Chapter Four #3
He turned on the shower and undressed with his back to the doorway, though he knew that was a meaningless gesture.
The bathroom was arranged so that the shower was visible from the hall.
He stepped under the water and the collar's burn flared where the water ran over it, a sharp sting that settled back into the usual low throb after a few seconds.
He tried to let the water run hot enough to scald, hot enough to burn the feeling of Grainger's finger along his jaw off his skin, but the water only got to warm. Even the temperature was controlled.
Grainger talked.
He talked the entire time Amani was in the shower.
His voice floated in through the open door, calm and steady and utterly unhurried, as if they were having a conversation over coffee rather than Amani standing naked and trembling under lukewarm water while a stranger narrated at him from ten feet away.
"I've been alone here for a very long time, you know," Grainger said.
"My mate, my first mate, passed eleven years ago.
Eleven years in this house with no one. Can you imagine?
Eleven years of eating alone and reading alone and watching the sun go down over the desert with no one to share it with.
I used to talk to the horses, but they're wild things. They don't stay."
Amani pressed his forehead against the tile and counted his breaths. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. Under the sound of the water and Grainger's voice, he reached for the shift.
Not all at once. Carefully. Just a test, the way you'd press on a bruise to see how deep it went. He reached for the lion the way he always did, the warm golden place inside him where the animal lived, and pushed.
The silver hit him like a freight train.
Pain erupted behind his eyes, not the low burn of the collar against his skin but something deeper, something that felt like his skull was being split open from the inside.
His vision whited out. His knees hit the shower floor before he knew he was falling, and he caught himself on his hands, water streaming over his back, his whole body shaking.
For one horrible second he felt the shift start, his jaw aching, his fingers cramping, the bones in his shoulders grinding as they tried to rearrange themselves, and then it snapped back like a rubber band, slamming him back into his human body so hard that his teeth clacked together and he tasted blood.
He knelt there on the shower floor, gasping, his head pounding so badly that the edges of the bathroom pulsed in and out of focus. The collar burned against his throat like a brand.
"—but you'll stay," Grainger was saying from the hallway, still talking, apparently unaware of what had just happened.
Or unconcerned. "I knew when I saw your picture that you were the one.
The sharks showed me several options, you know.
There was a young antelope, very pretty, and a fox with the most striking red hair.
But the moment I saw you I said, that's him.
That's my little cub. Something about your eyes.
They reminded me of sunsets out here. Amber. Warm."
Amani got his breathing under control. Pulled himself upright.
Braced one hand against the tile until the bathroom stopped spinning.
The headache sat behind his eyes like something with weight, pressing down, and the lion inside him had gone quiet in a way that scared him more than the pain.
Not gone. Just stunned. Knocked back into a corner and too dazed to try again.
That was what the collar did. Not just prevented the shift. Punished the attempt. Made the cost so high that your own body learned not to try.
He scrubbed his skin until it was raw. He scrubbed the place on his jaw where Grainger had touched him and the place on his shoulder where the needle had gone in and the places on his wrists where the rope had burned. He scrubbed as if cleaning could undo any of this.
"I think we'll be very happy here," Grainger was saying. "I have books, hundreds of them. I love being read to. My first mate used to read to me every evening before bed. He had the most wonderful voice. Deep, like yours. I think yours might be even better, once you relax."
Once you relax. As if this were nerves. As if Amani were a houseguest who needed to settle in, not a prisoner who'd been drugged and caged and collared and driven into the desert and sold.
He turned off the water. Reached for a towel. Dried himself quickly, mechanically, trying to cover himself as fast as possible because the door was open and Grainger was still talking and the absence of a closed door meant the absence of every boundary Amani had ever taken for granted.
He pulled on the clothes Grainger had laid out.
The linen shirt was soft and expensive. The cotton pants hung loose on his hips.
They fit. Of course they fit. Grainger had known his size, which means the sharks had told him, which meant this had been planned, the clothes, the flowers in the kitchen, all of it prepared for his arrival like a guest room readied for someone who'd been invited.
The collar sat above the shirt's neckline, visible, a thin band of silver against his brown skin. There was no hiding it.
He looked at himself in the mirror. The man looking back at him was pale under his usual brown, with dark circles forming under his amber eyes and a red mark on his cheek from the concrete and raw bands around his wrists from the ropes.
A ring of irritated skin peeked out above and below the collar, already going an angry red. He looked scared. He looked young.
He didn't look like a lion.
He took a breath. Set his jaw. Lifted his chin the way his mother had taught him. The collar shifted against the raw skin and he winced.
Then he walked out of the bathroom.
Grainger was waiting in the hallway. He'd been standing just outside the door the entire time, closer than his voice had suggested, close enough that he could have been watching through the open doorway for all Amani knew.
The thought sent ice down his spine but he kept his face still.
Training. Training was the only thing between him and a breakdown.
The old crane stepped forward and took Amani's chin in his hand. Tilted his face to the left. Then to the right. His eyes moved over Amani's features with a slow, appraising thoroughness that had nothing to do with attraction and everything to do with inventory. He was checking a purchase.
"Open your mouth," Grainger said.
Amani opened his mouth.
Grainger peered in briefly, then closed it for him with a finger under his jaw.
He took one of Amani's hands and turned it over, inspecting his fingers, his nails, the rope burns on his wrists.
He clucked his tongue at the marks. "Those brutes.
I told them to be careful with you." He ran his thumb over the raw skin as if he could soothe it, and Amani stood perfectly still and felt nothing because feeling something would have meant coming apart.
Grainger released his hand and stepped back, surveying the full picture. The linen shirt. The loose pants. The wet hair dripping onto the collar. His expression shifted into something soft and satisfied, the look of a man admiring his own decorating.
"Much better," he said. "You clean up beautifully, little cub. My mate was always well-groomed too. It matters, I think. Taking care of one's appearance. It shows respect for the household."
He reached up and smoothed a strand of Amani's wet hair back from his forehead, tucking it behind his ear with a tenderness that made Amani's stomach lurch.
His fingers brushed the collar on the way down and he paused, adjusting it slightly, centering it on Amani's throat the way you'd straighten a crooked necklace.
"Now," Grainger said, smiling that warm, terrible smile. "Let's get you something to eat."
Amani followed him toward the kitchen. His legs were unsteady but they held.
As he kept his face blank, his mind was racing, cataloging, filing.
The hallway layout. The distance to the front door.
The windows and whether they locked from inside.
The collar and how to get it off. Survive. Observe. Wait for the opening.
He was still a lion. Even dressed in someone else's clothes, even with silver burning into his throat, even with his boundaries stripped away one by one, even with an old man's hands turning his face like a prized animal at auction.
He was still a lion. He just had to remember that.