Chapter Fourteen
Nero told himself he was going to Kinky Kritters for the case.
It was a reasonable story. There were loose ends: the formal victim statement still needed to be taken, the other three sharks were in various stages of being processed, and Paulie was still in the wind somewhere between Vegas and the California border with Harold tracking his scent through three counties.
Nero had legitimate professional reasons to be walking through the lobby of a BDSM club at nine o'clock on a Tuesday night.
He told himself this. He almost believed it.
Bethany was at the front desk. She looked up when he came in and her face did a complicated thing, relief and wariness and gratitude all competing for the same real estate, and then she settled on professional.
"Detective. We weren't expecting you tonight."
"Just a check-in. I wanted to see how your brother's doing and go over a few things for the case file."
Bethany's eyes flickered toward the elevator.
Just for a second, but Nero caught it because catching things was his job.
"He's behind the bar. He just came back a few nights ago.
Mom isn't thrilled about it but—" She stopped herself.
Reconsidered how much to share with a near-stranger who happened to have carried her brother out of a ranch house in the desert. "He's behind the bar."
"Got it."
She buzzed him through. He rode the elevator into the main room of Kinky Kritters and took a moment to orient himself, because the last time he'd been here it had been daytime and empty and frantic with Lady Leo's controlled fury.
It was evening and full. The room had the low-lit, leather-and-wood warmth of a place that had been designed to make people feel both safe and dangerous at the same time.
Good lighting. Clean sight lines. Private rooms off a central hallway.
A stage area. And running the length of the far wall, a bar.
Two steps in, Nero spotted Amani and his feet checked. Just for a half-second, a hitch in his stride that he caught before anyone else could.
The kid was different.
Not in the ways that would be obvious to a stranger.
He was behind the bar, moving with efficiency, pouring drinks, exchanging words with customers.
He looked functional. He looked like a bartender doing his job.
But Nero had spent three years in enforcement reading people who were trying to look functional, and what he saw behind that bar was a man in an oversized gray hoodie with the sleeves pulled past his wrists and loose jeans and soft-soled sneakers, standing in the exact center of a three-foot-wide workspace, and never, not once in the five minutes Nero watched him, moving to either end where the bar opened and the room began.
The hoodie was new. Nero had looked at the photo of Amani that Bethany had given him a dozen times during the investigation, the kid grinning behind the bar in tiny black shorts and nothing else, all amber eyes and bare chest and the absolute confidence of someone who knew exactly how good he looked and enjoyed the knowledge.
That person was gone. The person currently behind the bar was covered from neck to wrist to ankle, and the hoodie was big enough that his hands disappeared into the sleeves when he wasn't actively pouring. He was using it like armor.
Nero understood armor. He'd worn his own versions of it for years: the dry humor, the professional distance, the I-don't-care energy that kept people from looking too closely at what a ferret actually felt in a world built for bigger predators.
Armor was what people wore when the alternative was being seen, and being seen was something that used to be safe and wasn't anymore.
He walked to the bar.
Amani saw him coming. Nero could tell because the kid's hands stilled on the glass he was polishing, just for a second, a hitch in the rhythm that someone less observant would have missed. Then he resumed polishing, looked up with an expression that was trying very hard to be casual.
"Detective."
"Amani."
They looked at each other. The last time they'd been face to face, Amani had been in Lady Leo's living room at two in the morning with his sister asleep on his shoulder, watching Nero with eyes that looked like a light left on in a dark room.
At that moment, they were in a bar with eighty people and a sound system and leather furniture and the distance between that night and this one was measured in days but it felt like the distance between two different countries.
"How are the feet?" Nero asked, because it was clinical and safe and gave them both something to talk about that wasn't the other thing.
"Better. Miriam says another week before the deeper cuts close fully. The infection's clearing up. She thinks the infection may be why shifting doesn’t help the healing."
Nero wasn’t a shifter doctor, but had seen other cases where that was the case. "You're standing on them."
"I'm a bartender. Standing is part of the job description."
"How long have you been on them tonight?"
Amani's jaw tightened. The bratty edge that Nero had seen flickers of, in the car after the rescue, in the way the kid cataloged and dismissed him, surfaced. "Are you my doctor now?"
"No. But I was an EMT before I went into enforcement, and those cuts on your arches need another week before you should be putting full weight on them for more than thirty minutes at a stretch. When's your next break?"
"I just had one."
Nero glanced at the stool behind the bar. It was pushed into the corner, clearly unused. "When?"
Amani held his gaze for a beat too long. Then: "Forty-five minutes ago."
"So you're fifteen minutes past due."
"I'm fine."
Nero leaned against the bar. He didn't push.
Pushing was what big predators did. Bears shouldered through, wolves pressed with eye contact, lions roared.
Ferrets didn't push. Ferrets waited in the space between what someone said and what they meant, and eventually the gap got wide enough that the truth fell through.
"Sit down, Amani."
It wasn't a request. It wasn't a command. It wasn't a suggestion. It was the voice Nero used with witnesses who were running on adrenaline and stubbornness, who needed someone to give them permission to stop. Quiet. Steady. Inarguable.
Amani sat. He did it like it cost him something, pulled the stool out from the corner, lowered himself onto it, took the weight off his feet. His shoulders dropped an inch. His grip on the glass loosened. He probably didn't notice either of those things but Nero noticed both.
"There," Nero said. "Was that so hard?"
"You're annoying."
"I get that a lot too."
The corner of Amani's mouth twitched. It was a fraction of the grin Nero had seen in the photograph, maybe a tenth, if he was being generous, but it was there. Something alive behind the armor.
"What can I get you?" Amani asked, and the question was professional, routine, the bartender reasserting himself over the patient.
“Maybe you can just sit there for a few minutes, like you’re supposed to. I can wait.”
Amani raised an eyebrow, and pouted. It was a sexy pout, whether he meant it to be or not.
“Talk to me while we wait.” Nero took the empty stool across from Amani.
“I’m not going to talk about…stuff…while I’m at work.”
Nero shrugged. “Didn’t expect you to. We can get official statements another time. What’s things been like the past few days? You’re back at work. That’s good.”
“Yeah. Much more healing than laying around on Mom’s guest bed, or even being in my own place. Mom’s not hovering like she was. Bethany either.” He pulled his new phone out and glanced at the screen.
“You’ve still got about five minutes.” Nero flashed a grin.
“Do you have a clock in your head or something? Is it a ferret thing?”
“You could say that. Okay, so how does this place work? I mean, I’ve heard rumors but never know how much to believe and how much to ignore.”
Amani relaxed and proceeded to give Nero a run down of how the club operated. It took a little over ten minutes.
When Amani reached the end of the explanation, he slipped off the stool, grimacing slightly when his feet hit the floor. “Okay, what’s your order, officer?”
"Screwdriver."
Amani's eyebrows went up. "Seriously?"
"What's wrong with a screwdriver?"
"Nothing. If you're at a hotel pool in 2004." He was already reaching for the vodka. His hands moved with the automatic precision of muscle memory, measure, pour, ice, orange juice, stir. He set it in front of Nero without a garnish. "You want an umbrella with that? Maybe a crazy straw?"
Nero took a sip. "It's good."
"Of course it's good. I made it."
There was the kid from the photograph. Just for a second, the sharpness, the confidence, the I-know-what-I'm-doing energy that no amount of gray hoodie could fully suppress. It surfaced and submerged so fast that if Nero had blinked he'd have missed it, but he didn't blink.
Nero nursed the screwdriver and watched the room and waited for Amani to bring up the thing they both knew was sitting between them.
Amani didn't bring it up. He served customers.
He made drinks. He was good at his job. Nero could see that even from one stool's vantage point.
He knew every regular's name, remembered orders, read body language with the fluency of someone who'd been working with people since he was a teenager.
He was efficient and precise and his hands only shook once, when a customer set a glass down too hard and the bang made him flinch.
He covered it by picking the glass up to refill it before anyone could clock the hesitation.
Nero clocked it.