Chapter Twelve
Amani didn't sleep.
Lady Leo had made up the guest room, fresh sheets, extra blankets, a glass of water on the nightstand.
The room was warm and clean and smelled like his mother's house, which was the smell of safety, of childhood, of the world before.
He lay in the bed, staring at the ceiling, and listened to the sounds of the house settling.
The distant hum of the city outside was normally a comfort, but he did not sleep.
Every time he closed his eyes, hands touched his stomach. Breath danced over his neck. A voice said little cub. The room smelled like sage. The clock ticked while the desert pressed against the windows.
He kept his eyes open.
At some point, three, maybe four in the morning, he got up. His feet screamed as they touched the floor but he barely registered it anymore. Pain was just a thing that was happening. It had been happening for days. It would keep happening. It was the least important thing about him at that moment.
He went to the bathroom. Closed the door. Locked it. Stood there for a moment in the bright fluorescent light and looked at himself in the mirror.
He was still wearing Grainger's clothes.
The linen shirt, the cotton pants. Cream-colored, soft, expensive.
Chosen for him by someone who was deciding what he would wear, what he would eat, what his life would look like.
He was still wearing them. They had driven three and a half hours back to Vegas and walked up the porch steps and been examined by Miriam and sat on the couch with his sister and he had been wearing a dead man's taste in clothing the entire time and no one had said anything because there were more important things and that was true but it didn't matter because the shirt was touching his skin and it was the wrong shirt and he needed it off. He needed it off that instant.
He yanked the shirt over his head and threw it on the floor.
The pants followed. He stood in the bathroom in his underwear.
As he looked at himself in the mirror, the person looking back was thin, tired, and had dark circles under his amber eyes with red marks on his wrists from rope that had come off four days ago and a raw red ring around his throat where the collar had been.
His body used to be something he was proud of, was just a body, just the container he happened to live in.
He turned away from the mirror.
There were clothes in the guest room closet, things he'd left at his mother's house over the years, washed and folded and kept.
He found them in the dark, moving by feel because turning on the light would mean seeing himself again.
His hands found a hoodie, oversized, gray, the kind of thing he'd worn to the gym years before he decided that showing skin was more interesting than covering it.
He pulled it over his head and the fabric settled around him like armor.
Heavy. Covering. His arms disappeared into the sleeves.
His collarbones vanished. His chest, his stomach, the places where Grainger's hands had been, gone, under cotton fleece, hidden.
He found jeans. Loose ones, not the tight kind he normally wore when he wasn't wearing his signature shorts.
He pulled them on and they hung on his hips and covered his legs and his bandaged feet disappeared under the hems. He stood in the dark guest room in a hoodie and loose jeans.
For the first time in days, he breathed.
It was the first full breath he'd taken since the kitchen. Since the hands on his stomach and the voice in his ear saying you'll love our life together.
He sat on the edge of the bed. The hoodie was warm.
The jeans were loose. Nothing was touching his skin that he hadn't chosen.
Nothing was showing that he didn't want to show.
The person in the mirror, the one he'd turned away from, was gone, covered up, put away.
And in his place was someone new. Someone who looked like a kid on a Sunday morning, unremarkable, invisible, safe in the way that only invisible things were safe.
He lay back down. The hoodie bunched at his waist and the jeans were uncomfortable to sleep in, but he didn't take them off.
He lay there in his mother's guest room in clothes that covered every part of him and he stared at the ceiling and he did not sleep, but for the first time in five days, he was not being watched.
The ceiling fan turned slowly above him. The house settled. Somewhere outside, a car passed on the street, its headlights sweeping briefly across the curtains and then gone.
Amani lay still in his armor for a long time. The ceiling fan turned. The house breathed. And the waiting felt like the ranch, like the bed with Grainger's arm across his chest, like lying in the dark hoping the night would end because he had no power to end it himself.
He sat up.
The hoodie came off first. He pulled it over his head, folded it, and set it on the chair beside the bed.
Then the jeans, stepped out of carefully, folded, placed on top of the hoodie.
Then the underwear. He stood naked in his mother's guest room.
The air was cool on his skin. Nothing he was wearing had been chosen by someone else, because he wasn't wearing anything at all.
He reached for the lion.
Not the way he'd reached in Grainger's shower, desperate and panicked, grabbing for the animal like a drowning man grabs for a rope.
This was slower. Deliberate. The way someone would reach for a friend they hadn't seen in five days and weren't sure would recognize them.
He found the warm golden place inside his chest where the lion lived and he pressed into it, gently, and said: come on. It's me. We're home.
The shift hurt. His bones ached as they lengthened.
His muscles burned as they rearranged. His jaw cracked open wider than it had on the tailgate, and kept going.
The pain was real and large, but it was nothing like the silver.
The silver had been punishment. This was cost. This was his body spending what little it had left because he'd asked it to.
It was answering because he'd asked. The difference between those two things was the whole difference between the ranch and the room.
It took longer than it should have. His body stuttered halfway through, the shift stalling the way an engine stalls when the fuel is low.
For one terrible second he thought it wasn't going to complete and he was going to be stuck between forms on his mother's guest room floor, half-lion and half-human and fully broken.
He pushed. Not with force. With patience.
Come on. I know you're tired. So am I. But we can do this.
The shift completed.
Four hundred pounds of lion lay on a guest bed that was not built for him.
His paws hung off one end and his tail draped off the other and the bedframe creaked under the weight in a way that would probably alarm his mother if she heard it.
His body hurt everywhere. The deep bone-ache of a shift done on empty.
His paws were still tender where the bandages had been.
The gauze shredded somewhere in the tangle of sheets.
But he was a lion. He was a lion in a locked house with his mother down the hall.
Three doors between him and the street. Teeth that could take a man's arm off at the shoulder.
Nothing in the room could hold him. Nothing in the house could collar him.
The silver was in an evidence bag in the back of a cop's SUV.
His throat was bare. His jaw was his. If anything came through that door it would meet four hundred pounds of the reason his species was named for kings.
Amani put his enormous head on his enormous paws and closed his eyes.
He slept. Not well. Not long. But he slept as a lion, because he chose to, because he could, and because choosing was the point.
***
The first day, his mother made pancakes.
She made them the way she always had, from scratch, thick and golden, with real butter and the Vermont maple syrup she ordered online because she said the grocery store kind tasted like sweetened cardboard.
She made bacon. She squeezed orange juice by hand.
She set the table in the dining room instead of the kitchen because the dining room had more light in the morning.
The good plates were on the table, the ones with the gold rim that she only used for holidays and guests she was trying to impress.
Amani sat at the table in his hoodie, loose jeans, and the gauze on his feet.
He ate three pancakes and half a strip of bacon before his stomach closed like a fist. He pushed the plate away.
Lady Leo looked at the remaining food and said nothing and poured him more orange juice.
He drank it because refusing juice seemed like a cruelty he wasn't willing to commit against a woman who had spent the last five days not knowing if her son was alive.
Bethany arrived at nine. She let herself in with her key and came into the dining room still wearing the previous day's mascara and a KK staff t-shirt she must have slept in.
She hugged Amani carefully, from the side, as if she'd been briefed on approach angles.
She sat, ate his leftover pancakes, and talked about the club.
"Reza's been holding it together but he can't do it alone, not on weekends.
Marco's been filling in and he's fine but he doesn't know anyone's orders and he can't do more than two cocktails at a time without getting flustered.
Tommy from the Thursday crew covered last night but he pours too heavy.
By eleven half the floor was wobbling. I've been doing what I can from the front but I can't be in two places at—"
"Bethany," Lady Leo said.