Tonight's My Lucky Night

The Gilded Lantern kept its worst secrets in the basement, and Adrian Cole had come down to look at one of them.

He sat in the corner booth with a glass of whiskey he hadn't touched, his back to the brick, his left hand resting on the table where the light caught the heavy gold signet ring on his finger. He was thirty-five years old, and he wore a charcoal three-piece suit the way other men wore armor. Every man in the room knew his name. Not one of them had looked at him for more than a second at a time.

Which was why the man who slid into the booth across from him was either very stupid or very drunk.

"Word downstairs," the man said, grinning, "is that nobody's touched you in eight years."

Adrian's eyes lifted slowly. The man was handsome in the way of someone who had never been told no: loosened tie, expensive cologne, a signet ring that belonged to a family three rungs below Adrian's own. Two of his friends hovered behind him, delighted with their own courage.

"Eight years," the man repeated, leaning in. "That's a long time to be lonely, Mr. Cole. Tonight's my lucky night."

Adrian set his glass down. The sound it made was small and exact. "You have until I finish this sentence to stand up and leave."

"Or what?"

"That was the sentence."

The man laughed and reached across the table, fingertips aiming for Adrian's wrist.

He never made it.

A hand closed around the man's collar from behind, and in one clean, brutal motion he was hauled out of the booth and slammed against the nearest pillar hard enough to rattle the bottles behind the bar. The music did not stop, but the room did. Conversations died mid-word. Somebody's glass hit the floor.

"Touch him again," said a low voice, almost conversational, "and I'll take that hand home as a souvenir."

Adrian knew the voice before he turned his head. He would have known it in the dark, in a crowd, in his sleep. He had heard it crack at twelve years old over a coffin. He had heard it shout down tutors, and laugh at birthday dinners, and mutter *good night, Adrian* through a half-closed door more evenings than he could count.

Miles Moretti stood with one forearm pinned across the stranger's throat, perfectly calm, and the calm was the dangerous part.

He was twenty now. Tall, lean, with his father's sharp jaw and his father's wolfish amber eyes, golden-brown hair pushed back carelessly from a face that had stopped being a boy's face somewhere while Adrian wasn't looking. He wore a black shirt open at the collar, sleeves shoved to the elbow, and a thin cut on his knuckle was bleeding where he'd already hit someone upstairs. Adrian could see the pulse in his throat. It was steady. That frightened him more than if it had been racing.

"Miles," Adrian said.

"Give me a second, Uncle." Miles didn't look away from the man. "He's apologizing."

"I—" The man wheezed. "I didn't know he was—"

"Whose," Miles said softly. "You didn't know whose he was."

Adrian rose from the booth. "Miles. Let him go."

A beat. Then Miles released him, stepped back, and the man slid down the pillar and scrambled away on his hands and knees, his friends dissolving into the crowd ahead of him. The room let out its breath. Nobody dared to meet Miles Moretti's eyes. The little wolf cub had grown teeth, and the entire underworld of the city had just watched him show them.

"What are you doing here?" Adrian said. His voice came out level, cold, the voice that closed deals and ended arguments. It cost him effort. "You're supposed to be at school."

"You're supposed to be home." Miles stepped closer. He did it without hurry, the way a man steps into his own territory. "You told Marcus you had a late meeting. Marcus told me this was the meeting." His gaze flicked to the booth, to the untouched glass, back up. "Is this what you do when I'm not around? Sit in the dark and let strangers circle you?"

"I came to see what the Lantern's new management was doing with our license. It's business."

"It's not business." Miles's mouth curled. "You hate this place. You came down here because somebody told you the old Gabriel crowd drinks here on his anniversary week, and you wanted to be near people who remembered him."

Adrian said nothing. That was the trouble with being raised by a man for eight years: he learned every one of his silences.

Miles's face softened, just barely, and then hardened again. "Eight years, Adrian."

It was the first time in months he had dropped the *Uncle*. Adrian felt it like a hand pressed flat against his sternum.

"I thought you'd mourn him forever," Miles said quietly. "I really did. I thought, fine, let him. My father was worth it. He was worth anyone's forever." He took another step. Now there was barely a foot of air between them, and Adrian could smell cedar soap and cold night air and the faint copper of blood. "But you're done now. I can see it. You've been done for a while. You just won't admit it."

"That's enough. We're going home."

"Then let me be the one."

The room, the music, the whole thick basement seemed to tilt away from Adrian and leave only those five words hanging in the space between their mouths.

"Say that again," Adrian said, very quietly, "and I'll forget you're twenty years old and put you over my knee in front of every man in this room."

Miles smiled. It was a terrible smile, sweet and sharp, and it was his father's smile exactly. "You won't. You've never once laid a hand on me in anger. You'd rather break your own wrist." He tilted his head. "Do it anyway, if it helps. I'll still love you after."

Somebody at the bar actually gasped.

"Gabriel's only son," Adrian said, low and rough, as much to himself as to Miles, "is standing in the middle of a club full of Rossi men telling me—"

"Telling you I love you. Yes." Miles didn't lower his voice at all. "That's exactly what I'm telling you. In front of everyone. Let them hear it. Let the whole city hear it. I don't care who knows."

"Miles—"

"Gabriel was my father. You were my father's sworn brother, his right hand, the man who held me at the funeral because my mother was too high to remember the date." Each word landed with the precision of a blade placed on a table. "I know what you are to me. I know what I'm not supposed to want. And I'm telling you anyway, because I am done pretending I'm still a child you can keep in a spare room."

Adrian could not breathe properly. He did what he had always done when the world went sideways: he turned his face to stone.

"Car," he said. "Now."

He walked out through the silent crowd without looking back, and he did not let himself check whether Miles was following. He heard the footsteps behind him, easy and unhurried, the footsteps of a man who knew he would not be left behind.

It was not until the elevator doors closed on the two of them, and the mirrored walls showed Adrian a stranger with a trembling hand and a flush climbing his collar, that he understood what the doors had also locked in.

Miles stood beside him, shoulder an inch from his. He wasn't touching. He didn't have to. Heat rolled off him like off a stove.

"You heard me," Miles said to the closed doors.

"I heard a boy who's had too much to drink."

"I haven't touched a drop. You'd know that if you looked."

Adrian looked. He shouldn't have. In the mirror, Miles's eyes were locked on him, steady and dark and unbearably patient.

*Eight years*, Adrian thought, as the numbers above the door ticked down. *Eight years I watched him grow up, and I never noticed. When did the way he looks at me change? When did I stop being the one who looked away first?*

He had loved Gabriel Moretti once, hopelessly and in silence, from the first night Gabriel had kicked in the door of a rotting apartment and carried a thirteen-year-old Adrian out of it. His parents had been passed out on the kitchen floor, needles still on the table, a bottle rolling slowly in a pool of its own mess. Gabriel had stood in that doorway, seventeen years old and furious, and said to the half-conscious boy in his arms: *Nobody gets to hurt you anymore. I swear on my name.* Adrian had believed him with every cell in his body. He had gone on believing for twenty-two years.

And when Gabriel died, the only thing Adrian had been able to do with his grief was raise the child Gabriel left behind.

He had taken bullets for that child. He had burned houses down for him. He had stood beside a closed coffin at twelve years old and let a small hand clamp around his fingers, and made his own silent oath. *Nobody gets to hurt you either.*

He had never imagined the one who would be hurt by the oath was himself.

The elevator opened on the garage. Miles reached out and held the door with one hand, and as Adrian stepped past him their sleeves brushed, and Adrian felt that single point of contact all the way to his spine.

"Adrian," Miles said, very softly.

"Not tonight."

"Then tomorrow." A pause. "I'll keep asking until you say yes or you send me away. And we both know you can't do the second thing."

Adrian walked to the car. He did not answer.

But as the driver pulled out into the neon-streaked dark, he caught his own reflection in the window, and saw his hand resting against Gabriel's gold ring, thumb moving back and forth across the wolf crest like a man trying to remember a prayer.

He had told himself eight years ago that he would never again want something that could break him.

He was starting to suspect that he had been lying for most of them.