What's Mine

The call came at two in the afternoon, three days later, while Adrian was in the middle of a meeting about shipping routes.

"Boss." Marcus's voice was clipped. "The young master's been in a fight at school."

Adrian was already standing. "Hurt?"

"No, sir. But the other kid is."

He did not remember the elevator ride. He remembered the car, and telling the driver to go faster, and the way the city smeared past like wet paint. He remembered a cold thread of fear unspooling in his stomach, the same fear he had felt every time that boy had ever been late, been sick, been quiet for too long. It was the fear of a man who had already buried one Moretti and would not survive burying another.

Ashford University's administration building was all glass and anxiety. The dean met him in the lobby with the strained smile of someone who had been told, several times, that this was a very important family.

"Mr. Cole. We're so sorry to trouble you. There's been an incident involving a student named Lane Whitfield—"

"Where's Miles?"

"Waiting in the— well. Outside. He wouldn't sit in my office."

He found Miles on the steps in the thin autumn sun, sleeves rolled, one hip propped against the stone railing, tossing a pen from hand to hand like a boy waiting for a bus. Two of Adrian's men stood a respectful distance away, wearing the faintly haunted expressions of people who had watched something they wouldn't be repeating.

"Marcus tells me," Adrian said, "that Whitfield has three broken ribs."

"Four, probably. Marcus is conservative."

"Miles."

"He had it coming." The pen stopped. Miles looked up, and the lazy look in his eyes did not match the stillness in his jaw. "He's been following me around campus for two months. Leaving notes in my locker. Writing things." His lip curled. "Today he cornered me in the library stacks and decided I'd be friendlier if I knew how many of his friends were watching."

The cold thread in Adrian's stomach turned to ice.

"Did he touch you?"

"He tried. That's why he has four ribs broken instead of none." Miles pushed off the railing and came down two steps. "Don't look like that. I didn't need rescuing. I just needed him to understand."

"Where is he now?"

"Hospital. Don't worry, Adrian. I'm not going to finish it." A pause. "Unless you want me to."

"No," Adrian said, too quickly, and then, in a lower voice: "No. I'll handle it."

Something shifted in Miles's face. Something warm and pleased, entirely inappropriate for the setting. "You were worried."

"I'm always worried about you. It's a chronic condition."

"No." Miles smiled slowly. "You came here in forty minutes from the other side of the city with your tie crooked. That's more than worry."

Adrian reached up to straighten it, realized what he was doing, and dropped his hand.

Miles's smile deepened.

"You're coming home," Adrian said. "You're done with the dorm."

"After that? You still want me in the dorm?" Miles's eyebrow went up. "You're worried I'll put someone else in the hospital?"

"I'm worried about the ones who'll come after Whitfield. Men like that have friends." He kept his voice even. "That freak will never come near you again. I'll make sure."

"A freak," Miles repeated thoughtfully, and gave him a long look. "Funny. I don't think you meant the part where he writes me love letters. Do you, Adrian? Don't you like men too?"

Adrian went very still.

"Careful."

"You loved my father."

"That's—" He heard how his own voice sounded, strangled, unsteady. "Nonsense. How could I?"

"I was twelve, not blind." Miles stepped down to the last stair, putting them almost eye to eye. "You used to watch him leave a room like a man watching the sun go down."

"Get in the car, Miles."

"You're not denying it."

"I'm telling you to get in the car."

Miles laughed, low and unbothered, and walked past him so closely that his shoulder brushed Adrian's on the way. "Yes, sir," he murmured, in a tone that made the title sound like something else entirely.

---

Dinner at the Cole-Moretti house was served at eight, in a dining room built to seat twenty. They sat at the near end of it, across a corner, because years ago a small boy had refused to eat anywhere he couldn't see Adrian's hands.

Miles had not stopped watching them all evening.

"Eat," Adrian said.

"I'm eating."

"You're pushing things around a plate."

"You've always been so strict about my meals." Miles leaned back, one arm draped over the chair next to him, studying Adrian from beneath lowered lashes. "You said I'm still growing. Being too refined will stunt me."

"That's right."

"Still growing." The corner of his mouth lifted. "How big do you want me to get, Adrian?"

Adrian's fork stopped halfway to his mouth.

It was, he told himself, a perfectly innocent question from a perfectly innocent twenty-year-old. It was a *tease*. He was reading too much into it. He had been reading too much into things for three days, jumping at sounds, watching doors, and none of it was warranted. Miles was a boy who had lost his father and clung to the last man standing. Miles was a child.

Miles was not a child.

"Finish your plate," Adrian said evenly.

"Feed me."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You used to when I was sick." Miles pushed his plate an inch across the table, eyes bright with challenge. "Humor me. One bite."

"You're twenty."

"And you never refused me anything." A pause, soft and merciless. "Until recently."

Adrian should have stood. He should have taken his plate and his dignity and gone upstairs to the study to stare at the ceiling. Instead he picked up his fork, speared a piece of roasted lamb, and held it out across the corner of the table with a hand that was not quite steady.

Miles leaned in and took it from the fork without breaking eye contact.

Slowly. Deliberately. His lips closed over the tines. His eyes did not leave Adrian's face.

Adrian's mouth went dry.

"More," Miles said when he'd swallowed.

Adrian fed him another bite. Then another. By the fifth he was acutely aware that the soft sounds in the room were his own breathing, that the candle between them cast Miles's lashes in long gold shadows on his cheekbones, that a muscle was jumping in his own jaw. *Stop*, said a clear voice at the back of his mind. *Stop this now.*

He did not stop.

"There," Miles said, finally, softly. "You ate all of it. I mean—I did." A smile curved. "Who told you to shove it in my mouth, Adrian?"

"You asked—"

"I did. And I liked it." He leaned forward on his elbows. "I like it when you feed me what's yours."

Adrian dropped the fork. It rang against the china, loud as a gunshot.

"Enough," he said hoarsely.

Miles didn't flinch. He just looked at Adrian, long and open and a little amused, and then, instead of pressing, he glanced down and did something worse. He reached across the table and caught Adrian's left hand.

"What are you looking at?" Adrian demanded.

"The ring."

"It's nothing. It's—"

"Gabriel's." Miles turned the hand over gently, as if it were something fragile. The signet ring, heavy gold, engraved with the Moretti wolf, caught the candlelight. It had been on that finger for eight years. "He gave you this before he died. You've never taken it off. Not once. Not in the shower, not in bed, not in a fight." His thumb ran across the engraving. "Let me see it."

"Miles."

"Let me see it. Please."

It was the *please* that undid him. Adrian slid the ring off. The skin beneath was pale and faintly dented where the gold had sat for so long. It felt obscene to see, as if something private had been stripped bare.

Miles took the ring carefully, turned it between two fingers, and slid it into his own pocket.

"Careful," Adrian said, with a flash of sharpness. "Give it back when you're done."

"Relax. You'll get it back." Miles stood and rounded the table, and before Adrian could rise he had caught his left hand again. "But a hand shouldn't be bare."

From the same pocket he took something else: a ring of plain brushed steel, unadorned, unmistakably new. He slid it onto Adrian's ring finger in one smooth, deliberate movement.

It fit perfectly. Of course it did. Miles had known the size for years.

"If you like it, take it," Miles said, voice low. "If you don't, take it anyway."

"This is too much," Adrian whispered. "Aren't we—we're brothers. In a way. We don't keep score."

"Since when are we brothers?" Miles lifted Adrian's hand and pressed his lips, once, to the new steel. The touch was warm and brief and went through Adrian like a current through water. "I never once thought of you that way. Not for a second."

He let go. Straightened. And walked out of the dining room without looking back, taking a dead man's ring with him, leaving a living man's heart pounding in his throat.

Adrian sat alone at the table for a long time, looking at his own hand.

The band was still warm.

From that night on, he did not take it off.