Lady Leo turned off the water and dried her hands on a towel embroidered with tiny gold lions, because of course she had towels with lions on them. "Your sister makes a fair point."
"Of course you'd side with her."
"I'm not siding with anyone. I'm observing that you have a pattern, and patterns can become prisons if you're not careful." She folded the towel with the same precision she applied to everything. "Your father was a leopard. Not exactly the biggest cat in the jungle. But he was the best man I ever knew, and I wouldn't have found him if I'd only been looking at lions."
That landed. It always did when she brought up his father. Amani hadn't known him, he'd died when Amani was three, but the way Lady Leo spoke about him, even years later, even in passing, carried a weight that Amani couldn't argue with. She didn't talk about him often. When she did, it mattered.
He put the last glass away and closed the cabinet. "I hear you. Both of you. I'm not promising anything, but I hear you."
Bethany bumped his shoulder as she passed. "That's the most we'll get out of him," she told their mother.
"For now," Lady Leo agreed. Her gaze met Amani's, and the patience in them was its own form of pressure. She wanted more for him. She always had. Not just a Dom who could match him, but one who could surprise him. One who could get past the walls he'd built out of preference, species, and the unshakable certainty that he already knew exactly what he needed.
Amani loved her for it. He also wished she'd give him a break.
***
He walked home from his mother's house in the late afternoon heat, cutting through the residential streets toward the warehouse district. The sun was doing its merciless Nevada thing, turning the pavement into a griddle and the air into something people had to push through rather than breathe. He liked it. Lion blood ran hot and the heat felt like home in a way that air conditioning never did.
His apartment was on the fourth floor of a converted warehouse that had been turned into expensive lofts by a developer who'd had grand visions of making the warehouse district trendy. The visions hadn't quite materialized, the neighborhood was still more industrial than hip, but the loft was beautiful. High ceilings, exposed brick, big windows that looked out toward the Strip. From his bedroom, the city at night was a wall of light that made the heavy blackout curtains a necessity rather than a luxury.
He let himself in and stood in the doorway for a moment, taking in the silence. His place was clean. He was precise about that. The lion in him demanded order, but lived-in. There were books on every surface, because Amani read voraciously and hadno system for putting things back when he was done. A pair of the tiny black shorts was draped over the back of a kitchen chair where he'd tossed them after his last shift. The kitchen counter held a coffee maker, a blender he'd used exactly once, and a collection of takeout menus that constituted his primary relationship with food.
He couldn't cook. This was a known fact, acknowledged by everyone in his family with varying degrees of horror. Lady Leo, who could produce a restaurant-quality frittata before noon, viewed his inability to feed himself as a personal failure of her parenting. Bethany thought it was hilarious. Amani had made peace with it. He could make cereal, grilled cheese if the situation was dire, and coffee that was technically drinkable if the drinker didn't have standards. For everything else, there were apps.
He showered, changed into fresh shorts and nothing else, there was no point in clothes when he was home alone, and stretched out on his couch with his phone. The afternoon was his. He wouldn't need to be at the club until eight, and until then the world was pleasantly empty.
He scrolled through his messages. A group chat with a few of the KK regulars, mostly memes and complaints about the heat. A text from Bethany: a photo of the frittata leftovers with the caption "I saved you some so you don't die of cereal poisoning." A notification from the club's scheduling app showing him on close, as he was every Saturday.
Nothing from anyone special. No one checking in with attention that meant something more than friendship. That was fine. He was twenty. He had time.
The wolf from the previous night crossed his mind briefly. He'd been attractive. Confident without being pushy, which was rarer than it should have been. Amani had meant it when he'd told the man to come back, watching a Dom playwith someone else told him everything about their skill, their patience, their ability to read a sub's signals. It was better than any conversation. But Bethany's words nagged at him, the way her words always did, because his sister had the inconvenient habit of being right about the things he most wanted to be wrong about.
Was it a wall? His preference for big predators? He didn't think so. He thought of it as knowing what he wanted, as clarity, not limitation. A lion should be with someone who could match him physically, who could make him feel contained and overwhelmed in the way that made submission meaningful rather than performative. Small shifters, foxes, ferrets, raccoons, the whole parade of animals that weighed less than his shifted form's paw, how could they possibly give him that?
It wasn't prejudice. It was biology. It was common sense. It was the perfectly logical conclusion of a lifetime spent watching his mother, a lioness, command rooms full of predators twice her size through nothing but force of presence.
He paused on that thought. Examined it. Set it aside.
Lady Leo was five foot six and weighed maybe a hundred and thirty pounds. She had never once needed to be bigger than anyone to be more dangerous than everyone.
He set that aside too.
The afternoon light moved across his ceiling in the slow, golden way it did in the hours before the city woke up for the night. Amani closed his eyes and let himself drift, half-sleeping in the warm quiet of his apartment, thinking about nothing and everything and the comfortable certainty that the next day would look exactly like every other. The same four blocks. The same bar. The same tiny shorts. The same flirting. The same walk home at four in the morning under the same orange sky.
He fell asleep on the couch with his phone on his chest and the late afternoon sun on his face.
Chapter Three
Saturday night was busier than Friday, which was unusual. Amani noticed it the moment he stepped into the building at seven forty-five and saw the line of people waiting to check in at Bethany's desk. A line. At Kinky Kritters. His mother would be thrilled.
Hurrying out of the elevator, he slipped behind the bar and started setting up for the rush before it hit. Ice bins full, garnish trays stocked, the well liquors in their places. He pulled his hair back with a band he kept on his wrist, because it was going to be a sweating kind of night and he didn't want it in his eyes, and stretched his arms over his head until his shoulders popped. The tiny shorts rode up when he stretched. He didn't adjust them. Let people look. That was half the point.
By nine the bar was three deep and Amani was in his element. He moved between orders like a current between rocks, smooth and fast and never quite stopping. Two hands, twelve bottles, no wasted motion. Reza was at the other end, running the well, and they'd long since developed the silent choreography of bartenders who'd worked enough shifts together to read each other's rhythm. Amani called regulars by name and newcomers by what they were drinking. He remembered who tipped and who didn't. He noticed when a sub at a corner table flagged his drink count to the bartender, two fingers held up discreetly, and he made sure his third was mostly juice without making it obvious. He noticed when a Dom led a partner toward the private rooms with a hand on the back of their neck that was a shade too tight, and he caught the eye of Marco, the gorilla on security, with a look that saidwatch that one.
They were the small things. The invisible machinery of a club that actually worked. Most people never saw it. They saw the leather and the lighting and the beautiful people in not enough clothing. They didn't see the bartenders tracking every dynamic in the room from behind a wall of bottles, or the bouncers who followed up on a look with a quiet check-in, or the owner making her rounds with a martini in one hand and a mental map of every scene in progress in the other.
KK worked because people like Amani made it work. He was proud of that in a way he didn't talk about much, because talking about it would have required admitting that bartending at a kink club was more than a job to him. It was a vocation. He was good at it the way some people were good at music or medicine, not just skilled but called.
