Page 12 of Gagging the Gharial

"For some people that total handover is exactly the deal. They adore it. It's a gorgeous thing when it's real and freely chosen." Kyan lifted one of the necklaces off its peg without quite deciding to, a heavy plain gold chain, and the weight of it in his palm dragged up a memory whole. "I gave you a chain like this once. For our six months. I wasn't thinking collar at all, I just liked the idea of something of mine sitting against your skin. But you could shift in it without losing it, so it would have worked, if either of us had owned the word for what we were circling back then."

"I still have it," Sai said quietly. "I have all of them. Every single thing you ever gave me. I couldn't make myself get rid of one."

Kyan let that be true for a moment without touching it. Then he hung the chain back on its peg before it could become a conversation he wasn't braced to have standing in a sex shop at one in the morning with a clerk twelve feet away turning pages.

"Amani's mated now," Sai offered, lighter, steering them both back off the cliff's edge. "To Nero. The ferret who runs all the security at the club. They're disgustingly good together, honestly. He looks at Amani like the building's on fire and Amani's the exit." He hesitated, then went on. "Would your mom have been strange about that? A lion mated to a reptile, or a lion with anything that isn't another big cat?"

The question was innocent. It landed square on the one nerve in Kyan's whole body that had never fully closed over.

"Lady Leo wasn't strange about it at all," he said, which was true and also not the question Sai had asked. "She vetted Nero like a forensic accountant and then she handed him a keycard and a security budget. That's how that side of the family does things. You earn the lioness's respect, on her terms, and then you're family, and species doesn't enter into it."

"And your side?"

"Not right now," Kyan said. "Maybe later."

He turned toward the register with the gag in hand, and Sai caught his elbow, light, not pulling, just stopping him in place.

"Hey." Sai's voice had gone careful. "What did that mean. Your side, not right now."

Kyan turned back. He could have deflected. Sai was visibly leaving him the door to. But they'd spent a whole night learning to say the true thing out loud to each other, and it felt cheap to start lying again on the easy stuff.

"You know how every kind of shifter runs itself differently," he said. "Wolves and their packs, bears off being solitary, all of that. With lions, the females hold the power. Flat out, no asterisk. The males follow what the females decide. I can argue with my mother till I lose my voice, and once in a blue moon I even win the argument, but in the long run, on anything that actually matters, I do what she wants. That's not something I can fix. It's just what I am." He leaned a shoulder against a shelf of glossy magazines. "Lady Leo runs that whole empire of clubs, and right now she's stretched to the edge of herself, because she's pulling Bethany up to take over Los Angeles and standing up a whole second club out there from the bare studs, all of it on her own dime, all of it at once. And my mother looked at her own sister juggling every bit of that and decided this was the ideal moment to demand a third Chicago club for herself. That's the actual reason I'm in town. To make the numbers sing so my mom can carve more off the top while Leo's hands are full keeping the lights on."

"That's a lot to carry into a sushi date," Sai said softly.

"You have no idea." It came out flatter than Kyan meant it to. "And the worst part is I'm good at it. I'll probably even close it. I just hate that hating it has never once changed whether I do it."

Sai was quiet for a beat, looking at him. "That sounds like its own kind of collar," he said. "The kind nobody asked if you wanted before they buckled it on."

It went through Kyan clean, because it was true, and because Sai had found his way to it on his own in a single sentence. And that was him, the man who'd just finished explaining he would never put a claim on another person's whole life, wearing exactly that, fitted to him at birth and never once unbuckled since.

"Yeah," Kyan said. "It is."

He didn't say the rest of it. That his mother had a jaguar lined up for him, the right bloodline, the right portfolio, named twice now in calls he'd hung up on too fast. That doing what she wanted had a price coming, and he'd been working hard not to look at it. He looked at Sai instead, holding the gag they were about to buy together, looking back at him like an answer. And the price suddenly felt like something a man could just refuse to pay.

"Come on." He settled his hand at the small of Sai's back again, because he liked it there and because he needed to move before he said something enormous in entirely the wrong room. "Let's go pay for your first real piece of gear. Then I'm taking you to the hotel, and I'm finished talking about my mother for the night."

Sai grinned, the gag held loose in one hand. "You're the boss."

"In the room," Kyan said. "Out here we're just two guys buying a horse bit at this hour of the night."

But he was smiling when he said it, and the smile held all the way to the register, where the clerk rang them up without totally glancing away from his paperback. Sai paid for the gag himself with his own card. Such a small thing. It felt like the most important purchase either of them had made in a year.

Chapter Eight

The hotel was the kind of place Sai had only ever seen from the outside, through glass, on his way to somewhere he actually belonged.

The lobby was all marble, crystal, and hush, the floor so polished it threw the chandeliers back up at the ceiling. Sai stumbled half a step crossing it because he kept looking up instead of down. He felt like a smudge somebody had let in by mistake. Only Kyan's hand around his, warm and certain, kept him walking toward the bank of mirrored elevators at the far end like the doors to somewhere even more expensive.

"Don't get skittish on me," Kyan murmured as the nearest one opened.

"It's just a little more than I'm used to." Which was the understatement of Sai's entire life. His apartment was a studio over a laundromat. He leaned into Kyan's side as the doors closed, and the mirrored walls caught them and threw them back, again and again, a hundred Kyans and a hundred Sais receding into a gold-lit forever. Sai could have stood there all night, watching the two of them go on without end. It felt like a promise the night hadn't actually made yet.

The elevator climbed for a long time. When it finally opened, it opened on the penthouse.

"Seriously?" Sai breathed.

"My mother only travels one way." Kyan gestured him out ahead, and Sai stepped into a room that cost more than he'd earn in a decade. A crushed black velvet couch. The same white marble flowing up from the lobby. Floor-to-ceiling glass with the whole glittering valley spread out below it, and past a set of French doors, steam rose gently off the surface of a private hot tub built into the terrace.