Page 1 of Gagging the Gharial

Chapter One

Kinky Kritters still had half an hour before the club opened for the night, which was the only reason Kyan had shown up when he did. He stepped off the elevator into a room that smelled almost clean. The lights were up high, bright enough to show the wear on the leather booths and the scuff marks on the floor, and the music played low enough that even his feline ears had to reach for the lyrics. It was a different place at this hour. Later it would be packed wall to wall with shifters spreading their musk around and spilling beer. The bass would be turned up until it pounded through the floor and the walls. The whole underground space would be thick with heat and want. He'd never loved it crowded. He'd always preferred it half-lit and quiet, before the place woke up underneath the city.

He hadn't been to Vegas in a long time. Long enough that walking back in felt like opening a drawer he'd told himself he'd cleaned out.

His mother had booked the trip, which meant his mother had a use for it. Zahara never spent money on a thing unless that thing was going to make her more. The luxury hotel, the absurd rental car waiting in the valet lot, the open tab she'd probably set up somewhere expensive: none of it was for Kyan's comfort. It was a setting. He was the jewelry she'd sent ahead to soften up her sister before the real negotiation began. Sweet-talk Lady Leo. Compare the figures. Show her why a second club in Chicago made sense on paper, so that his aunt would sign off and his mother could expand her corner of the empire one more notch. Because that was the math sitting at the middle of his mother's whole life: the empire was Lady Leo's, every club and every city of it, and a lioness did not add so much as a coat of paint to her corner without the head of the family's name on the paper. The sit-down itself was set for tomorrow, midday, in his aunt's office, on her turf and her terms. Which left Kyan tonight to do what he always did before a negotiation: walk the floor, see what a year away had changed, and remind the family how charming he could be.

He could do it. He was good at numbers and better at charm when he bothered. He just resented being the errand.

Kyan crossed to the bar and took a stool. That was when he spotted Amani, and the resentment went quiet in his throat.

His cousin was behind the counter wiping down glasses, and he was wearing a hoodie. Sleeves down to the wrists. The last photo Kyan had seen of him, Amani had been in shorts that barely qualified as clothing and nothing at all above the waist, grinning at the camera like the whole room belonged to him. The lion in that photo had been impossible to miss. This one stayed covered and held himself calmer than the boy in that photo ever had. Not diminished. Changed. Whatever had put the long sleeves on him, he'd long since come out the far side of it, and the grin, when it surfaced, was the same grin that had run this bar since he was a teenager.

Kyan knew part of the story. His mother had told him about it a good while back, in the offhand cruel way she delivered everything that wasn't about her. Something bad had happened to Leo's boy out in the desert. She'd said it the way she might mention a stain on a tablecloth. From everything Kyan had heard, Amani had clawed all the way back from it and then some, but a thing like that left its marks, and Kyan was looking at a couple of them.

Mostly, though, Kyan was just glad to see him upright behind his own bar like he owned the world, because by the sound of it there'd been a stretch when that hadn't been a sure thing.

"Your mother didn't say you were in town," Amani said. He hadn't looked up until Kyan was already on the stool, which meant he'd smelled him coming the moment the elevator opened. His voice was even, but the rag moved faster.

"My mother says a lot of things she doesn't mean and forgets the things she does." Kyan pulled a twenty from his wallet, folded it lengthwise so it stood on its edge, and set it on the bar. "She also says you should call her more."

"It's hard to be social when you sleep through the daylight and aren’t sure of other people’s schedules." Amani tucked the rag under the counter. There was a beat where he looked at Kyan and Kyan looked back, and neither of them said the thing sitting between them. "What are you drinking?"

"Scotch." Kyan let the silence stretch one more second, then let it go, because his cousin clearly wanted him to. "Good to see you wearing more than a smile, for once. Last picture I saw, you'd talked yourself out of most of your clothes."

It was the gentlest way Kyan knew to ask the question. Amani heard the whole of it anyway.

"Got a Dom now," he said, reaching for the bottle. "He keeps me decent." And there it was, the grin, the old one that used to run this entire room. "There's a lot you've missed."

Down the bar, a man Kyan didn't recognize was slicing limes with the easy competence of someone who'd done it ten thousand times. An otter, by the smell of him, small and unhurried, half Amani's presence and not trying to be anything more. He glanced up, gave Kyan a friendly nod, and went back to his limes without making it a thing.

"Reza," Amani said, following his look. "Came on a while back. Fast hands, never flustered, makes a better old-fashioned than I do." There was real fondness in it, the easy regard of a man who'd found someone he actually liked sharing a shift with. "Best second I've ever had back here."

Kyan took his scotch. Over the rim of the glass he caught the rest of it, now that he was looking. A man near the mouth of the private-room hallway, broad through the shoulders, brown gaze moving across the empty floor in a slow professional sweep. A bloodhound, earth and rain. A security badge sat clipped to his belt, and he moved with the unhurried patience of a career cop. And nearer, half in shadow at the end of the bar, a leaner man with dark eyes who wasn't working and wasn't drinking, just standing where he could see Amani and the elevator at the same time. A ferret. He hadn't introduced himself. He didn't need to. Everything about where he'd chosen to stand said whose safety he was minding.

"That your Dom?" Kyan asked, tipping his head a fraction toward the ferret.

"Nero." Amani said the name the way some people touched a wedding ring, without seeming to know he was doing it. "My mate. Runs security for the whole building. The big one's Harold, he's on a couple nights a week." He tipped his head toward the elevators. "And Bethany's packing up her office between check-ins, if you can believe it. Mom's sending her to run the LA club. So, say your goodbyes while she's still ours. She ships out soon, and the desk's already half handed off to people she trusts."

"I should go up and congratulate her before she's gone."

"You should. You won't." Amani's mouth tipped. "You never did like the part where you have to be charming to family. But she'd want to see you. We're all a little wrecked about it, in the happy way. She is going to be magnificent out there."

"I save it for people who can sign contracts." Kyan drank. The scotch was good, smooth and warm, and he made himself slow down. He didn't want to be even slightly drunk for what the night might turn into, though he couldn't have said yet what that was.

He was there for figures. He kept reminding himself of that. Figures, and a few days of being pleasant to an aunt he actually liked, and then back to Chicago to hand his mother the win and let her decide what to do with it. Simple. Bounded. In, out, done.

"So," Amani said, in the tone of a man laying down a card he'd been holding the whole time. "Sai's been coming around. If you still care about that kind of thing."

Kyan set the glass down very gently, because the alternative was to crush it.

For a moment the music was the only thing in the room.

He stared at the amber left in the bottom of the glass and kept his face still. Behind his ribs the lion stirred, ears back, low in its chest. Not anger. Older than anger. Sai's name in his cousin's mouth, casual as a weather report, after a year of making sure nobody said it around him at all. He pushed the lion down. People got banned from this club for letting the animal off the leash, and he was not going to be the visiting cousin who lost it at the bar on his first night back. He was better than that. He'd spent a year being better than that.

"You're an adult," he said when he could. "Find a better word than that kind of thing. He's the man I wanted to spend my life with. He left because he couldn't stand who I am. There's a word for it. It's just not a small one."

Amani had the grace to look apologetic. "Fair. Sorry."