The Dark

The ring was gone.

Adrian had turned the study inside out. He had searched his dresser, his coat pockets, the little drawer in the nightstand where he kept the things that mattered and could never be shown to anyone. Two in the morning found him on his knees beside the bed, running a hand along the carpet in the dark, feeling like a man who had lost a limb.

"Strange," he muttered. "It has to be in this room."

"It's not."

He did not startle. He had stopped being able to startle at that voice years ago. He simply closed his eyes and said, "Miles. Go to bed."

Miles was leaning in the doorway, barefoot, in gray sweatpants and an old black T-shirt with the collar stretched out. In his hand, held loosely by the throat, was a bottle of water he was clearly not planning to drink. The hallway light behind him turned his hair to gold.

"At dinner," Adrian said, rising, "you asked to see my ring. Did you give it back?"

"I did."

"You did not."

"Is that so?" Miles looked unbothered. "Then maybe you dropped it. Stop looking, Adrian. It's a ring."

"It's your father's ring."

"It's a love token," Miles said. "That's all it ever was. A pretty piece of gold he put on the hand of the man who followed him around like a shadow. You were the best gift he ever gave himself and he never knew it."

"A love token?" Adrian stared at him. "Then what about your mother, and you? Your father—"

"He had a lot of lovers besides my mother. He was a handsome man in a violent business. That isn't a secret. Why is that strange?"

"Because Gabriel liked women."

Miles regarded him with an almost clinical patience. "Gabriel liked *whoever was in the room*. But all right. Forget it." He drained half the bottle, set it down on the dresser. "You like wearing a ring? I'll buy you one."

"With what? Whose money do you think you're spending?"

"Yours." The corner of his mouth twitched. "Obviously."

It should have been funny. For a moment it almost was. But Adrian looked at the steel band on his own hand and the half-grin on Miles's face and felt, rising in him, a slow cold awareness that he was losing a game whose rules he had never agreed to.

"Go to bed," he said again, more quietly.

Miles didn't move.

"Uncle." The word came out soft, almost shy. "The light in my room is broken."

"Then I'll send for an electrician in the morning."

"Can I sleep in your room tonight?"

For a long moment Adrian did not answer.

It was such a small thing. It was a child's request. It was the same one a twelve-year-old had made in a trembling voice through a half-open door, three weeks after the funeral, when the whole enormous house felt like a mouth about to close.

*Miles is afraid of the dark.*

He had said it to the housekeeper once, years ago, to excuse the small night-light he kept plugged into the hall. *But he clings. He's afraid for a reason.*

"It's not broken," Adrian said, very low. "Is it."

Miles's gaze did not waver. "No."

"Miles—"

"I know." The word was quiet. "I know what I'm asking. I'm asking anyway."

The old house ticked and breathed around them. Somewhere below, a clock struck the quarter hour.

Adrian ought to have said no. Every sane part of him knew it. He should have taken the boy by the shoulders and walked him back down the hall and locked the door between them with a key he would throw into the river.

But there was a twelve-year-old standing behind the twenty-year-old's eyes. He had been standing there for eight years. And Adrian had never once, in all that time, been able to turn that child away.

"Lie on the left," he heard himself say. "And keep your hands to yourself."

Miles smiled at him then, a real smile, bright and boyish and devastating. "Yes, sir."

---

He remembered the first night.

The funeral had ended hours before. The house was full of strangers' perfume and the smell of lilies and wet wool, and Adrian had been standing at a window in the dark, hollowed out, unable to cry, when a small hand knocked on the bedroom door.

*Uncle Adrian?*

The boy had looked so small. Not yet thirteen, tall for his age but narrow as a blade, in his school uniform because he'd refused to take it off. *Can I sleep here? Please. I can't be in there. It's too quiet.*

Adrian had taken him in his arms and sat on the edge of the bed in his white robe, and Miles had buried his face in his chest and shaken without a sound. All night. Adrian had held him, hand spread across his small back, murmuring things he didn't remember, until the boy slept with fingers knotted in the terrycloth, sticky with tears.

He had looked down at Gabriel's son, curled against him like a stray animal that had decided to trust a human, and he had thought, with a kind of wonder: *Nobody gets to hurt you. I swear on my name.*

The same oath. The same words. Gabriel had given them to him. He had given them to Gabriel's child.

It had been so simple, then.

---

At six in the morning, Adrian woke in a cage.

Not a literal one. But a warm, heavy weight pinned him to the mattress, an arm banded around his waist, a leg hooked over his own, a face tucked into the hollow of his shoulder. He felt breath against his collarbone, slow and even. He felt, very distinctly, a hard line of heat pressed against his thigh that had nothing to do with comfort.

*Twenty*, he reminded himself. *He is twenty years old. He is a grown man. He is—*

He was also, undeniably, still sleeping. Sunlight crept through the curtains, laying a bar of gold across the sheets. Miles looked younger in sleep, lashes dark against his cheeks, lips slightly parted, one hand curled over Adrian's ribs as if he were afraid the man might evaporate.

Adrian's body, traitor that it was, responded.

He disentangled himself with infinite care. He slid out from under the arm, the leg, the weight. He stood up, and his knees felt oddly weak. He made it to the bathroom, turned the shower to cold, stepped in fully clothed in the silk pajama bottoms he'd slept in, and braced both hands against the tile.

The water was brutal. It did not help.

*What kind of man*, he thought, teeth clenched, *finds peace in his best friend's son's arms, and then wakes up wanting him?*

When he emerged, dripping and furious with himself, Miles was awake. He lay propped on one elbow in the rumpled bed, hair tousled, watching the bathroom door with an expression Adrian couldn't read.

"You ran," Miles said.

"I took a shower."

"A cold one." Miles's gaze dropped, deliberately, then returned to his face. "I could hear it from here."

"Get dressed. You have a lecture at nine."

"Adrian."

"Get *dressed*, Miles."

He closed the door of the dressing room behind him and stood in the dark among his suits, shaking.

*I can't read him anymore*, he thought. *Or maybe I can, and I'm the one who can't stand what's written there.*

He knew then, with total certainty, that something had to change before one of them did something unforgivable.

And since he was the grown man in this house, it was going to have to be him.