Page 1 of Velvet Betrayal
Ruby
The snow was beautiful.
That was the first thing that made me want to scream.
Not the fact that my phone had been confiscated “for my safety.”
Not the fact that we were somewhere in the Berkshires, off-grid, off-map, off-everything. Not the fact that my daughter—my daughter—was laughing in the backseat like this was a Christmas miracle instead of the aftermath of a kidnapping.
None of this felt real compared to the way light played over snow drifts as we switchbacked up the mountain, powder iridescent as fairy wings, every branch sugar-frosted, every road sign blanked out by a soft, pitiless white. I wanted to scream because I wanted to be home in my bed, or in my house, or in my office with a mug of conference-room coffee and the clean hum of computers, thinking about a homicide case, not keeping a running inventory of hypothetical escape routes from an Audi Q7 with bulletproof glass.
Rosie pressed her forehead to the glass, mouth open. “Mami, look! There’s so many deer!” I couldn’t see any deer, just the edges of the road going gray thatched with dirty flakes, but I made a pleased sound.
“There are,” I said.
“What?” Rosie asked.
“There are so many deer,” I said.
She groaned, satisfied, and kicked her feet. The boots—she’d begged for them, furry and ridiculous, with a charm on each zipper—thudded rhythmically against my seat. I let her. Let her thud, let her shake off the last hour, the last year, everything that hung like icicles from our voices and gestures now. I glanced at her in the rearview, the narrow slash of her gaze flickering from the snowy verge to me, then away again. She smiled, unbothered. Sometimes I thought Rosie existed on some parallel plain of delight to the rest of us, one I envied, or maybe resented.
The headlights knifed through the thickening storm, outlining branches before erasing them completely. The road had felt infinite, and then, all at once, it was gone—a sudden elbow turn and we were crawling up the drive of a lodge that looked like it had been exhumed from someone’s idea of Old Vermont, wood-smoke scent faked and piped in, Christmas lights drooping along a warped porch rail. The tires stuttered into a rut and for a second we just sat, engine idling, the snow hissing as it hit the hood.
Rosie hummed something close to a carol, off-key and blissful, while I studied the shapes on the porch. There was no one here. No signs of tire tracks besides ours. No footprints. Maybe the storm had scrubbed them away, maybe Kieran or whoever ran logistics up the Callahan chain had thought of that, ever-thorough, but I doubted it. I felt watched anyway: the dilation of my own breath a kind of surveillance. In the rearview, Rosie watched me back. Her face, shifting in the blue dashboard glow, seemed older than it should.
Could I run? Maybe. Maybe Rosie would think it was a game, at least for a few minutes. Then she’d be cold, hungry, pissed off.How would I get us home? How would I call for help without tipping him off?
Kieran killed the engine.
We sat in the silence, which was somehow louder than the storm outside—Rosie breathing fast, me bracing for whatever came next, Kieran patting his coat for a cigarette he wasn’t going to light.
The silence had broad shoulders; it could bear a lot before breaking.
He looked at Rosie first. “You want to see inside, Ro?” Not really a question, not really not.
Her face lit up. By the time I reached for the door, she was already fighting her seatbelt, tangled and whining. I came around and helped her. She let me, small enough to curl into my coat against the wind. I caught the scent of her hair, all floral bath bomb and leftover panic from the morning meltdown at the pancake house off Exit 24. It felt like a year ago.
Kieran’s boots broke the snow first, slow and deliberate. He swept the porch, checked the windows, then looped around the house. He was different out here—sharper, more animal. Like he expected trouble. That scared me more than anything.
Because fuck me. Maybe there was a reason he had decided to kidnap me after all. I didn’t like thinking about that at all.
“Can I have my phone?” I asked, again. Maybe for the fifteenth time.
“Later,” Kieran said. “Right now, we’re doing an adventure. Remember?”
I rolled my eyes. “Right. Is that where we’re staying?”
“Absolutely. Come on. You’re going to love it.”
I doubted that.
“Do you want to hop on the snow?” Kieran asked, grinning at Rosie. “It’s crunchy.”
Rosie demanded to be put down. We walked up the drive, single file, dodging the deepest drifts. Rosie hopscotched in her neon boots, Kieran drifting behind us, hands loose, face blank. The wind was all bite. I kept one arm around Rosie, part steering, part claiming.
Rosie squealed and pointed at the porch’s welcome mat, which had a bright, chirpy cardinal painted dead center, plastic beneath the packed snow.
“It’s winter, cardinals should go south,” Rosie said. “He’s lost.”
