Chapter 10
Nico
At some point Daniel is going to stop accepting extending the assessment and start asking questions I don't have answers for.
The bar at noon. Same booth. Same IPA. Same nachos.
Ezra on his stool, slightly warmer than yesterday — he said good morning when I walked in, which is an improvement over the silence, and his eyes tracked me to the booth for approximately one and a half seconds before returning to his screen.
Progress, I think. Or I'm reading too much into the eye movements of a lion shifter, which is a sentence I never expected to think and am adding to the growing list of things about this assignment that Yale didn't prepare me for.
The report sits in my drafts folder. Complete.
Thorough. Recommending against acquisition.
I could send it right now — thirty seconds, one click, and the professional obligation is met.
Daniel gets the report. Langford gets the recommendation.
I check out of the hotel and fly back to Portland and never eat another plate of nachos in a window booth while a man who smells like tea pretends I don't exist.
I don't send it. At this point, not sending it is a decision I should probably examine, but examination would lead to conclusions I'm not ready for, so I'm filing it under due diligence and moving on.
The morning is quiet. Jason brings the nachos. Ezra does the books. I work on — what am I working on? The assessment is done. I have no other active files. I'm typing in a document that's half property analysis and half diary entry and is becoming increasingly useless as a professional deliverable.
Traffic patterns on adjacent roads remain consistent with initial assessment.
No material changes observed. The bar's customer base appears to be exclusively internal — pride members and affiliated humans.
No walk-in traffic observed during the assessment period except for one date brought in by the agent (see: Troy incident, professionally irrelevant, personally humiliating).
I delete the last parenthetical. Stare at the screen.
Type a new note: Extended observation suggests the property's primary value is residential/communal, not commercial.
The business model relies on the garage operation, not the bar.
Any acquisition strategy that treats the bar as the primary asset is fundamentally misunderstanding the property's function.
That's actually useful. I save it.
At twelve-thirty, the front door opens and the librarian walks in.
Toby. I've seen him most days — he lives upstairs with Knox, walks to the library in the morning, walks back.
He's one of the two humans in the building, the other being me, and he's the only person here who has never once made my survival instincts activate.
This is because Toby radiates approximately the same threat level as a puppy.
He's carrying a lunch bag and a book and he's wearing a cardigan with — I squint — cats on it. Small, embroidered cats on a green cardigan. This is a real garment that a real adult man is wearing in public.
"Hi!" Toby says, spotting me. "Mind if I sit with you? The bar stools hurt my back and the other tables don't have outlets."
"Go ahead."
He slides into the booth across from me.
Not my side — the other side, the one that's always empty.
He plugs in his phone, opens his lunch bag, and starts unpacking with the methodical care of someone who takes lunch seriously.
Sandwich — peanut butter, the crunchy kind, cut diagonally.
An apple. A bag of pretzels. A juice box.
A juice box.
"Those are good," he says, noticing my look. "Apple cherry. Knox makes fun of me but he drinks them too when he thinks no one's watching."
I process the image of Knox — six and a half feet of alpha lion shifter — drinking a juice box in private. It doesn't compute. I file it away anyway.
"How's the library?" I ask, because I've run out of things to type and Toby is here and talking to a human who doesn't make my heart rate spike feels like a reasonable use of my afternoon.
"Good! Quiet today. We're between programming cycles." He bites into his sandwich. "What about you? How's the — what do you do, exactly? I know you're from a company but I don't actually know what your job entails."
"Property assessment. I evaluate a site's commercial viability and write a report recommending for or against acquisition."
"And this property?"
"Against."
Toby looks at me over his sandwich. "You've been here over a week and just now figured that out?"
This man is a librarian. He reads people the way he reads books — thoroughly, with attention to subtext.
"The report has gaps," I say. "I'm being thorough."
"Uh-huh." Toby takes another bite. Chews. Swallows. "Can I ask you something?"
"Sure."
"Why do you come here? Every day, I mean. The Wi-Fi's fine but it's not that good. The nachos are good but you could get nachos anywhere. You sit in that booth for hours every day and you barely talk to anyone and you drive back to a hotel. Why here?"
It's a simple question. It should have a simple answer — I'm finishing my assessment, this is where the property is, where else would I work. Professional, logical, complete.
"I don't know," I say instead.
Toby nods like this is perfectly reasonable.
"When I first came here, I was lost. Literally lost — my phone was dead and there was a storm and I walked in because the door was unlocked and I was soaking wet.
" He smiles at the memory. Something soft and private.
"I didn't know they were shifters. I didn't know anything.
I just knew the building was warm and someone gave me a blanket and food and nobody asked me to leave. "
"That doesn't bother you? Being here with—" I gesture vaguely at the bar, the garage, the building that contains multiple apex predators.
"Being here with lions?"
"Being here with people who could hurt you."
Toby sets down his sandwich. Considers this with the seriousness it deserves, which I appreciate — most people would deflect or minimize.
"Sometimes," he says. "Not the way you mean — I don't lie awake calculating escape routes."
"I calculate escape routes."
"I know. Ezra told me about the twelve-minute sweep." Toby says this without judgment. "But I get nervous sometimes. Not about safety — about fitting in. About taking up space in a world that's designed for people who are bigger and stronger and faster than me. About being the breakable one."
"How do you handle it?"
"I let them take care of me." He says it simply, like it's obvious.
"Knox wraps me in blankets when it's cold.
Jason makes me food. Silas recommends books.
Vaughn once carried me to bed when I fell asleep on the couch and didn't wake me up.
They take care of me because that's what they do — it's how the pride works.
And I let them, because accepting care from people who love you isn't weakness. It's the whole point."
I don't know what to say to that. I've been taking care of myself since I was twelve — since Martin's house, since Yale, since Coldwell. The idea of letting someone carry me to bed without waking me up is so foreign that my brain rejects it like an incompatible file format.
"You don't have to figure it out all at once," Toby says, reading my face.
"I didn't. I spent the first two weeks after I officially moved in here being anxious about everything — was I in the way, was I too loud, did they actually want me here or were they just being polite.
Turns out they're not polite. They're lions. If they didn't want me here, I'd know."
"That's... oddly comforting."
"Right? The honesty is actually the easiest part. Nobody here pretends." He picks up his sandwich again. "Except Ezra, who's pretending really hard right now about something I'm not going to speculate about because it's not my business."
He says this casually, lightly, the way you mention the weather.
Then he takes a bite and changes the subject to a book he's reading about deep-sea creatures, and I spend the next twenty minutes learning more about anglerfish than I ever expected to know, and the booth feels less like a workstation and more like a place where someone sat across from me and shared their lunch hour because they wanted to.
* * *
At two, Toby goes back to the library. "Same time tomorrow, if you want," he says, casual, no pressure. Like it's a standing invitation that I can take or leave.
"Yeah," I say. "That would be good."
He kisses Knox on his way out, who appeared in the office doorway at some point during our conversation, watches Toby leave with the expression of a man who tracks his person's movements as naturally as breathing.
Then he looks at me. Brief. Not the loaded look — something lighter.
Acknowledgment. You had lunch with Toby and Toby liked you. That's a data point.
The afternoon settles. I try to work. I manage about forty-five minutes of actual productivity — cleaning up the report, refining the financial analysis, making it airtight even though I'm not sending it.
The work is soothing. Familiar. The click of keys and the logic of numbers and the satisfaction of a clean spreadsheet.
At three, something lands on my booth.
Not something — someone. A small, orange someone who apparently materialized from the ether and is now sitting on the bench next to my laptop bag like she owns the real estate.
She's never been inside the bar before, as far as I know. She's an outside cat — the motorcycle, the dumpster, the parking lot. But here she is, in my booth, blinking at me with the slow deliberation of an animal who has made a choice and expects the universe to accommodate it.
I look at her. She looks at me. Neither of us moves.
"Um," I say.
She blinks again. Settles her paws underneath her body — the bread loaf position, compact and deliberate. She's not going anywhere.
I don't know what to do. I've never had a cat sit next to me on purpose.
Cass had a cat in London — a hostile Persian named Clementine who hated everyone except Cass and expressed this hatred through strategic vomiting — but Clementine never chose me.
No animal has ever chosen me. I'm not an animal person. I'm barely a people person.
Very slowly, I extend my hand. Palm up, fingers relaxed, the way I've seen Ezra do it behind the dumpster when he thinks no one's watching.
Mango sniffs my fingers. Her whiskers tickle my knuckles. She considers the data — whatever data cats collect from smelling a stranger's hand — and apparently reaches a satisfactory conclusion, because she butts her head against my palm with a firm, definitive pressure.
I scratch behind her ears. She purrs. It's a small, mechanical sound — a motor idling, a phone vibrating, the contentment of an animal who has decided something and committed to it fully.
She leans into my hand, eyes closing, and I sit in my booth scratching a stray cat's ears and feeling something unclench that I didn't know was clenched.
From the bar, I hear Ezra stop typing.
I don't look up. But I know he's watching, because I can feel the quality of the air change — the same shift I've been tracking all week, the weight of Ezra's attention when it's focused on me instead of his spreadsheet.
Mango purrs. I scratch. Ezra watches.
Nobody says anything. The moment doesn't need words. It just needs the quiet, steady sound of a cat who chose to come inside and a man who let her stay.
* * *
I leave at four-thirty. Same time. Thirty percent on the bar. Mango has relocated to the windowsill of my booth, curled in the sun spot, apparently claiming the territory.
"See you tomorrow," I say to Ezra.
"See you tomorrow." And then, almost like he can't help it: "She doesn't do that."
"What?"
"Come inside. Sit with someone." He's looking at Mango, not at me, but the wall has a crack in it. A hairline fracture, barely visible, the kind that happens when something inside is pushing outward. "She's an outside cat. She doesn't choose people."
"She chose a spot. I happened to be in it."
"That's not what happened."
"How would you know? You weren't looking."
The crack widens. Just barely. His mouth twitches — not the half-smile, not the smirk. Something surprised out of him by my accuracy.
"I was looking," he says. Quiet. An admission that costs him something.
"I know," I say. "I noticed."
I leave. The drive back to the hotel is ten minutes. I spend all of it thinking about a hairline crack in a wall and a cat who came inside and a librarian who drinks juice boxes and a building full of lions who carry people to bed without waking them up.
The ceiling is popcorn textured. The HVAC hums.
I don't calculate escape routes. I think about tomorrow.