When my vision cleared, I saw half a dozen girls circling us, watching with hunger and admiration as I took Sir Kenosi for the first time. Some of them were touching themselves. I didn’t know how long they’d been watching instead of engaging with each other, and I suddenly felt painfully exposed. I tried to roll away, but Kenosi held me fast.
“Bring the princess a warm towel,” he said to my nurse, who had appeared at some point. “The rest of you are dismissed to your usual duties for the rest of the day.”
Sir Kenosi pulled out slowly, and I felt his seed spilling out over my thigh as he withdrew. July appeared with a warm, wet towel, which she gently cleaned me with while I lay there in a quivering ball of exhaustion.
I waited for Kenosi to gloat, but he told July to go. When she had disappeared, he pulled me up the bed, propping us both on his pile of pillows. He drew the sheet over us and slid his arm behind my head like we were lovers instead of captor and captive.
If anything, this felt stranger than the sex. Okay, so he’d fucked me. I’d done that with Lord Balam for weeks before I felt anything. I’d done it with Shadow without meaning, without emotion. But lying in a bed with someone, our naked bodies side by side, made me feel vulnerable in a way that having him between my legs hadn’t.
“Did I pass your test yet?” I asked at last, a little seed of bitterness growing in my belly with my hunger.
“Barely,” he said. “I don’t think you’ll make a very good queen if that’s the best you can do.”
“Ah, so the real Kenosi comes back after you come,” I said. “I should have known.”
“The real Kenosi just fucked you sideways,” he said. “You weren’t complaining then.”
“If that’s all I needed you for, we’d be golden.”
He grinned. “What else do you need me for?” he asked. “Does Her Majesty need her pussy sucked again?”
“Her Majesty could use a real meal,” I said. “And some real clothes that don’t make me look like I’m ready to stand on a street corner. And most of all, I’d like to get back to my sister and the others.”
All I could think was that as long as I was here, though, that meant the others hadn’t told Kenosi that my sister was the heir. She was safe.
“The food can be arranged,” Sir Kenosi said, twisting his body toward mine and running his fingers lightly down my chest and over my sunken belly. “The clothes… I’ll have to think about that. I rather like having easy access to that delicious cunt.”
“And my friends?” I asked.
“I’m not interested in their cunts.”
I gritted my teeth. “When can I see them? I did what you wanted. I sucked your dick. I let you fuck me.”
“But you didn’t want it,” he said. “The lesson is for you to bow down and worship someone else the way you’ll be worshipped when you’re queen. You didn’t come to me wanting me. You have to want me more than I want you. You have to beg me for it.”
“I think I did.”
His beautiful, full lips twisted to one side. “Did you?” he asked, nuzzling into my neck. “I don’t remember that.”
“Why do you need me to worship you?” I asked. “You have a whole harem of women to do that, a different set each month. They’re all clamoring to get fucked every day. Does your ego really need more?”
“I said you have to want me,” he said, rubbing his nose against my earlobe until shivers ran through my body. “Not just fucking.”
“Well,” I said. “That’s not going to happen.”
“I bet it will.”
“You have a really odd way of trying to make it happen,” I said.
He pulled back, a slight smile playing over his lips as he studied me with real interest for the first time since we’d met. “Really?” he asked. “What would you try?”
“Um, first off, I’d try not imprisoning someone and starving them.”
“So, if I’d let you stay with your friends these last few days, you’d want me?”
“No,” I admitted. “I don’t know you. How can I want anything but your body when that’s all I know about you?”
He rolled onto his back again, drumming his fingers on his sculpted pecs for a few beats. “You want to talk?”
“That would have been a good place to start.”
“Huh,” he said. “Women never want to talk to me.”
“Maybe that’s because you’re a colossal asshole who never tries?”
“Possibly,” he said, smirking. “Or maybe they just want to fuck.”
“Could be,” I said. “If you blow their minds in bed, and you’re an asshole every time you open your mouth, can you blame them for wanting to keep you in the role of fuck buddy?”
“I never thought of it that way,” he said.
“That must be lonely.”
Neither of us spoke for a long minute.
“July said she talked to you,” Sir Kenosi said after a bit.
“Which one?” I said. “Aren’t all your women this month named July?”
“What’s that your people say about walking a mile in a man’s shoes?”
“I think that saying came from Shadow’s people, not mine.”
The name of my second lover made a funny knot twist up inside me. I barely knew Shadow, but I knew he’d given up his clan for me. I knew his people had killed my mother, too, though. It was too complicated to dig into with all the things that had happened. Now, I had no idea what had become of him or anyone else from my party. Were they safe and okay? Were they being held captive and tortured?
“It’s true, isn’t it?” Sir Kenosi said.
“Yes,” I admitted. It was true. I didn’t know what his life had been like any more than I knew about Shadow’s. I knew only what I’d seen in the tabloids, in memes and on posters.
This time, I rolled toward Kenosi, adjusting my head on his arm. “So, tell me,” I said. “Make me walk your mile. I can figure out how to be a queen of my own country. What I don’t know is what it’s like to be famous, or ridiculously wealthy and adored by dozens of lovers, or to be a shifter in the Cheetah Nation.”
“Didn’t July tell you that?”
“I’m not asking July to tell me,” I said. “You want me to want you? Give me a reason. Tell me your story.”
A skeptical quirk tugged at his eyebrow. “That works?”
“We’ll see.”
Twenty-One
I was sure I caught a flicker of uncertainty cross Sir Kenosi’s face for the first time since I’d met him. “You want to know about my lovers?”
“No,” I said. “I want to know about you. How you got here.”
“You can read about that in a dozen unauthorized autobiographies.”
I pressed my hand over his heart. “No,” I said. “I can’t.”
He swallowed and stared at the ceiling for a long moment before speaking. “I grew up here, same as everyone. In the cheetah village. Basically, the cheetah ghetto where they shoved all the shifters when they found out about us.”
“With your family?” I asked, my heart picking up speed.
“For a while.” He tapped his fingers on his chest again. “They came to take my mother one night—the humans did. My father tried to stop them, to defend her, and they shot him. My mother shoved me in a box when the men came knocking. She told me not to make a sound, no matter what they did. So I sat there while they dragged her out. They raped her in the street and killed her when they were done.”
His voice was flat, his words snapping out with a painful sting.
“Oh my god,” I whispered, barely able to speak. “I’m so sorry, Kenosi.”
“I had to get a job to buy food,” he said. “So, I started working for humans. At first, it was the regular stuff cheetahs did. Shopping for people and bringing their groceries, cleaning their toilets, walking their dogs.”
“How old were you?” I asked, sliding my fingers across his chest, interlacing them with his.
“Eight,” he said. “It
was tough, but lots of kids lived alone in the cheetah section. And there were aid workers from the ICFN who came in sometimes, mostly from the Tiger Nation. They brought food, but better than that, they brought food for our minds. I already knew that money was the answer to everything in this world. I asked for business books, and I studied the people I worked for, trying to figure out what I could give them that no one else was giving them. There had to be a need I could fill.”
“And that’s where your apps came in,” I said.
“That’s the interview version,” he said with a bitter smile. “What they leave out is the part in between, when I was a teenager. See, when I started to fill out, the jobs people offered changed. Sure, there was manual labor. But it was the women who wanted me to work outside—gardening, mowing, cleaning their pools. I didn’t notice the change while it was happening. But then one day one of those rich old pervs wanted me to help her out with a more… Intimate need. You know how some people are about shifters.”
“Kitty chasers,” I said, nodding despite Kenosi’s bitter tone. I hadn’t thought of it this way before, though. I’d thought of the shifters having all the power and fame in that relationship, and fangirls chasing after them. But of course it was more complicated, like any fetish. I hadn’t thought of the exploitation of those shifters who women chased so eagerly.
“Yeah,” Kenosi said. “And I guess that lady enjoyed what I had to offer. Before that, I was lucky to find enough odd jobs to keep myself fed. But pretty soon, I couldn’t schedule enough appointments. There literally weren’t enough hours in the day to fuck them all.”
“I guess it’s a lot different when you have control over it.”
“What?” Kenosi asked, drawing back to meet my eyes.
“That’s probably why you want so many women around you now,” I said. “To prove that now you’re the one in control.”
Kenosi’s dark eyes searched mine, like twin pools of black oil. “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”
I shrugged. “You’re rich now. You own everything. You help people out, and they adore you.”
“Money really does buy happiness.”
“If you say so.”
“What does that mean?” he asked, giving me some side-eye. “If you don’t believe that, you’ve never gone without it.”
“That’s true,” I said. “You have, though, and I don’t think you’re happy. Wealthy? Yes. You have anything you want, after all. If you don’t have it, you just snap your fingers, and someone gets it for you. Hell, even a princess. You pay someone enough, they’ll lock her up and starve her for you. Women are falling all over themselves for a chance to be the next woman fucked in the famous Sir Kenosi’s bed. But under all that, all you really wanted was someone to talk to.”
“That’s not what I said,” Kenosi countered. “I said I wanted you to want me. To beg for it. You said you wanted to talk.”
“It’s working, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” he asked, suspicion clouding his eyes.
“It’s working for me,” I admitted.
“I’ll be damned,” Sir Kenosi said. “I can’t believe that actually works.”
“Well, I’m sure you’ve never actually had to work for it,” I said. “You just flash that million-dollar smile, and they come like flies to honey, right?”
“I have a million-dollar smile?” he asked, showing it off for my benefit.
I rolled my eyes. “There’s at least a dozen gifs of it.”
“Like I said, there’s nothing fame and money can’t buy,” he said. “Usually I flash the million dollars to get what I want, not the smile.”
“That only works because your shifters got fucked over by the humans in this country,” I said. “If everyone else wasn’t living in abject poverty, I don’t think your money would have the same effect.”
He chuckled. “You’re wrong. King Cheetah is still the king, but no one cares what he thinks about things. When the ICFN comes visiting, they let him weigh in, but if we have opposing views, you know who they side with?”
I didn’t answer because I didn’t want to admit he was probably right.
“I can get things done,” he said. “The king can’t. Money means more than titles in this world, not just our nation.”
“I don’t think it’s like that everywhere,” I argued.
“Then you’re naïve,” he said. “You have a title, but I could still order my guards to lock you in a room, and they did what I wanted because they want to keep their jobs. They don’t give a rat’s ass what title you have. A title matters because someone allows it to matter. Money matters because it gets shit done.”
I couldn’t deny that having the title of princess did very little for me. But it wasn’t because I didn’t have money. It was because I didn’t have magic. That was my handicap. I came from money, but I was nothing in our world. He came from nothing, but now he had money, so he was someone. He also had magic, but I couldn’t debate whether that was more important than money without giving myself away as the unimportant princess.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said, sliding an arm over Kenosi. “I know I can’t understand what you went through to get here.”
“No?” Kenosi asked, a tone of mocking entering his voice. “The princess didn’t have to pimp herself out for bread money for ten years so she could save up for something better?”
Instead of reacting to his barbed comment, I shrugged. “You’re right. I never realized how privileged we had it in the Ocelot Nation. My life was… Damn easy, it turns out. But I do understand what it’s like to not be in control of your own life. To feel like a second-class citizen in society’s eyes.”
When Sir Kenosi scoffed, I snapped my mouth closed, cursing myself furiously. What the fuck was I saying? I had basically just outed myself as not being the heir, right after thinking that’s exactly what I couldn’t do. Talking wasn’t just making me understand Kenosi. It was making me feel closer to him, to forget I was playing a game here. Comfortable was dangerous.
“It took you ten years to make the dating app?” I asked, hoping to divert us from the more personal details.
“Yeah,” he said. “At first, it was a kind of secret app that only people here used to find cheetahs. But I always planned for it to go big. I knew there must be people like that everywhere, humans who had a thing for cats, and not just cheetahs. Shifters, and not just cats. And supernaturals in general, not just shifters. The only thing I hadn’t anticipated was supernaturals finding each other. The app kept growing. And so did all this.” He gestured around at the huge room, the lavish furnishings and giant bed. “The reality shows came next, then the fame, then the women.”
“But somewhere inside, you must know they aren’t here for you,” I said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have asked me to want you.”
Kenosi narrowed his eyes. “No, I wanted you to want me the same as they do.”
I remembered all the times Tadeu complained about the women he fucked getting all attached, and it was my turn to feel stupid. “Well, it’s not like I’m going to fall in love,” I said. “But I think I understand you, and it’s hard to hate you when I understand you. Is that good enough? Or does it just make me a total woman?”
“I don’t know,” Kenosi said slowly. “I don’t guess I actually know women that well, aside from how to fuck them.”
“Sir Kenosi doesn’t know women,” I teased. “Can I get that on record?”
“Never,” he said, throwing off the sheet. “Want to get some breakfast?”
About fucking time.
Twenty-Two
Prince Kwame
Lion Shifter, Lion Nation
I stood in the grass, watching the storm roll toward the savannah. There was something more coming this time. I could feel it. Could sense it.
“What is it, Kwame?” One of the other lions, maybe a grandfather or long lost cousin, bumped my hip with his. I’d been in lion form for so long I didn’t know exactly who people were anymore.
I knew who lions were. Every day, the knowledge of who they had been in their human form seemed further away.
At first, I’d held on so tightly. I had been sure that I would go back. That I could be human again. I measured time by the moon, so I would know how much had passed when I finally came back to myself. My human self.
But that had slowly faded until only the desire remained. I knew I wanted to be human again, needed it. I could remember why it wasn’t possible, though. I no longer believed that I would find a way around that.
“Something is coming,” I said in the way that we talked, tossing my head toward the bank of clouds, electricity lighting them from within.
He gave me a picture of rain, but I lifted my nose and scented as if I couldn’t see it. I could. I knew rain approached, and more than that. Thunder that shook the planes, lightning that split the sky and the trees. But something more. Not with the storm, but it was coming.
I turned and loped toward the shelter where my family lived. My human family. Some of the lions didn’t go back, didn’t want to remember. After a while, it became easier to live this way, in our skin, and forget what we had ever been. But giving up my human was as impossible as it would have been for me to give up one half of my head.
My mother leapt to her feet when I nosed through the wooden door, which stood ajar.
“Kwame? Is that you?” she asked. She knew it was. She recognized my lion form as well as she’d recognized my human one. She ran to me and dropped to her knees, wrapping her arms around me. I lifted a paw and rested it on her upper back, but it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t the embrace my mother deserved.
Even in lion form, with so much forgotten, I knew how much older she looked than when I’d last seen her with my human eyes. I wanted more than anything to tell her that she didn’t have to worry about me. I wanted to lie, so she could stop growing older with grief. But I could only offer what little comfort my visits afforded. If they gave her any comfort at all. Maybe they only reminded her of what she’d lost—what we both had.
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