Chapter Four
He came back to consciousness the way people come up from deep water, slowly, with pressure behind his eyes and a roaring in his ears that might have been his own blood or maybe the van's engine.
He couldn't tell. Everything hurt. His left shoulder throbbed where the needle had stabbed him.
When he tried to roll off it, he discovered two things at once: he was in a metal cage, and he couldn't move his arms.
Rope. Around his wrists, behind his back, then down to his ankles where they were cinched tight enough that he couldn't straighten his legs.
Whoever had tied him knew what they were doing.
The knots were efficient and the tension was distributed so that struggling would tighten rather than loosen them.
Amani recognized the technique. One of the sharks had been into rope play at the club before they'd been banned.
He'd tied a sub to the St. Andrew's Cross once with knots so clean that even the rope specialists had been impressed.
That knowledge did not make Amani feel better about being tied up by him in the back of a van.
A thick cloth had been shoved into his mouth and tied behind his head. It was tight enough to make his jaw ache and his breathing shallow. He forced himself to breathe through his nose. Slow. Steady. The way he'd been trained.
Then he felt the collar.
It sat heavy and close around his throat, a band of metal that burned where it touched his skin.
Not hot-metal burn. Worse. A sick, creeping burn that sank through his skin and into the muscle underneath, low and constant, like a headache that had settled into his neck and refused to leave.
He knew what it was before his brain finished forming the thought.
Every shifter knew about silver. It was the thing parents warned about.
The bogeyman of kids who could turn into animals.
Silver stops the shift. Silver traps, silver makes shifters human and keeps them there.
He'd never felt it before. He'd never had reason to.
Silver was something that happened to shifters in cautionary stories.
In the dark histories Lady Leo sometimes referenced, when she talked about the old days before the councils.
It had never really been more than a fairy tail. Not to him. Not to a lion in Las Vegas.
The burn was relentless. It didn't spike or fade.
It just sat there, a constant low throb against his throat, impossible to ignore, impossible to adjust to.
Every swallow pressed the metal tighter against the raw skin beneath it, and every breath reminded him it was there.
His lion paced somewhere deep inside him, agitated and muffled, like hearing an animal through a thick wall. Present but unreachable.
Because he had been trained. Not for this, no one trained for this, but his years as a sub at KK had given him something that was keeping him alive: the ability to be still when everything in him wanted to thrash.
To assess when his instincts said panic.
To comply when compliance was the only strategy that kept options open.
He opened his eyes.
The cage was small, barely big enough for him to lie on his side with his knees pulled up.
A cage meant for large dogs, metal bars, a latch on the front.
Through the bars he could see the interior of the van.
Dark. No windows in the back. Four shapes sitting around him on the floor, their smell thick and unmistakable. Salt water and decay. Sharks.
One of them noticed his eyes were open. "Look, the cub is awake."
Another laughed. A third was on his phone, not paying attention. The fourth, the driver, was invisible behind the seats. The radio played something with a heavy bass line, low enough to be a murmur.
He tried to speak around the gag. "I'm in pain." It came out garbled and incomprehensible.
"What did he say?" one shark asked another.
"He wants Shane?"
"Who's Shane?"
"I dunno. Maybe that's his Dom."
"Not anymore it's not. After we sell him to the crane, that'll be his Dom. And we'll be filthy rich."
They all laughed and Amani growled at them through the cloth. Low and deep, from the place in his chest where the lion lived. It wasn't a sound his human vocal cords should have been able to make, and two of the sharks flinched.
Good. Let them remember what he was, even tied up and caged and gagged and collared. He was still a lion. He was still dangerous.
Except the silver said otherwise. He could feel it every time the lion surged forward, the shift pressing against the inside of his skin and then hitting something, a wall that hadn't been there before, and falling back.
Like trying to scream underwater. The instinct was there.
The power was there. But the silver sat between him and his animal like a locked door, and every time the lion threw itself against it, the burn in his throat ratcheted up a notch and his skull throbbed.
Amani closed his eyes and forced himself to think.
He was in a cage, in a van, bound and gagged, with a silver collar burning into his neck, being transported by at least four sharks to be sold to someone they'd called "the crane.
" His phone was gone. He'd felt it crack under his hip when they tackled him, the screen shattering against the sidewalk.
It was lying on the concrete two blocks from the club with his mother's location tracker pinging a dead signal, and no one would find it until morning, and when they did they'd know something was wrong but they wouldn't know where he was because the phone hadn't made it into the van.
His mother didn't know where he was. She'd see his text in the morning, the one about heading home, and she'd assume he was sleeping.
She wouldn't worry until he didn't show up for work, and he wasn't scheduled until eight.
That was sixteen hours from now. Sixteen hours before anyone even started looking.
Unless Bethany called. Bethany sometimes called him in the mornings when she was bored, and when he didn't answer she'd call again, and then she'd text, and then she'd call their mother.
But that assumed Bethany called. That assumed she wasn't busy or sleeping in or assuming he was just sleeping off a long shift.
Amani lay in the cage and breathed through his nose and waited and tried not to calculate how many hours he had before someone realized he was gone.
***
They drove for a long time. Three hours, maybe four.
Amani drifted in and out, the drug was still in his system, pulling him under in waves that he fought against and lost against and fought again.
Each time he surfaced, the van was the same.
The sharks talked among themselves about nothing, women they were sleeping with, money they owed, a fight at some bar.
Meaningless. They talked around him the way people talked around furniture.
He used the lucid stretches to assess. The van was moving steadily, no stop-and-go traffic, which meant they'd left the city. The road was smooth. Highway. The temperature inside the van was rising, which meant sun and no shade, which meant desert. They were heading out of Vegas into the nothing.
Las Vegas existed as a bright, impossible jewel in the middle of a landscape that wanted to kill people.
Drive thirty minutes in any direction and you were in a world of scrub brush and sand and heat that could drop a man in hours.
Drive half an hour and enter a world where no one could find lost body.
The van slowed. Gravel crunched under the tires. They stopped.
The back doors opened and sunlight flooded in so bright that Amani squeezed his eyes shut.
The sharks spilled out, groaning and stretching, and then one of the bigger ones reached into the cage.
The latch clicked. Hands grabbed his bound wrists and dragged him across the metal floor and out into the open air.
He landed on his side on hard-packed dirt.
The impact knocked the wind out of him and sent a bolt of pain through his already-aching shoulder.
The silver collar burned like never before as his neck jerked back and forth.
Before he could orient himself, he was yanked up by the binding ropes.
The world swam around him, too bright, too hot.
The ground tilted under him as the drug, pain and the sudden jostling fought for dominance.
"You three! Don't you dare hurt him!"
The voice came from somewhere ahead. It was smooth and oddly musical, with a cadence that reminded Amani of a bird's call, precise, carrying, pitched to be heard across open space.
"He's to be my mate, after all."
Amani's stomach dropped through the floor of the world.
The sharks released him, laying him on the hot sand. He blinked against the sun until his vision cleared.
The man walking toward him was tall and lean, with long white hair tied back from his face and flowing down his shoulders.
Old, at least forty years older than Amani, maybe more, but he moved with a grace that seemed to contradict his age, each step precise and fluid, like a bird picking its way across water.
It was only in his hands that the years showed.
They were weathered, crippled things, the fingers twisted and the knuckles swollen, and they looked like they belonged to a much older man.
He walked up to Amani and laid a bony finger along his jaw. The touch was light but proprietary, the touch of someone inspecting something they'd purchased. Amani held still. His training held him still.
"He's beautiful," the man told the sharks. His voice had the hushed quality of someone looking at a painting in a museum. "He'll be a perfect mate to stay with me while I pass from this world. You've done well. Check your bank account, the money is all there."