Punishing the Panda (Kinky Kritters: Las Vegas #1)

CHAPTER ONE

Rodney cried out, ending with a whimper as he was slammed up against the brick facade of the office building he worked in.

The thick smell of murky water rushed around him, and he felt as though he was drowning in it.

The sharks around him just laughed. Struggling against their hold did nothing to break their grip on his arms, and one of them closed his hand around Rodney's neck.

The shark's fingers were thick, rough, and cold.

"So, where's the money, panda boy?" the shark growled. His beady brown eyes were dark and dangerous. Dominic, the others called him. He ran the enforcement arm of the casino's shifter operations, and he had the kind of face that made it clear he enjoyed his work.

After weeks of managing to avoid the casino enforcers, Rodney's luck had run out. He gagged at the strong grip on his throat. "I don't have it."

"Wrong answer." Dominic's grip tightened. "You're more than fifty thousand underwater to us. I haven't bothered to check and see if you owe money to any of the other casinos in town." He glanced at the other sharks around him. They all shook their heads.

"You're the only one," Rodney choked out. His gambling luck had been so bad in recent years that he'd stopped going to multiple casinos for fear of having several enforcers come for him at the same time. One set of sharks was more than enough.

A toothy grin spread across Dominic's face. Too many teeth for a human mouth. That happened with sharks who spent too much time in their animal form. The teeth didn't fully retract. It was the kind of detail that made Rodney's stomach turn.

"Fifty-three thousand, four hundred, and change," Dominic said, as casually as if he were reading off a grocery list. "That's before this week's interest. You want to know what it'll be after?"

Rodney didn't. He really, really didn't.

"Sixty-one thousand, give or take." Dominic loosened his grip just enough to let Rodney suck in a breath.

"Interest is a bitch, isn't it? Especially when you can't even cover the interest, let alone the principal.

At this rate, you'll owe us a hundred grand by Christmas.

And we're not exactly the patient type."

The two sharks holding Rodney's arms shifted their weight.

He could feel them getting restless. Bored, maybe.

This was just another Tuesday for them, rough up a debtor, make some threats, move on to the next one.

For Rodney, it was the worst night of his life.

Although, knowing his luck, something would come along to top it soon enough.

"I can make payments." Rodney’s voice cracked on the word payments, which didn't exactly help his negotiating position. "I have a job. I can—"

Dominic laughed. It wasn't a kind sound. "You work at a call center. I checked. You make, what, thirty-two grand a year before taxes? You couldn't pay this off in your lifetime."

That was probably true, and hearing it stated so plainly made Rodney want to fold in on himself. He'd known the math was bad. He just hadn't let himself do the math.

"Here's the deal, panda boy." Dominic pulled his hand off Rodney's throat but stayed close enough that the stale salt-water smell of him filled Rodney's nose with every breath.

"You've got one week to figure something out.

One week. After that, we start looking for someone who might want to buy your contract. And I don't mean your phone contract."

"Buy my—" Rodney's voice failed him entirely.

"There are places," Dominic said, and the casualness of it was worse than any threat.

"Places where a guy like you, something a little exotic, a little different, could fetch a decent price.

There's a spot out in the desert. The Playground, they call it.

Not as classy as some joints in town, but they're not picky about where their entertainment comes from. "

The shark holding Rodney's left arm chuckled. "Heard they had a panda once before. Years ago. Went over real well."

"See?" Dominic spread his hands like he was being reasonable. "You're a commodity, Rodney. Might as well accept that. One week. Get creative." He jerked his chin at the other two, and they released Rodney's arms at the same time, sending him stumbling against the brick wall.

By the time Rodney regained his balance, the sharks were already walking away.

A silver van idled at the curb. One of them opened the back doors, and the interior light caught the face of the driver, another shark, grinning that too-many-teeth grin.

Dominic climbed in without looking back, the doors slammed shut, and the van pulled into traffic like nothing had happened.

Rodney stood on the sidewalk shaking.

The call center behind him was dark. His shift had ended twenty minutes ago, and most of his coworkers were already gone.

A few cars remained in the parking lot, and somewhere down the block a bus rumbled past, but no one had seen what just happened.

No one ever did. That was the thing about the shifter world: it operated right alongside the human one, and the humans never noticed.

They couldn't smell the murky water on the air or read the threat in a shark's too-wide smile.

They just walked past and went about their lives.

Rodney wanted that. He wanted to just walk past and go about his life. But his hands were trembling so badly he could barely get his phone out of his pocket, and the bruises on his arms were already darkening, and in one week the sharks would be back.

He made it to the bus stop on autopilot. Sat on the bench. Stared at his shoes. They were scuffed and old, the laces fraying.

Not for the first time, Rodney wished he'd stayed in Arkansas and never come to Las Vegas.

If he'd never discovered gambling and just been happy being a simple grocery store clerk, his life would have been so much better.

He understood produce and customer service.

He'd had a good life there, or at least a stable one.

A small apartment above a dry cleaner. A job he didn't hate.

A mother who called him every Sunday, even if she never quite knew what to say to a son who was both gay and a gambler, two things her church had strong opinions about.

The gambling had ruined the Sunday calls before anything else.

First she'd started asking pointed questions about his finances.

Then she'd stopped asking. Then she'd stopped calling altogether, and when Rodney tried calling her, his father answered and told him not to bother until he'd gotten his life together.

That was three years ago. He hadn't gotten his life together. He'd gotten it significantly less together, actually, to the tune of fifty-three thousand four hundred dollars and change.

The bus came. Rodney got on. He pressed his forehead against the cool window and watched the lights of Las Vegas slide past, all that neon and gold, all those promises of wealth and excitement.

He'd believed those promises once. Believed that the next hand, the next roll, the next spin would be the one that changed everything.

That was the cruelest thing about gambling: it wasn't the losing that kept him coming back.

It was the almost winning. The near misses that convinced him that luck was just around the corner, that he was due, that the universe owed him something good.

It didn't.

His apartment was a studio in a complex that had probably been nice in the seventies.

Currently it was the kind of place where the hallway carpet was a color that no longer existed in nature and the fridge hummed so loud it woke him up at night.

One room that served as bedroom, living room, and kitchen.

A bathroom with a shower that alternated between scalding and ice cold with no warning.

A window that looked out on another building's window.

He locked the door behind him, double-checked it, and then stood in the middle of his apartment and tried to figure out what the hell he was going to do.

Fifty-three thousand dollars. In one week.

He didn't have it. He would never have it.

Even if he sold everything he owned, which wasn't much—a secondhand laptop, a TV with a cracked bezel, some clothes that were more functional than fashionable—he might scrape together a few hundred dollars.

Against fifty-three thousand, it was nothing.

A rounding error. The interest alone would eat it in a day.

The Playground. Dominic had said it like it was nothing.

Like sending a person to some underground sex dungeon in the desert was just business.

And maybe, to the sharks, it was. They dealt in bodies the way other people dealt in cards.

Rodney had heard whispers about the Playground, most shifters in Vegas had.

A warehouse somewhere outside the city. No rules.

No oversight. The kind of place where things happened that didn't happen at legitimate clubs.

The kind of place people went into and didn't always come back out of the same.

He went to the kitchen sink and splashed water on his face.

His reflection in the small mirror he'd hung next to the fridge stared back at him, round-faced, dark hair that never cooperated, built the way pandas were built.

He wasn't ugly. He was just the kind of guy who could walk through a room without anyone noticing he'd been there at all.

Which made Dominic's claim that someone might pay good money for him at the Playground seem absurd. But maybe that was the commodity, rarity, not beauty. There weren't many panda shifters in the world, and the few who existed tended to keep to themselves.

He didn't like thinking about it. He especially didn't like the part where he'd been too scared to fight back, too scared to run, too scared to do anything but stand there and let Dominic choke him against a wall.

He'd been bullied his whole life. Every school he'd ever attended, every job he'd ever held, there was always someone bigger and meaner, and that someone always found him.

He pulled out his phone and opened his contacts.

Scrolled through a pitifully short list. Coworkers he was friendly with but not friends with.

A couple of guys he'd gone on dates with years ago.

His mother's number, which he kept even though he never called it.

No one who could help him. No one who would even understand the problem.

One name caught his eye. Not a person, a place.

Kinky Kritters. He'd saved the number months ago after a coworker, Dean, had spent an entire lunch break talking about it.

Dean wasn't a shifter. He just knew people who were, and he'd heard things.

"It's supposed to be incredible," he'd said, leaning across the break room table with the enthusiasm of someone sharing a genuine secret.

"Like, the best club in the city. But you have to be a shifter to get in. They don't let humans past the lobby."

Rodney hadn't thought much about it at the time.

Clubs weren't his thing. He didn't like crowds, didn't like loud music, and definitely didn't like the idea of being around a bunch of shifters who were bigger and more attractive than him, which was all of them.

But the name had stuck, and he'd saved the number for reasons he couldn't quite explain, the same way he saved coupons he never used and bookmarked recipes he never cooked.

He stared at the number.

Kinky Kritters was owned by Lady Leo. Everyone in the Vegas shifter world knew that.

She was powerful, connected, and by all accounts ran the most legitimate operation in a city full of illegitimate ones.

She had money. She had influence. And she had, according to Dean's breathless secondhand gossip, some kind of arrangement with the sharks that nobody fully understood.

Maybe she could help. Maybe she'd buy his debt, or negotiate with the sharks, or do something, anything, that didn't involve him being sold in a warehouse in the desert.

Or maybe she'd laugh him out of her office. That seemed more likely. Why would someone like Lady Leo care about a nobody panda with a gambling problem?

But the alternative was the Playground. And Rodney had a week.

He set the phone down on the counter without calling. He'd think about it later. He'd think about it when his hands stopped shaking, the bruises on his arms stopped throbbing, and the smell of murky water faded from his clothes.

He didn't sleep that night. He lay in his narrow bed and listened to the fridge hum and thought about how few choices he'd ever really made.

How most of his life had happened to him rather than because of him.

He'd drifted through everything, let himself be pulled in whatever direction the current was going, like a leaf in a gutter.

One week. He had one week to stop drifting and do something.

He stared at the ceiling until dawn turned the window gray, and then he got up and went to work.