Page 6 of Subduing the Shark

It wasn't there.

He rolled onto his side and pressed his face into the pillow and waited for sleep to take him somewhere better than here.

Chapter Four

Harold arrived at Kinky Kritters three hours before the club opened and found Amani rearranging the liquor shelf for what Nero quietly informed him was the fourth time that week.

"He does this when he's processing," Nero said. He was at the small desk in the security office, which was barely more than a converted supply closet that still smelled faintly of industrial cleaner. He had the camera feeds up on the monitor, eight views of the empty club cycling through in rotation. "He'll reorganize the entire bar, top to bottom, decide he hates it, and start over. Last month he moved the vodkas three times before he was happy."

Harold leaned in the doorway. "Is this about the shark?"

"I haven't asked." Nero didn't look up from the monitor. "When he wants to talk about it, he'll talk about it. Pushing gets you nowhere with him."

That was one of the things Harold had always respected about Nero. Patience that would have driven most people insane. When they'd been partners on the force, Nero had been the one who could sit in a stakeout car for nine hours without complaining, who could wait out a suspect's silence in the interrogation room until the quiet became more uncomfortable than talking. Harold had always been the one to break first. He'd ask the question, make the observation, fill the dead air. Nero would just wait, dark eyes steady, until the world gave him what he needed.

He missed that partnership more than he'd expected to. When Nero had told him he was leaving the force to take thesecurity position at Kinky Kritters, Harold had made the joke about ferrets landing on their feet and then gone home and sat in his truck in the driveway for twenty minutes because the station was going to be wrong without him. Years of working together. Years of reading crime scenes side by side, of Nero tracking behavioral patterns while Harold tracked scent, of a shorthand so precise they could clear a building without speaking. He didn't replace that. He just learned to live with the gap.

Harold's phone buzzed. He glanced at it. His sister, texting a picture of her youngest in a Halloween costume, months late because she'd just found the photo on her phone. He sent back a thumbs up and pocketed it. His family was small and scattered. Two sisters, both married to humans, both living in Colorado where the pack had settled three generations ago. His parents had retired to a cabin near Durango with four shelter oneform dogs, which Harold's father found endlessly amusing and his mother found moderately embarrassing. Harold was the only one who'd left. The only one who'd become a cop instead of settling into the quiet life the pack had built in the mountains.

His mother had asked him once, during a Christmas visit, why he did what he did. Why he tracked missing people through miles of desert? Why did he work both the shifter and human divisions when most shifters wouldn't dream of it? Why he'd moved to a city that smelled like concrete and exhaust when he could be home in the pines?

He'd told her it was interesting. That was true but it wasn't the whole answer. The whole answer was that Harold had been born with a nose that could follow a scent trail three days old across forty miles of open ground, and the first time he'd used it to find a missing child in the Mojave, he'd understood what he was for. Not every gift was a calling, but his was. He could find people. And the ones who needed finding the most were the ones who couldn't ask for help.

He was starting to think Jack might be one of those people.

"I'm going to go say hi to Amani," Harold told Nero. "You want anything from the bar?"

"He'll offer before you ask. He always does."

Harold walked out onto the main floor. The club looked different with the lights up and the music off. Cleaner, bigger, the bones of the space visible under all the atmosphere. The stage was bare. The private room doors were closed. The tables that Jack had cleaned the night before were gleaming, and Harold noticed that too. The shark had done a good job. Better than most of the regular staff, if Harold was being honest.

Amani was behind the bar, but the energy was different from the night shift. His hoodie was unzipped, which was new. He still wore it, still had the sleeves pulled long, but the zipper being down felt like a concession to the warmth of the room rather than a loosening of armor. He was sorting bottles by some system that only made sense to him, muttering to himself as he moved a bourbon from one shelf to another.

"You're here early," Amani said without looking up.

"Nero wants me to review the sightline maps for the south hallway. Thinks we've got a dead zone near room six."

"We do. I've been telling him that for two weeks. There's a column that blocks the camera." Amani slid a bottle of whiskey into position and stepped back to evaluate it. "You look like you want to talk about the shark."

Harold pulled out a stool and sat down. There was no point pretending with Amani. The lion read people almost as well as Nero did, just through different means. Where Nero watched behavior, Amani watched faces. "How are you doing with him being here?"

Amani moved to the other end of the bar and started rearranging the mixers. Grenadine, simple syrup, bitters, arranged and rearranged. "It's weird. He's quiet. He does whatI tell him and he doesn't complain. He cleaned those tables like his life depended on it."

"Maybe it does, in his head."

Amani glanced at him. "Nero said the same thing." He set down a bottle of Angostura and leaned on the bar top. "I thought I'd be angrier. When I said I was ready for him to come here, I thought I'd want to make him scrub floors with a toothbrush and hate every second of it. But he showed up and he was just... scared. He tried to hide it but I could see it. He was terrified to be in this room with me."

"He should be."

"Maybe." Amani chewed on his lip. "But that's not what bothered me. What bothered me was that he was scared of everything. Not just me. The crowd, the noise, the guys touching him. All of it. He looked like he wanted to crawl out of his own skin the whole time he was here."

Harold thought about what Nero had said. Trained not to have boundaries. "I noticed that too."

"Last night, after I got on the bar and told everyone to leave my people alone, he looked at me like I'd handed him a million dollars. Like no one had ever told someone else to stop touching him." Amani's voice tightened and he turned away, back to his bottles. "I know what that feels like. And I hate that I know that because of what he and his friends did to me. But I still know what it feels like."

Harold let the silence sit. He'd learned that from Nero. Give the person room to finish the thought.

"He's not the worst of them," Amani finally said. "He called in the tip. He sat in holding for months without complaining. And last night he worked his ass off and let people grab at him and never once asked me to make it stop. I had to decide on my own to do that." He straightened up and pulled his hoodie closed, not zipping it, just gathering it around himself. "I don'tforgive him. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But I'm not going to torture him either. That's not what this is for."