Page 47 of His to Claim (The Owner’s Club #2)

Graham

The kitten is so small it fits in the bowl of my hands.

Its fur is patchy and matted, the color of ashes, and it makes a sound that's halfway between a squeak and a plea.

I find it behind the Circle K, wedged inside a damp cardboard box beside the dumpster, crying like it's been doing it for so long it's forgotten how to breathe between sobs.

"It's all right," I tell it. "You picked the right idiot."

It noses my thumb like it understands. I tuck it under my shirt and walk home hunched over, like I can hide it from the whole world just by holding it close enough to my ribs.

The house smells like old grease and cigarettes. My mother sleeps on the couch with her mouth slightly open and a half-empty glass tipping against her thigh. A bottle sits on the carpet by her hand, uncapped and sweating.

I move down the hallway on the balls of my feet.

My room is the only space in the house that feels like it belongs to me.

I close the door quietly and set the kitten on an old T-shirt spread over the floorboards.

It huddles there, shaking, and looks up at me as if I might have the answer to everything.

I steal some milk from the kitchen and pour it into a chipped mug. The kitten laps at it hungrily. I sit cross-legged in front of it and watch, chin in my hands.

"You need a name," I say. "If I name you, you get to stay."

It's a lie. Naming things never saves them in this house. I know that. I say it anyway because the act of saying it feels like a door I can open with a word.

"Smoke," I decide. "You look like you got made from a burned-out match."

The kitten lifts its milk-wet chin and lets out a ridiculous little mew that sounds like agreement. It's the stupidest thing I've ever rescued. I love it immediately.

The front door slams. Footsteps hit the hallway. My mother says something that sounds like please. It’s followed by a loud crack of hand against skin and then nothing at all.

Carl's voice comes before he does. "Where's the boy."

I gather the kitten against my stomach and stand. My heart thuds hard enough to make Smoke squirm. I tuck it tighter, whispering a promise that has no business coming out of a fifteen-year-old mouth. "I have you. I have you, I have you."

My door eases open without a knock. Carl leans against the frame, filling the space with shoulders and beer breath. He has a cap pulled low and the bottle hanging from his fingers like an accessory he's proud of. His eyes find the shape under my shirt and narrow.

"What the hell is that."

"A cat," I say. "Just a kitten."

"You brought an animal into my house."

There are a thousand answers that could save me a bruise. I don't pick one of them. "It was in the dumpster. It was going to die."

He takes a slow step into the room. His mouth twists into something that might be a smile if anyone had taught it how. "Not my problem. Give it here."

"No."

The word surprises us both. It comes from somewhere lower than my throat, a place that's been storing it for years without a label.

Carl's head tips to the side like he's found a strange insect and wants to pull its wings off. "What did you just say to me?"

"I said no. It's not hurting anything. It can stay. I'll clean up after it. You won't even know it's here."

"That's not how this works." His voice comes soft. That's how he does it when he wants to make sure I hear every piece. "Nothing comes into my house unless I say it can. Nothing stays in my house unless it pays rent."

He moves faster than a drunk should be able to move. One second he's across the room. The next his fist has my shirt collar and I'm off the floor. The kitten makes a terrified sound and I feel its little body pressed hard to my belly between us.

"Put it down," he says.

"No."

His first hit lands deep in my side, right where the ribs meet the soft. Pain goes white, then hot, then big enough to fill my ears. I suck air like a drowning person. He hits me again, open-handed across the face this time. The room tilts. My cheek burns.

"Put it down, Graham."

I don't. Smoke makes another thin sound. Something inside me snaps. Not the way a bone does. More like a thread that's been holding tight for too long. I've swallowed every other version of this moment for years. But he's reaching for the kitten. He's reaching for one small thing that needs me.

He swings for my head again. I duck under it. It's not graceful. It's not clean. It's enough. His momentum takes him into the dresser. The bottle in his hand slips free and shatters against the floorboards.

"You little bastard." He comes at me with his other hand.

I move without thinking. Low. Hands up. The way I've watched boxers do when I stay up too late. His knuckles scrape my ear and hit the wall. He swears and shakes his hand like he can throw the pain off his skin.

I don't try to hit him back. I need to get out. I dart past him into the hall.

My mother opens her eyes just long enough to see the blur of me. "Graham, where are you going."

"Out," I say. "I'm going out."

Carl's steps thunder behind me. I skim the coffee table with a hand that knows its way. My mother's purse lies there, half unzipped, her wallet a fat rectangle near the top. I slip it out without looking. Guilt will come later. Tonight I don't have room for it.

"Get back here," Carl roars.

I go through the front door so fast the knob leaves a circle in the drywall. The Florida evening hits me in the face like a wet towel. I run with the kitten under my shirt and the wallet burning a square into my palm.

He chases me for half a block, then three quarters, then his footsteps stop.

I don't turn around. I don't slow down. I run until my lungs hurt and my ribs beg me to stop.

I run until the neighborhood changes, until the houses turn into businesses and the businesses turn into the Greyhound station with its flickering letters and its smell of diesel and boiled coffee.

The ticket window clerk has a voice that sounds like every cigarette she's ever smoked and a look on her face that says she's seen kids like me before.

"One ticket to New York," I say. My voice shakes. I set the wallet on the counter, open it, and try to count with hands that won't stop trembling.

She raises an eyebrow. "By yourself."

"Yes."

"You got a guardian waiting for you."

"Yes." The lie comes out smooth. My grandmother has a name and a last known address. That seems like enough to offer the universe.

She thumbs the bills, her eyes flicking to my cheek and back to my hands. "You bringing a pet on board."

"No."

The kitten chooses that moment to mew. I flinch. The clerk looks at my belly, then at my face. She doesn't say anything for a long second. She slides the ticket under the glass. "Keep it quiet, baby."

I grab a few things from a vending machine, take a seat in the very back of the bus and tuck Smoke inside my shirt so that only its nose peeks out.

It falls asleep against my ribs to the rhythm of my heart.

Every few hours it wakes and licks my chin and I feed it sips of milk from a lid.

No one complains. The driver doesn't notice or pretends not to.

When we pull into Port Authority two days later, the city hits me like music.

Sirens and horns and a million voices layered on top of each other like a song that never bothers to find a chorus.

I step off the bus and feel small and alive in a way I've never felt in Florida.

Smoke pokes its head out of my jacket and looks around with an expression I choose to translate as approval.

Finding my grandmother takes longer than I want. The address I have for her is old. I sleep two nights in a shelter that smells like bleach and old socks. On the fourth day I stand on a stoop in Queens and knock on a door with a heart that can't decide if it wants to hammer or stop.

She opens it in a house dress and slippers, hair white and soft around a face that looks like my father's eyes decided to stay. She stares at me for one long breath.

"Graham," she says. It's not a question. It's a recognition so deep it makes the back of my throat ache. She reaches for my face with both hands. "Let me look at you."

I try not to cry. I fail in a way that feels like relief.

She pulls me inside and pulls me against her. She smells like laundry soap and chicken broth. I haven't felt held in so long I'd forgotten what it does to a person's spine. Smoke squirms and she laughs when it wriggles free of my jacket and lands gracelessly on her carpet.

"You brought a cat," she says.

"I rescued it," I say. "From a dumpster."

"Of course you did." She closes the door with her heel. "Hungry?"

She feeds me soup and toast and a slice of pie that tastes like apple and sugar and mercy.

Smoke gets a dish of water and a saucer of milk because she says you don't raise a soldier on an empty stomach.

She asks questions gently. She doesn't ask about the bruises until I've eaten enough that my hands stop shaking.

"Did he hit you," she says finally.

"Yes."

"Does he know where you are now?"

"No."

"Do you want him to?"

"No."

"Then he won't," she says. "I'm your grandmother. I'm not much but I'm enough for this."

She makes up the pullout couch into a bed with crisp sheets and a thin blanket that smells like sun. She sets a shoe box on the floor with a towel inside and tells Smoke that every king needs a castle.

That night I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling. Smoke curls up under my chin and purrs with a sound that settles my bones. For the first time since my father's heart stopped and my mom remarried a drunk, I sleep without one hand clenched.

I stay. I grow. I learn to cook three dinners passably and one breakfast very well.

I learn where she keeps the spare key and which step creaks and how to fix a leaky sink from a YouTube video.

She calls me her boy as if the years haven't tried to take me away.

She tells me my father would be proud of the way my eyes pay attention.

She takes a picture of me with Smoke on my shoulder and sticks it to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a pear.

She coughs all winter the year I turn seventeen.

It sounds like a chair dragging across a hard floor.

She swears it's nothing and tells me not to fuss.

I fuss anyway. Doctors say words like mass and options and numbers that pretend to be hopeful.

She smiles at me with her mouth and tells me to save my worry for something I can punch.

On a wet morning in March, in a room that hums and beeps and smells like sanitizer, she squeezes my hand and tells me not to forget breakfast isn't a time, it's a promise.

She tells me to go where my mind is loudest. She tells me to love something that loves me back.

Then she breathes out and doesn't breathe in again.

I plan the funeral with a notebook and a face that forgets how to move. People who knew her from the church bring casseroles and paper plates and hold my shoulders between their hands the way adults do when they mean tenderness but don't know where to put it.

After the last hymn fades, a man steps up beside me with a presence that doesn't demand attention so much as earn it. He's tall without being looming, dark hair that’s starting to turn grey, clean shave, a suit that fits like it's been measured to a centimeter.

"Graham," he says. "I'm very sorry for your loss."

"Thank you," I say. I feel the words touch the surface of me and float there without finding purchase.

He reaches into his jacket and produces a card. He doesn't flourish it, doesn't push it into my hand like he's selling me a service. He holds it out as if we're trading names like gifts.

"I'm handling your grandmother's estate," he says. "There are documents. Nothing complicated. I can walk you through all of it when you're ready. No rush. Grief has its own schedule."

"What is there to handle?" I ask. "She didn't have much."

"She had enough to matter," he says. "And enough to start something if you're careful. When you’re ready," he says, "call me."

When he turns away, I look down at the rectangle in my hand. The stock is thick. The letters are clean. The name sits in the middle like it's never once hurried.

Preston Wolfe.

I slip the card into my wallet and look up at the sky through the church windows.

The light coming through the glass has a gentleness to it I want to believe will hold.

I think about the boy who ran out of a house with a kitten under his shirt and cash in his pocket.

I think about the man he could become if he learns to hold on and let go in equal measure.

"Okay," I tell the room that still smells like lilies and rain. "All right."

I put my palm flat on the casket and close my eyes. You don't always get to say goodbye the way you want to. Sometimes you get a card and a promise and a name.

Sometimes that's how a life starts.

My grandmother's inheritance wasn't much—enough to buy a small building in Manhattan when real estate still made sense.

I turned it into something stable, nothing flashy.

Preston noticed the way I handled business and took me under his wing.

He wasn't warm—never that—but he was the closest thing to a father figure I'd ever known.

Taught me how money really works, how power moves through rooms full of men in expensive suits.

Smoke was there through all of it. Watching from windowsills while I built something that mattered.

Purring in my lap during late nights spent learning Preston's lessons about leverage and control.

The cat lived fifteen good years, saw me grow from a kid with potential into someone who could hold his own in any boardroom.

When Smoke finally left the world, the grief nearly broke me.

Smoke lived the way a small thing lives when it's loved hard.

Long enough to make the world soften around the edges.

Long enough to teach me that saving something once doesn't mean you're done.

Long enough to show me that the right weight in your hands can make you brave.

I'd thought losing my grandmother was the worst pain I'd ever feel.

Turned out losing something you'd chosen to love hurt even more.

And I never wanted to feel that sort of pain ever again.