Chapter Nine
Kyan waited until Sai's breathing had gone slow and even against his chest before he made himself move.
He'd carried Sai from the hot tub to the enormous bed, both of them still damp, and Sai had curled into him the way he always used to, one leg thrown over Kyan's, his face tucked into the curve of Kyan's neck.
For a while Kyan had let himself lie there and believe the night could simply end like this, on the high of it, with nothing owed to anyone and no one's voice in his head but Sai's.
But the phone sat dark on the nightstand, and the call was a stone in his gut, and a stone didn't dissolve from being ignored. It only got heavier the longer it sat.
He eased out from under Sai, tucked the duvet up over his bare shoulder, and pulled on a pair of shorts from his suitcase.
Then he carried the phone out to the far end of the penthouse, past the velvet couch and the wall of black glass, to where the city burned cold and bright a long way down and his voice wouldn't carry back to the bed.
It could have waited until morning. He knew it could.
But the afterglow was still moving through him, loose and warm and braver than he was in the daylight hours, and some reckless part of him wanted to have this out while he still felt like a man who might win it.
In the morning he'd be his mother's son again, careful and folded and good.
In that moment, with the taste of Sai still on his mouth and we've got time now still ringing in him, he felt like someone who could say a true thing to Zahara and survive it.
He found her name and pressed it before the feeling could drain away.
She answered on the second ring, which meant she'd been awake anyway, working some angle in the dark the way she always was. "Do you have any idea what time it is?"
"Not really." It was dark out and his heart was going hard, and that was all the time he had a use for. "Nighttime. I didn't check."
"Of course you didn't." Zahara sighed, the long-suffering sound she'd been aiming at him since he was a cub small enough to fit under her arm.
He could picture her with no effort at all, propped against silk in whatever suite was hers this season, a sleep mask shoved up into hair that never frizzed because she would not have allowed it, every ring still on because she removed them for no one and nothing.
"So. How is my sister's little dungeon. Did you get anywhere with her.
Tell me you got somewhere, Kyan, because I did not charter you a convertible and a penthouse so you could soak in a hot tub and run up a tab on my name. "
"I haven't talked numbers with Aunt Leo yet."
"You've been there how long?"
"A day."
"A day is plenty to open a door." Her voice honed itself to the edge he'd grown up stepping around.
"She is drowning right now, which is the entire point.
A drowning woman signs things she'd never sign on dry land.
Bethany shipped off to Los Angeles to play executive, a whole second build bleeding money out west, the whole operation stretched to the snapping point.
Leo does not have a single ounce of attention left over to fight me on a second Chicago club, and you are meant to be standing in her office spending that to the last cent.
Charm her. Now, while her hands are full.
That is the whole of your job this week and you are botching it in a bathrobe. "
There it was, stripped of even the pretense of decency.
His mother had looked at her own sister buried alive under a crisis and seen a soft place to put the knife.
Kyan had known the plan before he ever boarded the plane.
Hearing her say it plainly, while Lady Leo was a few miles across the valley holding her whole life together with both hands and lifting her daughter up to stand on her own, still sickened him in a way he hadn't braced for.
"I'll talk to her this week," he said. "I will. But that's not the reason I called."
"Then enlighten me, at this hour."
He looked out at the city, all that cold electric gold poured into the desert dark.
He thought about Sai asleep in the next room, the bruise gone soft on his jaw, the gag drying on the bathroom counter, the studio over the laundromat that Sai had never once apologized for.
And he thought he finally understood why.
It was the one thing in Sai's whole life that nobody else had chosen for him.
"I got back together with Sai," Kyan said. "We're together again. For real, this time. For good."
Her silence stretched, cold and deliberate.
"Sai," his mother said at last, and folded an entire continent of disgust into the single syllable. "The reptile."
"The gharial. Yes. You've met him. You've heard me talk about him for years, back when you still pretended to listen."
"The one with no family worth the name. No money. Nothing behind him at all. The one who works the register at a plant store."
"He runs a garden center. The whole operation, forty people. And yes. That one. The man I love."
"You’re exhausted," Zahara said, in the patient, poisoned voice she always reached for right before she took something away from him.
He knew that voice the way other men knew their childhood lullabies.
"You've had a long flight and a longer day and you've worked yourself into some kind of sentimental fog, and you are not thinking clearly, so I am going to do you the kindness of forgetting you said any of that.
Next quarter you will be mated, properly, to someone who matters.
I have spent the better part of a year in conversation with the Adeyemi family.
Their daughter is a jaguar. She is exquisite, she is shrewd, she runs three holdings entirely on her own, and the two of you joined would be a power this family could build the next thirty years on.
You told me once you wanted a partner with ambition.
I went out and found you the best one on the continent. "
"No." Kyan kept his voice low and even, mindful of the bedroom door, of the sleeping man beyond it.
"You wanted that. You wanted the holdings and the bloodline and the announcement in the right rooms. I never asked for one piece of it.
I asked you for exactly two things in my whole life.
To be left alone, when I was younger. And now, Sai. That's the entire list."
"Matings are not about what you want." The patience had thinned out of her voice, gone smooth and cold, the register that meant she had stopped arguing and started deciding, and that was the one that had always made him fold.
"They are about what the family becomes.
Perhaps for someone of your reptile's class it can be about feelings and a one-room apartment and love.
For a lion it is about power, and it always has been.
We do not mate to be happy, Kyan. We never have, not once, not in any generation.
It was bred into you the same as it was bred into me, and into my mother before me.
You don't get to wish your way out of your own blood. "
It was the same wall he hit every time. He could love Sai with everything he had and it wouldn't change a thing.
Lions followed the lionesses. He'd watched himself do it his whole life, every time it mattered.
The summer he'd wanted to study abroad and she'd needed him for a launch, so he'd stayed.
The man he'd dated at twenty-three, frozen out with three phone calls until the poor wolf stopped texting back.
Every fork in the road, she'd picked it, and he'd let her. That was just how it worked.
"Think very carefully before you say another word.
" His mother had gone gentle again, which was always worse.
"Everything you have, I put in your hands.
The condo you rent out for spending money.
The car some boy is parking for you tonight.
The account you live on without ever once watching the balance.
The name that has opened every door of your life before you got close enough to knock.
You have never earned a single dollar that didn't begin in my palm, Kyan, not one.
So go ahead. Throw your family over for a gharial with a name tag and a one-room apartment.
And then let's the two of us find out together how romantic that apartment feels when it's the only roof you've got left. "
He heard it for exactly what it was. Not the threat itself, not yet.
The inventory before the threat. She was reading him the list of everything she could take back, slow and itemized, so he'd carry every line of it to bed and lie awake doing her work for her in the dark.
It was a thing she'd done to him his whole life, and it had always, always worked.
And yet here he stood.
"I hear you," he said. "I do. I know precisely what I am and precisely how this is supposed to go. I've known since I was old enough to know anything."
"Then stop this nonsense and—"
"I'm telling you no anyway." It came out quiet and it came out whole.
Saying it didn't crack the sky open or stop his heart.
It was just true, and now it was said. "I'm with Sai.
I am not mating a jaguar I have met twice to turn the family into a force.
You can be as disappointed in me as you have the hours for. It is not going to move me."
The pause on the line went long enough that he heard, faintly, the click of one of her rings against the receiver, a thing she did when he'd surprised her, which was almost never.
"You ungrateful boy." But the venom had a thread of genuine shock running under it, because he didn't speak to her this way.
He never had. He was the one who folded, the reliable one, the good investment.
"You actually believe you can simply decide.
You think the world rearranges itself around what a cub wants at two in the morning because some reptile fluttered his eyes and made you feel young. "
"I think I'm about to find out," Kyan said.
When she spoke again her voice had dropped all the way down into the soft place, the one that frightened him more than any amount of shouting ever had, because the soft place was where she did her real work.
"We will discuss this when you are rested and thinking like a person again.
And we will discuss the Chicago club, which you will deliver to me regardless of your little romance, because that you cannot hide behind a love story to escape.
Get me the third club, Kyan. Be in your aunt's office in the morning, on time, charming, the son I raised.
And after it's done, we will see exactly how brave you still feel when there's nothing left in your hand but the gharial. "
She ended the call before he could answer, the last word taken and carried off like a kill dragged back to the den.
Kyan stood with the dead phone in his hand and his pulse loud in his ears and the whole glittering valley laid out cold beneath him.
He'd said it. After thirty years of folding, after a lifetime of letting that woman do his choosing for him, he'd told the lioness who held his leash no, out loud, in his own voice.
It hadn't broken anything yet. She hadn't reached for the things she could actually take from him, the allowance, the car with her business name on the title, the whole careful machine of approval and money she'd built him to need.
That part was coming. He knew his mother better than he knew almost anything, and the soft voice at the end of the call was a woman loading a weapon at her leisure, not a woman laying one down.
But he'd said it. And the sky was still up where she'd left it.
"She hates me."
He turned. Sai stood in the bedroom doorway with the duvet clutched around his hips, his dark hair a disaster, his eyes soft, worried, and wide awake. Kyan didn't know how much he'd caught. Enough, by the look on his face. More than enough.
"She doesn't hate you." Kyan crossed the cold marble and took Sai's face in both hands, gently, the same way he'd cradled the bruise hours before.
"She hates the idea of you, because the idea of you costs her a jaguar and an announcement.
That isn't the same animal as you. She doesn't get to know the real one.
That's a privilege, and she hasn't come anywhere close to earning it, and at the rate she's going she never will. "
"I heard the jaguar." Sai's voice came out small and careful.
"And I heard you tell her no." He swallowed hard.
"Kyan. I don't want to be the thing that detonates your entire life.
Your family, your money, the whole world you grew up in.
I'm a man with a studio over a laundromat and a simple job at a garden center.
I'm not something a person trades an empire for. "
"Let me be the one who decides what you're worth.
" Kyan pressed his forehead to Sai's and held it there.
"I have spent thirty years handing that woman every decision I ever had to make, the big ones and the small ones, my whole life routed through her like a collar nobody asked if I wanted.
I'm done. And the first thing I want to choose for myself, the very first, is you. "
Sai sagged into the touch, and for a moment they only stood there, foreheads together on the cold marble, the city burning silent and far below, the empire and all its teeth held off on the far side of a phone Kyan had set facedown on the table.
"We should sleep," Kyan said at last, because he didn't have the next part worked out and he wasn't going to insult Sai by pretending otherwise. "I have to go be the perfect nephew in a few hours, and you’ve barely slept a minute. Come back to bed. We'll figure out the rest of it when it's light."
Sai let himself be led. But as Kyan curled around him under the covers and felt the small unspent tension still held in the body in his arms, he understood, with a clarity the dark only sharpened, that he'd started something that night he was going to have to see all the way through.
That finishing it would cost him everything Zahara had ever given him.
And that he had never, in his entire managed life, been so certain a price was worth paying.