Chapter Twelve #2
"Fine." She slid the dark glasses back on, the meeting over on her terms or not at all, the way she'd always ended every call.
"Keep him. Keep your reptile and your funhouse and your low turnover.
But understand me, Kyan." She turned the glasses on her son one last time.
"There's still a quarter coming. There's still the Adeyemi girl, and the holdings, and a future you were born into and are now spitting on for a man who smells like potting soil.
I am not going to beg you. I have never begged for anything in my life.
I'm going to walk out of here, and you're going to spend the next year watching everyone you grew up with marry up and build and matter, and you're going to remember that you chose ferns. "
The last cruelty, aimed with all the precision of forty years of practice. She meant it to work on him slowly, later, in the dark. He knew the design.
Kyan looked at it. Then he looked at Sai, standing a few feet away with newspaper-dust still on his knees from packing Bethany's boxes, watching him with those steady dark eyes, not asking him for anything, just there.
He felt, for once, completely clear.
"You're right," Kyan said.
Zahara paused at the edge of his words, because agreement was the last thing she'd armed herself against.
"We don't get mated for love. You taught me that before I could read.
Lions mate for power, for holdings, for the family's next thirty years.
It's not about feelings, it's about what we become.
" He took a step toward her, and his voice stayed quiet, which made everyone lean in.
"I know the rules better than you think.
I've watched you follow them my whole life.
And I'm going to break every one of them, on purpose, out loud, in front of every one of these people you're so worried about. "
He turned to Sai.
"I'm going to mate him." He said it to the room, to his mother, to the cameras Nero kept running, to everyone.
"Not a jaguar with the right portfolio. Not a merger.
Him. For love, like a reptile, like a romantic, like exactly the kind of son you didn't raise.
I'm going to do the one thing lions are never supposed to do and I'm going to be happy doing it, and there is nothing in your accounts or your holdings you can take to stop me, because you already took it all this morning and I'm still standing here certain. "
The room had gone so quiet Kyan could hear the ice settling in the well behind the bar.
Then, because the whole point was that he'd learned how this was supposed to work, he crossed to Sai and took both his hands, and dropped his voice to something just for the two of them, the way he should have a year ago.
"If you'll have me," he said. "That part's yours.
It's always been yours. I won't put a single thing on you that you don't choose.
But I'm done wanting you quietly. So. Sai.
When the dust clears and it's just us and the studio apartment, will you let me be yours?
For real, the whole way, the mated, no-takebacks way? "
Sai's eyes had gone bright and wet, and his mouth worked for a second before anything came out, and the whole terrible glamorous weight of Zahara might as well have been weather in another state.
"Yeah," Sai said, thick and certain. "Obviously. Yes. I've been saying yes to you since I climbed out that bathroom window, I was just too scared to admit it."
Kyan kissed him, and behind them the club erupted, Bethany whooped, Amani clapped hard enough to sting, Reza drummed both palms on the bar top like it was New Year's. For a moment the whole room belonged to the two of them, the way it never had at night.
When Kyan finally looked up, his mother was already at the elevator.
She had her glasses on, her spine straight, and her face arranged into the cool nothing she wore to funerals and acquisitions.
She didn't congratulate him. She wasn't going to.
But she paused with one hand on the elevator frame, and for half a second, before she buried it, Kyan saw something flicker across her face that wasn't rage.
It might have been grief. It might only have been the recognition that she'd flown three thousand miles to win a fight, and lost it, and would have to ride home knowing her sister had watched.
"You'll regret this," Zahara said. It came out with none of its earlier teeth.
"Maybe." Kyan kept one arm around Sai. "But it'll be my regret. I picked it. That's the whole difference, Mom. That's the only difference that was ever going to matter."
The elevator opened. She stepped in without another word and let the doors take her, the diamonds the last thing to go, and then she was gone, and the cable hummed her up and away from a house that had never once been hers.
Thirty years of standing at attention went out of Kyan's shoulders all at once.
"Well." Lady Leo settled her reading glasses back down onto her nose, entirely composed, like she hadn't just watched a war end in her lobby.
"That's enough excitement for one afternoon.
The rest of you, back to work, the floor doesn't clean itself and we open in six hours.
" She turned for the stairs, then glanced back at Kyan over her shoulder, and the formidable face had gone warm at the edges again.
"Congratulations, nephew. Bring him to dinner Sunday.
I'll want to vet him properly, the same as I vetted Nero. Wear something nice."
And then she was climbing back toward her office, her folders, and her drowning-on-a-schedule.
Kyan stood in the middle of the cleaned daytime floor with his whole life rearranged around him, holding the man he'd just promised the rest of it to, and found that the parachute he'd been so sure he was falling without had been Sai the entire time.