Chapter 14 Miles
Miles
I'm standing on a porch in a neighborhood I've never been to, holding a sixty-dollar bottle of wine and listening to what sounds like a small riot happening on the other side of the door.
Someone is laughing. A baby is screaming — the happy kind, not the bad kind, I think, although I'm not sure I can tell the difference.
Music is playing, something uptempo that doesn't match the screaming or the laughing.
Ray's voice is in there, loud and easy, saying something that sends someone else into hysterics.
I took an Uber. I told myself it was because parking would be difficult. It's because arriving with Ray in his car meant something I'm not ready for it to mean.
I ring the doorbell.
Lawson opens the door with Noah on his hip and a dish towel over his shoulder and a grin like I just made his day. "Miles! Come in, come in. Sorry about the — yeah, it's always like this. Kole says we need a bigger house but I think the noise is the charm."
The house is warm. That's the first thing I register — the physical warmth, like someone turned the heat up too high, and then the other kind.
The walls are a soft gray and there are framed photos everywhere — the three of them at a beach, Noah's first birthday, Lawson and Kole's bonding ceremony.
There are toys on the floor and shoes piled by the door and it smells like garlic and something baking and underneath all of it, the layered scents of a bonded family.
I hand Lawson the wine. "Thank you for having me."
"Are you kidding? We never have people over. Kole's been cleaning all day. He'll kill me for telling you that." Lawson takes the wine and looks at the label and his eyebrows go up. "Okay, this is way nicer than what we were going to open. You're officially my favorite guest."
He ushers me inside and the riot becomes people.
Devon is on the couch with a baby — Gabriel, I think — propped against his shoulder, gesturing with his free hand while he tells a story.
Alex is leaning against the doorframe to the kitchen with his arms crossed, watching Devon with an expression that's half exasperation and half grudging adoration.
Kole is in the kitchen doing three things at once.
And Ray is on the floor — literally on the floor — building a block tower with Noah that Noah keeps knocking over and shrieking about.
Ray looks up when I walk in and his whole face changes. Not dramatically — just this softening, this pull, like seeing me here in this context is something he's been wanting. "Hey," he says. "You made it."
"I said I would."
"Yeah, but I thought you might fake a work emergency." He grins and turns back to Noah and the blocks and I stand there in the entryway of this loud, overfull house in my good coat and my third-best suit and I have no idea what to do with my hands.
"Miles, right?" Devon is looking at me from the couch. He's got his brother's dark hair but sharper features, and his eyes are doing the same assessing thing that I do to people in depositions. Gabriel is chewing on the collar of his shirt. "Ray's told us about you."
"Only good things, I hope."
"He said you're his boss and you're terrifying. I didn't realize terrifying came in that size."
I look down at myself — five-ten, one-sixty soaking wet — and back at Devon. "The terror is mostly psychological."
Devon's mouth twitches. He looks over at Alex, who hasn't moved from his spot in the doorway. "I like him."
"Great," Alex says flatly. "Another sarcastic one."
"You married a sarcastic one," Devon says sweetly.
"I'm aware. I regret it daily."
Devon blows him a kiss. Alex rolls his eyes but the corner of his mouth moves, just barely, and the whole exchange takes about four seconds and tells me everything I need to know about their relationship.
They love each other the way people who used to fight love each other — with their teeth still showing.
The evening happens around me. Lawson orders too much Thai food because Kole's thing in the oven turns out to be a side dish, not the main event.
Everyone sits wherever there's space — the dining table only seats four so Devon and Alex take the floor, which Devon complains about until Alex pulls him down by the back of his shirt.
The food is spread across every available surface.
Noah eats pad thai noodles with his fist and gets sauce in his hair.
Gabriel falls asleep on Alex's chest during the main course and stays there for the rest of the meal.
I eat green curry and drink wine and listen to conversations that overlap and interrupt and circle back.
Lawson tells a story about his father that makes everyone groan.
Devon tells a story about a client that makes everyone laugh.
At one point Kole asks me about the Shaw firm — what Richard is like in person — and I find myself actually answering, not the professional version but the real one.
"He's the kind of alpha who doesn't need to raise his voice because the room is already listening.
" Kole nods like he knows exactly the type, and Devon says "sounds like Alex" and Alex, without looking up from the baby asleep on his chest, says "I raise my voice plenty.
You just don't listen." Devon throws a napkin at him.
Ray is in the middle of all of it — reaching across the table to steal Devon's spring roll, catching Noah's cup before it falls, asking Kole about his freelance work, refilling my wine without being asked.
He does that — the wine thing — so casually that I almost miss it.
But I don't miss it. I watch him notice my glass is low and reach for the bottle and pour and set it back down and never break stride in his conversation with Lawson, and I think: he's always doing this.
The coffee at the office. The water at the resort.
The food he ordered when I was going into heat.
He takes care of people without announcing it and without expecting thanks and it's such a fundamental part of who he is that he doesn't even know he's doing it.
I drink the wine he poured and it tastes better than the last glass.
Later, while Devon is telling another story and Ray is laughing and Kole is trying to keep Noah from climbing onto the table, Alex catches my eye from across the room.
He's still holding Gabriel, the baby's face pressed into his neck, and he gives me this look — not unfriendly, not inviting, just steady and direct.
Like he's reading something in me that I thought I was hiding.
Then he nods, once, slight, and goes back to watching Devon talk.
I don't know what the nod means. Approval, maybe.
Or recognition. One guarded person acknowledging another.
After dinner, Devon corners me in the kitchen. I'm rinsing a plate because I needed a task and washing dishes is a task, and then he's next to me, drying.
"So," he says. "You're the boss."
"Senior associate. His direct supervisor, yes."
"That's very corporate." He dries a plate with more care than seems warranted. "You know, Ray took that job because I guilted him into it. Told him he needed a real job with a real paycheck. He hated every second of it until about three months ago."
I rinse another plate. "What changed three months ago?"
"You tell me." Devon gives me a look that's way too perceptive for someone with baby food in his hair. "He calls me on his lunch break. He used to complain about the fluorescent lights and the coffee. Now he talks about you."
"I'm sure he complains about me too."
"Oh, constantly. You're mean and you don't sleep enough and you drink cold coffee, which he says is a cry for help." Devon pauses. "But the way he complains about you is different from the way he used to complain about the lights."
I don't have a response to that. I rinse a glass very thoroughly.
"I'm not grilling you," Devon says, and his voice is softer now.
"Ray's an adult. He makes his own choices.
I just—" He stacks the dry plate on the counter.
"He's my little brother. He acts like nothing bothers him but that's bullshit.
He feels things. I just want to make sure whoever he's feeling things about is worth it. "
"I'm his boss, Devon."
"Yeah." Devon looks at me steadily. "That's not what I asked."
He leaves me alone in the kitchen with wet hands and the distinct feeling of having been seen through a wall I thought was solid.
I find Kole on the back porch. He's leaning against the railing with a glass of wine, looking at the dark yard, and he looks up when the door opens and smiles. "Hey. Escaping the noise?"
"Needed a minute." I lean against the railing next to him. The air is cold and it feels good after the heat inside. "Your home is beautiful."
"It's a disaster." He laughs. "But thank you. It's ours, you know? Lawson wanted something bigger but I wanted something that felt lived in." He takes a sip of wine. "I spent years living in places that looked perfect and felt empty. I don't want that anymore."
The sentence lands on me harder than it should. I take a drink.
"Ray says you two are working on the Whitfield case together," Kole says. "That must be intense."
"It's a significant matter. We're managing."
He gives me a look that's amused and kind and entirely too knowing.
"I used to talk like that. 'Managing.' 'Handling it.
' Corporate omega survival language." He says it without judgment.
"I worked in corporate before Noah. Different industry, same game.
Keep your head down, outwork everyone, make sure nobody sees you sweat. "
"It's effective."
"It's exhausting." He looks at his wine. "I was on suppressants for six years. Strongest dose they make. I figured if I couldn't be a 'real' omega — you know, the soft, domestic kind everyone expects — then I'd just... not be one at all. I'd be better. Harder. I'd make them forget my designation."