I Unintentionally Became Her Kitten

Chapter 40: Chicken and Rice Bowl

The next few days were calm. Alisha pulled me into the back room with Tye for more training. It became apparent I was not strong but I was a fast learner and most things that I mastered for one day tended to stick to the next session. This was good because despite my efforts to increase my strength with the other equipment, it was not going well and I was more often than not just left sore with no notable gains.

Tye observed me while it hurt way too much to move very fast and despite me trying to hide how pathetic I felt about it, he sighed. “Have you been eating protein?” he asked.

I looked up, currently holding a spoon with yogurt slowly sliding off of it.

“Yogurt,” I told him, gesturing with it.

“If you want your body to build muscle you need to provide it with the raw materials to do so,” he explained.

I blinked. “I can eat two yogurt.”

The expression on his face was… complicated. I had a feeling he was trying very hard not to lecture me on why yogurt protein wasn’t good enough.

“Alisha…” he started. “Does not tend to eat much protein,” he said finally.

I nodded. Alisha didn’t eat much of anything that wasn’t coffee and a few staple meals that included salads, fish and rice, or avocado in various forms. When she was grumbling about wanting something sweet, she went for fruit or yogurt.

It was probably the healthiest diet I had ever witnessed someone maintain, outside of the plethora of restaurant food she ended up consuming due to the constant running around for the business.

“So,” I realized. “I need to seek out more protein than yogurt?”

He nodded. “Like meat or there are protein yogurts out there but they taste awful.”

“I see. But I'm supposed to be sore right?”

“Yes but not in your joints like the way you're moving.”

I flexed an arm experimentally. It did hurt in my elbow.

“You can tell by looking?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I gave him time to elaborate but he didn’t have more to say. 

“So… meat would be good for me to eat more of…” I opened the fridge. There were a couple brown paper bundles in there.

“I have a number of recipes and the like you could try,” he offered.

“You cook?” I asked before I could stop myself.

He shrugged. “They’re not complicated recipes. Mainly protein bowls.”

“I could try a few,” I said. “But I don’t really know how to cook.”

“I’ll show you. Does she have some chicken in there?”

I rummaged through the brown packages. “Yes,” I said.

“Is it thigh or breast?”

“Uhm… breast,” I determined. I pulled it out.

“You could probably afford the thigh meat but it is what it is,” he said.

I blinked, clueless and stood back up as he reached up to the wall behind the stove and pulled one of the frying pans from there.

“Thigh has more collagen and your tendons would probably appreciate that.”

“Tendons?” I looked down at my hands.

“It’s why your joints hurt,” he explained. “Your body was starving enough it started to break itself down, that included muscles and tendons. You’ve been regaining muscle and even some amount of fat but tendons heal slowly.”

“I see,” I said. I didn’t really understand what he was talking about but I would trust his judgement.

He walked me through slicing the chicken into pieces. It made terrible squelching sounds that made my stomach turn a little. He seasoned it with salt and pepper, explaining that there were other spice blends but Alisha’s pantry was rather sparse in that department. Salt and pepper would make it palatable at least. The chicken was cooked in a large batch, stirred occasionally in oil that popped and snapped, occasionally spitting out a bit of grease that stung when it hit my skin.

“It’ll last about five days in the fridge,” he explained. “So you don’t have to cook every meal, just reheat and assemble it.”

I nodded as he then squinted at a rice package with suspicion. “Can this be cooked on a stovetop?” he mumbled. “I usually use a pressure cooker.”

“Does it have instructions?” I asked.

“Yes but…”

I looked around his arm to read over them just to find a large block of Japanese characters.

“I have a translator,” I said and took my phone out.

He offered the text to me and my phone took a few seconds before producing an English version.

“We can do this. It does recommend using a rice cooker, but I don’t imagine Alisha has one of those.”

“Not that I know of,” Tye agreed. 

We went through the long way, rinsing, draining, soaking and finally boiling the rice in a lidded pot.

It smelled amazing. I knew the rice Alisha usually used tasted really good but I didn’t know that it didn’t have anything added to it to give it that incredible sweet and somewhat nutty fragrance. I could understand why so many asian cuisines had just rice as a staple. It was both filling and tasty.

When it was done and cooled off enough to be manageable, Tye scooped some into a bowl and then topped it with the chicken. He offered it to me.

“I usually put some sauce or something on too but…”

I nodded, understanding. Alisha’s fridge was lucky it had a half-used jar of olives in it. There wasn’t so much as salad dressing. She was not culinarily inclined in even a crude sense of the word.

“That should be about thirty grams of protein, though. You could probably aim for about sixty a day. If you ask Alisha, I’m sure she’ll get you some richer cuts of meat that’ll help your joints heal.”

I nodded and tried the chicken and rice. It wasn’t glamorous or complex but it was tasty. If I had an upset stomach, this could probably be a nice meal when I could just start eating solid food again. I would appreciate some kind of sauce, though.

“Thank you,” I told Tye.

“Anytime,” he said and started to scrub down the glass cook top of Alisha’s stove. There were some fine flecks of oil and grease on there now.

“I mean it,” I said. “You do a lot for me. And you really just have to make sure no one drags me off, right?”

He hesitated to answer this. “It’s not just that,” he said. “That is my primary duty, yes. But since I've been freed from driving Alisha on her daily rounds, it gives me time to organize my own people.”

“You… are a captain?” I asked. I had forgotten he had mentioned this forever ago in passing and it hadn’t really sunk in.

“Yes,” he answered. “And when Alisha had me at her side, it made it difficult to keep tabs on everybody so Matteo tended to have a lot more put on him than was really needed.”

“But what– who–” I didn’t know how to ask the question and found myself staring intently at my half-eaten food.

“What’s my job?” he guessed.

I nodded, and tried to hide the anxiety I could already feel moving my face.

“We’re her enforcement.” He continued examining the stove for more grease stains.

I nodded, a little bit of fear slithering into my throat. Tye was the one Alisha relied on when people needed to disappear. I’d never seen him kill anybody, but that didn’t mean it didn’t happen.

“Fortunately it’s not something I need to deal with very frequently. We function as much as deterrent as actual enforcement. Doesn’t mean I haven’t killed people but it’s probably not as many or as brutal as you might expect.”

I nodded again. My stomach felt a bit off and I didn’t really want to keep eating this chicken-rice bowl. But stopping now would be a pretty obvious sign of discomfort so I put more food in my mouth and chewed.

“I know,” he said. “It’s… unpleasant. It’s not really what I wanted but this is a position passed down from my father. I don’t have the skills to do anything else.”

“You can’t learn?” I asked.

“It’s more that other people can’t learn what I know. I was trained from a very young age, which means that I’m the best Alisha’s got. If she needs someone to be missing their first two joints of their left ring finger, I can do it. And if she needs someone’s spleen packaged up in a cooler and shipped to their boss, I can do that too. But she knows it bothers me, so she put me as captain so I can keep my hands as clean as I can.”

I nodded. “I see…”

He finally turned around, the stove apparently passing his scrutiny.

“I don’t blame you,” I told him. “Alisha said that things need to be done in order for the entire system to work. If the system collapses…”

“There’s a lot of lives at stake,” he filled in. “Both mobsters and non-associates. So it’s the age-old question of: do you save the few at the cost of the many or sacrifice the few to keep the many safe?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s still…” I trailed off. There wasn’t a word that summed it up easily.

“It’s part of what makes Alisha different,” he continued. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her hurt someone for a purely personal reason. Sergei has probably gotten the closest but disobedience is still a problem that needs to be fixed.”

“But the men in the alley didn’t do anything to me,” I pointed out.

“They were going to. Dragging unassociated people into the business by force is a massive liability. People don’t just roll over and accept their fate, they make efforts to escape and get help or revenge. That’s why even in this filthy business, sexual assault and general violence is heavily frowned upon. Some captains are more lenient than others but if Alisha spots it, there’s no mercy. I’m not one to tolerate it either.”

I took the time to thoroughly chew some more chicken. “... I think you’re a good person,” I told him. “At least from what I’ve seen.”

He was the one to be a little sheepish for once and broke our eye contact to stare at the floor. “Thank you,” he said. “That means a lot coming from someone like you.”

“An unassociated person?” I asked.

“Yes.” He turned and scraped the remaining rice and chicken in a container that he then put in the fridge. “You can just reheat that in the microwave for like ninety seconds or so,” he said and left the room.

I let my shoulders relax a bit and looked down at the chicken-rice bowl he had made. I couldn’t really blame Alisha or Tye for getting where they were. I didn’t know details but Alisha had extensive childhood trauma. The fact that she was functioning at all was a tribute to her strength. Tye… I didn’t know much about him. He didn’t enjoy hurting people, even if it was what he was raised to do. Even if he was Alisha’s enforcer… or the captain of her enforcers, he was still far more preferable for me to be around than someone like Sergei or Nicco, who didn’t have to do their own dirty work. That was probably because Sergei and Nicco both treated me like an object that could be poked, prodded or criticized for no reason beyond being defiant to Alisha. Tye treated me like a person, and took the time to show me how to cook chicken. It was good chicken, too. There wasn’t a lot of flavor but the texture was soft and juicy still.

Tye probably had a lot of trauma on his shoulders too. Perhaps that was why he turned down that girl at Taco Mojado. If he felt like a bad person he might think he didn’t deserve any happiness.