The bedroom was large and white. A massive bed with expensive linens, too many pillows, a headboard carved from dark wood. The windows were uncovered and the desert night pressed against the glass. No light anywhere, just the starsand the vast black nothing of a landscape that wanted people beneath it to understand exactly how alone they were.
Grainger pointed to the bathroom. "Change for bed. I've put things out for you."
The things were sleep pants, soft cotton, laid on the bathroom counter the way the day clothes had been. Amani changed quickly with the door open, he didn't try to close it, and came back to find Grainger already in bed, propped against the pillows, watching the bathroom doorway with the patient look of a man who knew exactly when his companion would reappear.
Amani stood at the foot of the bed and every part of him said no.
Not this. Not the bed. Not lying down next to this man, not in the dark, not with those hands and that breath and that voice calling him a name that wasn't his. Everything else he'd endured today, the cooking, the reading, the couch, the kitchen, all of it had been horrible but it had been vertical. Standing or sitting, with space to move, with the option of stepping back even if stepping back meant nothing because there was nowhere to step back to. The bed was different. The bed was horizontal, enclosed, intimate in the way that beds were. Lying down next to Grainger meant giving up the last physical boundary Amani had.
Grainger watched him. The warm smile was there but so was the patience that was not patience: the patience that was waiting, that was a countdown, that was the cold thing underneath sayingyou have about ten seconds before this stops being a request.
Amani got into the bed.
Grainger turned off the lamp and pulled him close. One arm across Amani's chest, the other hand finding his hair again. The old man's body was bony and warm and pressed along Amani's back so that every breath Grainger took pushed against him.Grainger's breath was on his neck. The room was dark. The desert was silent.
Amani lay there with his eyes open. His jaw locked. His fists clenched under the blanket. He did not move.
Grainger's thumb traced circles on his chest. Slow. Absent. The way you'd touch someone you'd been sleeping beside for thirty-two years. "Goodnight, my little cub," he murmured. "Sleep well. We have a lovely day planned for tomorrow."
His breathing changed within minutes. Deepened. Slowed. The arm across Amani's chest grew heavy with sleep. The thumb stopped its circles. Grainger's mouth went slack against the back of Amani's neck.
Amani didn't move.
He waited. Five minutes. Ten. He counted Grainger's breaths until they were deep, even, and uninterrupted. Then he counted a hundred more. Being wrong about his plan, being wrong, having Grainger wake up to find him trying to leave, was not something he could afford.
At one hundred and twelve, Grainger shifted in his sleep and rolled slightly away. The arm across Amani's chest left.
Amani lay in the dark. He listened to the clock ticking somewhere in the house. Outside, the wind sang across the desert. Next to him was the slow, steady breathing of the man who had bought him.
He thought about the front door. It had been unlocked when they came in. He'd watched Grainger walk right through it without reaching for a key. Because where would Amani go? There was nothing for miles. No car keys visible anywhere. No phone. His had died on the sidewalk two blocks from KK, the screen cracked under his hip when the sharks took him down. Just the door, the desert, and the road that had to be somewhere to the south. There was also the silver collar that meant even if he ran he couldn't shift.
The road.
He didn't have shoes. His feet were bare on the cool sheets and outside those sheets was tile and outside the tile was desert, rocks and scrub and hard-packed dirt and things that bit and stung and cut. Running barefoot through the Mojave was not a plan. It was a way to die with more steps involved.
But staying was not a plan either. Staying was rice and reading. Enduring hands on his stomach, breath on his neck, and a bed that got harder to leave every night because compliance was a muscle and the more you used it the stronger it got and the harder it became to remember that you had ever moved on your own.
He was a lion. He could run fast and far. He could handle pain. The collar kept him human but it didn't keep him weak. Somewhere out there, at the end of a road he couldn't see, was a highway. On the highway were cars. In those cars were people who didn't know his name, but who would stop for a barefoot man running out of the desert at dawn.
Maybe. Hopefully. If he ran far enough.
Grainger's breathing hitched. Amani froze. The old man changed position, mumbled something, Edward, maybe, or something else Amani couldn't make out, and then settled again, his breath deepening back into sleep.
The next night. When Grainger fell asleep. He would go.
Amani closed his eyes. He would not sleep, he was certain of that, as certain as he'd ever been of anything, but he closed his eyes and lay still in the dark with a dead man's mate pressed against his back. He waited for the night to end.
Chapter Seven
Day three was the same. The routine was already setting like concrete.
Amani woke with Grainger's arm across his chest, extracted himself with the careful precision of someone lifting a trip wire, and stood in the dark bedroom listening to the old man breathe until he was sure the rhythm hadn't changed. It hadn't. Grainger slept the deep, untroubled sleep of a man who believed his world was exactly as it should be.
The collar had rubbed the skin of his throat raw. Three days of constant contact and the irritation had deepened into something angrier, a ring of inflamed skin that stung when he swallowed and ached when he turned his head. He'd stopped noticing the burn of the silver itself. It was the damage around it that kept reminding him.
Breakfast. Eggs again, because eggs were the only thing Amani could produce with any reliability and because Grainger seemed content to eat the same meal twice in a row if it meant watching Amani in the kitchen. The crane sat at the breakfast bar with his newspaper and talked about the weather, a clear day, high of a hundred and four, the horses would be sheltering in the arroyo to the west. Amani filed the information. The arroyo. West. Somewhere the horses went when the heat was worst. Water, maybe. Or shade.
He filed everything. Three days of cataloging and he had a map of the house in his head that was detailed enough to navigate blindfolded. The front door was always unlocked. The windows in the sitting room opened outward with simple latches. There were no other people on the property, no guards,no hired men, no one between Amani and the door. Grainger's arrogance and the desert itself were the only security system.
