Chapter Seventeen
Nero showed up at eight in a button-down and slacks because Lady Leo had said professional and he wasn't stupid enough to test her on his first day.
Bethany was at the front desk with his keycard and a laminated building map and an expression that suggested she had already formed opinions about him and was reserving the right to change them.
"Security office is downstairs, past the private rooms, second door on the left.
It's small. There's a desk and a chair and a monitor bank and it smells like the last security guy's cologne, which was terrible.
I've been airing it out but it might take another week.
" She slid the keycard across the desk. "Marco's on at ten.
He'll walk you through the door protocols.
Mom's in meetings until noon but she said to tell you the camera system login is on a Post-it on the monitor, which is her idea of an IT handoff. "
"Thanks, Bethany."
She tilted her head. The same assessing look her mother had, but younger, less controlled. "You're really doing this? Leaving enforcement to run security at a kink club?"
"Apparently."
"Amani doesn't know you took the job."
Nero paused. "He doesn't?"
"Mom wanted to tell him herself. She hasn't yet. Which means he's going to find out when he walks in later and sees you behind a desk instead of on a bar stool, and I want you to know in advance that his reaction is going to be—" She searched for the word. "Complicated."
"Complicated how?"
Bethany smiled. It was Amani's smile, the same family architecture, the same sharpness at the corners. "You'll see."
Nero took the keycard and went downstairs.
The security office was, as advertised, small.
A desk, a rolling chair with a broken armrest, and a bank of six monitors showing feeds from cameras positioned around the building.
The footage was grainy and the angles were wrong and Nero spent the first two hours cataloging every blind spot with the methodical attention of someone who had spent years studying how buildings could hurt the people inside them.
The staff entrance had no camera at all.
The service corridor behind the private rooms had one, but it was pointed at the ceiling, which was either an installation error or sabotage.
Nero was going to find out which. The stretch of sidewalk between the building and the nearest cross street, the four blocks Amani used to walk every night, had zero coverage.
Nothing. Four blocks of dark warehouse district with no eyes on it whatsoever, and a twenty-year-old bartender had been walking it alone at four in the morning for years, and the only reason nothing had happened sooner was luck.
Luck and the fact that the sharks hadn't bothered looking until someone paid them to.
Nero pulled up vendor contacts and started pricing camera systems. Then escort rotation schedules.
Then staff training modules. The work was absorbing in the way that good work always was, the satisfaction of seeing a problem clearly and knowing exactly how to fix it.
This was what he was built for. Not the paperwork, not the tip line, not the waiting.
The doing. The fixing. The making-sure-it-never-happens-again.
By late afternoon, he'd drafted a security overhaul proposal, mapped the new camera positions, and scheduled meetings with Marco and the two part-time bouncers for the following morning.
He'd also fixed the broken armrest on his chair with a multi-tool from his pocket, because a ferret who couldn't fix things with his hands wasn't much of a ferret.
He ate dinner at his desk. A sandwich from the deli two blocks over, eaten without tasting it, his attention still on the vendor quotes and the camera angles and the twelve miles of blind spots between the building and the world outside it.
The staff started arriving around six. He heard them through the walls, voices and footsteps and the clatter of equipment being prepped. The building waking up.
The club opened at seven. The transformation was immediate: the fluorescents went off, the ambers came on, and the building became what it was meant to be.
Nero heard the music start through the office walls, felt the bass in the soles of his shoes.
The monitors showed the rooms filling. Bethany at the front desk, checking IDs, waving members through to the elevator.
Marco at the main door, big and visible and reassuring in the way that gorillas were.
The regulars settling into their usual spots.
The equipment being set up for the night's scenes.
And Amani. Behind the bar in the hoodie, jeans, and sneakers, moving with the speed and precision that Nero had watched from a bar stool for weeks and was now watching from a monitor, which was different in a way he hadn't expected.
From the stool, he'd seen the bartender, the performance, the competence, the armor.
From the monitor, he saw the whole picture.
The way Amani's shoulders tightened when someone approached from his left.
The way he kept the bar between himself and the room at all times.
The way his hands went into the hoodie pocket whenever there was a lull, hiding themselves, protecting themselves.
The way he scanned the room every few minutes, not the casual sweep of a bartender tracking his customers, but the systematic check of someone cataloging exits and threats.
The way his gaze went to the elevator every time it opened.
The way his whole body braced, just slightly, every time a new person walked into the club.
Nero watched all of this on a six-inch monitor in a basement office and understood, in a way he hadn't fully understood from the bar stool, exactly how much it was costing Amani to be there.
The kid was working. He was functional. He was making drinks and serving customers and doing his job.
But he was doing it the way a soldier does a patrol through hostile territory: alert, prepared, expecting contact at any moment.
Reza was on the well beside him, the otter's hands moving fast on the basics while Amani worked the rail.
Nero had met Reza when he stopped by weeks earlier, and got to know him a little better that morning before the lunch rush — quiet, competent, six months in, no drama.
On the monitor he could see what the staff file hadn't told him: that Reza had adjusted his whole rhythm around Amani's new one.
He was taking the orders Amani couldn't take, the ones that involved leaning too close or reaching across.
He was intercepting the regulars who didn't know how to greet a changed version of a person they liked.
He wasn't making a thing of it. He was just working.
At nine fifteen, Nero left the office and walked to the bar.
Amani saw him coming. He tracked every movement in the room, a habit born from a van and a ranch and a cage. His gaze found Nero and his hands stilled on the glass he was polishing. His face did something that Bethany's word "complicated" did not adequately describe.
Surprise first. The hands freezing mid-rotation on the glass.
Then confusion, his gaze dropping to the button-down, the slacks, the keycard clipped to Nero's belt where a badge used to be.
Then a flicker of something that moved through his expression too fast to name but that pulled his shoulders back and loosened his grip on the glass by a fraction, the body responding to information the mind hadn't processed yet.
Then the jaw set and the armor locked and the bartender was back.
"You're wearing a button-down," Amani said.
"I work here now."
Amani stared at him. The glass had stopped moving entirely. Behind them, a customer waited for a refill and had the good sense to wait quietly. "Since when?"
"Since this morning. Your mother hired me as security chief."
Amani set the glass down. Slowly. The way he set things down when the alternative was throwing them. "She didn't tell me."
"I gathered."
The silence between them had texture. Nero could feel Amani working through it, running calculations in real time the same way he had with the bear's fist bump a few weeks back.
But this calculation was bigger, messier, and had more variables, because the ferret who'd been a safe place at four in the morning was standing in the club wearing a keycard, and safe places weren't supposed to move.
"She hired a ferret to run security at a shifter kink club." Amani's voice was carefully flat. "A ferret."
"A ferret who came through a window and carried you out of a ranch house. But sure, focus on the species."
The flatness cracked. Not much. A fissure, a shift in the jaw, the almost-flinch of someone who'd been hit with something true and was trying to decide whether to be angry about it or grateful.
He picked the glass back up and resumed polishing, but the rhythm was different.
Faster. Tighter. The hands doing something so the rest of the body could process.
Nero didn't push. He stood at the bar and waited the way he always waited, in the space between what Amani said and what he meant, and the gap was wide that night and full of things neither of them were going to say in a room with eighty people and a sound system.
"Your screwdriver's at the end of the bar," Amani said finally. He turned back to his customers.
Nero looked at the end of the bar. The screwdriver was there.
Ice, vodka, orange juice, a pink cocktail umbrella tucked into the rim that hadn't been there the last time Amani had made him one.
He didn't know where the umbrella had come from or when Amani had decided to add it or what it meant, but it was there.
Amani was already serving someone else and not looking at him, which meant the umbrella was supposed to do the talking.
He took the screwdriver to his usual stool and sat, drank it, and didn't remove the umbrella.
They didn't talk for the rest of the night.
Nero did his rounds. Amani poured his drinks.
The club moved around them. The distance between the security office and the bar was exactly sixty-two steps, Nero counted.
He made a point of not walking past the bar more than was professionally necessary, which turned out to be about four times an hour, which was probably twice more than necessary but he was new and still learning the layout and anyone who suggested otherwise could take it up with his supervisor.
He was in trouble. He'd known he was in trouble since the pillow. But trouble, for a ferret, was just another word for something worth paying attention to. Nero had never once in his life stopped paying attention to something because it was trouble.
At close, Bethany found him in the security office reviewing the night's footage. She leaned against the doorframe. "How'd it go?"
"Fine. Your brother's mad at your mother."
"My brother's always mad at my mother. That's not news. I meant—" She gestured between the office and the direction of the bar. "The two of you."
"Professional."
Bethany's smile was knowing in a way that made her look exactly like Lady Leo. "Sure," she said, in the exact same tone Harold had used. "Welcome to the family, Nero."
She walked away. Nero sat in his small office with the broken armrest he'd fixed and the monitors showing an empty club.
The smell of the last security guy's cologne finally fading.
He thought about sixty-two steps and a screwdriver that had been waiting for him with a pink umbrella that a kid who was angry about having something he needed had put in his drink without being asked.
It was a good first day.