CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mordechai was in his study with a glass of Scotch and a case file when Amani started calling.
He ignored the first call. And the second.
By the third, he was annoyed. By the fifth, he was considering blocking the boy's number entirely, because there was no emergency in the known world that required five consecutive phone calls from a twenty-year-old lion who didn't understand the concept of boundaries.
His phone lit up with a sixth call. Then a text: ANSWER YOUR PHONE NOW.
Then another: It's Rodney.
Mordechai answered.
"About time," Amani said. He was out of breath, and the background noise suggested he was running. "Check the Playground forum. Right now. Someone posted a photo fifteen minutes ago with the caption 'look what the sharks just dropped off.' It's Rodney."
The glass of Scotch hit the floor. Mordechai was already moving, phone in one hand, the other pulling up the forum on his laptop. It took three seconds to find the post. Three seconds to see the photo. Three seconds for everything inside him to go very, very still.
Rodney. Standing in a dim room with red lighting and concrete walls. Behind him, a large man with white hair and cold blue eyes.
Inuit.
The stillness broke. What replaced it was not anger, anger was a human emotion, managed and directed.
What replaced it was older… simpler, and came from the part of him that was cat, pure cat, the part that recognized a threat to something it had claimed and responded with the only vocabulary it possessed.
"I'm coming to you," Amani said.
"No. I'm going now." Mordechai was already stripping, shirt, pants, shoes. His body was trying to shift without permission, his cat clawing toward the surface.
"Then I'm meeting you there. I already texted Mom, she's sending the bouncers, but they'll be ten minutes behind us. Don't go in alone."
"Amani—"
"He's my friend too." Amani's voice cracked on the last word. The bravado was gone. What was underneath was raw and young and terrified. "I walked him through the auction. I told him he'd be safe. I promised him, Mordechai. So, don't tell me to stay home."
Mordechai didn't have time to argue. "Back of my house. Three minutes. Keep up or I leave you behind."
He shifted. The panther was faster than the man, faster to think, faster to react, faster to move across open ground. He hit the pet door at the back of the house at full speed and cleared the back fence in a single leap, landing in desert sand.
Amani was already there. Shifted, golden-furred, smaller than Mordechai but leaner, built for speed rather than power. His eyes were wide and bright in the moonlight.
They ran.
The desert at night was a different country. Cool air, open sky, the ground flat and hard-packed beneath their paws. Mordechai ran full out, the kind of running that existed beyond effort, beyond thought, that was just muscle and bone and the single focused intent of getting there.
Amani kept pace. The lion was faster than Mordechai expected, or more accurately, more motivated.
He ran with the desperate, flat-out commitment of someone who had something to prove and something to protect, and Mordechai realized with a clarity that cut through his rage that Amani was not doing this for Mordechai.
He was doing it for Rodney. Because Rodney was kind to him.
Because Rodney had asked did you cheat on him with me?
Because Rodney was the sort of person who worried about other people's feelings while blindfolded and terrified, and that sort of person was worth running for.
The warehouse materialized out of the desert like a bad dream, squat, dark, the parking lot full of expensive cars belonging to people who came to the desert to do things the city wouldn't tolerate.
Two guards at the door. Both bears. Both big. They saw the panther and the lion approaching and bristled, showing teeth, blocking the entrance with the practiced stance of men who were paid to keep things in and people out.
Mordechai shifted. Naked, blood-hot, vibrating with a fury that he was barely containing in human form. He stepped toward the door and the guards stepped forward to meet him.
And Amani appeared beside him. Still in lion form, which was a smart choice, a lion in a confined space was a more immediate threat than a naked man, no matter how angry the man was.
But Amani shifted too, standing naked and golden and small between Mordechai and the guards, and he looked up at them with an expression that was pure Lady Leo.
"If you ever want to set foot in Kinky Kritters again," Amani said, his voice steady and cold and carrying every ounce of his mother's authority, "you'll step aside. Right now."
The guards hesitated. Mordechai could see the calculation happening behind their eyes, the Playground paid them by the night, but KK was where they played, where they lived, where the community existed that gave their lives meaning.
Being banned from Lady Leo's club was a social death sentence in the shifter BDSM world.
They stepped aside.
Mordechai was through the door before the guards finished moving.
Rodney's scent hit him immediately, earth and grass and bamboo, overlaid with the sharp, acrid stink of fear and the copper tang of blood.
He followed it down the hallway, his cat so close to the surface that his eyes had gone amber and his claws were out and his teeth were fully extended.
He found the room. The door was unlocked. He opened it.
The sound that came out of him was not human.
Rodney hung from chains on the wall. His shirt was gone.
His back was a ruined landscape of welts and bite marks and broken skin, the damage layered and overlapping in a pattern that spoke of sustained, enthusiastic violence from multiple sources.
His head hung forward. His wrists were bloody where the metal had cut into them.
He was conscious, Mordechai could tell by the tension in his body, but he wasn't moving.
He'd gone somewhere inside himself, somewhere deep and still and far away from the pain.
A single man stood near him. The one in the leather mask. He turned at Mordechai's entrance and had exactly enough time to register what was coming before Mordechai crossed the room and slammed him against the opposite wall hard enough to crack the concrete.
The masked man crumpled. Mordechai didn't look at him again.
He was already at the chains, already working the bolts, his hands shaking with a combination of rage and something else, something that felt like drowning, like the air had been replaced with water and he was breathing in something that was going to kill him.
"Rodney." His voice was barely recognizable. "Rodney, I'm here. I'm going to get you down."
Rodney's head turned. Slowly. Like it cost him something to move.
His gaze found Mordechai's, and what was in them was not fear.
Not pain. Relief. The specific, devastating relief of someone who'd been holding on and holding on and holding on because they'd believed, against all evidence, that help was coming, and help had come.
"You came," Rodney whispered.
"Of course I came." The first chain came free. Then the second. Rodney's arms dropped and he sagged forward, and Mordechai caught him, carefully, so carefully, one arm around his waist and the other supporting his head, keeping his destroyed back away from any surface. "I've got you. I've got you."
The door opened behind them. Inuit.
He walked in carrying a drink, casual and unhurried, and stopped when he saw Mordechai. A smile spread across his face, the indulgent smile of a man who'd been expecting this and was pleased it had arrived.
"Relax," Inuit said. "He's fine. You should see what he looks like when he really—"
Mordechai didn't let him finish the sentence.
The shift was instantaneous. One second he was a man holding a wounded panda, and the next he was a panther launching across the room with every ounce of predatory fury that his body could produce.
There was no thought behind it. No decision.
Just the animal recognizing a threat to its mate and responding with the only answer it had.
He hit Inuit at full speed. The polar bear was large, larger than Mordechai in both forms, but Mordechai had momentum and rage and the focus of a predator that had stopped thinking entirely.
They went down together, crashing into the wall, and Inuit shifted mid-fall, the white bear erupting from the man's body in a surge of pale fur and massive bulk.
It didn't matter. Mordechai's claws were already buried in him.
His teeth were in the bear's throat. The fight was not a fight.
It was an act carried out with the cold efficiency of an animal that had no interest in dominance displays or territorial posturing or any of the rituals that turned violence into communication.
Mordechai wasn't communicating. He was ending.
Inuit thrashed. Snarled. His massive paws raked at Mordechai's sides, leaving furrows that burned but didn't slow him. Mordechai held on. Tightened his jaw. Felt the moment the resistance changed from fighting to failing.
Then felt the moment it stopped.
The room was quiet. Mordechai stood over the body, blood-soaked, his sides heaving. His cat wanted more, wanted to tear, to rend, to make sure the threat was not just ended but obliterated, but the man pulled him back. Barely.
He shifted. Stood naked and bleeding in the red light, looking down at what was left of Inuit, and felt nothing. Not satisfaction, not horror, not regret. Nothing. The space where emotion should have been was occupied entirely by the sound of Rodney's breathing behind him, ragged, wet, alive.
He turned.
Rodney was on the floor against the wall, exactly where Mordechai had set him down.
He was staring at Mordechai with wide eyes, and his scent was a complicated mixture of pain and fear and something else, something warm and bright underneath the rest of it, like a fire burning in a house that was falling down around it.
Mordechai moved toward him. Slowly. Blood on his hands, in his hair, on his skin. He crouched in front of Rodney and waited.
Rodney reached for him.
Not away. Not flinching. Not recoiling from the man who'd just killed someone in front of him.
Reaching for him. His hands, shaking, bloody, raw from the chains, found Mordechai's chest and pulled him close, and Mordechai went, wrapping his arms around Rodney as gently as he could manage given the state of his back, and Rodney pressed his face into Mordechai's neck and cried.
Not loud. Not dramatic. Quiet, exhausted, broken-open crying, the kind that happened when the holding-on was finally over and everything that had been held back came flooding through.
Mordechai held him. That was all he could do. Hold him and breathe and feel the trembling body against his and think: I will never let this happen again. I will tear the world apart before I let anyone touch him again.
"Mom's pulling up," Amani said from the doorway.
His voice was hoarse. When Mordechai looked up, the boy was standing in the hall with his arms wrapped around himself, his face wet, staring at Rodney's back with an expression that Mordechai recognized because he'd felt it himself, the helpless fury of seeing someone you care about hurt and knowing you couldn't have prevented it.
Amani crossed the room. He knelt beside them and pressed his cheek against Rodney's bare shoulder, the lion gesture again, the scent-marking, except this time it wasn't a claim. It was a comfort. A promise. I'm here. You're not alone.
"I'm glad you're okay," Amani whispered.
Rodney's hand found Amani's and squeezed.
Mordechai looked at them, his sub and the boy who'd loved him and let him go and then run across a desert to save the man who'd taken his place, and something gave way inside him that he'd been bracing against for a very long time.
"Thank you," he said to Amani.
Amani dropped his gaze. A small nod. "Take care of each other."
They would. Whatever came next, the healing, the conversations, the slow process of putting a broken man back together, they would do it together.
Mordechai was certain of that with the same certainty he'd felt when his cat had scent-marked Rodney in the club, before his brain had caught up with what his instincts already knew.
This man was his. And he was going to keep him safe.
Outside, tires crunched on gravel. Lady Leo's car, coming to take them home.