Chapter Twelve #3
Amani set his mug down. He did it carefully, because if he set it down the way he wanted to set it down, hard, emphatic, loud, the mug would break and his mother would worry about his hands instead of listening to what he was saying.
"You want to take me off the bar."
"I want to give you a role that uses your skills and doesn't require you to stand on injured feet for hours in a room full of—" She stopped herself. Reconsidered. Started again. "It's an opportunity, Amani. It's not a punishment."
"It is a punishment. You're punishing me for getting kidnapped."
The words landed between them like a slap.
Lady Leo's face went rigid. For a terrible second Amani thought she was going to cry, which would have been worse than anything Grainger had done to him because Lady Leo did not cry and if she cried it would be his fault and he would never forgive himself for it.
She did not cry. She breathed in, breathed out, and set her own mug down with the same deliberate care he had used.
"I am not punishing you. I am trying to protect you."
"By hiding me in an office where no one can see me."
"By giving you a role where you don't have to perform for strangers every night while you're still healing from what those strangers' world did to you.
" Her voice was controlled. Precisely, dangerously controlled, the way it got when she was using every ounce of her discipline to not raise it.
"You were taken from a sidewalk four blocks from this family's business.
You were sold to a man who treated you like property.
You came home with your feet destroyed and you haven't slept through a single night since and you want to go back to standing behind a bar at four in the morning like nothing happened. "
"Something happened. I know something happened.
I was there." Amani's voice cracked on the last word and he hated it, hated the weakness of it, hated that his body kept betraying him at the exact moments when he needed it to hold.
"But the bar is the one thing he didn't touch.
He made me cook. He made me read. He made me sit with him and sleep in his bed and he put me in a cage when I tried to leave.
But he never touched the bar. He never even knew about the bar. It's the only part of me that's still—"
He stopped. He was not going to finish that sentence. He was not going to say the only part of me that's still mine in his mother's kitchen because if he said it out loud it would become real and real was a country he was not ready to visit.
Lady Leo was very still. She was looking at him with an expression he had never seen on her face before, not the business face or the mother face or the lioness face.
Something underneath all of those. Something raw and helpless.
The face of a woman who could run an empire but could not undo what had been done to her child.
"The bar," she said quietly. "Is where you feel like yourself."
"Yes."
She was quiet for a long time. The coffee cooled between them. The kitchen clock ticked. Somewhere outside, a car passed on the quiet street and its headlights swept across the ceiling and were gone.
"Miriam's rules," Lady Leo said at last. "Thirty minutes on your feet, fifteen minutes off. No exceptions. Reza covers while you sit. You do not close alone. You do not walk home. If your feet bleed, you are done for the night."
"Fine."
"I am not finished." Her voice sharpened.
The lioness, returning. "You take the antibiotics.
You eat before your shifts. You answer your phone when I call and you do not pretend you're fine when you are not fine, because I am your mother and I can hear the difference and lying to me about your wellbeing is the one thing I will not tolerate from you. "
Amani swallowed. "Okay."
"And we are still discussing the management role.
Not as a replacement. As an addition. When you're ready, at whatever pace you choose, you will start learning the business side.
Because you are not going to be a bartender forever, and because this family's future needs you in a place where your brain is being used as much as your hands. "
She reached across the table and took his hand. Her grip was firm and warm and it was the grip of a woman who had held his hand since it was small enough to fit entirely inside her palm. Amani looked at their joined hands and his throat closed and his eyes burned and he held on.
"You are my son," Lady Leo said. "You are not a piece of my business that can be reshuffled. If the bar is where you need to be, then that is where you will be. But you will not destroy yourself to prove that you are unbroken. I will not allow it."
He nodded. He couldn't speak. If he spoke the thing in his throat would come loose and he would cry and he had cried once in captivity and he was not ready to cry again because he was afraid that if he started he might not stop.
Lady Leo squeezed his hand once more and then let go and stood and collected the mugs and took them to the sink and washed them by hand even though she had a dishwasher, because Lady Leo believed that some things required the attention of doing them yourself.
"Soon," Amani said to her back. "When the bleeding stops."
She didn't turn around. "When the bleeding stops," she agreed. And then, quieter, still facing the sink: "Wear comfortable shoes. Bethany will drive you."
Amani sat at the table for a while after she left. The kitchen was quiet. His coffee was cold. His feet ached and his mother loved him so much it had nearly crushed him and his mother loved him so much she was letting him go back anyway.
He went to the guest room. He lay on the bed in the hoodie and the jeans. He stared at the ceiling and he thought about the bar, the bottles in their rows, the garnish trays, the cool wood under his palms, the one place in the world where he had always known exactly what to do.
He fell asleep. Not for long, twenty minutes, maybe, before the hands found his stomach and the voice found his ear and he woke gasping. But twenty minutes was more than he'd gotten in any single stretch since the ranch.
He lay in the dark and listened to the house and waited for his heartbeat to slow