Chapter Fourteen #2
"You shouldn't believe it because I say so," he said.
"You don't know me yet. The only reason you've got to trust this is the same one I've got, and it's not a flattering one.
I loved him before any of this existed. Before I knew about the empire, before the money, before I ever heard his last name land in a room and watched people sit up straighter.
I fell for a man who hid half of himself from me for months because he was certain I'd run if I saw it.
And then he showed me a piece of it, and I did run.
Once. It was the worst thing I've ever done, and I spent a whole year paying for it badly, in a club I couldn't stand, getting hurt by strangers, trying to turn myself into someone who'd earned a second try at him.
" He lifted his eyes and held hers, steady.
"I don't need one thing he has. I walked into this with my own apartment, my own job, my own life, all three built with nobody's name opening a door for me, and I'm keeping all three no matter how this goes.
So if it ever does burn down, I'll be the one walking into the fire after him.
The same way I'm told somebody once walked into one for your son.
" He let that sit. "That's the only promise I've got to give you.
I think it might be the only kind that's worth anything. "
Lady Leo didn't answer that right away. She cut another wedge of pie nobody had asked for and pushed it toward the center of the table, and when she spoke again her voice had gone quieter, which Kyan had learned tonight was the more dangerous register, the same as it was in her sister, the one place the two women were alike.
"One more," she said. "Then I'll leave you alone.
You spent a year in my club, by your own account, hating every minute of it.
And the thing my nephew hid from you, the thing you ran from once, is the thing my whole business is built on.
So, I need to know it isn't tolerance. I have watched good people decide they could put up with a partner's nature to keep the partner, and I have watched that curdle every single time, because nobody wants to be the thing their love endures.
I won't sign off on my nephew being somebody's tolerated inconvenience.
So, tell me plainly. Is this world yours, Sai, or are you just willing to suffer it for him? "
Sai was quiet a moment, and Kyan saw him actually think about it rather than reach for the answer that would land best, which was the only thing the question had really been testing.
"It's mine," Sai said finally. "I didn't know that for a long time.
I came into the club hating it because I was doing it alone, badly, and getting hurt.
I thought the hating meant it wasn't for me.
But it wasn't the wanting I hated. It was the being lost. The first time somebody actually showed me how it was supposed to work, slow, with a word that stopped everything and someone who asked before he touched me, I found out it was mine all along.
I just hadn't had anybody hand me the map.
" He turned the fork over in his fingers.
"I'm not enduring anything. I spent a year trying to teach myself a language I wanted to speak.
He's just the first person who ever spoke it back. "
The kitchen had gone completely quiet.
Kyan watched his aunt study Sai the way she studied a difficult ledger, that long unhurried calculating look, and found his own heart going hard against his ribs, because he wanted this more than he'd let himself know.
Not her permission. Sai had never needed anyone's permission, that was the entire point of him.
Her welcome. The single thing his own mother had refused to give the man he loved, refused on sight, refused on principle.
Lady Leo set down the pie server.
"Amani." She didn't take her eyes off Sai. "Get the man a key to the floor. The good spare. Same as Nero's."
For a second nobody moved. Then the whole table went up in noise.
"He passed," Lady Leo said, over the top of it, the corner of her mouth lifting. "Passed cleaner than you did, ferret, no offense intended. You wept."
"I misted," Nero said, dignified.
"You wept openly into the green beans," Bethany said. "We have witnesses. It was the most beautiful thing any of us had ever seen and we’ll never let it go."
And just like that the table broke wide open again, loud and overlapping, Amani crowing and going to dig out the spare key, Bethany reaching clear across the pie to grip Sai's hand, Nero defending his honor in his allotted dry sentence and being shouted down with love.
Sai sat in the middle of all of it looking like a man who'd walked in braced for the worst and stumbled into a homecoming instead.
Across the noise, Lady Leo caught Kyan's gaze and gave him a small, deliberate nod, the kind with a whole paragraph folded inside it, something close to well done, he'll do, and your mother is a fool who threw away gold.
Kyan nodded back and didn't trust his voice to attempt anything more.
Later, down on the quiet street outside the club, walking to the secondhand car Kyan had bought that morning to replace the one his mother had had towed out of a valet lot, Sai stopped and looked back up at the building, at the warm lit windows of the family floor high above the dark club, the family still loud and golden behind the glass.
"That's what it's supposed to be," he said quietly. "A family. That's the whole thing she never gave you, isn't it."
"That's the whole thing." Kyan took his hand. "I had to lose the counterfeit one to find the real one. Took me thirty years and a gharial in a bad shirt to manage it."
"Hey. This is a good shirt. It's my fourth-best shirt."
"It's a terrible shirt and I'm going to be buried in it.
" Kyan looked up at the building one more time, thinking of the people Lady Leo had gathered up out of her own hard years and handed keys to one careful soul at a time, and of the man beside him who had just, in front of all of them, earned his.
"Worth it?" Sai asked.
"Every inch of it," Kyan said, and drove them home to their nine steps and their crowded window and their bed built for one.