Chapter Eight
Jack got to KK four hours before his normal shift.
Lady Leo had told him the day before that he was on the full-time schedule, paid, and to come in early to start on inventory.
That was the first of it. Real work, real wages, the first money that would be his instead of the shiver's.
He already knew what he'd do with it. Open an account in his own name, the first one he'd ever have that the shiver couldn't touch.
Doing that would be a betrayal. It made him uneasy to go against the other sharks yet again, but part of him knew he had to do it, despite the punishment they'd give him if they ever found out.
Thankfully none of them ever really cared where he was as long as he showed up at night.
The club was empty except for staff. Empty, the club was a different place.
Amani moved through it looser than Jack had ever seen him, the wariness not gone but eased.
He still wore the hoodie but the zipper was down, and he'd pushed the sleeves up past his wrists.
Jack noticed that every time and tried not to stare.
The wrists had been the worst part of the van.
Rope around Amani's wrists, tight enough that he couldn't shift, and Jack had been the one to check the knots because the others said he tied the tightest.
He was wiping down the private room doors when Amani came around the corner.
Alone. No Nero, which struck Jack as strange, because in every shift he'd worked he'd never once seen Amani on the floor without him close.
Amani walked through the empty club touching things, checking the rooms, reclaiming his territory one square foot at a time.
Jack did what he always did when Amani came near.
He pressed himself back against the wall to make room and waited for him to pass.
This time, Amani stopped.
"You don't have to flatten yourself against the wall every time I walk by," Amani said. "I'm not going to bite you."
"I'm keeping my distance."
"It's just us right now." Amani leaned against the opposite wall, arms crossed, studying Jack the way he studied a new bottle of liquor he was deciding whether to stock.
"You've been here two weeks. You haven't caused a single problem.
You work harder than half my regular staff and you've never once complained about anything I've asked you to do. "
Jack wasn't sure if this was a compliment or a setup. "Okay."
"Why did you turn them in?"
The question was quiet and direct and it landed in Jack's stomach like a stone.
He'd been asked this before. Lady Leo had asked him.
Harold had circled around it. But Amani asking carried a different weight because Amani was the person in the center of the thing Jack had done, and his answer mattered in a way it didn't when anyone else asked.
"Because it was wrong," Jack said. "What we did to you was wrong and I knew it while we were doing it."
"Then why did you do it?"
Jack put the cleaning cloth down. He owed Amani the conversation and he wasn't going to have it with a rag in his hand.
"The shiver wanted to get back at your mother for banning us from the club.
They decided taking you would send a message.
I went along with it because that's what you do in a shiver.
You don't argue. You don't refuse. You do what the group decides. "
"And selling me to the crane?" Amani's voice was controlled but his fingers were working the hem of his hoodie, pulling and twisting the fabric. "That was the group's decision too?"
"Yes."
"Did you know what he was like? Before you brought me to him?"
Jack closed his eyes. This was the part he'd never said out loud to anyone. "Yes. I knew."
The silence that followed was long enough that Jack opened his eyes. Amani was staring at him, the controlled expression fracturing at the edges. "How? How did you know?"
"The crane had dealings with the shiver before you.
He paid for access to us. To the lower-ranked sharks.
" Jack kept his voice flat because if he let any of what he was feeling into it he wouldn't be able to finish.
"He liked to watch. He'd choose who would fight, and then he'd tell the winner what to do to the loser while he watched.
It wasn't the fighting that was different from what we normally did.
It was having someone outside the shiver directing it.
Having someone who wasn't a shark telling another shark what to do to me. "
Amani's hand had stopped moving on the hoodie. He was very still. "He did that to you."
"More than once."
"And you still brought me to him."
"Yes." Jack didn't look away. He didn't soften it or qualify it or explain it.
He'd delivered another person to someone he knew was a predator.
There was no version of that sentence that didn't make him complicit.
"I knew what he was capable of and I helped hand you to him because the shiver decided it and I wanted to belong. "
Amani went and picked up a glass from the shelf behind him and threw it.
It shattered against the wall two feet from Jack's shoulder.
Jack didn't flinch. He'd been some kind of reaction.
What he hadn't expected was the sound that came out of Amani after, a noise that was half snarl and half something broken, the lion pressing against the surface hard enough that Jack could see the amber flash in his eyes.
"You knew." Amani's voice shook. "You knew what he would do to me and you drove the van anyway."
"Yes."
"You knew because he'd done it to you and you still let him have me."
"Yes."
Another glass. This one hit the wall closer to Jack's head and he still didn't move.
The spray of glass caught his arm. It stung, but he didn't look down.
Moving would have been wrong. Running would have been worse.
He stood there because that's what he owed Amani.
He owed him the target and the truth and whatever came after.
Amani was breathing hard, his hands gripping the shelf behind him. Nero appeared at the end of the hallway, drawn by the sound of breaking glass, and stopped when he saw them. His dark eyes moved from Amani to Jack to the glass on the floor, reading the scene in two seconds the way only Nero could.
"Amani," Nero said. Quiet. Not a command. A check-in.
"I'm fine." Amani's voice was raw. He wasn't fine.
His hands were shaking and the hoodie sleeves had fallen back down over his wrists and he was gripping the fabric so hard his knuckles had gone pale.
But he was still standing in the hallway with Jack, and he hadn't run, and Nero respected that enough not to move closer.
"You knew what he was like," Amani said again, quieter now. The rage was burning down to something underneath it. "You went through it yourself. And you gave me to him."
"I wanted to belong to the shiver more than I wanted to protect you.
" Jack heard the words leave his mouth and felt each one like a piece of himself being removed.
"That's the truth. That's the worst thing about me.
Not that I didn't know better. I did. I just decided it didn't matter enough to stop. "
Amani stared at him for a long time. Jack watched the anger cycle through him and out of him and what came up underneath was something Jack hadn't expected to see.
Not forgiveness. Not understanding. Recognition.
The look of someone seeing a different shape in a thing they thought they already knew the dimensions of.
"You didn't just deliver me," Amani said slowly. "You were one of us. One of his."
Jack nodded. The word us, coming from Amani, directed at what the crane had done to both of them, was the most painful thing Jack had heard since Harold's word on the floor of the private room.
Different pain. Harold's word had torn open the framework of his life.
This word connected him to Amani through a door he'd spent months in holding trying not to look at.
"Clean up the glass," Amani said. "The price of both comes out of your pay." He turned and walked toward the bar. Nero fell into step beside him, one hand on the small of Amani's back, and Jack watched them go.
He got the broom and dustpan from the supply closet and swept up the glass. Carefully. Every shard. The cut on his arm was small and had already stopped bleeding. He put the glass in the bin and went back to wiping down the doors.
His shift that night was finished in silence.
Amani communicated through Nero again, wouldn't look at him, loaded the trays with his back turned.
The progress of the past two weeks was gone.
The distance was back and it was wider than before because it wasn't just built on what Jack had done.
It was built on what Jack had known and done anyway.
Harold found him at the end of his shift, sitting on the floor of the locker room with his street clothes in his lap.
"I heard about the conversation with Amani."
Jack didn't look up. "From Nero?"
"From Amani. He told me himself, which means he wanted me to know.
" Harold sat down on the bench across from him.
Close, in the small room. His knees were a foot from Jack's.
He smelled like warm earth and the coffee he drank on shift.
The locker room was small enough that the scent filled the space between them.
Jack noticed the way Harold's body took up the bench.
The wide-set thighs, the forearms resting on his knees, the solidity of him.
He'd noticed it before, in glimpses he didn't examine, but in the quiet of the locker room with the club noise muffled through the walls, Harold's physical presence was harder to look past. "Are you okay? "
Jack nearly laughed. "I told him I knew what the crane would do to him and I helped hand him over anyway. He threw two glasses at my head. No, I'm not okay."
Harold was quiet for a moment. "You told him about the shiver's history with the crane. What was done to you too. That took guts."
"It took the bare minimum of honesty. He deserved to know." Jack pulled his shirt over his head, wincing when it slipped across the cut on his arm. "It doesn't change anything. I still did it. Knowing I was a victim too doesn't make him less of one."
"No. But it makes the picture more complicated. And complicated is closer to the truth than simple."
Jack finished getting dressed and stood. "I need to go home."
Harold stood too. "Do you want me to walk you out?"
Jack shook his head. He wanted to be alone. He wanted the silence of the pool but it was midnight and the dolphins were closed and the shiver house was the only place he had.
He walked home in the dark. Dresden was asleep. Rashe was out. Lichen's door was closed. Jack went to his room and lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
Amani had looked at him and said you were one of us.
One of his. And the recognition in his eyes had been worse than the anger, worse than the glass, because the anger Jack knew how to take.
Recognition meant Amani saw him as a person who'd been hurt by the same man, and that was a kind of intimacy Jack had never asked for and didn't know what to do with.