CHAPTER TWO
Rodney spent two days pretending the sharks didn't exist.
He went to work. He answered calls from angry customers who wanted to know why their internet was slow or their bill was wrong.
He ate lunch in the break room, a sandwich from the vending machine, the kind where the bread was always a little damp, and he smiled at Dean when Dean talked about his weekend plans, and he clocked out at five and took the bus home and locked his door and stared at the ceiling.
On the first night, he almost convinced himself that the sharks were bluffing.
They wanted to scare him into paying. That was all.
They weren't really going to sell him to some desert warehouse.
That kind of thing didn't actually happen.
Las Vegas was not some lawless wasteland where people disappeared.
Except it was also Las Vegas, and people did disappear.
Shifters especially. The human police didn't track shifter disappearances—they didn't even know shifters existed, most of them, and the shifter council, such as it was, had about as much enforcement power as a neighborhood watch.
If the sharks decided to sell him to the Playground, nobody was coming to look for him.
His mother hadn't called in three years.
His coworkers would assume he quit. His landlord would notice eventually, but only because the rent stopped.
On the second night, lying in bed at two in the morning with the fridge humming its endless one-note song, Rodney pulled up Lady Leo's number again.
He'd spent the day thinking about it. Not obviously, he'd still answered his calls and eaten his sad sandwich and smiled at Dean, but underneath all of that, his mind had been turning the idea over and over like a stone in a tumbler.
Lady Leo. Kinky Kritters. The arrangement Dean's friend's friend had mentioned, where Lady Leo sometimes helped shifters with debt problems. Nobody seemed to know exactly how it worked.
But the consistent thread was that Lady Leo paid off debts, and the people she helped didn't end up at the Playground.
What they did end up doing was less clear.
He typed out a text message, deleted it, typed another one, deleted that too. What was he supposed to say? Hi, I'm a panda who owes sharks fifty thousand dollars and I heard you might be able to help me not get sold to a sex dungeon? That seemed like a lot for a first text.
In the end, he kept it simple. He typed: My name is Rodney Olyrea. I'm a shifter and I'm in trouble with the sharks. I was told you might be able to help. Could I come talk to you?
He stared at the message for a long time. Then he hit send before he could talk himself out of it, dropped his phone on the nightstand like it was hot, and pulled the pillow over his face.
His phone buzzed forty seconds later.
Tomorrow. 10 AM. Come to the main entrance and tell Bethany you have an appointment. Don't be late. I don't like late.
Rodney didn't sleep much after that either.
***
The building that housed Kinky Kritters didn't look like much from the outside.
A tall glass tower on the edge of the financial district, indistinguishable from the accounting firms and insurance offices around it.
People in expensive suits walked past without giving it a second glance.
Rodney, in his khaki pants and the blue polo shirt he hadn't changed out of after his morning shift, felt profoundly out of place.
He stood on the sidewalk for three full minutes before going in.
He counted. Part of him was still waiting for the sensible part of his brain to take over and tell him this was insane, that he should go home and figure out something else, anything else, that didn't involve walking into a stranger's office and asking for help with a problem he'd created entirely by himself.
But the sensible part of his brain had been asleep at the wheel for years.
It was the part that should have told him to stop gambling after the first thousand dollars.
The five-thousandth. The ten-thousandth.
It had failed him at every turn, and he didn't see why it should suddenly start being useful now.
He went inside.
The lobby was quiet. Cool marble floors.
The kind of emptiness that felt expensive, not abandoned, but curated.
Like every unnecessary thing had been stripped away and only the essential remained.
A single desk sat in front of two sets of elevators, and behind it was a young woman tapping a pencil against the surface in a lazy rhythm.
She looked up as Rodney approached, and he saw the resemblance immediately.
The same pointed nose, the same curve of chin, the same feeling of being studied by eyes that were cataloguing more than they let on.
But where the woman he was here to see was intimidating, according to everything he'd seen online lately, this girl's expression was closer to curious. Maybe even a little amused.
"Hi," Rodney said. His voice bounced around the empty lobby. "I'm, um. Rodney. Olyrea. I have an appointment with Lady Leo."
The girl, Bethany, the text had said, stopped tapping her pencil. "You're the panda."
Rodney wasn't sure if he should be offended or not. "I am."
Something shifted in her expression. Not warmer, exactly, but more interested.
She tilted her head the way cats did when they spotted something unexpected.
"She's upstairs. Take the elevator on the right, go up to the third floor.
Her office is at the end of the hall. You'll smell it before you see it. "
"Smell it?"
Bethany gave him a smile that was more teeth than comfort. "You'll see."
The elevator was mirrored on all sides. Blue polo, slightly wrinkled. Khakis with a stain on one knee from where he'd dropped mustard at lunch three days ago. Hair doing its own thing despite his best efforts that morning. He looked away.
The doors opened on a hallway that was nothing like the sparse lobby downstairs.
Here, the walls were paneled in dark wood, the carpet was thick and blonde, and the air smelled of something heavy, musky, and warm.
The scent of a big cat, and his panda instincts twitched with the ancient, useless urge to curl into a ball and stay very still.
He didn't curl into a ball. He walked down the hallway on legs that felt like they might give out at any moment, past closed doors and tasteful artwork, until he reached the door at the end. It was open.
The office behind it was large and immaculate. Dark mahogany desk. Blonde carpet, nearly the same shade as the hair of the woman sitting behind the desk. Floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the city. Everything was elegant and controlled and quietly expensive, just like the woman herself.
Lady Leo watched him approach with the gaze of a predator who was not currently hungry but liked to keep her options open.
She was beautiful in the way that dangerous things were beautiful, sharp lines, precise features, eyes that tracked every movement of his body as he crossed the room.
Her hair fell in a perfect sheet of gold over her shoulders, and her nails were long and manicured and could probably, if she wanted, become something considerably more lethal.
"Please, Mr. Olyrea, have a seat." Her voice was smooth and unhurried. The kind of voice that had never needed to be raised.
Rodney settled into the leather chair she'd indicated and folded his hands over his stomach.
It was a self-conscious gesture—he was always trying to cover his middle around people who looked like they'd never eaten a carbohydrate—but it was also grounding.
He pressed his thumbs together and tried to remember why he was here.
"Thank you for seeing me," he said.
Lady Leo tilted her head. Studied him. "I don't get many walk-ins," she said. "Most people who end up in my office arrive by different means. You're here because you came to me. That's... interesting."
"I didn't know what else to do."
"Honesty." She sounded pleased. "That's refreshing.
Most of the men the sharks send my way spend the first ten minutes trying to convince me their debt is a misunderstanding.
" She leaned back in her chair and picked up a pen, rolling it between her long fingers.
"It isn't a misunderstanding, is it, Rodney? "
"No." His throat was dry. "I gambled. I lost. A lot."
"Fifty-three thousand, four hundred, and twelve dollars. As of this morning." She said it the way someone might recite the weather forecast. Rodney opened his mouth, then closed it. She already knew. Of course, she already knew. She'd probably known before he texted her.
"The sharks were kind enough to forward me your file when I inquired.
It has all the important details about you," Lady Leo continued.
"You've been a reliable debtor for three years.
Always making minimum payments, never quite enough to touch the principal.
That kind of consistency is actually impressive, in a grim sort of way. "
"Thank you?" Rodney wasn't sure that was a compliment.
Lady Leo laughed. It was a soft sound, more amused than warm. "Let me tell you how this works, Rodney, since you've taken the unusual step of coming to me rather than being brought."
She stood, and even though Rodney was sitting and she wasn't particularly tall, she seemed to fill the room.
There was a physicality to her that went beyond her human form, the presence of a lioness who had chosen to wear silk and sit behind a desk rather than hunt on the savanna but had lost none of the instinct.