Chapter Eight
Trevor showed up at Sero's apartment on Tuesday evening without food, without the duffle bag, and without the confidence that Sero had come to associate with his presence the way he associated cedar with his scent.
He stood in the doorway looking like a man about to walk into traffic who knew the light was red.
"You look terrible," Sero said.
"I need to talk to you."
Sero stepped aside and let him in. The apartment was clean, the Strip lights just beginning to paint the windows in its early-evening palette of rose and amber.
Sero had been getting ready for his casino shift, uniform laid out on the bed, shoes by the door, a bowl of mango on the counter for the walk.
He had forty-five minutes before he needed to leave.
Trevor didn't sit. He stood in the middle of the living room with his hands at his sides, his posture rigid, and Sero's whole body went cold.
He'd seen this stance before. On Wade, the night Wade told him about the waitress.
On the gecko, the evening the gecko said he'd realized he wasn't actually gay.
On every man who'd ever stood in a room with Sero and prepared to deliver the words that ended things.
"Just say it," Sero said. He sat on the arm of the couch, because his legs had decided to be unreliable. "Whatever it is. I'd rather hear it fast."
"It's not what you think."
"You don't know what I think."
"I think you think I'm breaking up with you."
"Aren't you?"
"No." Trevor's voice cracked on the word. Actually cracked, the way a voice cracked when the body behind it was holding something too heavy. "I'm telling you the truth. Which might make you want to break up with me, and if it does, that's—" He stopped. Swallowed. "That's your right."
Sero waited.
Trevor started pacing. Three steps toward the window, three steps back.
His hands moved to his hair, his pockets, his hair again.
Every line of his body said I don't want to do this, and Sero felt, beneath the cold, a small flare of respect.
Whatever Trevor was about to say, he was saying it.
Not deflecting, not charming his way around it, not disappearing.
He was standing in Sero's living room, visibly miserable, and choosing to speak.
"The machine," Trevor said.
"What about it?"
"It does more than what I told you."
Sero went still. The kind of stillness he brought to the blackjack table when the count went wrong: total attention, zero movement, every faculty directed at the next card.
"The vibration, the rotation, the suction, all of that is real," Trevor continued.
He was talking fast now, the words tumbling out in the order they came rather than the order that would make this easier.
"That's what you experience. That's the toy.
But the tubes, the ones I didn't explain, they run through the base unit to a sealed compartment.
During the session, while you're, while the machine is working, the tubes collect. .. material."
"Material," Sero repeated.
"Your cum. Your sexual energy. Whatever you want to call it.
There's a physical component and an energetic component, and the tubes capture both.
" Trevor stopped pacing and faced him. His eyes were bright, almost feverish.
"I'm an alchemist. It's a rare ability, not connected to shifting, separate from it.
I can take raw biological material and refine it into something else.
What I collect is refined into a serum. A sexual-performance serum for older shifters whose bodies have broken down. I sell it."
The stillness became a sound. Not audible.
Internal. A high, thin frequency like the whine of a bat's echolocation pushed past its range.
Everything in the apartment looked the same, the mango on the counter, the Strip light on the windows, Trevor standing in the middle of his living room, but the meaning of everything had changed.
"You harvest my cum," Sero said. His voice was level. Devastatingly level. "Without telling me. And you sell it."
"Yes."
"While I'm in the machine. While I'm in the space. While I'm—" His throat closed. He opened it by force. "While I'm trusting you with my body. You're collecting something from it that I don't know about."
"Yes."
"How many times?"
"Both sessions."
"Both." Sero pressed his hands flat on his thighs. The pressure helped. It gave the sensation somewhere to go besides his face, which wanted to crumble. "And before me? Other men?"
"Dozens. Over three years."
"Did any of them know?"
"No."
The word sat in the air between them. Small. Final. A period at the end of a sentence that Sero hadn't known was being written.
He stood up. His legs worked after all. He crossed to the kitchen, put both hands on the counter, and stared at the bowl of mango.
The fruit was bright and orange and perfectly sliced, and it looked like a thing from a different life, a life in which Sero had been getting ready for work and thinking about Wednesday and being happy in the specific, Trevor-shaped way that was now, in the space of three minutes, something else entirely.
"The workshop," Sero said. "The door you wouldn't open. That's where you keep it. The equipment, the serum, whatever you refine it into."
"Yes." Trevor's voice was behind him. Close, but not approaching. He had the sense, at least, not to touch.
"The sharks." Sero turned around. Trevor flinched. "You have a client. Someone dangerous. He buys the serum. And whatever you've been making from me is better than what you've been giving him."
Trevor nodded. He looked sick. Actually, physically sick, gray beneath his skin, his jaw tight, his hands shaking at his sides.
"And now he wants more." Sero didn't need Trevor to confirm it.
The tells were all there. The tension that had been building.
The reason Trevor stood in his living room confessing instead of waiting until he was ready.
Someone had forced a timeline. "Which means eventually he's going to want to know where it comes from. Which means he's going to want me."
"That's why I'm telling you. Because they're going to—"
"Don't." The word came out sharp enough to cut. Sero held up a hand. "Don't frame this as you protecting me. You're not telling me because you want to keep me safe. You're telling me because Amani made you."
Trevor went still. "How did you know that?"
"Because you would have told me on Saturday, in the bath, when I asked about the workshop.
You said you needed time. You didn't come here tonight because you decided the time was up.
Someone else decided for you." Sero's voice was shaking now, the level facade cracking at the edges.
"Amani. He's the only person with enough leverage over you.
He told you to confess or he'd do it himself. "
Trevor said nothing. Which was an answer.
Sero turned back to the counter. The mango blurred. He was not going to cry. He was not going to give Trevor the satisfaction.
"I need you to leave," Sero said.
"Sero—"
"Now."
"Please let me—"
"There is nothing you can say right now that I want to hear.
" He didn't turn around. He couldn't. If he looked at Trevor, at those blue eyes, at that face that had looked at him with wonder while secretly cataloguing his output, he was going to either hit him or break down, and he refused to do either.
"You harvested my body without my consent.
You sold pieces of me to a stranger. And you did it while I was in the most vulnerable state I've ever been in.
While I was in the space. While I was trusting you. "
His voice broke on the last two words. He heard it break and hated it.
"I know," Trevor said. His voice was wrecked. "I know what I did. I'm not asking you to forgive me. I'm asking you to let me help keep you safe, because the Grizzly—"
"Get out."
Footsteps. The door. A pause, Trevor standing in the doorway, and Sero could feel him there, could feel the weight of everything unsaid pressing against the threshold.
"I destroyed the machine," Trevor said quietly. "Last night. After I talked to Amani. I took it apart and I burned the components. It's gone."
Sero said nothing.
"And I haven't sold your vials. Either of them. They're still in my workshop. I couldn't—" His voice fractured again. "I couldn't sell them. From the beginning. I tried to make myself and I couldn't."
Sero said nothing.
"I'm sorry. I know that's not enough. I know sorry is just a word and what I did isn't something a word can fix. But I'm sorry, Sero. For all of it."
The door closed.
Sero stood at the counter for a long time. The mango sat in its bowl, bright and untouched. Through the windows, the Strip cycled through its colors, red, gold, blue, indifferent to everything happening in the apartments it illuminated.
He didn't go to work. He called the casino's scheduling line and said he was sick, which was technically true if he defined sickness broadly enough to include the feeling that his internal organs had been rearranged without anesthesia.
He shifted. He hung in the closet. He didn't eat.
The dark was the same dark it always was, small, enclosed, the echo of his own breathing bouncing off the walls and coming back to him in the shape of the space.
But the dark felt different. It felt like the inside of a machine he hadn't known he was in.
A device designed to look like pleasure and feel like trust and produce, without his knowledge, something that could be extracted and sold.
He hung upside down and thought about Trevor and tried to hate him even as it broke his heart.
***
The phone call came at two in the morning.
Sero was still in the closet, still in bat form, when his phone buzzed on the bedroom floor. He shifted, the change instantaneous, his human body unfolding from the small dark space with the disoriented clumsiness of someone waking from a dream. He grabbed the phone.
Amani.
"Are you home?" Amani's voice was tight. Not the usual warmth, not the teasing. Urgent and controlled.
"Yes. What's wrong?"
"The Grizzly's people just came to the club. Two sharks. They walked in during closing and asked about Trevor. Asked who he'd been spending time with. Asked—" Amani paused. Sero heard him breathe. "They asked about the bat."
Sero's hands were steady, because his hands were always steady, because bats processed fear the same way they processed pain, as information rather than emergency. But inside the steadiness, his heart was hammering.
"They know about me."
"They know Trevor's been booking rooms with someone. Bethany's records are private, but the sharks don't need records. They've been watching the building. They described you, Sero. Short, dark hair, comes on Wednesdays. They know what you look like."
Sero sat on the edge of his bed. The Strip light painted his bare legs in alternating stripes of color.
"What do they want?" he asked.
"They want the source. Whatever Trevor's been making from you, they think it's the good stuff. Trevor's been stalling, sending inferior product, and the Grizzly's done being patient."
"So, they're going to come for me."
"I don't know. Maybe. The Grizzly's a regular at the Playground. You know what that place is?"
Sero knew. Everyone in the shifter community knew about the Playground, even if most had never been there.
A warehouse in the desert, thirty minutes from Vegas, fifteen on paved road, fifteen on dirt.
Expensive cars in the lot. Heavy chains inside.
No consent, no safe words, no rules except the ones the people with money made up as they went.
It was the anti-KK. The place that existed because some shifters believed power was something you took rather than something that was given.
"I need you to come to the club," Amani said. "Tonight. Right now. My mother has security here, real security. You'll be safe until we figure out what to do."
"Have you called Trevor?"
A pause. "No."
"Call him."
"Sero—"
"I know what he did. I know what he is. Call him anyway.
He's the only one who understands the Grizzly's operation, and if the sharks are coming for me, Trevor's the one who knows how they think.
" Sero pulled on jeans, a shirt, shoes. His hands moved with the calm efficiency of someone dealing cards, automatic, practiced, steady even when the count was bad. "I'll be there in ten minutes."
"I'll be behind the bar."
"At two in the morning?"
"I'm always behind the bar." The ghost of a smile shone in Amani's voice. "Hurry."
Sero hung up. He stood in his apartment, the apartment he'd cleaned that morning because he was happy, the apartment with the persimmons in the fruit drawer and the closet where he hung when the world was too much, and felt the shape of his life shift around him.
Three weeks ago, he'd been a blackjack dealer who went to a kink club twice a month and ate fruit alone in the dark. Without his knowledge, he’d become a man whose body produced liquid gold, whose trust had been distilled and almost sold, and whose existence had attracted the attention of creatures who didn't recognize the word no.
He locked the door behind him and walked to Kinky Kritters in the dark.
The warehouse district was quiet. The streetlights cast long yellow pools on the asphalt.
Somewhere in the distance, a car engine revved and faded.
Sero walked quickly, his bat senses sharp, echolocation pinging off buildings and parked cars, his ears tracking every sound within a block radius.
He smelled salt water once, faintly, carried on the warm night air.
It could have been nothing. It could have been the desert playing tricks.
He walked faster anyway.
KK was four blocks. He made it in six minutes, and when the elevator doors closed behind him and the lobby light gave way to the amber glow below, he let himself breathe for the first time since the phone had rung.