mother till I lose my voice, and once in a blue moon I even win the argument, but in the long run, on anything that actually matters, I do what she wants.
That's not something I can fix. It's just what I am.
" He leaned a shoulder against a shelf of glossy magazines.
"Lady Leo runs that whole empire of clubs, and right now she's stretched to the edge of herself, because she's pulling Bethany up to take over Los Angeles and standing up a whole second club out there from the bare studs, all of it on her own dime, all of it at once.
And my mother looked at her own sister juggling every bit of that and decided this was the ideal moment to demand a third Chicago club for herself.
That's the actual reason I'm in town. To make the numbers sing so my mom can carve more off the top while Leo's hands are full keeping the lights on. "
"That's a lot to carry into a sushi date," Sai said softly.
"You have no idea." It came out flatter than Kyan meant it to. "And the worst part is I'm good at it. I'll probably even close it. I just hate that hating it has never once changed whether I do it."
Sai was quiet for a beat, looking at him. "That sounds like its own kind of collar," he said. "The kind nobody asked if you wanted before they buckled it on."
It went through Kyan clean, because it was true, and because Sai had found his way to it on his own in a single sentence.
And that was him, the man who'd just finished explaining he would never put a claim on another person's whole life, wearing exactly that, fitted to him at birth and never once unbuckled since.
"Yeah," Kyan said. "It is."
He didn't say the rest of it. That his mother had a jaguar lined up for him, the right bloodline, the right portfolio, named twice now in calls he'd hung up on too fast. That doing what she wanted had a price coming, and he'd been working hard not to look at it.
He looked at Sai instead, holding the gag they were about to buy together, looking back at him like an answer.
And the price suddenly felt like something a man could just refuse to pay.
"Come on." He settled his hand at the small of Sai's back again, because he liked it there and because he needed to move before he said something enormous in entirely the wrong room.
"Let's go pay for your first real piece of gear.
Then I'm taking you to the hotel, and I'm finished talking about my mother for the night. "
Sai grinned, the gag held loose in one hand. "You're the boss."
"In the room," Kyan said. "Out here we're just two guys buying a horse bit at this hour of the night."
But he was smiling when he said it, and the smile held all the way to the register, where the clerk rang them up without totally glancing away from his paperback.
Sai paid for the gag himself with his own card.
Such a small thing. It felt like the most important purchase either of them had made in a year.