"That's my personal number and my address. It doesn't matter what time it is. If you need to talk, or if you can't sleep, or if you just need to be somewhere that isn't here and isn't your apartment, you call that number or you show up at that address. Three in the morning. Four. Doesn't matter."
Amani looked at the card. He didn't pick it up. "Why?"
It was such a simple question and the answer was so complicated that Nero didn't trust himself to give it. Not yet. Not there. So he gave the simple version, the version that was true enough to hold weight.
"Because I've been doing this job long enough to know that the hardest part isn't the thing that happens to you. The hardest part is the three AM after, when the room is quiet and your brain won't stop and you don't know who to call because it feels like nobody in the world is awake at three AM." He tapped the card. "I'm awake at three AM."
Amani looked at the card for a long time. Then he picked it up and put it in the pocket of his hoodie and said, "I doubt I'll use it."
"That's fine."
"I'm really not your type either, by the way. I don't date cops."
"I'm not asking you to date me. I'm asking you to call me if you can't sleep."
Amani's hand went to the card in his pocket. An unconscious gesture, his fingers finding the edge of it through the fabric, confirming it was there. He probably didn't know he was doing it. Nero saw it, didn't mention it, but filed it in the same place he filed the near-laugh, the armor drop, the way Amani had sat down when he'd been told to, not because he'd been commanded but because some part of him recognized the voice of someone who was not going to hurt him and was tired of fighting.
"Goodnight, Amani."
"Goodnight, Detective."
Nero walked out of Kinky Kritters into the Vegas night. The air was dry, warm, and smelled like concrete, neon, and the distant chemical sweetness of the Strip. He got in his car and sat there for a minute with his hands on the wheel. He thought about a kid in a gray hoodie with armor over his armor and a near-laugh that had escaped before he could catch it and amber eyes that were learning, slowly and against their will, to look at a ferret and see something other than a disappointment.
He drove home. He didn't expect the phone to ring that night. Probably not the next either. But it would ring. Nero was patient. Nero was a ferret. And ferrets were very, very good at waiting.
Chapter Fifteen
Nero almost didn't hear the knock.
He'd been at the kitchen table with case files spread out in front of him, the shark arrests moving through processing, Dale and Mako booked, Paulie still in the wind, Harold sending updates every few days that amounted to "still sniffing, the bastard's fast for a fish." The knock was so quiet it could have been a branch against the siding. But Nero's ears were sensitive, tuned for frequencies that bigger animals missed, and something in the rhythm of it, two taps, a pause, a third, sounded like a person who wasn't sure they wanted to be heard.
He opened the door and Amani was standing on his porch.
The hoodie was zipped to his chin. His arms were wrapped around himself the way they always were since his rescue, hands hidden in the sleeves, shoulders curved inward like he was trying to take up less space. His feet were in the soft-soled sneakers. His eyes were wide and glassy in the porch light. Overall, he looked like he hadn't slept in days, which he probably hadn't.
"I can't sleep," Amani said.
He didn't say more. He didn't need to.
Nero stepped back from the doorway. "Come in."
Amani came in the way a cat enters an unfamiliar room, one step, then a pause, then another step, his gaze moving over everything. The living room was small and unremarkable. A couch that had seen better decades. A coffee table with a ring stain from a mug Nero kept meaning to sand out. Bookshelves along one wall, mostly procedural manuals and crime fiction, a few field guides to desert wildlife that he'd picked up when he first transferred to Vegas. The kitchen was visible through anopen doorway, clean counters, a single plate in the drying rack, the case files he'd been reading.
"It smells like coffee," Amani said.
"I can make you some."
"I don't want coffee. I just—" He stopped. His jaw worked. Whatever he'd come here to say, or not say, was caught somewhere between his throat and the air, and the effort of not saying it was visible in the tendons of his neck.
"Sit down," Nero said. Not a command. An offer. The couch, the chair, the kitchen table, wherever felt right. "I'm going to make food. You don't have to talk."
Amani sat on the couch. He pulled his knees up and wrapped his arms around them and tucked himself into the corner of it the way Nero had seen trauma survivors do in interview rooms, making themselves small, putting their back against something solid, reducing the number of directions a threat could come from. It was instinct, not conscious choice. The body remembering what the mind was trying to forget.
Nero made burgers. Not because burgers were the right food for four in the morning, but because they were the only thing he could make without thinking. Thinking would have meant looking at Amani. Looking at Amani in that moment would have meant showing something on his face that this kid was not ready to see. So, he cooked. Seasoned the meat. Shaped the patties. Heated the pan. The sounds of cooking filled the small kitchen, the sizzle of beef hitting hot cast iron, the click of the gas burner, the quiet scrape of the spatula. Ordinary sounds. Safe sounds. The sounds of a house where someone was making food because someone else was hungry. That was all. Nothing terrible was happening in the kitchen. The doors were locked. The desert was miles away.
When he brought the plates to the living room, Amani had uncurled slightly. His feet were on the floor and his arms werelooser and he was looking at the bookshelves with the expression of someone cataloging titles out of habit.
"You read crime fiction," Amani said.
