Chapter Eighteen
Several weeks into the job, Lady Leo handed Kyan the thing she'd been holding back to see whether he'd flinch at it.
"Los Angeles," she said, and dropped a folder on his borrowed desk that landed with the weight of a small sleeping animal. "Bethany is brilliant, and she is green, and she is about to walk into a market that has never once heard her name and owes her nothing. She’ll be living in my sister’s shadow.
I have the vision handled. What I do not have is a single person who can sit down with the actual numbers for three days and tell me, honestly, where my daughter runs out of runway before she ever gets airborne.
Your mother had you doing exactly this for her from the time you were nineteen.
So do it for me. Do it for your cousin." She paused in the doorway.
"And Kyan. If the answer is that I've sent her in underfunded, you tell me that to my face.
You do not tell me the answer that lets me sleep.
The entire reason I hired you over a hundred men with softer hands is that you will not flatter me.
Don't make me wrong about that on the first real thing I hand you. "
Then she was gone, and Kyan sat there looking at the folder, and felt something he had never once felt in front of a spreadsheet in his whole life.
He wanted to be good at it.
Not because someone would punish him if he wasn't. Not to keep an allowance, or earn a cold woman's approval, or avoid being named the family disappointment for one more quarter.
He wanted to be good at it because Bethany was about to bet everything she had on a city that didn't know her name yet, and the numbers in that folder were the difference between her flying and her going down, and he could read numbers like that better than almost anyone alive.
For the first time in his life, that same talent was pointed at building something up instead of stripping something down.
He caught himself on stripping down and almost laughed. Even his own brain still reached for his mother's vocabulary. He set the phrase down and opened the folder.
He worked for two days nearly straight.
He found the soft spots one at a time. A lease in the LA build-out hemorrhaging money on terms some panicked negotiator had signed under pressure.
A staffing ramp that came online a full month too early and would burn through cash before there was a dollar of revenue to cover it.
A marketing line so generous it bordered on reckless, the kind of number a person wrote to look brave for a boss.
None of it was fatal on its own. All of it stacked together was exactly the gap between Bethany making the whole thing look effortless and Bethany lying awake at three in the morning doing the exact thing she'd warned the whole family she'd be calling about.
He tore the model down and rebuilt it three times.
And by the end he'd found her four extra months of runway without asking Lady Leo for another cent, just by moving things to where they should have been sitting from the start.
When he walked Lady Leo through it, line by line, she went quiet, which from her was a standing ovation with the lights up.
"You're certain," she said when he finished.
"I'm certain. She isn't underfunded. She was badly sequenced, and now she's not.
She'll still have a hard first year, but she'll have the runway to live through a hard first year, which is more than most people get and exactly as much as she needs.
" Kyan closed the folder. "Don't tell her I touched it.
Let her think it came to her this clean.
She's spent her whole life being the one who quietly holds the door for everyone else.
She doesn't need to find out her cousin caught her on the way out before she even knew she was falling. "
Lady Leo studied him for a long moment over the top of her glasses.
"My sister spent thirty years telling you what you were," she said finally.
"A tool. A closer. A thing she aimed at problems and fired.
She was entirely right about the skill and entirely wrong about everything that mattered.
" She tapped the folder once. "This is the same skill she used you for.
Look at what it does the second you point it at keeping someone up instead of taking someone down.
That was always the only difference, nephew.
Never the talent. Only the aim. Your mother could never once tell the two apart, and it's going to cost her everyone she has left, one at a time.
" She slid the folder back across the desk to him.
"Good work. The best I've seen since I opened the doors.
Now go home. You've been in this building for two days and you smell like a man who badly needs to go be loved by his gharial. "
Kyan got out of her office, and made it all the way to the elevator before his eyes did anything embarrassing.
He sat in his terrible secondhand car in the lot a while before he turned the key, and thought about the thing Sai had said in the garden center break room, back when Kyan had been quietly grieving over having nothing in the world that was his.
Give it more than a few days. It had been more than a few days.
And somewhere in the last two of them, hunched over a model that would catch his cousin before she fell, he'd built the first thing in his whole life that was actually his.
Not handed down. Not stripped off anyone.
Made, with his own two hands, out of a skill his mother had only ever used as a blade.
He still hadn't heard from her. He'd stopped checking the phone for it days ago.
That was its own slow kind of healing, the kind that happened while he was busy doing something that finally mattered.
He drove home to the studio with his chest fuller and lighter than it had been in a month.
Sai was watering the window plants when he came in, barefoot, a watering can in one hand and the gray evening light pooling on all the green, and he turned at the sound of the door and took exactly one look at Kyan's face.
"You did the thing," Sai said. "Whatever it was, you did it. You've got the look all over you."
"I caught her." Kyan crossed the nine steps, took the watering can gently out of Sai's hand, and set it on the only empty spot on the sill.
"Bethany. She was going to run out of money four months early and not know until it was far too late, and I found it, I fixed it, and Leo told me not to tell her, just let her fly thinking it was always that clean.
" His voice cracked on it and he kept going.
"I built something, Sai. With the exact skills my mother only ever used to wreck people.
I aimed it at holding somebody up instead, and it worked.
It's the first thing I've ever made that belongs to me. "
Sai's whole face went soft and bright at once. "I knew you would." He tangled both hands in the front of Kyan's shirt. "I told you. More than a few days."
"You told me." Kyan kissed him, and it started soft and did not stay that way.
The relief and the pride and two sleepless days all rolled over at once into something hungrier, and Sai made a low sound against his mouth and pulled him in by the shirt, walking them backward toward the bed against the wall.
They didn't talk about pace, or words, or rooms. They didn't need to.
Three weeks in, they knew each other in the dark the way a person knows a song they've sung a thousand times, and it was nothing like the careful negotiation of that first private room or the trembling weight of the claiming.
This was easy, filthy, and certain. Two men who had finally stopped being afraid of how much they wanted each other, falling into a too-small bed in a small green-smelling room with the dryer humming its way through a cycle below them.
Kyan got Sai's shirt up over his head and put his mouth to the scent-gland beneath his jaw, scenting him slow and deep, the thing that always melted him, and felt the gold rise warm under his lips.
He kissed his way down, unhurried, because slow was simply how he was built and Sai had learned to love him slow, and he stripped the rest of Sai's clothes off between kisses and laid him out across the narrow bed and took his time relearning every inch he already knew by heart.
Sai arched, swore, and got Kyan's shirt off over his head before finally, finally burying both hands in the hair on his chest, the thing he always reached for first, like a man coming home to it.
"Want you," Sai breathed against his mouth, easy with it, not a scrap of the old shyness left anywhere in him. "Just you. Like this. No gag, no game tonight. I want to feel every bit of it. I want you to hear everything, the whole time."
"Yeah." Kyan kissed him deep and slow. "Yeah, baby. However you want me."
He kissed his way down the body he had memorized, slow, because slow was the whole gift and they both knew it, mouth tracking over the gold scales rising in the wake of it, down the flat of Sai's stomach, into the crease of his hip, taking his time, taking forever, until Sai was swearing and arching up off the mattress before Kyan had gotten anywhere near where he wanted him.
And when Kyan finally took him into his mouth, slow and wet and unhurried, Sai's whole body bowed off the bed and both his hands fisted in Kyan's hair and the sound he made was the kind that used to need a bit of steel to keep it decent, and tonight got to fill the whole small room instead.
Kyan worked him like that until Sai was begging out loud with no shame left in it, gold flooded down to his thighs, hips chasing a rhythm Kyan kept just out of reach, and only then did he ease off and crawl back up the length of him and slick himself and settle in close, watching Sai's face the entire time, the way he always liked to.
"A year ago you couldn't ask me for a glass of water," he murmured, thumb stroking slow over Sai's hip. "Now you're spread out in your own bed telling me exactly what you want with your whole chest." He pressed close, right where Sai was aching for him. "Say the hearing-me part one more time."
"Want to hear you," Sai gasped, hips lifting to chase him. "All of it. The whole time. Don't you dare be quiet on me."
He took him slow and bare and unhurried, and there was nothing at all between them, no bit, no borrowed room, no audience, just Kyan working deep into the man he loved, the gold flooding down Sai's chest and his own name spilling out of Sai's mouth unmuffled, over and over, exactly the way Sai had asked for it.
He scent-marked Sai's throat as he rocked into him, claiming him fresh and deep, and Sai dragged blunt nails down his spine and gave back every bit as good as he got, demanding, an equal, no longer anyone's quiet handed-around thing in a back room.
He set a deep steady rhythm and built it, slow, until Sai was shaking under him and gasping his name like a prayer he'd given up on saying.
When Kyan finally got a hand between them, Sai came fast and loud and utterly without shame, clenching tight and gold around him, and Kyan followed him over the edge a few strokes later with his face buried in the marked curve of that throat, groaning Sai's name into the scent like a man who'd finally found the door home and walked through it.
After, they lay tangled and wrecked and grinning at the water-stained ceiling, the watering can abandoned on the sill, the plants left thirsty and neither of them able to care.
"First thing that's all yours," Sai murmured, tracing slow shapes on Kyan's chest. "The Bethany thing. How's it sit."
"Like the start of something." Kyan caught his hand and kissed the knuckles, one at a time. "Turns out I'm good at building things up. Nobody ever bothered to find out, including me. All it took was someone letting me pick the aim and a gharial to come home to after."
"The gharial part stays non-negotiable," Sai said, smiling against his shoulder. "You're stuck with that part for good."
"Best clause in the whole contract." Kyan kissed the top of his head. "We should water your plants. I drowned a fig once, I know what neglect looks like, and that fern's judging us."
"Let it judge." Sai didn't move, boneless and claimed and warm against his side. "I'll water everything in the morning. Tonight you found four months of runway for your cousin and built the first thing that was ever yours, came home, and fucked me in our own bed. The fern can wait one night."
"Our bed," Kyan repeated, quiet, turning the word over. A month ago it had been Sai's bed in Sai's studio that Kyan was visiting. Somewhere in the last few weeks it had quietly become ours, and neither of them had announced it, it had just happened, the way the good things were starting to.
He pulled Sai closer in the dark, the green, with the steady hum of the dryers below, a man who'd spent thirty years getting used as a weapon learning, slow, in a bed too small for the both of them, exactly what he could build once he finally got to choose the aim himself.