“Wait,” he said. “Swan...maiden?” he asked. “Is that literal, Lily? Like, you’re a virgin?”
I felt myself flush beneath his gaze. “Does it matter?”
He rocked back and considered this. “It does to me.”
I hit my head against the leather couch behind me and rolled my eyes. “Oh, comeon, Namir—”
He took the hand from his belt to take my chin, leaning over me to make me look at him. His scent was intoxicating from this close, and everything about him set off everything about me. His pupils were wide, his nostrils flared, hips were pressed to mine, and things I hadn’t ever felt safe wanting before rushed to the surface—to taste his skin, to feel his touch, to have him in me. My imagination had sometimes been torturous, but now thathewas here, it was all so much worse. I bit my lips and made a sound I wasn’t proud of, begging for him—and I watched his green eyes flash into a dangerous cats’ slitted pupils.
“Do you have any idea how hard I’ll fight to come back and be the first in you, little bird?” he asked me, and the tone he asked it in made me shiver. I shook my head against his hand, and he gave me a wicked grin. “If I had to, I’d kill everyone in this state.”
As thrilling as that was to hear, I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “But what if you don’t?” My voice was tiny and high. “What if this is the last chanceIget, to make up my mind?”
Namir moved back to survey me. I wished I could twist away to hide from him; I knew I was a mess. My long, light blonde hair had fallen out of my dealer’s bun and was in tangles, I knew my nipples were hard enough to show through my thin bra and shirt, and I was dripping so much I’d probably ruined his couch.
“I promise you it won’t be,” he said. His hands reached for mine and used them to slowly pull me up, being gentle with my wounded hand. “I will be so careful with you, Lily, but, because I care for you, now is not the time.”
I swung my legs down, pressing my knees together, both furious at him and still somewhat frightened. “I don’t even know if careful’s what I want.”
“Then we’ll figure it out, together.” He brought my unbandaged hand up to his lips, brushed a kiss across it, then grabbed his tie and stood to walk out his door.
Chapter 5
Ten minutes later I was done cleaning myself up in his bathroom.
That smug motherfucker.
How-the-fuck dare he cut me out of getting my own feathers back.
They were mine, and no one else’s—and it was all too easy to imagine him out there, putting something on a billboard about them when he was through. He’d already gone and told Rax. I could feel myself winding up; the patterns of my fear and anger were familiar trails inside my head.
But . . . maybe Namir didn’t deserve that.
Yet.
He was a fool though if he thought I was just going to stay behind and wait for him. And he wasn’t the only one who knew how to find shit.
Swans had been on their own, protecting each other, for centuries. I had a duty to warn the rest of my kind, and also, humiliatingly, tell my parents what’d happened, before someone else controlled my whole life and I couldn’t anymore.
I picked up my phone and logged into a website one of the oldest of our kind had made, as a clearing house for information that had twelve-factor identification practically, and told my story, in case it helped anyone else escape my fate, and in case anyone else was in a position to help.
Then I called my mom and dad and had the worst phone conversation I’d ever had to have in my life.
Chapter 6
My parents tag-teamed on the phone with me, my mother buying plane tickets out to rescue me somehow—did airlines give breaks for pre-bereavements, for when someone was going to metaphorically die?—while my father did his best to sound rational and keep her sane.
He swore they’d find me, and that they’d find my feathers for me, but in reality they were three thousand miles away on the other coast, and if someone bought my feathers and told me to never talk to them again, I wouldn’t. I didn’t tell them anything about Namir—I didn’t want to offer them any false hope—and in the end, we cried with each other on the phone for a good thirty minutes before I started worrying about my phone’s battery and we all made ourselves hang up.
After that, I wandered into Namir’s bedroom, wondering if he’d have one of those phone-charging pads I could use on his nightstand. Also, I was curious if there were any other signs of women around, since whatever level of experienced I was sexually, Namir was the opposite of—but his bedroom was just more unadulterated manliness, like the tiger himself. Done in bronzes and blacks, with a few pictures on the wall, nice pieces of art, and a bed that wasn’t made but that smelled like him.
It turned out after talking to my family, for possibly the last time while I was still myself, I wasn’t done crying yet. So I started, crawling into his bed, salting his pillows with my tears, and somewhere along the way, sleep got me.
When I woke up much, much later, my phone battery was at fifteen percent—but several other swans had gotten back to me. Some to tell me stories of their own survival, how they’d gottentheir own feathers back after long periods of servitude and for me to not give up, others to say goodbye, that they’d be praying for me. But in the middle of all of these was one swan who’d briefly lived locally and felt liked they’d been stalked last year, who’d caught a picture of the guy, before she’d left in the night and now she was ever so sorry she didn’t post his photo at the time.
He did look a little familiar, and as I scrolled back in my mind through every punk who’d tried something with me at the casino—yeah—if that guy had a shaved head—because he had the exact same scar near his hairline as I remembered. Namir had thrown him out on my behalf last month, muttering something aboutfucking hyenasall the while, before telling him to never come back.
I was good at making superficial friends and fitting in, so it was nothing to send out a frantic message to the dealers girls’ chat, pretending to have the hots for a hyena-shifter I’d met, and where did they all hang out? And sure enough, one of their boyfriends was friends with one and told her to tell me the bar where they liked to frequent.