Chapter Eighteen
Nero was walking the perimeter. He did it twice a night, once at ten, once at close, checking the exits, the lot, the sidewalk, the new cameras he'd had installed along the four blocks between the club and the cross street.
The cameras had gone in his second week.
Lady Leo had signed off on the invoice without comment, though the number had been significant enough that Nero had expected at least a raised eyebrow.
She'd just initiated the purchase order and slid it back across the desk and said, "I should have done this years ago," and the weight in those words had been enough that Nero hadn't pushed.
The back door opened and Amani came out.
He didn't see Nero at first. He was moving the way he moved when he thought he was alone, slower, less controlled, the bartender performance stripped away and the kid underneath showed through.
He sat down on the concrete step and pulled off his sneakers one at a time, wincing as each one came off, and stretched his socked feet out in front of him and tipped his head back against the door frame and closed his eyes.
Miriam had cleared him for full shifts two days ago.
He'd immediately worked a double, because Amani's relationship with his own limits was adversarial at best. His feet were paying for it.
Nero could see the way he'd been favoring his left heel all night, the deeper cuts had closed but the scar tissue was new and tender and standing for ten hours on it was the kind of decision that made sense to a twenty-year-old who equated rest with weakness.
Nero could have gone back inside through the side entrance. Completed his perimeter check without Amani knowing he'd been there. The professional thing. The safe thing.
He walked over instead.
"Your feet," he said.
Amani opened one eye. "Are fine."
"Are off."
"Temporarily off. I'm going back in."
"You've been favoring your left since eight o'clock."
Both eyes opened. The amber was sharp in the security light, catching the overhead fluorescent the way a cat's eyes caught headlights. "You've been watching my feet since eight o'clock?"
"I watch everything. It's my job."
"Your job is cameras and door protocols. My feet are not a door protocol."
Nero leaned against the wall near the step. Not sitting. He never sat when Amani was sitting, because the height difference bothered Amani in ways Amani would never admit and Nero wasn't going to add to it by towering over him on purpose. Leaning was a compromise. Present but not looming.
The parking lot was empty except for staff cars and the yellow gleam of Bethany's sports car in the far corner.
The night was warm and the sky had the orange-gray wash that Vegas skies always had, the city's light pollution smothering anything that might have been a star.
Somewhere down the block a car alarm went off and stopped.
The ordinary sounds of a city being a city. Not the desert. Not the silence.
Amani opened both eyes and looked up at him.
Not at his face, at the way he stood. Nero noticed because Nero noticed everything, and what Amani was studying was specific.
The balance. The loose readiness in his shoulders.
The hands free at his sides, not in pockets, not crossed over his chest. Weight centered on the balls of his feet, body angled slightly toward the parking lot entrance so that his sight line covered the widest possible area.
A man who stood like awareness was a resting state.
Amani had been doing this more often in the weeks since Nero had started at KK.
Watching him work. Not obviously. Amani was too proud for obvious.
But Nero caught it in peripheral glimpses.
The amber eyes tracking him as he moved through the club.
The way Amani's head turned when Nero passed the bar on his rounds, following the sound of his footsteps even when his hands were busy with a drink.
The way the tension in Amani's shoulders dropped by a fraction, just a fraction, barely visible, when Nero was in the room.
"Can I ask you something?" Amani said.
"You're going to ask whether I say yes or not."
The corner of Amani's mouth moved. Almost a smile. Almost. "Why enforcement? A ferret in enforcement. That's like a—" He stopped himself. Reconsidered the metaphor he'd been about to reach for.
"Like a prey animal in a predator's job?" Nero offered.
"No. Ferrets aren't prey. You're—" Amani frowned. The frown was genuine, the look of someone rearranging a piece of information that didn't fit where he'd been keeping it. "You're mustelids. You're predators, technically. Just—"
"Small ones."
"Yeah."
Nero considered the question. He'd been asked variations of it his entire career, by supervisors, by suspects, by colleagues who couldn't quite reconcile his size with his job title.
He had a professional answer that he could deliver on autopilot: the advantages of being underestimated, the skill set that mattered more than mass, the tactical applications of speed over force.
He'd given that answer a hundred times. It was polished and convincing and it satisfied people who wanted to believe that the world made sense.
He didn't give that answer to Amani. He told the truth instead, because Amani was sitting on a concrete step with his shoes off and his guard down and the truth was the only currency that meant anything between them.
"When I was twelve, my best friend, a rabbit shifter, kid named Danny, got cornered by two wolves after school.
Species hazing. The kind of thing people shrug off because it's just how predators are.
" He let that phrase sit in the air between them.
Just how predators are. "I got between them.
Twelve years old, about eighty pounds soaking wet, and I got between two wolves and a rabbit in a schoolyard.
One of them laughed. The other one said something I've never forgotten. "
Amani was very still. Not the stillness of the ranch, the rigid, survival stillness that Nero had seen on the monitors and in the car.
This was different. This was the stillness of someone listening, actually listening, the way Amani used to listen to people at the bar before the kidnapping, with his whole body, leaning in, giving the speaker the gift of his full attention.
"He said, 'What are you going to do, little ferret?
Bite my ankle?'" Nero paused. "So I bit his ankle.
Shifted right there in the schoolyard and bit clean through his Achilles tendon.
I got lucky and none of the humans saw it.
He was on crutches for six weeks. And after that, nobody in my school touched Danny again. "
Amani stared at him.
"That's the truth of it," Nero said. "I went into enforcement because I learned at twelve that size determines how people see you, but it doesn't determine what you can do.
A wolf is impressive. A bear is intimidating.
But a ferret can get into places wolves can't reach, move faster than bears can track, and be inside the room before anyone knows the window is open.
" He looked at Amani. Held the gaze. "You know that. You were there."
Amani's expression was cycling fast enough Nero could track the individual shifts. Surprise, then reassessment, then the brow drawing down and the mouth softening in a way that Amani was clearly trying to suppress and not quite managing.
"It's not the same thing," Amani‘s voice lost the certainty it usually carried.
"What's not the same thing?"
"Enforcement and—" He gestured vaguely with one hand, the hoodie sleeve flopping past his fingers. "Other things."
"You mean a relationship."
Amani's jaw tightened. "I didn't say that."
"You were going to. Lions mate with big predators. That's what you believe. Cats and bears and wolves, the ones who can match you physically. The ones who look the way a Dom is supposed to look."
"It's not about what a Dom looks like—"
"Then what's it about? Feeling safe? Feeling contained?
Feeling like the person you're with could hold you down if they needed to?
" Nero kept his voice level. Not challenging.
Not pushing. Asking, the way you asked a question when you actually needed the answer and weren't interested in a performance.
"Because I've read your file, Amani. I know the species of the man who took you.
A crane. A bird. Seventy years old with bad knees.
And he held you prisoner for five days."
The air between them changed. Not tension, something heavier. The weight of a truth that had been present in the room for weeks and was finally being spoken.
"Size didn't make you safe then," Nero said.
"It was never going to make you safe in a relationship either.
Safety isn't a body type. It's a choice someone makes every day to show up for you and stay and not take more than you're offering.
That's got nothing to do with species and everything to do with the person. "
Amani's mouth was open. His amber eyes were wide and unguarded in a way Nero had only seen at four in the morning on the couch, except it wasn't four in the morning, it was eleven-thirty on a Tuesday and he was sitting on a concrete step in a parking lot behind his mother's kink club and the architecture of something he'd believed his entire adult life was developing cracks in real time.
He didn't have a comeback. Nero watched him reach for one, the mouth opening, the sharp tongue gearing up for the deflection, the I-prefer-big-predators wall that had served as perimeter defense for years, and come up empty.
Amani closed his mouth. Looked down at his socked feet on the concrete.
The security light threw his shadow long and thin across the asphalt and for a moment he looked very young and very tired and very much like someone standing at the edge of something he hadn't expected to find.
Nero let the silence hold. He'd said what he needed to say.
The words were out there. They would do their work or they wouldn't. He was not going to campaign.
He was not going to push. Pushing was what other people did, people who wanted things from Amani badly enough to reach for them.
Nero wanted him badly enough to stand still and let Amani come to it on his own.
"You bit someone's Achilles tendon," Amani said at last. His voice was rough around the edges, scraped raw by something that wasn't the collar scar.
"Clean through."
"That's disgusting."
"It was effective."
A beat. Amani's fingers were pulling at the hem of the hoodie, the nervous habit he'd developed since the ranch, finding fabric, holding it, anchoring himself to something soft and present. "Did it hurt? The wolf."
"Considerably."
"Good." The word came out quick, and fierce.
It surprised them both. Amani blinked. Then the corner of his mouth turned up, not the almost-laugh, not the near-smile, but something sharper and more real.
Satisfaction. The predator's satisfaction of hearing about a bully getting what he deserved, delivered by an eighty-pound twelve-year-old with a ferret's jaw and no intention of backing down.
Nero saw it and had to look away for a second.
"You're still not my type," Amani said. But the words were empty. Rote. The muscle memory of a conviction that had already been gutted, the mouth still forming the shapes while the rest of him moved on.
Nero smiled. The real one. Not the professional half-smile he wore on rounds, not the wry grin he used with Harold, but the full thing, the one that crinkled his eyes and softened his face and made him look, for a moment, like someone who wasn't always calculating angles and assessing threats.
Like someone who was just a man standing in a parking lot, smiling at another man, because the other man had said something he didn't mean and they both knew it.
"Yeah," Nero said. "I know."
He pushed off the wall. "Break's over. Get your shoes on. I'll walk you back in."
Amani put his sneakers on and stood and winced and Nero didn't offer to help because Amani didn't need help and wouldn't have accepted it.
The day Amani asked for help would be the day Nero moved mountains to give it, but that day was not there yet.
They walked back into the club through the staff entrance and the music and the noise washed over them and the parking lot conversation sealed itself behind the door, a thing that had happened, a thing that had changed something, a thing they were both going to pretend hadn't changed anything at all.
Amani went behind the bar. Nero resumed his rounds. They didn't look at each other for the rest of the night, which was a lie they both maintained with the discipline of people who were very good at not looking at the thing they most wanted to see.
The next evening, Nero sat down at his usual stool at nine o'clock.
Amani slid a screwdriver across the bar without being asked, same as always.
The pink umbrella was in it, same as always.
But Amani's fingers lingered on the glass for a half-second longer than the handoff required.
When Nero looked up, Amani was already turning away, but the line of his shoulders was different.
Not the tight, braced posture of a man holding himself together.
Something lighter. The set of someone who had put something down, not all of it, not even most of it, but one thing, one piece of the weight he'd been carrying, and was standing a fraction straighter for the loss of it.
Nero drank his screwdriver with the umbrella in it and didn't take it out. When the glass was empty, he pocketed the umbrella, because some things were worth keeping even if you couldn't explain why, and a tiny pink umbrella from a lion who wasn't ready to say what it meant was one of them.
He was still carrying it three days later when Amani showed up at four AM and saw it on the kitchen counter where Nero had left it next to his keys, and neither of them said a word about it.