Chapter Five
Jack had slept on the floor again, the way he did after the bad nights, and by the time light came through the blinds the worst of the stiffness had loosened enough that he could move without guarding his side.
He dressed in something that covered the bruise and left before anyone else in the house was awake.
There was only one place he wanted to be, it wasn't the shiver, and it wasn't the club. It was the water.
The dolphins ran a pool facility thirty minutes south of the city. From the outside it looked like a vacant warehouse with a painted dolphin on the corrugated metal wall. Every shifter in Nevada knew better.
Jack showed his ID to the dolphin behind the counter.
The guy sniffed the air, made a face the way they always did when they caught shark on someone, and pointed him toward Pool B.
The smallest one, in the back, away from the other swimmers.
Standard protocol. Nobody wanted to share water with a shark, and Jack didn't blame them.
He'd been swimming alone his whole life.
There were benefits to being the species everyone avoided.
Pool B was ten feet deep and maybe thirty feet long.
Glass windows on two walls let him see the other pools, the other shifters gliding through their own water.
Dolphins in the big pool, a couple of seals in Pool C, what looked like a crocodile in Pool D.
Everyone in their own lane. Jack stripped at the edge and dove in before the cold air could settle on his skin.
The shift came over him the moment the water closed above his head.
It wasn't like the descriptions he'd heard from other species, the pain and the stretching and the sound of bones rearranging.
For Jack, it was relief. Like exhaling after holding his breath for days.
His human body dissolved and his shark body took its place with the smoothness of water filling a glass.
Six feet of lean gray muscle, pectoral fins spreading wide, the pressure of the water pressing evenly against every inch of him.
He sank to the bottom and stayed there.
Silence. Real silence, the kind that didn't exist on land.
No music, no voices, no shiver, no club.
Just the hum of the pool's filtration system and the muted percussion of his own heartbeat.
At the bottom of the pool, with ten feet of water between him and the world, Jack could finally stop performing.
He didn't have to control his face, slow his breathing, or pretend that nothing hurt.
He could just be a shark. Drift, think, and float in the pressure of the water that held him from every direction equally, asking nothing.
He'd been coming here every day since the punishment started, killing the hours between the shiver house and his evening shift at KK.
The routine had formed fast. Wake up at the shiver house, avoid whoever was awake, walk to the pool, swim until his time was up, walk to KK, put on the shorts, do his three hours, walk home, endure whatever challenge was waiting, sleep. Repeat.
The pool was the only part of the cycle that belonged to him.
He stayed at the bottom for an hour, barely moving.
His shark body didn't need to surface for air.
He could stay down there indefinitely if they let him, and the dolphins didn't seem to mind as long as he was out by the time his block ended.
Sometimes he swam slow laps. Sometimes he just hovered near the drain and let the current push him in lazy circles.
Mostly he rested on the concrete bottom with his belly flat against the cool surface and tried not to think about the bruise on his ribs.
Dresden had picked him the previous night.
Not Rashe. Dresden, who was bigger, slower, meaner, and who didn't believe in getting it over with quickly.
The challenge had gone the way it always went.
Jack fought enough to show he was trying, lost, took what came.
But Dresden had noticed the bruise from Rashe the night before and had pressed his thumb into it during the fight, grinding the heel of his hand against Jack's side until the pain layered on top of itself.
After, Jack had lain on his bedroom floor instead of the bed because the floor was cold and the cold helped.
He didn't want to think about that. The pool was for silence.
When his time was up, the dolphin knocked on the glass and Jack surfaced, shifted, climbed out. He dressed in the bathroom, checked his reflection for visible marks. The bruise was below his shirt line. Good. He didn't need questions.
He got to KK at eight forty-five. Bethany barely looked at him anymore, which was an improvement over the death threats.
He went downstairs, changed into the shorts, and came out onto the floor fifteen minutes early.
Amani was behind the bar with Reza, prepping for the night.
The club wasn't open yet but a few staff were moving around, setting up the rooms, testing the sound system.
Jack went to the supply closet, got his cleaning materials, and started on the tables.
He was four tables in when he noticed Harold.
The hound was leaning against the wall near the hallway entrance, the same spot he'd been in every night for the past week.
Arms crossed, badge on his belt, watching the floor.
But his attention kept drifting to Jack instead of scanning the room.
Jack could feel it. Not the way he felt the club patrons looking at him, which was like being examined through glass.
Harold's gaze felt like pressure. Like being leaned on.
Jack turned his back to him and kept cleaning.
By the time the club opened and the crowd rolled in, Jack had the tables done and was running drinks.
The system had smoothed out over the past week.
Amani loaded the trays, Jack picked them up, delivered them, came back.
They didn't talk. They didn't need to. Jack could read Amani's nods.
Left meant the booths along the wall. A chin lift meant the high tables near the dance floor.
Fingers tapping the tray meant he'd overloaded it and Jack should take two trips.
It wasn't friendship. It wasn't even warmth. But it was functional, and after a lifetime of interactions that were built on hierarchy and threat, functional felt like progress.
Harold fell into step beside him as Jack carried a tray of beers toward a table near the back.
The hound didn't say anything at first. Just walked alongside him, close enough that the drunk patrons gave them both a wider berth.
Jack put the drinks down, collected a few empties, and started back toward the bar.
"How'd you get the bruise?" Harold asked.
Jack's hand tightened on the tray. "What bruise?"
"The one on your ribs that you're favoring your left side to protect. It wasn't there two nights ago. It was there yesterday. Worse tonight."
Jack kept walking. "I tripped."
Harold didn't laugh, which would have been easier to deal with. He just kept pace, matching Jack's stride. "You didn't trip. You're moving like someone hit you. I've seen enough assault victims to know the difference between a fall and a fist."
"I'm fine." Jack set the empties on the bar. Reza took them without comment, already reaching for the next order. "Can you stop following me?"
"I'm doing my job. Making sure nobody bothers you."
"You're the one bothering me."
Harold stopped walking. Jack went back to the tables with his cleaning supplies, hoping the conversation was over. It wasn't.
Harold found him again ten minutes later, this time near the far wall where the crowd thinned out. "Your scent gets stronger when you're afraid. Did you know that?"
Jack sprayed the table and wiped it down without looking up. "I'm not afraid."
"Right now you're not. But every night when you walk in here, the whole floor smells like the open ocean. It cuts through everything else. Fifty shifters packed into this club and I can pick you out before the elevator doors finish opening."
"Congratulations. You've got a nose. Go sniff someone else."
Harold leaned against the next table over. Not blocking Jack's path, not crowding him. Just present. "The scent spikes when someone touches you. It drops when you're alone with the cleaning. Spikes again when you head for the elevator at midnight. What's waiting for you when you leave here?"
Jack's hand stopped moving on the table. He forced it to start again. "Nothing that concerns you."
"I tracked scent trails in the Mojave for the better part of a decade.
I followed your smell through a parking lot and into a van months ago.
I know what your fear smells like better than almost anyone alive, because I spent three days breathing it while I helped process the crime scene.
So, when I tell you that what I'm smelling on you right now is worse than what I smelled in that van, I need you to hear that. "
Jack looked up. Harold's brown eyes were steady, warm, impossible to dismiss. He wasn't being cruel. He wasn't being clinical. He was being honest, and the honesty of it was worse than cruelty because Jack couldn't deflect it.
"Go hump a fire hydrant," Jack said.
Harold's mouth twitched. "That's dogs. Real dogs. One-forms. Shifters don't do that."
"Then go chase your tail, sniff someone's butt, or whatever hounds do when they're being annoying. I don't need you cataloging what I smell like and drawing conclusions about my life."
"Fair enough." Harold pushed off the table and straightened up. He didn't leave, but he didn't push further. "If you change your mind about wanting to talk, I'm here every night. Same spot."
Jack watched him walk back to his post near the hallway.
The hound moved through the crowd without touching anyone, which Jack noticed because he couldn't manage it himself.
People bumped him constantly. Harold seemed to flow between them like water around rocks.
He was broader than Jack had thought before.
Not just bigger, which Jack had noted the first day in the clinical way you note the size of any potential threat.
Broader in a way that had nothing to do with threat.
The shoulders filling out the t-shirt, the way his weight settled into his hips when he took his position against the wall.
Jack's gaze caught on Harold's hands, the thick fingers, the relaxed grip of someone who could restrain and choose not to.
He looked away. He didn't know what that observation was for or where to put it. He went back to the tables.
He finished the table and headed to the next one. The bruise on his ribs pulsed with every reach of his right arm. Harold hadn't been wrong about the flinch. He hadn't been wrong about any of it.
At midnight, Jack changed out of the shorts and headed for the elevator. Harold was at his post, not watching him, or at least not obviously. Jack hit the button and waited. The doors opened.
He stepped in, turned around, and found Harold looking directly at him across the length of the club. Steady. Patient. That same warm pressure that felt like being leaned on.
The doors closed. Jack rode up alone, walked past Bethany's empty desk, and headed into the night.
His fear scent must have been trailing behind him like a wake in the water, because he was terrified. Not of Harold. Not of the club. Of the walk home and the door that didn't lock and the challenge that was waiting on the other side of it.
Harold could smell all of that. Harold knew. He might not know the specifics, but he knew enough to have the pieces.
Jack walked faster.