Beg

The first thing Miles knew was the sound of water slapping against a hull.

The second was that he couldn't feel his hands.

He lay on a narrow bunk in a small cabin that stank of salt and cheap cologne, wrists bound above his head with nylon cord. His shirt was torn at the collar. His mouth tasted of copper and chemicals. When he tried to lift his head, the world swung wildly to the left and he gagged.

"Easy there, pretty boy." A hand patted his cheek. "Don't want to choke on your own tongue. Not yet."

Lane Whitfield sat beside him on the edge of the bunk, one arm in a sling, a ring of bruises under his eyes. He was a good-looking man, in the bland, well-fed way of trust-fund sons, and he smiled down at Miles with an expression of such sweet and total ownership that Miles's skin crawled.

"I was so mad," Lane said conversationally. "When you broke my ribs. I thought, I'm going to *ruin* him. And then I thought: why not do it the nice way? Why not make him *want* it?"

"Go to hell."

"Oh, I plan to. Later." Lane's hand slid down Miles's throat, over his collarbone, and rested lightly on his chest. "But first, I get to watch the Moretti heir beg."

Heat was starting to coil in Miles's belly. Not pleasant, not anything like pleasant. A hot, sick, spreading tide, like a fever under the skin. He recognized it at once, with a dull terror: they had dosed him with something. Something strong. Something designed to strip a man's will from his body.

*Adrian*, he thought, with sudden naked longing. *Adrian, where are you?*

"I can see it kicking in," Lane murmured, almost tender. "Don't fight it. You'll hurt yourself."

"I'd—" Miles's voice came out wrecked. "I'd rather die."

"Baby." Lane tutted. "How long are you going to hold out? Every man in the city says you're a little wolf. A killer. And look at you, shaking like a girl." He leaned down and put his mouth beside Miles's ear. "Beg me now. Just say you want me."

Miles turned his head, stared straight into Lane's eyes, and spat in his face.

The blow that followed split his lip and rang his skull against the bulkhead. Stars burst in his vision. When they cleared, Lane was laughing softly, wiping his cheek.

"Damn," said one of the men by the door, an uneasy, muscular man with a boxer's nose. "This guy's sick, boss."

"I'm not sick," Lane said. "I'm in *love*." He turned back to Miles, and his smile was awful. "Baby, I don't want to force you. I really don't. It's no fun that way. Just say you want me, and I'll make it so good for you. Just say it."

*What defies the world*, Miles thought, in a distant, hysterical flash, *is what's truly precious.*

It was one of the lines from Lane's letters, the ones he'd burned in the dorm incinerator. Something about forbidden things being the only ones worth keeping. It sickened him that he agreed with the words and loathed the mouth that had written them.

*If Adrian doesn't come, I'll...*

He bit down on his own tongue until he tasted blood.

*He'll come. He will.* The fever surged. His body arched involuntarily and he heard himself make a sound he hated. *He always comes. He's never once been late.*

"Look at that," Lane breathed. "Look at you."

Miles closed his eyes.

That was when the first gunshot went off on the deck above.

---

Adrian took the steps down into the hold two at a time with a pistol in each hand and four dead men behind him.

He had not planned it that way. He had not planned anything. He had stood at the prow of the interceptor with Marcus shouting numbers at his side, and when the white hull of the Whitfield yacht had loomed up out of the morning haze he had simply gone over the rail, into the fight, and done what he had spent twenty years learning to do.

It was very quiet, now, below deck.

He kicked open the cabin door.

Lane Whitfield stood with one hand wound in Miles's torn shirt, a knife at the boy's throat, and an expression of dawning horror. Behind him, on a narrow bunk, Miles lay bound and flushed and bleeding, his chest heaving, and the sight went through Adrian like a bullet through glass.

For one second he forgot every rule he'd ever lived by.

"Step back," he said, in a voice he did not recognize.

"Mr. Cole." Lane's voice shook. "Mr. Cole, I'm— this is a misunderstanding. He came willingly. Ask him."

"I will," Adrian said, "when you're dead."

"You wouldn't—"

"Look at his wrists."

Lane did not need to. The raw red marks were vivid against Miles's pale skin.

"Let him see it with his own eyes," Lane whispered suddenly, and it was a stranger's voice, giddy and cracked. "If I can't have him, then he can watch me—"

He never finished the sentence.

Adrian shot the knife out of his hand, then his knee, then took two steps forward and drove the butt of the pistol into the man's face with a crunch that echoed off the cabin walls. Lane went down screaming. Adrian kicked him once, hard, in the ribs, precisely where the old fracture was healing. He kicked him again. Marcus's men came pouring through the door behind him and dragged the whimpering thing out by its ankles.

"Don't kill him," Adrian said, without looking back. "Not yet. I'm not finished."

Then he turned, and there was only Miles.

He crossed the cabin in three strides and dropped to his knees beside the bunk, slicing the cord with a knife he had no memory of drawing. Miles's hands fell free. They were cold. Adrian caught them between his palms and chafed them, hard, thinking *breathe, breathe, breathe*.

"Miles. Miles, look at me."

"Adrian?" The voice was hoarse and disbelieving. The amber eyes, glazed and unfocused, slid up to find his face. "You came."

"Of course I came."

"You came to get me."

"Always." Adrian's voice cracked down the middle. "I always will. Let's go home."

"I thought—" Miles swallowed. "I thought maybe you'd decided you were done."

"Never." He gathered the boy against him, one arm under his shoulders, one under his knees. Miles weighed almost nothing, or perhaps it was only that Adrian couldn't feel his own arms. "Don't move. I've got you."

"Adrian."

"Don't talk."

"Adrian, I—" A shudder ran through Miles's whole body. His forehead dropped against Adrian's neck, and Adrian felt the unnatural, burning heat of his skin through the cloth. "I feel— something's wrong. I can't— it's—"

"I know. I know." Adrian was already moving, carrying him up through the narrow companionway into the harsh gray light. "Whatever they gave you, we're going to fix it. Get a hold of yourself. Stay with me."

"It hurts."

"I know, baby. I'll find you a doctor. All right?"

Miles made a ragged sound that was almost a laugh. His fingers knotted in the front of Adrian's jacket.

"No," he whispered. "No doctor."

"Miles—"

"I'd rather—" His voice splintered. "I'd rather let it kill me than let anyone else touch me."

Adrian stopped dead on the deck.

The wind whipped his coat around his legs. Gulls cried over the churning water. Marcus and the others had gone very still, studiously not looking, and Adrian stood there with his dead friend's son burning in his arms, knowing exactly what had just been said and exactly what it meant.

He did not let himself think. He just started walking again.

"Get the car," he told Marcus, in a voice like cracked ice. "Take us home. Call Dr. Weiss. Tell her to meet us at the house, and tell her to bring a sedative and anything for a stimulant overdose, and then tell her—" His throat closed. He forced it open. "Tell her to be discreet."

"Yes, sir."

"And Marcus."

"Sir?"

"If anyone ever asks," Adrian said quietly, "he was never on that boat."

He climbed down the gangplank without looking back, carrying the only thing in the world he could not afford to lose.

And all the way home, with the shaking head tucked beneath his chin and the ragged breath against his throat, he felt something inside him tear free of the moorings it had been chained to for eight years, and go drifting, helpless, out toward open water.