The Anniversary

Dr. Weiss left at four in the afternoon with her bag half-empty and her expression carefully blank.

"It's a synthetic stimulant," she told Adrian in the hall, pulling off her gloves. "Short-acting, but vicious. He's been flushed, hydrated, and sedated for six hours. The worst of the fever has broken. By tonight he'll be clear-headed again, though he'll feel like he's been hit by a truck." She hesitated. "Mr. Cole, whoever dosed him meant to do something unforgivable."

"I know."

"I'm only saying it's a miracle you reached him in time."

"I know," Adrian said again, and the doctor, who had served the family for fifteen years and knew when to stop talking, nodded and left.

He spent the rest of the afternoon in the chair beside Miles's bed.

He didn't plan to. He had told himself he would look in once. But the boy slept so heavily, his face so pale against the pillow, a bruise purpling along his cheekbone and rope burns circling both wrists, that Adrian found he could not make himself leave. He pressed cool cloths to the fevered forehead. He tucked the blanket back when it slid. At some point he realized he was holding Miles's hand and had been for an hour, and that his own thumb was moving over the knuckles in slow, steady circles.

*Nobody gets to hurt you.*

He had failed. For the first time in eight years, he had failed.

When the light outside the window turned amber, then violet, then black, he finally rose and went downstairs.

---

It was the anniversary of Gabriel's death.

Adrian had not forgotten. He never did. Every year, on this night, he lit a single white candle in the study and sat with his old friend's photograph until it burned down. It was a ritual. A penance. A way of keeping a promise that no longer had anyone to hold him to it.

Tonight he lit the candle and did not sit.

He stood at the window with his back to the room, jacket off, sleeves rolled, watching the city lights shiver through the glass. On the desk behind him, the frame stood facing him: Gabriel at twenty-eight, laughing, a cigarette in one hand and the other thrown carelessly around Adrian's shoulders. It was the last photograph of the two of them together. Adrian had been twenty-four, scowling and self-conscious and so deeply in love he had nearly stopped breathing in the shot.

*Gabriel fought like hell back then*, he thought. *Nobody in the underworld dared cross him. And his son turned out to be exactly the same.*

The door opened behind him without a knock.

Adrian didn't turn. He knew the weight of that tread.

"You should be in bed."

"I've been in bed all day." The voice was hoarse but clear, the old edge of dry humor creeping back into it. "I'm done."

"Dr. Weiss said—"

"Dr. Weiss said the drug was out of my system by four. She told Marcus. She told *me*, an hour ago, before she left." A pause. "Ask her yourself, if you don't believe me."

Slowly, Adrian turned around.

Miles stood in the doorway in black sweatpants and a loose white shirt, hair rumpled, barefoot. A bandage wrapped his left wrist. The bruise on his cheek had darkened to a deep plum. He looked exhausted, bruised, and wholly, unmistakably himself. His eyes, those clear amber eyes, held nothing foggy or fevered. They were sharp as glass.

"I'm not dosed," he said quietly. "I'm not confused. I'm not scared." A step forward. "I want you to understand that before I say anything else."

"Miles." Adrian's voice was strained. "It's the anniversary of his death."

"I know what night it is."

"We shouldn't be—" He broke off, jaw working. "Doing this. Isn't it—aren't we letting him down?"

"Letting him down." Miles smiled faintly. "Adrian. He's been dead for eight years. He was a good man and a bad husband and a worse father, and he loved you in the clumsy, selfish way he loved everyone. He'd have laughed." The smile flickered out. "But even if he wouldn't. Even if he'd hate it. It wouldn't change a thing."

"You're not thinking clearly."

"I haven't thought clearly since I was fifteen." He crossed the room. "You know what that boat was? Four hours of lying on a bunk, waiting to die, and the only thing in my head was *Adrian*. Not my father. Not my mother. Not even myself." He reached the desk. "Just you. Isn't that the truest thing I could tell you?"

Adrian's fingers tightened on the windowsill behind him.

"I can't do this," he said hoarsely.

"You can."

"I'm your—"

"You're *Adrian*." Miles stopped an arm's length away. "That's all you are to me. It's the only name I've ever had for you."

The candle flickered. In the dark glass of the window, Adrian saw the two of them, side by side, and thought: *when did he become as tall as me?*

"I almost lost you today," he said. It came out of him like blood. "I stood on that deck and I thought, if he's dead, I won't survive it. I won't even try."

"I know."

"I wasn't supposed to feel that. Not like that."

"I know." Gently, Miles took the last step. His hand rose, slow as a man gentling a frightened horse, and cupped Adrian's face. His palm was warm and a little rough. "I know, Adrian. Let go."

*Let go*, Adrian thought, distantly. *Eight years.*

He didn't know which of them moved first.

---

The kiss was not gentle.

It was eight years' worth of hunger, a starving thing finally let off its chain. Miles's mouth crashed down on his, hot and demanding, and Adrian made a low, broken sound against it. His hands, which had been clenched at his sides, came up and sank into Miles's hair of their own accord. He hauled him closer. He tasted salt and toothpaste and the faint metallic sting of the split in Miles's lip.

"Miles," he gasped against his mouth. "Wait—"

"No." The word was a growl. Miles walked him backwards until his spine hit the edge of the desk, a photo frame clattering over somewhere behind him. "I'm done waiting."

"You're hurt—"

"I'm *fine*." Miles's hands were everywhere, tearing at the buttons of Adrian's shirt, dragging the fabric open, flattening against bare skin. Adrian's breath hitched. "God, Adrian. Eight years. Do you know how many nights I lay awake wondering what you'd sound like?"

"Stop—"

"Do you want me to stop?" Miles pulled back an inch. His eyes were black with want, and his chest was heaving, and he looked at Adrian with such total vulnerability beneath the hunger that something in him cracked cleanly in two. "Say it. If you want me to stop, say it, and I will. I'll walk out that door and never touch you again. I swear on my name."

Adrian looked at him.

At the bruise on his cheekbone. At the raw red rope marks on his wrists. At the boy who had once slept in his arms and the man who was holding him now, and the line between them, which had never been a line at all.

"Don't stop," Adrian whispered.

Miles made a sound like a man being dragged from deep water.

Then his mouth was on Adrian's throat, teeth scraping lightly over his pulse, and Adrian's head fell back against the dark wood of the desk. He heard himself groan. He felt Miles's hands slide down his ribs, his waist, his hips, thumbs hooking beneath his belt, and every nerve in his body lit up like a struck match.

"Look at you," Miles murmured against his skin. "So composed. So careful. All this time." A scrape of teeth. "I want to see what's under it."

"Miles—"

"Say it again."

"Say what?"

"My name." A bite, light and wicked, at the corner of his jaw. "Say it like you mean it."

"*Miles.*"

"Again."

"Miles—*God*—"

"Good." Miles lifted his head. His mouth was swollen and wet, his hair wrecked, his eyes burning, and the smile that crossed his face was the most beautiful and most devastating thing Adrian had ever seen. "That's it. Daddy."

Adrian's whole body jolted.

"Don't—"

"Why? I'm only telling the truth." Miles's hands tightened on his hips, hauling him up onto the desk's edge, stepping between his thighs. "You raised me. You fed me. You gave me everything I ever needed, and I'm working so hard now to make you feel good." His voice dropped to a whisper at Adrian's ear. "Doesn't that make me a good boy?"

The last of Adrian's restraint went up like paper in a fire.

He took Miles's face in both hands and kissed him until neither of them could breathe, and somewhere in the roaring in his ears he heard the white candle gutter, and the old photograph slide off the desk, and a low voice he didn't recognize as his own saying *yes, God, yes, you're so good, baby, you've always been so good*—

The rest belonged to the dark.

---

He woke at dawn to an empty bed and a flood of memory.

It hit him all at once, the way a wave strikes a man on a shore: the desk, the study floor, the long hours afterward in his own sheets with a warm weight half-sprawled across his chest. The soft sounds Miles had made. The things Adrian had said into his hair.

The space beside him was still warm.

He sat up, pressed the heel of his hand to his eyes, and felt the full, crushing weight of what he had done.

*He was drugged yesterday morning. He was kidnapped. He was hurt. And I—*

*No.* Even through the horror, the honest part of him spoke up. *He was clear. He asked. He asked me over and over.*

It did not matter. It did not make him any less the older man, the guardian, the one in whose arms a frightened child had cried himself to sleep. It did not undo twenty-two years of loving a dead man, or make him any less afraid.

He stood. He dressed. He walked down the long hall to the study, where the candle had burned itself to a puddle of white wax and the photograph lay facedown on the carpet.

He picked it up and set it right. Gabriel smiled up at him from the glass, young and golden and unbothered.

"I'm sorry," Adrian said.

Behind him, the door opened.

"Marcus."

"Sir." Marcus kept his eyes carefully on the floor. "Your car is ready."

"Get ready," Adrian said. His voice was steady. He did not know how. "Miles leaves tonight."

"Sir?"

"Put him on the evening flight. Not abroad. The Santa Barbara house, where nobody can reach him. Tell the staff there to watch him around the clock. Do not let him run back." He swallowed. "Put someone on him every hour of every day."

"Yes, sir."

"And Marcus. If he asks to see me—"

"Sir?"

"He isn't to."

---

Miles was waiting in the hall when he turned to go.

He leaned against the wall in a rumpled shirt, one shoulder against the plaster, arms crossed, and his face wore an expression Adrian had never seen: cold, quiet, a kind of dreadful calm. He did not look like a boy who had been loved. He looked like a man who had just watched a door close.

"Santa Barbara," Miles said.

"It's safest."

"It's *far*."

"That's the point."

Miles nodded slowly. "And this is because of last night."

Adrian could not make his mouth shape the lie. "It's because you're my best friend's son. Because you were hurt. Because I'm—" He swallowed. "Because I'm your guardian. I'm supposed to protect you."

"From what?"

"From me."

"I see." Miles straightened off the wall. He walked up to Adrian slowly. His breath smelled faintly of coffee. "That's how it is, then. You're my father's brother. I'm your best friend's son. We're family, and we did something unforgivable, and the only decent thing to do is pretend it never happened." His lips curled. "If you're really worried about being my uncle, I'm the fool who's been paying for it all along."

"Miles—"

"Don't believe me?" He tilted his head. His eyes glittered. "Get a paternity test."

Adrian's heart stopped.

"What?"

"Get a paternity test, Adrian. I mean it. Humor me." A twisted little smile. "My father had so many lovers. My mother couldn't have told you who was in the room. You've always called me Gabriel's son, and I've never once asked you how you knew."

He didn't wait for an answer. He brushed past, shoulder-first, and kept walking.

Adrian stood in the middle of the empty corridor and heard the sound of a door opening somewhere below, a car idling, a voice saying *Young master, we're ready.*

And a memory broke loose from the bottom of his mind, one he had locked away years ago.

*A small face, wet with tears, looking up from a polished dining table the night after the funeral. A thin, trembling voice.*

*"Adrian, are you leaving me behind too?"*

*And his own voice, answering without thought, fierce and young and absolutely sure: "I'll never leave you behind. Never."*

He pressed his fist against his mouth until the room stopped spinning.

Then he walked, slowly, back into the study, closed the door, and did not come out until night had fallen and the car was long gone.

On the desk, beside the photograph, lay a folded envelope he had never seen before. His name was written on it in a familiar hand.

He did not open it.

Not yet.