CHAPTER TWELVE
Rodney had been working at the firm for four days.
Four days of Sarah's knitting and horoscopes, of learning the phone system and the filing and which clients liked which restaurants.
Four days of Mordechai's smile through the glass wall, of lunches eaten together in his office, of the quiet domestic rhythm that had settled over them like a blanket.
Four days of riding to work together in the morning, tea and scones from the café on the corner, Rodney's chocolate chip, Mordechai's plain with butter, and driving home in the Jaguar in the evening, Mordechai's hand on his thigh.
He'd given his two weeks' notice at the call center.
Dean had been confused but supportive. His manager had been confused and unsupportive.
Rodney had felt guilty for about an hour, and then Mordechai had texted him a photo of the desk that would be his, right outside Mordechai's office, and the guilt had evaporated.
Everything was good. Everything was so good that some part of Rodney, the part that had learned through thirty years of experience that good things didn't last, had been waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It dropped at nine-fifteen at night, outside his apartment building.
Mordechai had dropped him off at eight. They'd had dinner at the Thai place, their place now, the corner table by the window, and Mordechai had kissed him at the curb and told him to lock his door and text when he was inside.
Rodney had done both. He'd changed into pajama pants and a t-shirt, brushed his teeth, and realized he was out of toothpaste.
Which meant a quick trip to the bodega on the corner, three minutes there, three minutes back, barely worth putting real pants on.
He put on real pants anyway, because Mordechai had opinions about going out in pajamas and Rodney had internalized them faster than he was comfortable admitting.
The smell hit him the moment he stepped outside. Murky water. Salt. The heavy, choking stench of sharks in their human form, as unmistakable as gasoline and twice as nauseating.
Rodney froze. His hand was still on the building's front door. He could turn around. Go back inside. Lock the door. Call Mordechai.
He didn't get the chance.
Dominic stepped out of the shadow next to the stoop like he'd been poured from the darkness itself.
His grin was wide and toothy and completely devoid of anything that could be mistaken for warmth.
Two more sharks flanked him, the same two from last time, the ones who'd held Rodney's arms while Dominic choked him against a wall.
"Hey there, panda boy." Dominic's voice was cheerful. Conversational. The voice of a man picking up a conversation that had never really ended. "Miss us?"
"Lady Leo paid you." Rodney's voice came out steady, which surprised him. Inside, his blood had turned to ice water. "Whatever I owed, she covered it. We're done."
"See, that's the thing." Dominic pulled a phone from his pocket and made a show of checking it.
"That was before we went back to the boss and ran the numbers again.
Turns out there was some interest that hadn't been applied yet.
Interest on the original debt, plus interest on the interest, plus a processing fee for the transfer to Lady Leo, plus, you know how it is.
Numbers add up. By the time we were done crunching, you were another fifteen grand in the hole. "
Rodney's gut clenched. "That's not possible. You can't just—"
"Can't just what?" Dominic's grin widened. "Add interest? That's literally all we do, Rodney. It's the family business."
It was a lie. Rodney knew it was a lie. The numbers were fabricated, the interest manufactured, the whole thing a transparent pretext to grab him again.
But knowing it was a lie didn't help when three sharks were standing between him and his front door and the silver van was already pulling up to the curb.
"Let's go, panda. The Playground waits."
The word landed like a fist. The Playground. The place Dominic had threatened him with weeks ago, the place Lady Leo had described with genuine disgust, the place where people went in and didn't always come back out the same.
Rodney bolted.
He made it three steps before the two sharks caught him.
They grabbed his arms with the efficient brutality of men who'd done this a thousand times, and Rodney struggled, really struggled, kicking and twisting and trying to wrench free, but he was a panda.
Pandas weren't built for fighting. They were built for climbing trees and eating bamboo and being left alone, and none of those skills were useful when two sharks had your arms and a third was opening the back doors of a van.
"Mordechai is a cat," Rodney gasped, still fighting. "He'll smell you on me. He'll find me."
Dominic paused. Tilted his head. Then laughed, a genuine, delighted sound, as if Rodney had said something charming. "I'm counting on it. The more people who come looking, the more leverage we have."
They threw him into the van. The doors slammed. The interior was dark and smelled of salt water and rust and the despair of a place where bad things happened regularly. Rodney hit the metal floor hard, the impact ringing through his elbows and knees.
One of the sharks reached for a blindfold, and Dominic stopped him with a raised hand. "Don't bother. Let him see everything. Maybe it'll sink in that nobody's coming to walk him through this one."
The van pulled away from the curb. Rodney's phone was in his back pocket, they hadn't taken it, hadn't even searched him, but with the two sharks watching his every move, he couldn't reach for it without being seen. He pressed his palms flat against the cold metal floor and tried to think.
Mordechai. He had to get word to Mordechai.
The van was already leaving the city, the lights of the strip fading in the rearview mirror, and the desert was opening up around them like a mouth.
***
They drove for thirty minutes. Fifteen on paved roads, fifteen on dirt.
The van bounced and rattled and threw Rodney against the walls with every rut and pothole.
The sharks didn't bother holding onto anything, their bodies compensated naturally, swaying with the motion like men who'd been born at sea, while Rodney was battered from side to side, catching himself on the wheel wells, his elbows and knees collecting bruises.
By the time the van stopped, he was bruised, nauseous, and close to the kind of panic that shut down higher brain function and left nothing but animal instinct.
His panda was screaming at him to curl up, to go small, to make himself as unthreatening as possible and hope the predators lost interest. It was the strategy his species had evolved over millions of years, and it was exactly wrong for this situation, because these predators wanted him scared.
"Out," Dominic said, and the doors opened onto a parking lot in the middle of nowhere.
The desert stretched in every direction, flat, dark, moonlit. The air was dry and carried the faint mineral smell of sand and the less faint smell of something else. Sweat. Leather. Blood.
The Playground was a warehouse. Large, corrugated metal, no windows.
Several expensive cars were parked in the lot, the kind of cars that belonged to people with money and appetites that couldn't be satisfied through legitimate channels.
A single metal door sat in the center of the wall, flanked by two men in black who watched the van arrive with the professional disinterest of bouncers who'd seen everything.
Rodney stumbled out of the van. His legs were shaking so badly he nearly fell, and he caught himself on one of the sports cars. An alarm blared, honking and flashing, and the sharks laughed.
"That's going to set the mood," Dominic said.
Rodney steadied himself without touching anything else.
He looked at the door. At the warehouse.
At the desert stretching endlessly around them.
There was nowhere to run. Even if he got past the sharks, he was miles from the city in open terrain, and he was a panda, and they were predators, and the math was very simple and very bad.
He squared his shoulders.
He wasn't sure where the impulse came from, maybe from Mordechai, who'd taught him that posture mattered even when everything else was falling apart.
Maybe from Sarah, who'd told him that her panda husband had spent his life giving in.
Maybe from Amani, who'd stood in a locker room and said you can handle scared.
He squared his shoulders and walked toward the door.
Inside, the smell hit him first. Sweat and sex and leather, overlaid with the copper tang of blood and something chemical he couldn't identify.
The lighting was dim and red and designed to obscure rather than illuminate.
A narrow hallway stretched ahead of him, lined with doors, and from behind those doors came sounds that made his stomach turn.
Not the sounds of the club, not the consensual moans and laughter and music of Kinky Kritters.
These sounds were sharper. More desperate.
The kind of sounds people made when they weren't enjoying themselves but couldn't say so.
This was the anti-Kinky Kritters. The dark mirror. Everything Lady Leo had built her clubs in opposition to, distilled and concentrated in a warehouse in the desert.
There was no Bethany at a desk, giving wristbands and doing crossword puzzles. There was no Amani, walking nervous newbies through the process with warmth and honesty. There was no safe word. There were no rules.
Dominic's hand closed on his arm. "This way, panda. Your buyer's waiting."
He was dragged more than led down the hallway. Dominic checked his phone, turned around, went back three doors, and knocked.
"Yes," said a deep voice from inside.
"Delivery," Dominic said. "Plus a little extra for the prompt service."
The door opened, and the man behind it was large and white-haired and smiling in a way that made every nerve in Rodney's body scream.
He was dressed expensively, tailored black, open collar, a heavy watch on his wrist, but the clothes couldn't disguise what he was.
His eyes were pale blue and completely, utterly cold.
He smelled like stale ice and fish. Polar bear.
The same polar bear who'd been bidding against Mordechai at the auction, who'd pushed the price to forty thousand, who'd lost and clearly hadn't taken the loss well.
"Inuit," Dominic said, accepting an envelope. "As always, a pleasure."
Inuit's smile widened as he looked at Rodney. "Come in, little panda. We've been waiting for you."
We.
The door closed behind him. The lock turned. And in the dim, red-lit room, Rodney realized with a cold, sinking certainty that there was no safe word here. No quick-release tab. No clip he could undo. No warm voice telling him he could leave whenever he wanted.
For the first time since he'd met Mordechai, Rodney was truly alone.