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Milo’s whole face lights up. Delaney turns and glares at me.

“I cannot let you buy us dinner after you already saved him,” she says.

“I have no interest in watching my assistant waste an evening poisoning us over a stove.” I collect my jacket off the chair. “Let’s go.”

The restaurant is a Volkov Holdings room, dark wood and old Russian dishes and staff who go straight-backed the moment I walk in. The manager moves to clear the other diners out, and I stop him with a look. Tonight, I would rather not be that man.

Milo reads the menu like a contract, checking each price before he permits himself to look at the dish beside it.

“Order whatever you want,” I tell him.

“I have to assess carefully,” he says. “Wasting food is incompetent.”

“Milo,” Delaney prompts. “What do you say first?”

“Thank you for dinner.” Then, without a single pause, “Also, these clothes were cut for the skinny twin. You have way too many muscles for them. Did you two get the same face, but you got all the arms?”

Delaney chokes on her water.

I glance down at the shirt straining over my chest. It is, I will admit, the first time in a great many years that I’ve eaten dinner dressed like this.

“Do you agree the clothes don’t fit?” I ask her.

“I think Milo is talking a little too much,” she says, her red face betraying her completely. Milo smirks back and forth between the two of us, thoroughly pleased with himself.

When the food comes, Milo falls on the pumpkin soup and the cheese pancakes as though he has not eaten in a week. Delaney tells him to slow down. I think about the numbers in her file, about the debt that never moves.

“Why do you owe so much?” I ask her.

She sets down her fork. “My parents died in a car accident. The treatment before they passed cost a great deal.”

I start to ask about them, and she nods once, quick, without lifting her eyes. Beside her, Milo slows his fork too.

“My salary covers the loan, with a little left over,” she says, flat and even, the way you might report the weather. “We manage fine.”

Something twists hard and unfamiliar in my gut. She lays out the loss of her parents, a mountain of debt, and the raising of a child alone as though none of it is worth a second of pity, as though she has never once let herself sit down and grieve any single piece of it.

I signal the manager and have him bring a checkbook. I write the full figure of her debt across it and push it over the table to her.

She looks at it and frowns at once. “No, I can’t take this.”

“It’s not a problem for me,” I say.

“It is a problem for me.” She pushes the check back with two fingers. “Why would you even do this? My debt has nothing to do with you.”

Her refusal is real and immediate, and somehow it only makes me want to press the money, and a good deal more than money, harder into her hands.

“Consider it compensation,” I say. “On my brother’s behalf, for what he did to you.” I push down the protective, possessive thing rising in me, the instinct that has no business being anywhere near my chest. This is not the cold sort of man I usually am, and I know it even while I’m doing it.

“She works so hard,” Milo says around a mouthful of pancake. “Especially after our parents died. She does everything.”

Delaney taps the top of his head. “Chew your food first.”

“Our parents,” I repeat.

My glass stops halfway to my mouth. That one small word, our, hangs in the air and rearranges the whole afternoon.

Delaney’s eyes close. Color climbs up her neck. “Milo is my brother,” she says. “He is not my son. He is my little brother.”