Page 9 of Gagging the Gharial

They rode up together, and Sai stood with his head high for once, which was a small ridiculous thing to be proud of and he was proud of it anyway. Kyan took up the center of the elevator the way lions took up the center of everything. He wasn't Amani, his family didn't own this place, but he was still a big cat, and it showed. So, when a shark slipped in just as the doors were closing, broad and cold-scented and already letting his gaze travel slow over Sai, Sai felt his old instinct to make himself smaller, and didn't get the chance to act on it.

Kyan's arm came around him. Not grabbing, just settling, a warm weight across Sai's shoulders, and over the top of Sai's head Kyan bared his teeth at the shark in a flat, unhurried display that needed no translation. The shark found something fascinating to look at on the elevator wall.

Sai pressed his palm to the small of Kyan's back, thanking him without words. He hadn't thought the shark would do anything. He just hadn't had anyone stand between him and the possible aggression in a long, long time.

In the lobby, Kyan traded his arm for Sai's hand again, and led him out into the warm Vegas night and over to a car that made Sai stop walking.

"This isn't you," Sai said. It was a low, sleek convertible, the kind of expensive that announced itself a block away, and Kyan had always preferred his money quiet.

"My mother booked the trip." Kyan opened the passenger door for him, and those four words explained the whole car. Sai had never met Zahara, only assembled her out of overheard phone calls and the few stories Kyan let slip, a woman built entirely out of diamonds and certainty, the sort who'd choose a car for the statement it made about her even when she'd never sit in it. Kyan slid behind the wheel. "She doesn't travel any way but loud."

"That explains the spaceship." Sai sank into a seat that probably cost more than his monthly rent and tried to look like he belonged in it. "Where are we actually going?"

"Sushi."

"You don't eat fish. Lions don't eat fish."

"Gharials do." Kyan pulled them smoothly out toward the Strip, the lights sliding gold across his face. "Trust me. My mother staged this whole trip. The hotel, the car, a standing table at every room in town she wants me seen in. The reservations are the one useful thing which is the one useful thing she's done all week."

Sai let it go and watched the city pour past the window, and tried not to read too much into a man driving him to dinner in the middle of the night like the last year had been a long drought that had finally moved on.

The restaurant, when they reached it, said one word on the front in plain letters. Fish. Heavy black curtains hid the windows, and there was nothing about it that promised sushi at all, let alone sushi worth the drive. Sai had walked past places like it and assumed they were fronts for something. He kept that opinion to himself as Kyan handed the keys to a valet and walked them up to a host standing in a small room with a closed door behind him.

"Reservation?" the host asked.

"Kyan, lion. Sai, gharial."

Sai's head turned sharply. Nobody announced species out loud. Not in front of humans, not ever, because the entire unspoken agreement of shifter life was that everyone passed for human at all times, everywhere, no exceptions. The host only smiled and touched his own chest.

"Boa," he said. "Follow me. Your room's ready."

It was a shifter restaurant. Sai followed the boa down a corridor of stark white walls and hand-numbered doors, listening hard and hearing nothing through any of them. "Soundproofed," he guessed.

"For our guests' privacy. Though that's not the only reason." The boa glanced back at him, amused. Then a sound came from behind one of the doors they passed, a muffled animal screech that no human throat had ever made, and Sai jumped back into Kyan without deciding to.

"They're shifted," he breathed. "In public."

"You can shift here, if you want to." Kyan's hand found the small of his back and stayed there, steadying, as they walked. "It's the whole point of the place. Total privacy, every kind. A little alarm goes off when your time's up."

Sai had no idea what to do with that. He'd shifted maybe a dozen times in the last five years, always alone, always somewhere remote, because his other shape was enormous and graceless on land and made people who weren't expecting it afraid. He hadn't known a place like this existed. He hadn't known, until this exact hallway, how much he'd wanted one to.

The boa stopped at a blank white door and opened it. "Enjoy yourselves. Dinner's laid out." And he was gone back up the corridor before Sai could decide whether to thank him.

Sai stepped in, and his eyes went first to the sushi, dozens of pieces of it, jewel-bright and beautiful, and then to the fact that it had been laid out across a man.

He was on the table on his stomach, a sheet draped low over his hips and nothing else, his face down in a padded hole the way a person lies for a massage, headphones over his ears. The sushi ran in careful rows along his back and the backs of his thighs. He seemed entirely relaxed about it.

Kyan stepped toward him, closer than Sai liked, and Sai caught his sleeve and pulled him back. "This is too weird," he said under his breath.

"You don't want sushi?"

"I want sushi. I don't want sushi off a person." Sai kept his voice low, though the headphones meant the man probably couldn't hear them. "Who even is he? Does he actually want to be doing this? You can't just assume."

That was the thing he'd learned the hard way, over and over, in rooms with numbers on the doors. A yes couldn't be assumed. It had to be real and it had to be spoken, and every time Sai had gotten hurt was a time somebody had skipped that part.

"Then let's ask him," Kyan said, like it was obvious, and that was somehow the most reassuring thing he'd done all night.

He went and knelt beside the man and tapped his shoulder, and the man lifted his head and slid one earpiece off.