Page 23 of Gagging the Gharial

The kitchen was loud and bright and crowded. Amani stood at the stove stirring something he was very likely ruining, Nero beside him slicing bread with the grim concentration of a man who'd rather have eyes on the exits, the two of them folded into each other's space the easy unthinking way they always were, mate-close, hip to hip. And at the head of it all, in an apron thrown over a good blouse, wooden spoon held in one hand like a scepter she'd earned in combat, stood Lady Leo.

Sai stepped forward before his nerve could desert him and held the little pot out in both hands. "I didn't know what you're supposed to bring to something like this," he said. "So I brought something alive. It's rosemary, off one of mine at home. This struck me as a house that feeds people, and you can never have too much rosemary."

Lady Leo took it, turned it once in the light, and for a moment the head-of-the-table look slipped. "You're late," she told Kyan, "and you brought a nervous reptile carrying a houseplant." She carried the cutting to the window herself and set it among her own, in the spot that got the morning sun. "Good. Sit. Not there, that's Amani's chair, he's territorial about it and almost nothing else. Sai, you're next to me. Kyan, across, where I can watch the both of you react to things in real time." She leveled the spoon at the chairs until they filled. "We eat first. I don't interrogate a man on an empty stomach. It's bad for the digestion and it makes him lie to speed things along. The hard part waits until there's pie on the table."

"That's a threat," Amani translated, setting down a dish. "I need you to understand the pie is a threat. Walk in knowing that."

Dinner was the warmest meal Kyan had sat through in a decade.

It was loud the way his mother's table had never once been, everyone talking over everyone, Bethany and Amani sniping with the bottomless ammunition only siblings carried, Nero offering exactly one dry sentence every few minutes that landed twice as hard for being rationed. Lady Leo ran the whole thing from the head of the table without appearing to do anything at all, topping up glasses, killing arguments before they caught, missing nothing.

Sai, to Kyan's quiet amazement, unclenched. By the second helping he was deep in an argument with Amani about whether a fern counted as a houseplant or a long-term commitment, and winning, and Bethany was laughing so hard she had to put her wine down, and Kyan sat across the table and watched the man he loved get folded into a family like he'd been one chair short of it for years and nobody had noticed until tonight.

Partway through, Lady Leo tapped her glass with a fork, and the table dropped to something like attention.

"Next month," she said, looking at her daughter. "Next month and this one gets on a plane to go run my Los Angeles club into the ground. I've assembled her a team. I've signed off on a budget that gave me heartburn. And I have decided, against my every instinct, to let her make her own mistakes out there instead of mine." She lifted the glass. "To Bethany. Who has run my front desk since she was sixteen and is about to find out how much harder it is to run everything."

"To Bethany," they all said, and Amani knocked his glass against his sister's hard enough to slosh, and Bethany rolled her eyes at the ceiling and blinked fast and didn't quite manage to look like the toast hadn't gotten her.

"I'm going to be on the phone constantly," she warned the table. "I'm going to call all of you at terrible hours and demand you tell me I'm not failing."

"We know," Nero said. It was his second sentence of the night, and it landed soft. "We'll pick up."

Then the plates were cleared, the pie came out, and Lady Leo folded her hands on the table.

"All right," she said. "The hard part."

The room didn't go silent. It settled. Everyone at the table had survived this exact moment once, and it showed. Amani sat back with his fork. Bethany propped her chin in her hand. Nero, for the first time all evening, looked directly and openly interested, like a man settling in to watch a fight he had a stake in.

"I vetted Nero at this table," Lady Leo told Sai, conversational, cutting clean wedges of pie. "A while back, right where you're sitting. I asked him things no one had ever had the spine to ask him, and I watched him decide, in front of everyone, whether to lie to me. He didn't. That's the entire test, in case it isn't obvious. I care less about your answers than about whether you'll hand me a true one when a kinder one is sitting right there for the taking." She slid a plate in front of him. "So. My nephew set his whole life on fire for you, in my lobby, in front of my entire day staff. Tell me why I should believe it'll burn clean and not just take him down to the ground with it."

Kyan opened his mouth. Lady Leo raised a single finger without looking at him, and he closed it.

Sai put down his fork. He was pale, but his hands stayed still on the table, and when he spoke his voice held.

"You shouldn't believe it because I say so," he said. "You don't know me yet. The only reason you've got to trust this is the same one I've got, and it's not a flattering one. I loved him before any of this existed. Before I knew about the empire, before the money, before I ever heard his last name land in a room and watched people sit up straighter. I fell for a man who hid half of himself from me for months because he was certain I'd run if I saw it. And then he showed me a piece of it, and I did run. Once. It was the worst thing I've ever done, and I spent a whole year paying for it badly, in a club I couldn't stand, getting hurt by strangers, trying to turn myself into someone who'd earned a second try at him." He lifted his eyes and held hers, steady. "I don't need one thing he has. I walked into this with my own apartment, my own job, my own life, all three built with nobody's name opening a door for me, and I'm keeping all three no matter how this goes. So if it ever does burn down, I'll be the one walking into the fire after him. The same way I'm told somebody once walked into one for your son." He let that sit. "That's the only promise I've got to give you. I think it might be the only kind that's worth anything."

Lady Leo didn't answer that right away. She cut another wedge of pie nobody had asked for and pushed it toward the center of the table, and when she spoke again her voice had gone quieter, which Kyan had learned tonight was the more dangerous register, the same as it was in her sister, the one place the two women were alike.

"One more," she said. "Then I'll leave you alone. You spent a year in my club, by your own account, hating every minute of it. And the thing my nephew hid from you, the thing you ran from once, is the thing my whole business is built on. So, I need to know it isn't tolerance. I have watched good people decide they could put up with a partner's nature to keep the partner, and I have watched that curdle every single time, because nobody wants to be the thing their love endures. I won't sign off on my nephew being somebody's tolerated inconvenience. So, tell me plainly. Is this world yours, Sai, or are you just willing to suffer it for him?"

Sai was quiet a moment, and Kyan saw him actually think about it rather than reach for the answer that would land best, which was the only thing the question had really been testing.

"It's mine," Sai said finally. "I didn't know that for a long time. I came into the club hating it because I was doing it alone, badly, and getting hurt. I thought the hating meant it wasn't for me. But it wasn't the wanting I hated. It was the being lost. The first time somebody actually showed me how it was supposed to work, slow, with a word that stopped everything and someone who asked before he touched me, I found out it was mine all along. I just hadn't had anybody hand me the map." He turned the fork over in his fingers. "I'm not enduring anything. I spent a year trying to teach myself a language I wanted to speak. He's just the first person who ever spoke it back."

The kitchen had gone completely quiet.

Kyan watched his aunt study Sai the way she studied a difficult ledger, that long unhurried calculating look, and found his own heart going hard against his ribs, because he wanted this more than he'd let himself know. Not her permission. Sai had never needed anyone's permission, that was the entire point of him. Her welcome. The single thing his own mother had refused to give the man he loved, refused on sight, refused on principle.

Lady Leo set down the pie server.

"Amani." She didn't take her eyes off Sai. "Get the man a key to the floor. The good spare. Same as Nero's."

For a second nobody moved. Then the whole table went up in noise.

"He passed," Lady Leo said, over the top of it, the corner of her mouth lifting. "Passed cleaner than you did, ferret, no offense intended. You wept."

"I misted," Nero said, dignified.