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."
"I tried calling. You said something insane and made me hang up on you, and now here we are." She crossed to him; heels sharp on the floor. "So, I came to fix it the way I fix everything. In person, where people can't pretend they didn't hear me."
Sai, who wrote the schedule at his own garden center and had been trading himself dawn shifts all week to buy these afternoons, had been across the room helping Bethany carry a box to the elevator, and Kyan watched him freeze at the sound of the voice he'd only ever heard through a phone.
Watched him set the box down. Watched him decide, visibly, not to run.
Pride and dread hit Kyan at the same time.
He'd hoped to have this fight without Sai in the room. He wasn't going to get to choose.
"It's done, by the way." Zahara said it lightly, the way she said the things meant to land hardest. "I had Gerald handle it this morning.
Your account is closed. The condo's listed.
Someone is collecting the car from the valet at your little hotel as we speak.
You wanted to be a grown man who makes his own choices.
Congratulations. You're forty thousand feet up with no safety net and you packed the parachute yourself. "
The weapon she'd been loading since the phone call, fired clean. Kyan waited to feel the floor drop out from under him.
It didn't. That was the strange part. He stood there at a borrowed desk in a building that already paid him, with a job that was already his, and the threat that had run his whole life turned out to be nothing but news of things he'd already decided he didn't want.
"Okay," Kyan said.
His mother's eyes narrowed. "Okay?"
"You were always going to do it. I knew that when I said no." He shrugged. "I've got a job. I've got somewhere to be. You took back things you gave me to keep me on a string, and now the string's cut, and I'm still standing here. So. Okay."
For a second she had no script for that, and it showed. Then she found her footing the way she always did, by looking for the softest thing in the room to put her claws in.
She found Sai.
"You," she said, turning, and her whole face changed into something gracious and terrible. "You must be the reptile. Come here. Let me look at what my son set himself on fire for."
"Don't." Kyan stepped toward her. "You don't talk to him."
"It's okay." Sai's voice was quiet, but it didn't shake. He came across the floor and stopped a few feet from Zahara, his hands at his sides, and met her eyes. "Hi. I'm Sai. It's actually good to finally meet you. Kyan talks about you a lot, and not all of it was bad, which surprised me."
Zahara looked him over the way she'd look over a stain.
"A garden center," she said. "A studio apartment.
No family to speak of, no money, no standing.
You let my son throw away an empire for a man who waters ferns for a living.
" She smiled. "Tell me. When the shine wears off and he's broke, bored, and missing the life he had, what exactly are you going to give him? Plant cuttings?"
Kyan opened his mouth. Sai got there first.
"I'm going to give him a person who's never once needed his money.
" Sai said it plainly, no heat, like he was telling her the time.
"You keep saying it like it's an insult.
The studio's mine. I pay for it myself. I run the garden center, the whole thing, forty staff and a payroll, and I built that on my own with nobody's name opening doors for me.
I'm not after what Kyan has. I never was.
I fell for him back when I thought he was just a guy, before I ever knew there was an empire attached.
" He took a breath. "So, you can't actually threaten me with poverty, ma'am.
I've been taking care of myself my whole life.
I'm good at it. The difference between me and you is I never needed him small enough to control. I just wanted him."
The club had gone silent. Somewhere behind the bar, Kyan was fairly sure Amani had stopped breathing.
Zahara stared at the gharial in the cheap good shirt who had just declined, politely, to be afraid of her, and for the first time in thirty years, Kyan watched his mother hesitate.
She didn't know what to do.
"He's better at this than you are," Kyan told her, and he couldn't quite keep the wonder out of it. "You came all this way to break the weak one, and there isn't a weak one. There's just us."
"This is sentiment." Zahara's voice had gone tight. "Sentiment doesn't survive a winter. You'll see. You'll both see. And when it falls apart, do not come crawling back to Chicago expecting the door to be open, because I am closing it today, in front of witnesses, on purpose."
"Then close it." The new voice came from the stairs.
Lady Leo descended into the room without hurry, in her plain dark suit, and every eye in the place moved to her, because there was exactly one person on earth Zahara had never been able to walk over, and she was striding down the stairs of her own empire with her reading glasses still pushed up in her hair.
"Hello, sister," Lady Leo said. "You're loud in my house."
Zahara turned, and for the first time since she'd stepped off the elevator, she wasn't the most dangerous thing in the room.
"Leo." She recovered fast, she always did. "You look tired. Running an empire on feelings will do that."
"Running it well will do that." Lady Leo reached the floor and stopped a comfortable distance from her sister, unhurried, the way a person stands when they own the ground.
"You flew commercial or private? Private, knowing you. All that jet fuel to come yell at a boy in my lobby. You could’ve mailed a letter. "
Zahara squared her shoulders and for a moment looked ready for a second fight. "I came to handle my son."
"He's not yours to handle anymore. That's rather the point you keep missing.
" Lady Leo tipped her head toward Kyan. "He works for me now.
As of yesterday. So, when you tell me you've frozen his accounts, listed his condo, and towed his car, what I hear is that you've spent a morning of Gerald's expensive time taking back things from a man who already has a paycheck, a desk, and a reason to get up.
You didn't ruin him, Zahara. You gave him a clean break and saved him the trouble of packing. "
Kyan watched it land on his mother. Watched her do the math and arrive at the number she least wanted.
"You hired him." Zahara's voice had gone flat. "To spite me."
"I hired him because he's good with numbers and he wouldn't help you rob me, which made him the most trustworthy man to walk through that elevator in a year." Lady Leo's mouth curved, just slightly. "The spite is free. A bonus. I won't pretend I'm not enjoying it."
"This is a tantrum." Zahara's hand cut the air, diamonds flashing.
"You've always done this. Collected my strays, my discards, anyone I've ever had to be hard on, and you've petted them and called it kindness, and you've used them to make me the villain of every family story.
The broken things you keep on payroll and call staff.
The register boy you are about to fold into the family.
Now my own son. You build a shelter for everything I would throw away and then you act surprised the family looks at you like a saint and me like a monster. "
"I don't build shelters." Lady Leo's voice didn't rise, which made it worse.
"I build a business that doesn't run on fear, and it turns out people will work themselves to the bone for a place that won't break them.
You call that sentiment. I call it a lower turnover rate.
We were raised in the same den, sister, on the same rules.
You decided the answer was to win. I decided to build something I'd actually want to live inside.
Forty years on, mine's bigger, mine's calmer, and mine isn't currently standing in a competitor's bar in sunglasses making a scene in front of a floor full of staff who will be texting about it before you reach the curb. "
Somewhere by the bar, Amani made a sound like a man swallowing a laugh whole.
Zahara's jaw tightened. For a moment Kyan thought she might actually let the lion show, there, in the middle of her sister's empire, and Lady Leo simply waited, unhurried, a woman who had broken harder things than her own sibling.
The moment passed. Zahara was many things, but she didn't lose control.
Control was the only god she'd ever kept.