by Katya Moore
What am I doing? What the actual fuck am I doing? This is insane. Everything is insane. What the hell?
Everything I needed was in my room. I grabbed the most irreplaceable books and shoved them into my tote. I made it halfway to the door, then glanced back at my bed.
I couldn’t leave it. So I didn’t. I crammed the threadbare stuffed rabbit into my bag, buried it under a favorite hoodie, and ran for the door.
It was quiet. Too quiet.
I opened the door and stuck my head out.
Feral stood in the middle of my living room, smoothing his hair with his hands. Bodies lay sprawled all over my living room. I saw long slashes in the upholstery of my sofa. I didn’t see any knives.
“You good?” he asked like nothing had happened.
“I…uhh…buh…”
Feral smiled, stepped over a broken lamp, and reached for my hand. I let him take it and lead me toward the door. “You okay?” he asked softly.
I looked up at him in awe. “I’ve never… you… are you okay?”
He smiled. “Getting better every second.”
He was close. Too close. Not close enough. His fingers brushed my cheek. I leaned forward, my body taking over. His lips brushed mine, the faintest touch, then claimed them with an animal hunger. I gasped, then parted before the onslaught, letting him slip his tongue against mine, caressing me, pulling me closer, pressing me to his body. I forgot where I was. I forgot the fallen bodies around me. I forgot my name.
“OH, YOU OFFICERS ARE TOO KIND! THANK YOU SO MUCH!”
Feral pulled away reluctantly. “That’s our cue,” he said, his voice rough with unspent desire. “Time to go.”
Chapter Thirteen
“There you go! Hospital corners and everything.” Luxe gestured grandly at my freshly made bed. “That’s Egyptian cotton. It’s not as good as silk, but it’s close.” He winked.
I finished arranging my books on the desk, leaving the rest of my belongings in the purse. I wasn’t ready to reveal Mr. Snuggles to the criminal set. My closet bar held an assortment of clothes that I’d never wear in a million years. The shelf held three Styrofoam heads with different wigs on each, a makeup case, and a small basket of toiletries. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure,” he said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “Only fair that I make the bed before I help you mess it up.”
I laughed. “Cocky.”
“Confident.” He beamed up at me.
I felt a hint of nausea. Not revulsion. Guilt. I sat down on the bed next to him. Damn him. He’d been nothing but sweet to me, and I was so attracted to him that it hurt. But…
“I…Feral and I…” I didn’t know why I felt so guilty. I owed Luxe nothing. It’s not like we were dating. Or like we’d actually kissed. Or that we even stood a chance, considering he was a freaking con artist. But it was there, gnawing at my insides, killing me a little bit at a time.
Luxe rested a finger gently against my lips. “I can smell him on you, you know. It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Are you?” That mischievous smile did things to me that made those guilty feelings ten times worse.
“No. Yes. Ugh.” I buried my face in my hands. “What the hell are you two doing to me? I don’t even date! And now you…and him…and…why am I even telling you all of this?” I fell back on the bed like a dramatic teenager, hands over my eyes, groaning in supreme frustration.
I felt the bed settle. I moved a hand and peeped out. Luxe was reclining next to me on his side, head propped up on one hand, watching me. His other hand traced against the soft fabric of the sheets in idle swirls.
“Here’s the thing about shifter politics. The cats aren’t the rulers anymore, not since we went democratic. But there are an awful lot of us in the upper echelon, and we don’t cede power easily.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” I mumbled into my hands. My head was spinning hard enough. I didn’t need non-sequiturs to help it along.
“My family. My blood family. I was born stupidly wealthy. Potty training involved proper use of a bidet. Literal silver spoon in my mouth when they fed me my artisanal strained organic peas, prepared by our personal chef. Penthouse suite in the best cat-owned building in Manhattan. I had toy Bugatti race cars made by Bugatti. Designer play suits, not that I was really allowed to play in them.” He gave a sad laugh. “I had everything but parents. Father worked all the time, doing investment work for the other cat shifters. I saw him on my birthday and the solstices, for an hour each. Mother…” He shook his head. “Mother had problems. If she wasn’t popping a pill, she was snorting a line. Father tried to turn a party girl into a housewife and it didn’t work out so well. I had a nanny, but she was just in it for the paycheck and spent most of her time stuffing me in my room so she could sit on the couch, watch television, and steal Mom’s pills.”
I dropped my hands and rolled to my side to face him.
He smiled. “Poor little rich kid, I know, right? You’re probably wondering why I’m telling you all this. Don’t worry, I’m not trying to get your sympathy or pity. There’s a point.
“Anyway, one day, I got out of the apartment. I was going to run away. Didn’t think anyone would notice. I was six years old, and I’d never even been out of that damned penthouse.” He rolled to his back and tucked his hands under his head. “I had my stuffed tiger, a sweater, and an apple I’d stolen from the kitchen, all jammed into one of my mother’s purses. With that, I would seek my fortune.”
“How far did you make it?”
He chuckled. “To the elevator. I wasn’t sure how to work the buttons, so I just rode up and down for what seemed like forever, letting it take me wherever the other tenants drove it. They ignored me, for the most part. I had to have been in there for a couple hours.
“Finally, the building’s maintenance man got in. Mr. O. Big guy, a little scary. I’d seen him once or twice when Mother lost her shit and broke things in the penthouse. Tried to flush a Dior blouse once because she got bloated and it didn’t fit right.” His face turned introspective. The smile was gone, replaced by a stillness I couldn’t read. “He saw me. He saw what I was carrying. He knew who I was, knew my name, and asked me what I was doing. I told him.”
“He brought you back home?”
Luxe was quiet for a moment. “No. He looked at me for a long time. He saw things. He saw that I hadn’t eaten all day because the nanny was too busy watching TV and getting stoned. He saw the haunted look on my face when I realized I’d have to go back. He knelt down in front of me and asked me if I wanted some dinner, and would I like to meet his son.
“Oh my god, a real live child? I leaped at the chance. He took me down to the basement. I got a little scared about that, with all the pipes and the concrete walls. It looked like something out of a horror movie. Just when I thought I was done for, he turns a corner, opens a door, and there’s this tiny apartment.
“It was the size of our living room. The furniture was shabby but clean, the carpets were worn but vacuumed, the TV was minuscule but playing Sesame Street. And parked in front of that TV was a kid. An actual kid. He was bigger than me, broader than me, with this scruffy black hair and bruises on his shins and thrift store clothes.
“I didn’t know cats lived like this, and I was six, so I said something stupid. ‘Why’s your TV so small?’ The boy looked at me, all annoyed, and told me ‘Because we can’t all be you.’”
“And that’s how you met Feral?”
He nodded. “Mr. O was as good as his word. He sat me down at his table, wiped my face down to get rid of the tears, and Mrs. O gave me a big bowl of…”
“Store-brand mac and cheese?”
Another laugh, softer. “Yeah. It was the best thing I’d ever tasted. I almost licked the bowl. Mom… Mrs. O saw that, gave Mr. O a look, and got on the phone.”
“Did she call CPS on your folks?” I leaned in. It would have been career suicide for a maint
enance man.
A flicker of a smile. “Worse. She called the cats. The Feline Council takes care of its own. Even if your family is on the outs with them, as I later learned they were, hence the shitty job and the crappy apartment. She told them about Mother’s nose candy, Mary Pop-pills, and the lost little boy eating all her mac and cheese while not a damned soul looked for him for half a day.”
“What did they do?”
“Mrs. O got a new job, taking care of me. My nanny got reassigned to scrubbing toilets in an office building in Duluth, and I got to spend my days hanging out with Feral and his mom at their apartment.” He frowned. “They couldn’t take me away from my parents. Bad optics. They were high enough in shifter society that it would have looked bad for all cats if there was a scandal. But they kept me in the same building, and they kept me safe. I may have slept in the penthouse, but I lived with the Os.”
I picked at the sheets. “Feral didn’t mind the rich kid invading his space?”
“Nah. We were six. He didn’t really care. He was just pissed I’d made fun of his television.” I could feel the warmth from his smile. “Fer taught me how to be a kid. He played rough, but never mean. We’d wrestle, we’d watch cartoons, we’d crash his beat-up toy cars around the living room. I smuggled my best toys down there, and we trashed the hell out of them, playing with them like actual kids instead of proper little snots. And those designer rompers Mother kept putting me in didn’t stand a chance.” He laughed. “Mother lost her damned mind every time, but Mrs. O just had to raise an eyebrow and she’d shut the hell up.” He wiped a tear of mirth from his eye. “I still want to know what the Council said to her.”
“The… Os sound like great people.” It was my turn to trace designs of awkward distraction on the bed.
“So how did I get tangled up in a scandalous life of crime?” he finished for me. He met my eyes for a moment, then looked back up to the ceiling. “I went to private school, he went to public. We both started running with our own dangerous crowds. Feral got beat on, then learned to beat back. His trouble was physical, and he dealt with it in physical ways. I had to deal with the social manipulation and mind games that rich kids play with each other. Whose dad is more powerful. Who has the best car, the best electronics, the best chance at becoming the head of the Council someday. So I learned the games.
“When we hit high school, it came to a head. Feral’s family was at the bottom of the cat status ladder. He got sent to a trade school to be a mechanic. Me…my dad finally started to take an interest in me. For the first time in my life, I saw him on a daily basis. He’d take me aside and start teaching me about stocks, bonds, hedge funds, property deals. His work. He wanted me to follow in his footsteps, to take on the family business.” He frowned. “He wanted to take me away from the Os. Told me they were no-good human lovers and he wouldn’t have his son tainted by them.”
I felt a heaviness in my chest. “What happened?”
“He sent me away from them. Sent me off to college, someplace with a lot of ivy on the walls.” He shrugged. “They were supposed to be my people. But I missed that crappy apartment. I missed the hot dogs and the evening news with Mr. O and the late-night action shows with Feral. I belonged with them. I belonged with the outcasts who loved me like a son.
“I used my status and my connections, and I got in good with the local luxury car dealer. Got Feral a job in my town. He was thrilled. He got to work on the cars we’d played with as kids. Got to drive them. Got good at driving them, when the boss wasn’t looking. I let him drive mine, too. If I got good grades, I got extra cash. And I got very good grades.”
“This still doesn’t explain how you got into…”
He waved a hand at me. “Patience, dear Alex.” He drew in a deep breath. “Dad got busted by the Council during my sophomore year. His hedge fund was a Ponzi scheme. He’d kept it running for years, but once he’d dragged in pretty much every single Council family and a couple hundred big families from California, Texas, New York, Europe…yeah, it all came crashing down. We lost everything. The penthouse. The money. The status.” All emotion left his face. “My mother. She overdosed. Took every pill in the house as soon as Father called her to tell her it was over. She couldn’t bear to live like the Os. That’s what she said in the note, anyway.”
“I’m…so sorry,” I said. My hand rested on his arm.
He shrugged it off. “Don’t be. I wasn’t.” He closed his eyes. “Okay, I was. A little. She did give birth to me. But that was the only good thing she ever did for me.”
“What happened to your father?”
He shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know. He disappeared.” He stared into the distance. “I don’t know if he ran, or if the Feline Council put him in the ground. No one told me. They just told me I was on my own, and the money was all going to his victims.”
I rose up on the bed. “Oh my god. You were what, nineteen? And they just…left you with nothing?”
A bitter laugh slipped out. “They left me with tuition bills I couldn’t pay, an expensive car with no insurance, and a dorm room I was in danger of being evicted from.”
“Fuck,” I breathed.
“Yeah. So I ran my first con. Like father, like son.” His eyes locked on the smoke detector in the ceiling. “The dean of my college was an old-school bastard. He favored the richest kids, ignored the scholarship kids, and preyed on as many sweet, sexy young co-eds as he could get his withered talons on. One of them was a girl I was sweet on. Jodie. She was a scholarship kid, and he dangled that over her head so she’d give him what he wanted.
“I borrowed Feral’s work uniform and came into the office on a busy afternoon, pretending to be his mechanic, dropping off his keys. The secretary let me in his office, and I set up a handful of cameras. Really basic stuff. I didn’t have Kit’s know-how. They were probably obvious as hell. But they worked, and Jodie put on a hell of a show for them. She told him she didn’t want to do it anymore, he threatened to pull her scholarship, she tearfully submitted, and it was all on film.
“I sent him a copy, and the names of six students who would receive full scholarships with modest living stipends.” The corner of his mouth turned up in an evil grin. “Maybe not that modest.”
“Who were the other four students?” I asked.
“I picked them at random out of the student directory. A couple rich kids, a couple scholarship kids. We just needed to muddy the waters. I just wish I’d known how to set up a shell to hide Jodie’s take. It didn’t matter in the end. He knew he couldn’t touch her. He couldn’t touch any of us, not without his career blowing up.”
“You graduated from a good school. Why didn’t you just go into finance?”
That bitter laugh again. “My name was poisoned. No firm would have taken me, human or shifter.”
“Then why stay in college?”
“Connections.” He rolled his head to face me. “I met lawyers, judges, financiers, doctors, scientists, and a whole lot of shady motherfuckers who taught me everything they knew about running cons.”
“Oh.” I had trouble meeting his eyes. “And what about Feral?”
“Feral had his own problems. And they became our problems.” He looked away. “Mr. O had a stroke. A really bad one. Couldn’t work anymore. Mrs. O started cleaning houses for rich cats, but she was having trouble keeping up with medical bills.”
“I thought cats took care of their own,” I said with a frown.
“Outcasts get minimal care. They wouldn’t let him die, sure, but they wouldn’t pay for pain management. They wouldn’t pay for physical therapy. And, since he wasn’t working for the building anymore, they wouldn’t pay for his apartment. They had to move.” Anger darkened his eyes, hardened the handsome features. “Because Mr. O treated humans like they were worth something, because he sent his son to learn among them so he wouldn’t fear them, he was cast aside. Feral sent most of his paycheck to help his folks out. I sent them money too, but I didn’t have much after
school expenses. But I needed to help. Feral needed to help.
“Feral was a helluva fighter. He hooked up with the local underground mixed martial-arts circuit. The pay was shit, but he honed his fighting skills and got to be a bit of a name. I’d bring down the rich kids from the college to bet on him.”
“And you rigged the fights?” It didn’t take much to figure that out.
“We won some, we lost some, we threw some. Kept Dad in pain meds and got him to the right doctors to help him get the use of his right arm back. He’s still not up to working, but at least he can help Mom out around the house a bit and feel better about himself.”
My hand drifted back to his arm. “That’s… sweet. In a way.”
He rested his hand over mine. “I’ll take it.” The mischievous smile returned. “So, that’s our tragic backstory. Feral and I have shared a lot of things. Jealousy isn’t a thing we do.” He winked. “Want to make out?”
My jaw dropped at his audacity. Then I laughed. Then, his lips met mine, and I stopped laughing.
He pulled me against him, his hand at my waist, drawing me up against the length of his body. My hand was still on his arm, gripping tight, as though I was hanging on for dear life. His lips caressed mine, nibbling at my lower lip. It was a tender caress, so unlike his brother’s, but it had the same effect. I pressed my body against his, acutely aware of where we were, what position we were in, how easy it would be to just lie back and let him do whatever he wished.
He parted my lips, teasing at them before slipping his tongue against mine. I moaned softly as his fingers traced down the base of my spine, then cupped my ass, drawing me even closer. I could feel him through his fine tailored pants, pressing into me, firm and full of desire.
This is a bad idea.
So bad.
He caressed the globe of my ass with one hand and traced tantalizing fingers down the side of my neck at the same time.
So very, very bad…
