Chapter Fourteen
Lady Leo lived above her own club, in the family's quarters on the private floor over Kinky Kritters.
Her sister would have found that beneath her.
Zahara kept a different address for every season, each one gold and announced to the street and chosen for what it said about her to people who would never once be let inside.
Lady Leo had simply built her home over the top of her life's work, floors above a kink club where the bass never quite carried, and she acted like there was nowhere grander a woman of her power could possibly live.
The private floor was warm lamplight and big quiet rooms and the smell of something roasting, and the heart of it was a kitchen big enough to land a plane in and a long, scarred table that had clearly hosted plenty of arguments and outlived every one of them.
Sai brought a plant. A little rosemary plant he'd started from a cutting himself, potted that morning into a clean little dish, because he had no idea what a person was supposed to bring to a dinner like this one and showing up empty-handed felt worse than showing up wrong.
He held it in his lap the whole drive over and turned the pot a slow quarter-turn every minute or so, which was the only tell he gave that he was scared out of his mind.
Kyan let him turn it and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that would help, and because he understood it down to the bone.
He'd been to a hundred dinners on his mother's side, and every single one had been a performance with a scorecard nobody admitted was being kept.
He kept waiting for the old dread to climb his spine as they rode the elevator up to the family's floor.
It didn't come. That was the part he was still getting used to.
The dread had always been about Zahara, never about family, and he was learning, slowly, that for thirty years he'd been told those were the same word and they had never once been.
"Whatever she asks you," he said at the door, "tell her the truth. Even the ugly version. Especially the ugly version. She can smell a polished answer from the next room."
"That's reassuring." Sai's hand hovered short of the door. "I've never been good at meeting families. You know about the bathroom window."
"I've heard. The legend grows." Kyan kissed his temple. "This one's different. I promise. Knock."
The door opened before he could. Bethany stood there in an apron with flour on one cheek, grinning like she'd been waiting at the window.
"He came," she announced over her shoulder into the house. "The gharial actually came. I told all of you he had nerve, and nobody believed me, and now I get to be smug about it through the entire meal."
"I can hear you," Sai said.
"You were meant to." She caught him by the wrist before he could brace and towed him inside, and the warmth of the place closed over them both, garlic and roasting meat and something sweet baking under it, a radio murmuring low, Amani's laugh rolling out of the kitchen.
"Mom's finishing the roast, Nero's been ordered to be charming and is losing badly, and there's wine that costs more than your car, no offense, Kyan, your new car is an embarrassment and I love it. Shoes off. The lion knows the rules."
Kyan did know the rules. He toed his shoes off by the door, watched Sai fumble to match him, and watched Bethany not let go of Sai's wrist the entire time, towing him along like he was already hers to tow.
Such a small thing, and it landed on Kyan harder than anything his mother had said all week: the casual physical claim of it, a girl deciding a stranger belonged to her family before he'd been in the door thirty seconds.
His mother had never touched anyone she hadn't first decided was useful.
The kitchen was loud and bright and crowded.
Amani stood at the stove stirring something he was very likely ruining, Nero beside him slicing bread with the grim concentration of a man who'd rather have eyes on the exits, the two of them folded into each other's space the easy unthinking way they always were, mate-close, hip to hip.
And at the head of it all, in an apron thrown over a good blouse, wooden spoon held in one hand like a scepter she'd earned in combat, stood Lady Leo.
Sai stepped forward before his nerve could desert him and held the little pot out in both hands.
"I didn't know what you're supposed to bring to something like this," he said.
"So I brought something alive. It's rosemary, off one of mine at home.
This struck me as a house that feeds people, and you can never have too much rosemary. "
Lady Leo took it, turned it once in the light, and for a moment the head-of-the-table look slipped.
"You're late," she told Kyan, "and you brought a nervous reptile carrying a houseplant.
" She carried the cutting to the window herself and set it among her own, in the spot that got the morning sun.
"Good. Sit. Not there, that's Amani's chair, he's territorial about it and almost nothing else.
Sai, you're next to me. Kyan, across, where I can watch the both of you react to things in real time.
" She leveled the spoon at the chairs until they filled.
"We eat first. I don't interrogate a man on an empty stomach.
It's bad for the digestion and it makes him lie to speed things along.
The hard part waits until there's pie on the table. "
"That's a threat," Amani translated, setting down a dish. "I need you to understand the pie is a threat. Walk in knowing that."
Dinner was the warmest meal Kyan had sat through in a decade.
It was loud the way his mother's table had never once been, everyone talking over everyone, Bethany and Amani sniping with the bottomless ammunition only siblings carried, Nero offering exactly one dry sentence every few minutes that landed twice as hard for being rationed.
Lady Leo ran the whole thing from the head of the table without appearing to do anything at all, topping up glasses, killing arguments before they caught, missing nothing.
Sai, to Kyan's quiet amazement, unclenched.
By the second helping he was deep in an argument with Amani about whether a fern counted as a houseplant or a long-term commitment, and winning, and Bethany was laughing so hard she had to put her wine down, and Kyan sat across the table and watched the man he loved get folded into a family like he'd been one chair short of it for years and nobody had noticed until tonight.
Partway through, Lady Leo tapped her glass with a fork, and the table dropped to something like attention.
"Next month," she said, looking at her daughter.
"Next month and this one gets on a plane to go run my Los Angeles club into the ground.
I've assembled her a team. I've signed off on a budget that gave me heartburn.
And I have decided, against my every instinct, to let her make her own mistakes out there instead of mine.
" She lifted the glass. "To Bethany. Who has run my front desk since she was sixteen and is about to find out how much harder it is to run everything. "
"To Bethany," they all said, and Amani knocked his glass against his sister's hard enough to slosh, and Bethany rolled her eyes at the ceiling and blinked fast and didn't quite manage to look like the toast hadn't gotten her.
"I'm going to be on the phone constantly," she warned the table. "I'm going to call all of you at terrible hours and demand you tell me I'm not failing."
"We know," Nero said. It was his second sentence of the night, and it landed soft. "We'll pick up."
Then the plates were cleared, the pie came out, and Lady Leo folded her hands on the table.
"All right," she said. "The hard part."
The room didn't go silent. It settled. Everyone at the table had survived this exact moment once, and it showed.
Amani sat back with his fork. Bethany propped her chin in her hand.
Nero, for the first time all evening, looked directly and openly interested, like a man settling in to watch a fight he had a stake in.
"I vetted Nero at this table," Lady Leo told Sai, conversational, cutting clean wedges of pie.
"A while back, right where you're sitting.
I asked him things no one had ever had the spine to ask him, and I watched him decide, in front of everyone, whether to lie to me.
He didn't. That's the entire test, in case it isn't obvious.
I care less about your answers than about whether you'll hand me a true one when a kinder one is sitting right there for the taking.
" She slid a plate in front of him. "So.
My nephew set his whole life on fire for you, in my lobby, in front of my entire day staff.
Tell me why I should believe it'll burn clean and not just take him down to the ground with it. "
Kyan opened his mouth. Lady Leo raised a single finger without looking at him, and he closed it.
Sai put down his fork. He was pale, but his hands stayed still on the table, and when he spoke his voice held.