Chapter Ten #2
"Better answer than most men your age could manage.
" She sat back, and studied him the way she studied her folders, the calculating way, the way that meant she'd stopped merely reacting and started building.
Kyan braced for whatever came next. "Here is a thing you may not have thought through, in the heat of all that bravery.
You have just told the lioness who runs this entire empire that you've turned on your own mother and chosen love over the family's expansion.
You understand what that makes you, in Zahara's ledger, by this time tomorrow? "
"Disinherited," Kyan said. "Cut off at the root. The allowance, the condo, the car with her business name on the title. I've been bracing for all of it since I hung up the phone."
"It makes you unemployed." Her mouth curved, almost his mother's shark smile and somehow its exact opposite, because there was warmth living under this one.
"And it just so happens that I am a woman down one daughter, short a capable hand, and in real need of someone with a head for numbers who doesn't frighten easy and is, conveniently, already sleeping with one of my regulars and unlikely to leave town in a hurry.
" She tapped a single finger on the desk.
"I don't do charity, nephew, so don't mistake this for it.
I'm offering you a job. Here. In Vegas. Doing for me precisely what you'd have done for your mother, except pointed at building something instead of stealing it out from under family.
The pay is real. The work is hard. You'd answer to a lioness who has never in her life mated anyone off against their will, or cared one whit what species their happiness showed up wearing.
" Her eyes flicked, deliberate, toward the half-packed office at his back, toward the whole building Nero and his people kept safe for the love of people who'd been to hell and walked home.
"Think it over. You don't owe me an answer today. "
She turned a pen slowly over in her fingers, and for a moment her gaze went somewhere past him, back across a lot of years.
"Your mother and I came up in the same den, you understand.
Same mother, same rules, the same expectations poured into the both of us with the same heavy hand.
Zahara learned them cold and decided the only answer was to win the game harder than anyone else alive.
Take more. Hold tighter. Mate up, marry up, expand, never stop.
I learned the exact same rules and decided the game itself was rotten, so I went and built a house where the door only ever locks from the inside.
" Her eyes came back to him, sharp again.
"She thinks I'm sentimental. She has thought so for forty years and said so to my face at every holiday.
And every single year my sentiment turns a fatter profit than her teeth do, and it drives her clean out of her mind, which I will admit I have never once minded.
So hear me clearly, nephew. This is not all kindness to you.
Hiring the boy my sister threw in the bin, and then watching him do well at it, my way, in my house?
That is the single most satisfying thing I will get to do all quarter, and at my age you take your pleasures where they're offered. "
Kyan sat very still, because the floor of his life had just quietly shifted underneath him, and for once in thirty years it had shifted toward something instead of away.
His mother had spent his whole life making sure he needed her.
The condo, the account, the car, one comfort at a time, so that the day he finally found his spine he'd realize he couldn't afford to use it.
That was how she'd built him. And here was her own sister, in a plain dark suit, calmly handing him the one thing Zahara had always been careful never to let him have.
A way out that didn't cost him everything. A door.
"I don't need until tomorrow," Kyan said.
Lady Leo held up a flat hand. "Yes, you do.
You're going to want to talk it over with Sai before you tear your whole life up by the roots on the strength of one good morning.
That isn't weakness. That's sense, and it's the first thing I'd want from anyone working for me.
" She slid her glasses back on and pulled a folder toward her, the audience plainly drawing to its close.
"Go find your gharial. Last I saw heard was downstairs being fussed over by my son and wrapping Bethany's truly hideous coffee mugs in yesterday's newspaper.
Come back to me tomorrow. If the answer's still yes, we'll talk salary, and then you may have the genuine pleasure of calling your mother to tell her that her own sister hired the boy she threw out.
I intend to enjoy that part personally."
Kyan stood. At the door he paused, the way he never once had with Zahara, and turned back. "Thank you," he said, and meant it down to the floorboards.
"Don't thank me yet." Lady Leo didn't look up from the folder, but her voice gentled all the same.
"Just be good to him, and be good at the work, and remember on the hard days that you chose this.
Nobody poured it into you. That's the whole difference, nephew, between my house and your mother's.
Everything in mine was picked up on purpose.
" She turned a page. "Now go. Some of us are drowning on a schedule. "
Kyan went, and nobody walked him this time.
The stairs and the eyes had been for the way up, for men without keys.
The family elevator carried him down toward the back rooms where the man he loved was wrapping a departing woman's ugly mugs in yesterday's news, and for the first time in his managed, inherited, carefully controlled life, he felt like he was walking toward something he had chosen, start to finish, entirely for himself.