I close the app. I don't message him. I don't look at his profile again.
I go upstairs and lie in my narrow bed and listen to the building and fight with a lion that has already decided and won't take no for an answer.
Tomorrow I'll be better. Tomorrow I'll find the middle ground between cold distance and the terrifying warmth that my lion wants me to wrap around a man I barely know who works for a company that wants to erase us.
Tomorrow.
Mango jumps on my windowsill. Settles into the moonlight. Purrs.
My lion purrs back.
Neither of them listens to me.
Chapter 10
Nico
At some point Daniel is going to stop acceptingextending the assessmentand start asking questions I don't have answers for.
The bar at noon. Same booth. Same IPA. Same nachos. Ezra on his stool, slightly warmer than yesterday — he said good morning when I walked in, which is an improvement over the silence, and his eyes tracked me to the booth for approximately one and a half seconds before returning to his screen. Progress, I think. Or I'm reading too much into the eye movements of a lion shifter, which is a sentence I never expected to think and am adding to the growing list of things about this assignment that Yale didn't prepare me for.
The report sits in my drafts folder. Complete. Thorough. Recommending against acquisition. I could send it right now — thirty seconds, one click, and the professional obligation is met. Daniel gets the report. Langford gets the recommendation. I check out of the hotel and fly back to Portland and never eat another plate of nachos in a window booth while a man who smells like tea pretends I don't exist.
I don't send it. At this point, not sending it is a decision I should probably examine, but examination would lead to conclusions I'm not ready for, so I'm filing it underdue diligenceand moving on.
The morning is quiet. Jason brings the nachos. Ezra does the books. I work on — what am I working on? The assessment is done. I have no other active files. I'm typing in a documentthat's half property analysis and half diary entry and is becoming increasingly useless as a professional deliverable.
Traffic patterns on adjacent roads remain consistent with initial assessment. No material changes observed. The bar's customer base appears to be exclusively internal — pride members and affiliated humans. No walk-in traffic observed during the assessment period except for one date brought in by the agent (see: Troy incident, professionally irrelevant, personally humiliating).
I delete the last parenthetical. Stare at the screen. Type a new note:Extended observation suggests the property's primary value is residential/communal, not commercial. The business model relies on the garage operation, not the bar. Any acquisition strategy that treats the bar as the primary asset is fundamentally misunderstanding the property's function.
That's actually useful. I save it.
At twelve-thirty, the front door opens and the librarian walks in.
Toby. I've seen him most days — he lives upstairs with Knox, walks to the library in the morning, walks back. He's one of the two humans in the building, the other being me, and he's the only person here who has never once made my survival instincts activate. This is because Toby radiates approximately the same threat level as a puppy.
He's carrying a lunch bag and a book and he's wearing a cardigan with — I squint — cats on it. Small, embroidered cats on a green cardigan. This is a real garment that a real adult man is wearing in public.
"Hi!" Toby says, spotting me. "Mind if I sit with you? The bar stools hurt my back and the other tables don't have outlets."
"Go ahead."
He slides into the booth across from me. Not my side — the other side, the one that's always empty. He plugs in his phone, opens his lunch bag, and starts unpacking with the methodical care of someone who takes lunch seriously. Sandwich — peanut butter, the crunchy kind, cut diagonally. An apple. A bag of pretzels. A juice box.
A juice box.
"Those are good," he says, noticing my look. "Apple cherry. Knox makes fun of me but he drinks them too when he thinks no one's watching."
I process the image of Knox — six and a half feet of alpha lion shifter — drinking a juice box in private. It doesn't compute. I file it away anyway.
"How's the library?" I ask, because I've run out of things to type and Toby is here and talking to a human who doesn't make my heart rate spike feels like a reasonable use of my afternoon.
"Good! Quiet today. We're between programming cycles." He bites into his sandwich. "What about you? How's the — what do you do, exactly? I know you're from a company but I don't actually know what your job entails."
"Property assessment. I evaluate a site's commercial viability and write a report recommending for or against acquisition."
"And this property?"
