Page 7 of Subduing the Shark

"What is it for then?"

Amani picked up a clean glass and held it up to the light, checking for spots. "He needs to understand what he did. Not just feel guilty about it. Guilt is easy. You can feel guilty from a holding cell. He needs to be in this room, doing the work, seeing me every night, seeing what he helped do to me, and choosing to keep showing up anyway. If he can do that, then maybe we're getting somewhere."

The elevator chimed. They both looked up. Reza stepped off, a paper bag under one arm and a stack of napkins under the other, looking exactly like someone who'd stopped at the supply shop on his way in. He was an otter, compact and cheerful, and he strutted through the club like he'd been born in it. He saw Harold and nodded, saw Amani and grinned. "I got the good napkins. The ones that don't shred when they get wet."

"Thank god," Amani said. "The last batch fell apart if you looked at them wrong."

Reza slid behind the bar and started unpacking. The normalcy of it was striking. Two bartenders prepping for a shift, talking about napkin quality, while the weight of kidnapping and guilt and forgiveness hung in the air above them. That was what recovery looked like. Not dramatic breakthroughs. Just people going to work, doing their jobs, and making space for the hard things alongside the ordinary ones.

Harold left them to it and walked back to the security office. He was tired from working his shift on the force and then coming to the bar, but he wanted to be busy and the extra money helped.

Nero had pulled up the south hallway camera and was marking the dead zone on a floor plan.

"Amani's doing better than I expected," Harold said.

Nero marked another angle on the plan. "He's doing exactly what I expected. He doesn't do things halfway." He glanced up. "The shark's shift starts in two hours. Are you planning to shadow him again tonight?"

"Someone should."

"Someone should," Nero agreed. "I'm asking if you want it to be you."

Harold knew what Nero was really asking. His former partner was too precise with language for it to be accidental. "I want to understand what's going on with him. That's it."

Nero held his gaze for a beat. "Okay." He turned back to the floor plan. "Just remember that understanding someone and wanting to save them aren't the same thing. You've always been better at the second one."

Harold didn't argue. Nero was right. He'd become a cop to find people. But what he'd never been able to explain to his mother, Nero, or anyone, was that finding them was only the first part. The second part was the one that mattered. The part where you helped them figure out what came next.

He'd failed at that part once before. A sub he'd been seeing for almost a year who'd wanted pain Harold was willing to give and obedience Harold was willing to demand, but who hadn't wanted the rest. The conversations, the checking in, the part where dominance meant responsibility and not just authority. When Harold had pushed for more depth, more connection, the sub had laughed and told him he was overthinking it. It's just kink, he'd said. It doesn't need to be a whole relationship. Harold had ended it that night and spent the next six months wondering if the sub was right and Harold was the one making it too complicated.

He didn't think he was making it too complicated with Jack. He thought Jack was someone who'd never been given theoption of it being anything other than complicated. And that was a different problem entirely.

Two hours later, the club opened. The music came up, the lights went down, the elevator started cycling shifters into the space. Harold took his position near the hallway. Nero was behind the bar. Reza was pouring drinks. Amani was working alongside him, hoodie zipped, sleeves long, safely behind the bar as the crowd filled in.

The elevator opened at nine on the dot and that ocean scent washed over the floor.

Minutes later, Jack came out of the locker room in the black shorts. He looked tired. There were shadows under his eyes that hadn't been there the first night. He moved with a stiffness in his ribs that Harold's trained eye caught immediately. New stiffness. Not from the groping at the club. Something that had happened since he left.

Harold watched him cross the floor to get his cleaning supplies and filed the observation away alongside everything else. The fear scent. The compliance. The flinch. The new bruise he was trying to hide.

Nero was right. Harold wanted to save him. That was the truth of it. But he'd spent enough years as a cop to know that saving someone who wasn't asking to be saved was just another form of control. So, he stayed at his post, watched the room, and waited for Jack to ask.

He could be patient. He'd learned that from a ferret.

Chapter Five

Jack had slept on the floor again, the way he did after the bad nights, and by the time light came through the blinds the worst of the stiffness had loosened enough that he could move without guarding his side. He dressed in something that covered the bruise and left before anyone else in the house was awake.

There was only one place he wanted to be, it wasn't the shiver, and it wasn't the club. It was the water.

The dolphins ran a pool facility thirty minutes south of the city. From the outside it looked like a vacant warehouse with a painted dolphin on the corrugated metal wall. Every shifter in Nevada knew better.

Jack showed his ID to the dolphin behind the counter. The guy sniffed the air, made a face the way they always did when they caught shark on someone, and pointed him toward Pool B. The smallest one, in the back, away from the other swimmers. Standard protocol. Nobody wanted to share water with a shark, and Jack didn't blame them. He'd been swimming alone his whole life. There were benefits to being the species everyone avoided.

Pool B was ten feet deep and maybe thirty feet long. Glass windows on two walls let him see the other pools, the other shifters gliding through their own water. Dolphins in the big pool, a couple of seals in Pool C, what looked like a crocodile in Pool D. Everyone in their own lane. Jack stripped at the edge and dove in before the cold air could settle on his skin.

The shift came over him the moment the water closed above his head. It wasn't like the descriptions he'd heard from otherspecies, the pain and the stretching and the sound of bones rearranging. For Jack, it was relief. Like exhaling after holding his breath for days. His human body dissolved and his shark body took its place with the smoothness of water filling a glass. Six feet of lean gray muscle, pectoral fins spreading wide, the pressure of the water pressing evenly against every inch of him.

He sank to the bottom and stayed there.