Page 1 of Subduing the Shark

Chapter One

The guards at the holding facility didn't tell Jack where they were taking him. He'd stopped asking questions three months earlier, when it became clear that no one assigned to watch him considered conversation part of the job. Shifter council holding wasn't prison, technically, but the distinction had stopped mattering around week two. Small room. Delivered meals. No phone. No visitors. No information about when or whether he'd get out, because that decision didn't belong to the council, the guards, or the community defenders who'd processed the other three sharks through the system months ago. It belonged to a lion bartender Jack had helped kidnap, and Amani hadn't said a word about Jack's fate since the day of the sentencing hearing when he'd looked at the council and said, "When I'm ready."

Jack had spent a lot of time thinking about what ready would look like for Amani. Whether it would come at all. Some nights in holding he'd been sure that the lion would simply never say the word, and Jack would sit in that room until the council got tired of paying for his meals and tossed him back to the shiver. Other nights he'd thought maybe Amani would say ‘yes’ just to watch Jack suffer up close, which was fair enough. Jack would have let him. The suffering wouldn't be new, just different.

When the guard opened his door that morning and said, "Get dressed, you're going," Jack didn't ask where. He put on the clothes he'd arrived in three months earlier, tried not to notice how loosely they hung on him, and followed the guard to a van with blacked-out windows. A different guard drove. Neither of them spoke.

He smelled where they were going before he saw it. Deep in the warehouse district south of the Strip, the air shifted. Concrete and car exhaust gave way to something warmer, denser, layered with the musk of dozens of shifter species packed into the same city block. The van turned off the main road and pulled up in front of a glass-fronted office building that looked entirely ordinary from the outside. A few stories of tinted windows. A lobby with a front desk. Nothing that suggested what was underground.

Kinky Kritters.

He'd been there before, plenty of times. Always at night, always with the shiver, always when the club was open and packed and the music shook the elevator on the way down. He'd never been there in the daylight. The building looked different in the sun. Smaller. Cleaner. Just an office building with a lion's den hidden inside.

The guard walked him to the front door and left. Didn't say goodbye, didn't wish him luck, didn't explain what was supposed to happen next. Jack stood on the sidewalk for a full minute before he made himself walk through the glass doors.

Bethany was behind the front desk. He hadn't forgotten what she looked like. Amani's sister had the same amber eyes, the same high cheekbones, the same lean predator's build that made people forget she was barely five foot six until she opened her mouth and the lioness roared out. She was doing a crossword puzzle when he walked in, and she didn't look up right away. When she did, the pen in her hand went still.

"So, they finally said you could come."

Jack wasn't sure if she meant Amani or Lady Leo. It didn't matter. He nodded.

Bethany set the pen down and leaned back in her chair. Her amber eyes were hard, the playfulness he remembered from his nights at the club scrubbed clean out of them. She looked at himthe way she'd look at a stain on the floor that someone else was going to have to deal with. "Downstairs. They're waiting."

He moved toward the elevator. Her voice followed him.

"And if you ever so much as breathe on my brother wrong, I'll shift and tear your throat out. I won't wait for my mother's permission."

Jack hit the elevator button and didn't look back. The doors opened, he stepped in, and the smell of the club hit him like a wall. Alcohol. Sweat. Leather. A dozen different musks from a dozen different species, soaked into the walls, floors, and furniture over years of use. Under it all, faint but unmistakable, the warm heavy scent of lions. This was their territory. Everything about the place announced it.

The elevator opened into the club and Jack blinked against the lights. Full brightness, no music, no crowd. He could see everything. The bar stretched along the far wall, bottles arranged with a precision that suggested someone who cared about every inch of it. Tables and chairs spread across the main floor, most of them empty. A hallway led to the private rooms. The whole space felt exposed without the crowd and the noise and the low lighting to shrink it down.

Lady Leo stood beside the bar with a martini in her hand.

Jack's stomach dropped.

She looked exactly as he remembered. Perfect posture, heels that made no sound on the concrete floor, dark hair pulled back in a bun so tight it seemed to hold her entire face in place. Her gaze found him the second the elevator doors opened, and she watched him cross the floor without blinking. She was a lioness. She could hold a stare longer than he could hold his breath.

There were three other people in the room. Two of them were cops, or had been. They had an air about them. Competent and ready. The one closest to Lady Leo was lean and angular, compact muscle under a button-down that was tucked in tooprecisely to be casual. Dark hair, dark eyes, a face that gave nothing away. He stood with his weight balanced, hands visible, positioned so that he could reach Lady Leo and the person behind the bar with equal speed. Jack recognized him from the investigation. Nero. The ferret. Amani's Dom and the head of security at Kinky Kritters. He'd been a detective when Jack first encountered him. In the early days after the kidnapping, Nero had been the one who'd come to the shiver house to take Jack's statement. He'd been calm then too. Controlled. Reading everything Jack said and probably half of what he didn't.

The other cop stood further back, arms crossed, watching Jack's approach with an expression that mixed professional assessment with something harder to name. He was bigger than Nero. Broader shoulders, thicker arms, brown eyes that tracked Jack's movement across the floor with a focus that felt almost physical. A bloodhound. Jack could smell it on him. Earth, warmth, and wet loam, like damp soil after rain. Harold. Jack remembered the name from the holding facility paperwork. He'd been the one to track Amani's scent to the van.

And behind the bar, half-hidden by Nero's position, stood Amani.

Jack's feet nearly stopped. He forced himself to keep walking, to keep his face neutral, to give them nothing. But Amani. Amani looked nothing like the lion Jack remembered from the club. The Amani he knew had worked the bar in tiny black shorts and nothing else, had grinned at everyone who came through the door, had moved through the room like he owned it because he did. That Amani had been fearless, loud, golden, and alive.

The Amani who stood there in the bright lights was wearing a gray hoodie two sizes too big, with the sleeves pulled down over his hands. Jeans instead of shorts. He was thinner. His amber gaze found Jack and stayed there.

Jack watched something move behind them that he couldn't read. Not fear, exactly, though that was part of it. Amani's body was doing things his face wasn't admitting to. His fingers worked the hem of the hoodie. His weight stayed on his back foot, ready to move. He tracked Jack's position in the room the way a prey animal tracks a predator, constant and automatic, even though Amani was anything but prey.

There was no doubt, Jack had done this to him. Not alone, not by himself, but he'd been part of it. He'd held the rope. He'd driven the van. He'd known what Grainger was like, what the crane did to the people delivered to him, and he'd handed Amani over anyway. Because the shiver needed a body. Because Amani was available and Lady Leo had recently upset the shiver. Because Jack had wanted to belong badly enough to trade another person for it.

He'd known all of that in holding. He'd thought about it every day for months. Thinking about it and seeing it were different things. The hoodie was a different thing. The way Amani wouldn't come out from behind the bar was a different thing. The fact that Nero was positioned like a shield between Jack and the man he loved was a different thing, and Jack deserved every inch of distance in this room.

"You showed up," Lady Leo said. It wasn't a compliment. It was a check mark on a list.

"Yes, ma'am."

She sipped her martini, studying him over the rim. "Months in council holding. I'm told you were cooperative. Didn't cause problems, didn't try to contact your shiver, didn't complain about the wait." She set the glass down on the bar. "None of that earns you anything here. You understand that."