Honored Vow

and
    if I’ll ever feel like leaving.”
    Which was fine with me even though I knew it was selfish. If my
    best friend was always where I could see him, I would never have to
    worry ever again. But how fair was that to him?
    “Come on, come sit down and talk to me.”
    I followed, as always, without question.

    IT WAS hard talking to Ray the next day, with Crane. He was a good man
    and didn’t understand why we were leaving him. I finally lied and told
    him that Logan’s business needed us both, and that, finally, made sense to
    him. He himself ran a family business, and that loyalty clicked for him. I
    said I would give him two weeks to hire and train a new manager, and I
    felt bad when he told me it wasn’t necessary. Basically, people had been
    doing my job for months; he just needed to pick one of them to take over
    permanently. He extracted a promise from Crane and me that if either of
    us ever wanted back in the restaurant business, we were to call him at
    once. We both hugged him really tight before we left.

    118

    Mary Calmes

    During the following month, Yuri practiced by making himself the
    quarry of hunts. Artem and his men chased him down, all of them in
    panther form, and once they reached him, pumped up on adrenaline and
    bloodlust, he practiced calming them and forcing them to shift back into
    men. It was grueling and hard, and Yuri returned night after night bruised
    and bloody from his exertions. One night I saw an old face that I had been
    missing for a while, Andrian Basargin, and while we caught up—he had
    gone away to grad school in Boston—I finally realized that there had to be
    a reason I was seeing him.
    “Where’s Yuri?”
    “He’s hurt, my reah, and spending the night in a cave with Taj to
    watch over him, but he begs you to not come, let him be, and he will join
    you for breakfast in the morning. This is part of it. He has to learn to
    dominate others not through fear or brute force, but only by power. Please
    understand and grant him his time.”
    I wanted to go, every impulse told me to go, but the look on
    Andrian’s face stifled my instinct. He was the first man I had ever met
    from Logan’s tribe, and the ease that he had first shown me, the kindness,
    had never dissipated.
    “Alright?”
    I nodded.
    “Good.” He smiled at me. “I’m returning to them with food and
    water. I’ll tell them that you expect both of them in the house in the
    morning.”
    “And you,” I told him. “I wanna see you too.”
    “I would be honored, my reah.”
    As promised, they were all there in the morning for breakfast, and
    when I smacked Yuri on the back of his head, he rolled his eyes at me.
    “Never again,” I snarled at him.
    “Jin—”
    “Who’s going to protect me? Who should do that?”
    And I realized that my safety had never crossed his mind. It
    shouldn’t have, not really—I was scary now; no one in their right mind
    wanted to mess with a nekhene cat, not after my display in Sobek, and
    Artem was there, and the others—but still… Yuri was my sheseru.
    “No, my reah, I forgot my place.”

    Honored Vow

    119

    “Don’t do it again,” I cautioned him, my voice hard.
    To have me say it, speak my need for him, I saw how his eyes filled,
    watched the muscles in his square jaw clench; it was what he needed, had
    to hear. That I counted on him, that I slept better knowing he was in the
    house—the confession gave him strength and filled him with his own self-
    worth. Mikhail bumped my shoulder on the way out, and I saw his smile.
    They all understood what I had done, and it was nice.
    Logan’s poor parents came home to a world gone mad, and after the
    whole house sat down with them and explained, Eva was distressed and
    Peter was very proud of Logan for being chosen and terrified for me.
    “He really could kill you, Jin.” He caught his breath.
    “No,” I told him, utterly positive, “he won’t.”
    Even then, even after everything, Peter Church could still not quite
    wrap his brain around the fact that two men could love as hard and as ’til
    death do us part as a man and a woman. But his wife could and did.
    “You’ll bring us home a semel-aten,” she said as she patted my
    hand. “God, will I like living in Sobek?”
    I squinted at her.
    “Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it won’t we,” she
    sucked in a breath. “Now come on, tell me about Russ before I call and
    yell.”
    “No one will ever speak to Russ again!” her husband