Page 6 of Branding the Bat

The thing was, his pain tolerance was genuinely unusual. He'd known that since he was a kid: falling out of trees didn't make him cry, skinned knees were an inconvenience rather than a crisis. In his shifted form it made sense. Bats hung upside down for hours, squeezed through spaces that would crush other animals, and navigated by bouncing sound off walls in total darkness. Pain was background noise. The body registered it, filed it, and moved on. In human form, that translated to a threshold that most people found unsettling. The pronghorn had once slammed a car door on Sero's fingers and spent ten minutes panicking while Sero calmly freed his hand and said "ow."

He'd never thought of it as sexually relevant. Pain in a kink context was supposed to be intense, transformative, the kind of thing that pushed people into a different headspace. If someonecouldn't feel it enough, what was the point? He'd played with a few Doms at KK over the years, a bear who liked spanking, a wolf who was enthusiastic with a crop, and every time, the experience had been... fine. Pleasant. Like a massage that was a little too firm. He'd enjoyed the intimacy of it, the closeness, the trust. But he'd never gone under the way some subs described. Never hit that floating, formless place where pain became something else. He'd always assumed that place simply wasn't available to him.

But Trevor was a sadist. Not a Dom who enjoyed a little pain play, a genuine sadist. Amani had said so, and Amani didn't use words carelessly. If anyone could find Sero's actual threshold, the one below the threshold he'd been living at, it would be someone who made an art of pain.

The thought should have scared him. It excited him instead, and that was almost more unsettling.

Sero put the mango pit in the compost and wiped down the counter. He checked his phone: no messages, which was normal. His contact list was short. The casino's scheduling line, Amani (though they mostly talked at the bar), his landlord, and his mother in Tucson, who called every weekend and asked if he was eating enough fruit. He'd deleted the pronghorn's number three weeks ago. Before that, the gecko's. Before that, the wolf's. His phone was a graveyard of erasures.

He pulled up the KK website on his laptop, the real one, not the front-of-house version humans saw. The member portal had profiles, though most were pseudonymous. He searched for Trevor. Nothing under that name, which wasn't surprising. A lot of regulars didn't bother with online profiles. The club was the profile.

He closed the laptop and went to the grocery store instead. One block east, open twenty-four hours, staffed by humans who didn't know or care what he was. He bought a deli tray of cold cuts: chicken, turkey, ham, prosciutto, roast beef, because hehad no idea what Trevor liked and covering the bases seemed prudent. He bought more grapes for himself and a bag of dried figs because he was running low. The checkout girl looked at his basket, all fruit except for the deli tray, and said nothing, because Las Vegas was a city where no one's grocery choices were the strangest thing that happened on any given day.

Back home, he put everything away and sat on his couch. The afternoon light was dying. Through his bedroom windows, the first lights of the Strip were flickering on, turning the distant skyline into something that looked like a promise of excitement but was mostly just electricity and desperation. Sero had lived in Vegas for three years and still couldn't decide if he loved it or merely tolerated it. The city was good for shifters: big, anonymous, full of noise that covered other noise. No one noticed strange because everyone was strange. And the casino night shift paid well enough to keep him in dried fruit and warehouse rent.

He tried to watch a documentary about meerkats. Couldn't focus. Tried a different one about deep-sea creatures. Couldn't focus on that either.

He kept thinking about the paracord. The efficiency of the knot. The way it tightened when he pulled against it and loosened when he didn't. The metaphor wasn't subtle, and Sero wasn't stupid.

He went to bed early and lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling. The Strip cast colored light through the gaps in his blinds, red, gold, blue, cycling endlessly. His wrist, the one Trevor had tied, felt different from the other one. Not sore. Not marked. Just aware. As if the skin remembered the pressure and was waiting for it to come back.

He fell asleep thinking about cedar and black tea and the gentleness of a kiss on his cheek from a man who wanted to test his limits.

***

The next day, Sero arrived at Kinky Kritters at noon with a bag of grapes in one hand and a deli tray in the other. The club was quieter during the day: no thumping bass, no purple lights, just the normal amber glow and the hum of the ventilation system. A few people were scattered around the public areas, talking or reading or doing whatever people did in a kink club at lunchtime when the kink hadn't started yet.

Amani was behind the bar. Of course Amani was behind the bar. Sero was starting to wonder if the lion actually lived back there, curled up between the bottles when the club closed.

"You're back." Amani's grin was immediate and knowing. "He must have gotten under your skin in a hurry."

"Shut up," Sero grumbled.

"He's got a room for you already. Right through there." Amani nodded toward a door on the left side of the room. Then the grin faded, replaced by something more careful. "Don't be stupid. Playing with a sadist is tricky. Pain can be amazing, but it's a dangerous slope too. If it feels like too much, tell him to stop. He will."

Sero hesitated. "You sound like you know more about him than I thought. Was your scent ever on him?"

It was a personal question, and he knew it. But if there was history between Amani and Trevor, he wanted to know now rather than later.

Amani's smile returned, smaller and more private. "Not even a little. I like pain. Sometimes I like it a lot. But," he shrugged, and the shrug carried the weight of a philosophical position, "I don't play with small shifters. I like my Doms big and predatory. Call me a species snob if you want. It's a lion thing." He paused, then leaned forward with his elbows on the bar. "But I've known plenty of people who've spent time with Trevor, and they all tell me good things. Most of them actually tell me I'mmissing out by limiting myself. I doubt it, but you can make up your own mind."

"I intend to."

"Good. Do you want a drink before you meet with him?"

Sero was thirsty, but he wanted a clear head. He wanted to feel everything. "Got lemonade?"

"Of course." Amani poured it quickly, fresh-squeezed, because Amani's bar didn't do anything from concentrate, and set it in front of him. "Have fun. Be smart. Use the safe word if you need to. And Sero?" He waited until Sero met his eyes. "If he pushes you further than you want to go, you come find me. I don't care what he says or what you think you agreed to. You come find me."

"I will."

Amani nodded, apparently satisfied, and went back to polishing glasses. Sero picked up the deli tray, the lemonade, and, because he only had two hands and a mouth, clenched the bag of grapes between his teeth. Amani watched this logistical disaster with visible delight, then came around the bar to open the door for him.

"You're a hero," Sero mumbled around the grapes.

"I know." Amani closed the door softly behind him.

The room was small, a private play room, one of the dozen or so that lined the corridor behind the main floor. Low lighting, warm wood, a padded bench along one wall and a sturdy wooden table in the center. A leather couch in the corner. No windows. The walls were thick enough to contain most sounds, though Sero knew from experience that really ambitious sounds still leaked through.