Page 17 of Gagging the Gharial

"No," he said. "I'm not."

Lady Leo's eyebrow rose a fraction. "Your mother will eat you alive for it."

"My mother's already partway through the meal." Kyan leaned forward, forearms on his knees. "I told her no last night. To the jaguar she's spent a year lining up for me. To being mated off like a merger to make the family a force. I got back together with Sai, I'm staying with him, and I am done being the thing she aims at her problems. So no, Aunt Leo. I'm not going to help her gut you while Bethany's halfway out the door. You're the only one in this family who ever once treated me like a person instead of a line item. I won't rob you for her. Whatever it costs me."

For a long moment Lady Leo only looked at him, and Kyan held the look, the way he'd spent all weekend learning to hold the hard ones.

"Well." Her formidable face warmed at the edges. "It appears my nephew grew a spine while none of us were watching. Your gharial do that?"

"His name is Sai. And he didn't give me the spine. He just stood close enough that I remembered I'd always had one."

"Better answer than most men your age could manage." She sat back, and studied him the way she studied her folders, the calculating way, the way that meant she'd stopped merely reacting and started building. Kyan braced for whatever came next. "Here is a thing you may not have thought through, in the heat of all that bravery. You have just told the lioness who runs this entire empire that you've turned on your own mother and chosen love over the family's expansion. You understand what that makes you, in Zahara's ledger, by this time tomorrow?"

"Disinherited," Kyan said. "Cut off at the root. The allowance, the condo, the car with her business name on the title. I've been bracing for all of it since I hung up the phone."

"It makes you unemployed." Her mouth curved, almost his mother's shark smile and somehow its exact opposite, because there was warmth living under this one. "And it just so happens that I am a woman down one daughter, short a capable hand, and in real need of someone with a head for numbers who doesn't frighten easy and is, conveniently, already sleeping with one of my regulars and unlikely to leave town in a hurry." She tapped a single finger on the desk. "I don't do charity, nephew, so don't mistake this for it. I'm offering you a job. Here. In Vegas. Doing for me precisely what you'd have done for your mother, except pointed at building something instead of stealing it out from under family. The pay is real. The work is hard. You'd answer to a lioness who has never in her life mated anyone off against their will, or cared one whit what species their happiness showed up wearing." Her eyes flicked, deliberate, toward the half-packed office at his back, toward the whole building Nero and his people kept safe for the love of people who'd been to hell and walked home. "Think it over. You don't owe me an answer today."

She turned a pen slowly over in her fingers, and for a moment her gaze went somewhere past him, back across a lot of years. "Your mother and I came up in the same den, you understand. Same mother, same rules, the same expectations poured into the both of us with the same heavy hand. Zahara learned them cold and decided the only answer was to win the game harder than anyone else alive. Take more. Hold tighter. Mate up, marry up, expand, never stop. I learned the exact same rules and decided the game itself was rotten, so I went and built a house where the door only ever locks from the inside." Her eyes came back to him, sharp again. "She thinks I'm sentimental. She has thought so for forty years and said so to my face at every holiday. And every single year my sentiment turns a fatter profit than her teeth do, and it drives her clean out of her mind, which I will admit I have never once minded. So hear me clearly, nephew. This is not all kindness to you. Hiring the boy my sister threw in the bin, and then watching him do well at it, my way, in my house? That is the single most satisfying thing I will get to do all quarter, and at my age you take your pleasures where they're offered."

Kyan sat very still, because the floor of his life had just quietly shifted underneath him, and for once in thirty years it had shifted toward something instead of away.

His mother had spent his whole life making sure he needed her. The condo, the account, the car, one comfort at a time, so that the day he finally found his spine he'd realize he couldn't afford to use it. That was how she'd built him. And here was her own sister, in a plain dark suit, calmly handing him the one thing Zahara had always been careful never to let him have. A way out that didn't cost him everything. A door.

"I don't need until tomorrow," Kyan said.

Lady Leo held up a flat hand. "Yes, you do. You're going to want to talk it over with Sai before you tear your whole life up by the roots on the strength of one good morning. That isn't weakness. That's sense, and it's the first thing I'd want from anyone working for me." She slid her glasses back on and pulled a folder toward her, the audience plainly drawing to its close. "Go find your gharial. Last I saw heard was downstairs being fussed over by my son and wrapping Bethany's truly hideous coffee mugs in yesterday's newspaper. Come back to me tomorrow. If the answer's still yes, we'll talk salary, and then you may have the genuine pleasure of calling your mother to tell her that her own sister hired the boy she threw out. I intend to enjoy that part personally."

Kyan stood. At the door he paused, the way he never once had with Zahara, and turned back. "Thank you," he said, and meant it down to the floorboards.

"Don't thank me yet." Lady Leo didn't look up from the folder, but her voice gentled all the same. "Just be good to him, and be good at the work, and remember on the hard days that you chose this. Nobody poured it into you. That's the whole difference, nephew, between my house and your mother's. Everything in mine was picked up on purpose." She turned a page. "Now go. Some of us are drowning on a schedule."

Kyan went, and nobody walked him this time. The stairs and the eyes had been for the way up, for men without keys. The family elevator carried him down toward the back rooms where the man he loved was wrapping a departing woman's ugly mugs in yesterday's news, and for the first time in his managed, inherited, carefully controlled life, he felt like he was walking toward something he had chosen, start to finish, entirely for himself.

Chapter Eleven

Bethany's office had always been the tidiest room in the building, and it looked like a slow-motion storm had passed through it. Half the shelves stood bare. The other half held boxes in every state of fullness, and the desk was a chaos of bubble wrap and packing tape and a tower of coffee mugs so ugly they circled all the way back around to magnificent. Sai sat on the floor with a stack of newspaper, wrapping the mugs one at a time, because Bethany had told him to make himself useful if he was going to loiter, and because his hands needed a job that wasn't wringing themselves raw over Kyan upstairs.

"Not that one." Bethany pointed without looking up from the binder she was annotating in three colors of ink. "That one rides in my carry-on. Amani painted it for me at one of those paint-your-own-pottery places the week I started here, when I was sixteen and dead certain I'd be fired by Friday. The handle's crooked, the glaze ran, and it leaks if you fill it past the lopsided lion he put on the side. It's coming to Los Angeles whether it survives the flight or not."

"You're going to be great out there, you know." Sai set the lopsided-lion mug carefully aside, in its own safe spot. "Everyone in this building keeps telling me your mother doesn't make mistakes, and she's the one who picked you."

"My mother makes exactly one mistake at a time, very deliberately, and then calls it an investment." Bethany finally looked up and grinned, and Sai caught the resemblance to Amani in it, the same wide brightness that warmed a whole room. She was older than her brother by a year and sharper at the corners, and she'd run the front desk of this place since she was barely old enough to glare a drunk lion into behaving. "I'm terrified, if you want the honest version. I've worked one desk my entire life and now I'm supposed to step into my aunt’s shoes in a city that's never heard of me. But Mom's not throwing me off a cliff. She's giving me a team, real people she trusts, and she's leaving good hands here to cover the desk so the place doesn't fall apart the morning I leave. So, I get to be terrified with a safety line. That's the family way, on this side anyway."

"For what it's worth," Sai said, "this place is not going to be the same without you at that desk. I've been coming here a year. You're the only part of the front of house I wasn't ever scared of."

Her face went soft. "That is the nicest thing anybody's said to me all week, and you're a man who got handed off to strangers in my own club for a year, so I'm going to take it seriously and not even make fun of you." She came around the desk and folded down onto the floor across from him, abandoning the binder, and pulled a mug into her own lap to wrap. "I always wondered who you were waiting for, you know. You'd come in looking like a man headed to the dentist, do your sad little business in the back, and leave looking worse than when you came. I used to think, one of these nights he's either going to stop showing up, or somebody's finally going to turn out to be worth all that misery." She bumped her shoulder against his. "And then my idiot cousin strolls off the elevator out of nowhere, and Amani texts you, and now here you are on my floor wrapping my mugs and going pink every time somebody says his name. So. Tell me straight. Was he worth the year?"

Sai felt his face heat straight through. "Ask me again after the storm passes," he said. "His mother isn't exactly planning us a welcome dinner."

"Aunt Zahara wouldn't throw her own reflection a welcome dinner." Bethany said it with the easy, bone-deep contempt of someone who'd grown up watching the two sisters circle each other from a careful distance. "Whatever you do, don't you dare measure yourself by what that woman thinks is worth keeping. She would've traded any one of us for a better zip code and slept like a baby. Her scale is broken. Don't put yourself on it."

The door banged open and Amani came in carrying two cold glasses, handed one down to Sai and pressed the other into his sister's hands, and dropped into Bethany's abandoned chair like he owned it, which, Sai supposed, he half did.

"They have banned me from packing," Amani announced to the room. "Apparently I 'wrap things like a raccoon working a deadline.' So I've reassigned myself to morale and beverages." He nudged Sai's knee with the toe of his shoe. "You all right down there? You've got the dentist face on. Bethany's right, by the way, you really do have a dentist face."

"He's worried about Kyan's mother," Bethany supplied.

"Ah." Amani's grin gentled, and Sai saw again what he'd been noticing in him all week. The bright, easy, half-dressed lion who used to bounce around this place now had a quiet steadiness running underneath everything, like a river that had cut itself a deeper bed through hard ground. Amani had been through something. Sai didn't know the whole of it and had known better than to ask. He only knew that the man across from him wore long sleeves now and watched the room with a calm he'd plainly paid full price for. "Let me guess the exact flavor of it. You're scared you're the thing that costs him his family. His money. His whole life as he knows it. You're a guy with a small studio and a smaller job, and they're a dynasty, and you cannot for the life of you see how a person trades all of that for somebody like you."