Chapter Two
Saturday was family day, which at the Leo household meant brunch at eleven, unsolicited opinions by eleven fifteen, and at least one argument about Amani's life choices before the mimosas ran out.
He let himself into his mother's house with the key she'd given him when he moved out, though "moved out" was generous for someone who lived four blocks from the family business and ate at his mother's table three times a week.
The house was absurd. White columns along the front porch, a foyer that echoed, rooms that Lady Leo had decorated in shades of cream and gold as if she were furnishing a very expensive cage.
Amani had grown up there and still felt slightly underdressed every time he walked in.
Bethany was already at the dining table with her phone in one hand and a piece of toast in the other. She looked up when he came in, assessed his outfit, joggers and a tank top, practically formal for him on a day off, and went back to her phone. "You look tired."
"You look like you're about to say something I don't want to hear."
"Always." She took a bite of toast. "Mom's in the kitchen. She's making that egg thing again."
"The frittata?"
"The egg thing." Bethany waved the toast dismissively. "I don't learn the names of foods that take longer to pronounce than to eat."
Amani dropped into the chair across from her and stole a piece of her toast. She swatted at his hand but it was already in his mouth. Lion reflexes. She should have learned.
"Mom!" Bethany shouted toward the kitchen. "Your son is here and he's already stealing my food!"
"My son has his own toast on the counter," Lady Leo's voice came back, perfectly calm, perfectly carrying. "If he wants yours, he should’ve gotten here earlier. And if you're going to yell, Bethany, do it with your mouth empty. You were raised better than that."
Bethany rolled her eyes so hard Amani was surprised they didn't get stuck. He grinned and she kicked him under the table. This was family. He wouldn't trade it for anything.
Lady Leo emerged from the kitchen carrying the frittata on a serving platter that probably cost more than Amani's monthly rent.
She was dressed the way she was always dressed, impeccably, as if cameras might appear at any moment.
The cream blouse was silk with matching tailored pants.
Her hair tied in the high bun that Amani had literally never seen her without.
He sometimes wondered if she slept in it. He suspected she did.
She set the platter down, kissed the top of Amani's head, and took her seat at the head of the table. "You got home late."
"I got home at the same time I always get home."
"Four twenty-three. That's seven minutes later than Thursday."
Amani stared down the table. "You time me?"
"I check when your text comes in. It's not the same thing." She served herself a slice of frittata with surgical precision. "It's a mother's prerogative to notice patterns."
"It's a mother's prerogative to be terrifying, apparently."
Bethany snorted. "She has your location shared on her phone too. Don't act surprised."
Amani turned to his mother, who did not look remotely ashamed. "Mom. I'm twenty years old."
"And I'm your mother. Eat your frittata."
He ate his frittata. It was excellent, because everything Lady Leo did was excellent, including the things that drove him out of his mind.
The eggs were perfectly set, the vegetables precisely diced, the cheese melted in a way that suggested she'd watched a YouTube tutorial and then improved upon it through sheer force of will.
The conversation drifted to club business, which was the other thing that always happened at brunch.
Bethany wanted to start learning more about the financial side.
She'd been working the front desk for two years and was ready for more responsibility.
Lady Leo listened to her pitch with the expression of a woman who had already decided what she thought but wanted to see how well her daughter could argue.
Amani ate and watched them volley back and forth, enjoying the show.
"What do you think?" Bethany turned to him suddenly, looking for an ally.
"I think you'd be great at it." He meant it. Bethany was sharp, organized, and had inherited their mother's ability to stare down anyone who tried to shortchange her. "But I also think Mom's going to make you earn it regardless of what I say, so I'm staying out of it."
"Coward."
"Survivor." He winked. "I know which battles to fight in this family."
Lady Leo set down her fork with a small, satisfied sound. "We'll discuss it Monday at the office, Bethany. Bring numbers, not feelings."
Bethany's face lit up. That was as close to a yes as Lady Leo gave without a contract in front of her. Bethany kicked Amani under the table again, this time in excitement, and he kicked her back because he wasn't going to let her have the last word in any language, including foot.
After brunch, they cleared the table together, another Leo household tradition that Amani suspected existed solely so his mother could continue conversations while his hands were too full of dishes to escape.
Lady Leo washed. Bethany dried. Amani put things away, because he was the tallest and could reach the top shelves without a step stool, a fact Bethany had never forgiven him for.
"Any prospects?" Lady Leo asked, her hands in the soapy water, her tone perfectly casual in the way that meant it was anything but.
Amani knew what she was asking. She asked some version of it every week. "Not at the moment."
"There was a wolf in last night," Bethany offered helpfully. "New member. Big. Kind of intense. I saw him talking to you at the bar."
"He was ordering a drink. That's literally my job."
"He was flirting with you. I can tell from the video feed." Bethany gave him a look. "You turned him down, didn't you."
"I told him to come back next Friday."
"Which is your way of turning him down without saying no so he keeps coming back and buying drinks." Bethany shook her head. "You're going to die alone behind that bar."
"With excellent taste in whiskey and no regrets."
Lady Leo handed Bethany a plate without turning around. "What species was the wolf?"
"Timber, I think. Big, like Beth said."
"And you weren't interested."
Amani sighed. This was the part of the conversation he never enjoyed, because the truth was complicated and his family made it simple. "I told you. I'm particular. I want what I want."
"What you want…" Bethany set the plate in the drying rack with a pointed clink, "is a big predator who looks impressive enough to match your ego, which eliminates about ninety percent of the shifter population and a hundred percent of anyone who might actually be good for you."
"That's not—"
"It's exactly what it is." Bethany turned to face him.
She was shorter than him by several inches but she had their mother's stare and used it with the same devastating precision.
"You won't even look at anyone who isn't a cat, a bear, or a wolf.
You dismissed that fox tonight before he'd been in the building for five minutes. "
"The fox was nervous. He wasn't there to play."
"Maybe not. But you didn't even consider him, did you? Not for a second. Because he's a fox, and foxes aren't big enough or predatory enough for whatever fantasy you've built in your head about what a real Dom looks like."
Amani opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. She wasn't entirely wrong. She also wasn't entirely right. "It's a preference, Beth. Everyone has them."
"Preferences are flexible. Yours is a wall."
Lady Leo turned off the water and dried her hands on a towel embroidered with tiny gold lions, because of course she had towels with lions on them. "Your sister makes a fair point."
"Of course you'd side with her."
"I'm not siding with anyone. I'm observing that you have a pattern, and patterns can become prisons if you're not careful.
" She folded the towel with the same precision she applied to everything.
"Your father was a leopard. Not exactly the biggest cat in the jungle.
But he was the best man I ever knew, and I wouldn't have found him if I'd only been looking at lions. "
That landed. It always did when she brought up his father. Amani hadn't known him, he'd died when Amani was three, but the way Lady Leo spoke about him, even years later, even in passing, carried a weight that Amani couldn't argue with. She didn't talk about him often. When she did, it mattered.
He put the last glass away and closed the cabinet. "I hear you. Both of you. I'm not promising anything, but I hear you."
Bethany bumped his shoulder as she passed. "That's the most we'll get out of him," she told their mother.
"For now," Lady Leo agreed. Her gaze met Amani's, and the patience in them was its own form of pressure.
She wanted more for him. She always had.
Not just a Dom who could match him, but one who could surprise him.
One who could get past the walls he'd built out of preference, species, and the unshakable certainty that he already knew exactly what he needed.
Amani loved her for it. He also wished she'd give him a break.
***
He walked home from his mother's house in the late afternoon heat, cutting through the residential streets toward the warehouse district.
The sun was doing its merciless Nevada thing, turning the pavement into a griddle and the air into something people had to push through rather than breathe.
He liked it. Lion blood ran hot and the heat felt like home in a way that air conditioning never did.
His apartment was on the fourth floor of a converted warehouse that had been turned into expensive lofts by a developer who'd had grand visions of making the warehouse district trendy.
The visions hadn't quite materialized, the neighborhood was still more industrial than hip, but the loft was beautiful.
High ceilings, exposed brick, big windows that looked out toward the Strip.
From his bedroom, the city at night was a wall of light that made the heavy blackout curtains a necessity rather than a luxury.
He let himself in and stood in the doorway for a moment, taking in the silence.
His place was clean. He was precise about that.
The lion in him demanded order, but lived-in.
There were books on every surface, because Amani read voraciously and had no system for putting things back when he was done.
A pair of the tiny black shorts was draped over the back of a kitchen chair where he'd tossed them after his last shift.
The kitchen counter held a coffee maker, a blender he'd used exactly once, and a collection of takeout menus that constituted his primary relationship with food.
He couldn't cook. This was a known fact, acknowledged by everyone in his family with varying degrees of horror.
Lady Leo, who could produce a restaurant-quality frittata before noon, viewed his inability to feed himself as a personal failure of her parenting.
Bethany thought it was hilarious. Amani had made peace with it.
He could make cereal, grilled cheese if the situation was dire, and coffee that was technically drinkable if the drinker didn't have standards. For everything else, there were apps.
He showered, changed into fresh shorts and nothing else, there was no point in clothes when he was home alone, and stretched out on his couch with his phone. The afternoon was his. He wouldn't need to be at the club until eight, and until then the world was pleasantly empty.
He scrolled through his messages. A group chat with a few of the KK regulars, mostly memes and complaints about the heat.
A text from Bethany: a photo of the frittata leftovers with the caption "I saved you some so you don't die of cereal poisoning.
" A notification from the club's scheduling app showing him on close, as he was every Saturday.
Nothing from anyone special. No one checking in with attention that meant something more than friendship. That was fine. He was twenty. He had time.
The wolf from the previous night crossed his mind briefly.
He'd been attractive. Confident without being pushy, which was rarer than it should have been.
Amani had meant it when he'd told the man to come back, watching a Dom play with someone else told him everything about their skill, their patience, their ability to read a sub's signals.
It was better than any conversation. But Bethany's words nagged at him, the way her words always did, because his sister had the inconvenient habit of being right about the things he most wanted to be wrong about.
Was it a wall? His preference for big predators?
He didn't think so. He thought of it as knowing what he wanted, as clarity, not limitation.
A lion should be with someone who could match him physically, who could make him feel contained and overwhelmed in the way that made submission meaningful rather than performative.
Small shifters, foxes, ferrets, raccoons, the whole parade of animals that weighed less than his shifted form's paw, how could they possibly give him that?
It wasn't prejudice. It was biology. It was common sense. It was the perfectly logical conclusion of a lifetime spent watching his mother, a lioness, command rooms full of predators twice her size through nothing but force of presence.
He paused on that thought. Examined it. Set it aside.
Lady Leo was five foot six and weighed maybe a hundred and thirty pounds. She had never once needed to be bigger than anyone to be more dangerous than everyone.
He set that aside too.
The afternoon light moved across his ceiling in the slow, golden way it did in the hours before the city woke up for the night.
Amani closed his eyes and let himself drift, half-sleeping in the warm quiet of his apartment, thinking about nothing and everything and the comfortable certainty that the next day would look exactly like every other.
The same four blocks. The same bar. The same tiny shorts.
The same flirting. The same walk home at four in the morning under the same orange sky.
He fell asleep on the couch with his phone on his chest and the late afternoon sun on his face.