Page 16 of Subduing the Shark

He stopped. His breathing had quickened and he seemed to notice it, forced it back down with a visible effort that made Harold's hands ache. That control. Always that control.

"You gave me a word for the price," Jack said. "I told you it wasn't that. I was wrong."

Harold didn't move. He kept his breathing even and his body still because if he reacted visibly Jack would stop talking. That was the most honest thing the shark had ever said to him and Harold was not going to be the reason it ended.

"I don't know who I am outside of the shiver," Jack said. "I've never been outside of it. Even here, at the club, I'm still going home to them every night. Still getting challenged. Still losing. Still lying there waiting for it to be over. The only thing that's different is that now I know what it's called, and knowing doesn't change anything. It just means I can see the bars around me. I know I'm in a cage now. I know I'm trapped."

The grief scent thickened. Harold breathed through it, let it fill his lungs. His body wanted to close the two-foot gap between them. His Dom brain was screaming at him to reach over and put a hand on Jack's shoulder, to do something, to fix the situation. His cop brain knew better. Cops don't touch a person in crisis without permission. Cops didn't make it about their need to help when they were drowning on their own.

"It changes something," Harold said. "Maybe not enough. But seeing the bars is the first step to knowing there's a door."

"That's the kind of thing someone says when they've never been in a cage."

"You're right. I haven't." Harold wasn't going to pretend he understood what Jack's life had been. He'd grown up in a pack that loved him. His sisters teased him and his mother called every weekend and his father sent pictures of the dogs. The worst thing that had ever happened to Harold in a relationship was a sub who didn't want to actually be in a relationship. He had no frame of reference for what Jack described and he wasn't going to fake one. "I don't know what it's like. But I'm sitting here and I'm listening."

Jack turned his head and looked at Harold directly. Full eye contact, no deflection, no wall. His face was raw in a way Harold had never seen it. The mask was gone. Not dropped, not cracked. Just absent, like Jack had exhausted his ability to maintain it and this was what was underneath. Tired eyes, clenched jaw, a mouth that looked like it hadn't smiled in so long the muscles had forgotten how.

"Why?" Jack asked. "Why do you keep showing up? You're not on shift. You're not getting paid for this. I'm a shark who kidnapped your friend's partner and you keep just being here."

Harold considered lying. Something professional, something about security concerns, something that would let both of them pretend this was about the job. He looked at Jack's face and decided the man had earned better than that.

"Because you remind me of the people I used to find," Harold said. "The ones who were lost so long they forgot they were missing. I spent fifteen years tracking people through the desert. The ones I couldn't get out of my head were never the ones who were screaming for help. They were the ones who'd gone quiet. Who'd stopped expecting anyone to come."

Jack stared at him. The ocean scent shifted, the fear thinning at the edges, and underneath it Harold caughtsomething he'd never smelled on Jack before. Faint, barely there, gone almost as soon as it appeared. He couldn't name it. It wasn't hope. It wasn't trust. It was closer to the smell of a door opening in a room that had been sealed shut, the first breath of outside air leaking in.

"Let me walk you home," Harold said.

The door closed. Jack's face reset, not to the blank mask of the club but to something tighter, more guarded, a wall built for this offer and this moment. "No."

"Jack."

"I said no." He stood up, brushing the concrete dust off his jeans. He looked down at Harold, still sitting on the steps, and his expression tightened before it went neutral again. "You don't want to see where I live. And I don't want you smelling what happens when I walk through the door."

He turned and started walking. No goodbye. The ocean scent trailed behind him, thinning as the distance grew, and Harold sat on the steps and tracked it until it faded into the city. South and east. Toward the residential blocks where the shiver houses sat in their neat row of stucco and dead lawns.

Harold's hands were shaking. He pressed them flat against his thighs and breathed and told himself that following Jack would be a violation of the only boundary the man had set. That Jack had the right to walk into that house. That Harold couldn't save someone who hadn't asked.

He believed all of that. He also believed that Jack was walking toward a place where he'd be challenged, pinned, and used by someone who'd never once asked if he wanted it, and that Jack would lie still and let it happen because his body had been trained to and because he had nowhere else to go.

Harold sat on the steps until the sun came up. Then he got in his truck and drove home and didn't sleep.

Chapter Ten

Two weeks after the crane conversation, Amani stopped talking to Jack directly. It wasn't sudden. It was erosion. The first few days after the thrown glasses, Amani would still nod when Jack approached the bar, still load trays himself, still occupy the same space without retreating. By the end of the first week, the nods had stopped. The trays appeared at the far edge of the bar, loaded and waiting, with Amani's back turned. By the second week, everything went through Nero again. Distance restored, walls rebuilt, the brief window of direct contact sealed shut like it had never existed.

Jack didn't blame him. He'd told Amani the truth about the crane and the truth had made things worse, the way truth usually did.You were one of us. One of his. Amani had said that and then spent two weeks retreating from the implications of it. Recognizing that the person who'd kidnapped him had also been violated by the same man wasn't the kind of information that made forgiveness easier. It made the whole picture uglier and more tangled and harder to file into categories like guilty and innocent.

Jack understood that. He'd been trying to file his own life into categories for weeks and nothing fit anymore.

His shifts had become mechanical. Show up, change, get supplies, clean tables, run drinks, avoid eye contact, go home. The regulars had stopped groping him after Amani's bar speech and Nero's follow-up, which involved Nero standing very close to the worst offenders and explaining the new policy in a tone that suggested the consequences would be creative. The drunk bear from the incident with Harold hadn't come back. The club was safer for Jack than it had been at the beginning, and theirony of feeling safer in the place where he was serving his punishment than in the house where he slept was not lost on him.

Harold found him in the supply closet on a Thursday, twenty minutes before the club opened.

Jack was counting bottles of cleaning spray because the inventory list on the wall said twelve and he could only find eleven and the discrepancy was going to bother him all night if he didn't resolve it. He was on his knees checking the back of the bottom shelf when Harold's shadow filled the doorway.

"You got a minute?"

Jack pulled the missing bottle out from behind a bucket of rags. Twelve. "I have several. The club doesn't open until nine."