Epilogue
The diner on Industrial Road served breakfast all day and didn't ask questions about its clientele, which made it the unofficial morning-after spot for half the shifters in the warehouse district.
Jack had never been inside. He'd walked past it a hundred times on his way to KK, smelled the bacon and coffee through the open door, and seen the booths through the window.
It had never occurred to him to go in. The shiver ate at home.
Eating alone in a diner was the kind of thing that drew attention, and sharks who drew attention answered for it.
Jack walked through the door at ten on a Saturday morning and found the booth in the back where Harold, Nero, and Amani were already sitting.
Harold saw him first. Brown eyes warm, a cup of coffee in front of him and an empty seat beside him.
He'd saved the inside of the booth, the seat against the wall, which meant Jack wouldn't have his back to the room.
Harold did things like that. Small things, constant things, adjustments to the world that made it easier for Jack to be in it.
Nero was across from Harold, compact and precise in a black t-shirt, dark eyes tracking Jack's approach the way they tracked everything.
He had tea instead of coffee because Nero was the kind of person who drank tea at a diner and didn't care who had an opinion about it.
Beside him, Amani was reading the menu with the focus of someone who intended to order everything on it.
His hoodie was unzipped. His sleeves were at his elbows.
When he looked up and saw Jack, he grinned.
"Sit down," Amani said. "I'm getting a massive stack of pancakes and I need someone to judge me for it."
Jack slid into the booth beside Harold. Harold's hand found his thigh under the table, a warm steady pressure that said I'm here. Jack let his leg press against Harold's and felt the contact settle into his body like a key turning in a lock.
They ordered. Harold got eggs and toast. Nero got oatmeal, which earned him a look from Amani that could have curdled the cream in Harold's coffee.
Amani got pancakes, a side of bacon, scrambled eggs, hash browns, and orange juice.
Jack looked at the menu for a long time and ordered the salmon omelet because the diner had one and because he'd discovered, in the weeks since sushi with Harold, that he liked fish prepared by people who cared about food.
The conversation was easy. Not weightless, not without history, but easy in the way that conversations between people who'd survived something together could be when they'd come out on the other side and were still sitting at the same table.
Nero told a story about a patron at the club who'd gotten his collar stuck on a doorknob during a scene and they'd had to call maintenance.
Amani described Reza's latest napkin catastrophe in detail that suggested a full investigation had been conducted.
Harold mentioned that his mother had sent a picture of the dogs and passed his phone around and Amani spent thirty seconds cooing over a dog in a bandana.
Jack sat in the booth and listened and ate his omelet and felt the strangeness of it. Four people at a table. No agenda. No ritual. No rules about who spoke and who listened and what was owed afterward. Just breakfast.
When the plates were cleared and the coffee was refilled, Jack reached into his pocket and pulled out the folded hotel notepaper.
The table went quiet. Harold looked at the paper. Nero looked at Harold looking at the paper. Amani set down his orange juice.
Jack unfolded the pages and spread them on the table between the coffee cups and the creamer.
Four pages, front and back, covered in names.
"Fifty-seven names," Jack said. He was looking at Harold.
"Everyone the shiver hurt. Everyone I hurt.
Everyone who was part of the system." He pushed the pages across the table.
"I want you to have these. Figure out how to help them, if you can.
If you can even find them. I'll pay for what I've done too. "
Harold picked up the pages. He read them slowly, his eyes moving down the columns, and Jack watched him absorb each name the way Harold absorbed everything, completely, with his full attention. His thumb brushed the paper where the ink had smeared.
"Why me?" Harold asked.
"Because you gave me the word for what was on that list. You looked at my life and told me what it was when nobody else ever had.
" Jack's voice was steady. He'd practiced this.
Not the words, but the steadiness. "And because you're my Dom and these names are the heaviest thing I carry and I want you to help me hold them.
It's time. I've been waiting until I could give them to you and now it's time to do that.
It's time to give you the last piece of me. Of what I did."
The booth was very quiet. Nero's tea sat untouched. Amani's hand was on the table, still.
Harold looked up from the pages. His brown eyes were bright and his jaw was tight. He folded the pages carefully and put them in his shirt pocket, against his chest, and left his hand there for a moment.
"I'll hold them and I'll try to find them. It's what I do," Harold said.
Amani picked up his orange juice. He took a sip, set it down, and looked at Jack with the amber eyes that had been afraid and angry and distant and recognizing and forgiving over the course of months that felt like years. "You finally did it."
Jack nodded. He had. He didn't need to carry the last of his shame or his guilt alone.
Amani grinned at him. The full grin, the one Jack remembered from before the kidnapping, the one that made the lion look like he owned every room he walked into. "Also, my mother says you start on the security team Monday. Nero's going to train you. Don't be late."
Nero nodded once.
Harold's hand was still on Jack's thigh under the table. Jack put his hand on top of it, lacing their fingers together, and the contact was visible above the table edge. Nero saw it. Amani saw it. The waitress refilling their coffee saw it. Jack didn't pull away.
"I'll be there," Jack said.
They finished their coffee. Harold paid, over Jack's objection.
They walked out into the Saturday sun. The warehouse district was bright and warm and smelled like asphalt and coffee and the faint musk of a dozen shifter species going about their days.
Nero and Amani headed toward KK, Nero's hand on the small of Amani's back, Amani leaning into the touch with the ease of someone who'd learned that not all contact was a threat.
Harold and Jack stood on the sidewalk. Harold's truck was parked across the street. The sun was on their faces and the city hummed around them and Jack looked down at his hand inside Harold's.
"You're smiling," Harold said.
Jack looked up. He was. A real smile, the one he'd found on the apartment floor after the wrestling, the one that his face had forgotten how to make and was remembering. "Don't get used to it."
"Too late." Harold kissed him. On the sidewalk. In the sun. In front of the diner and the warehouse district and anyone who happened to be walking past. Jack kissed him back and tasted coffee and felt the warmth of it all the way down to his toes.
They walked to the truck hand in hand. Harold opened the passenger door for him, which was unnecessary and which Jack allowed because some forms of service went both ways.
"Where to?" Harold asked as he got in too.
Jack looked out the window at the city that had been the backdrop of the worst and best months of his life. The warehouse district. The club underneath it. The pool thirty minutes south. The apartment white sheets on a bed that smelled like earth after rain.
"Home," Jack said, smiling at him as he settled into the seat. "Let's go home."
Harold put the truck in gear and drove. He hadn't started moving his things in yet, but they both knew it would happen soon.
Jack's temporary apartment was on a lease and Harold stayed there more often than not.
Putting his things in the empty drawers was a formality. All of him was already home with Jack.
The End