Page 16 of Velvet Betrayal
A sigh, jagged and shaking. “Goddammit, Ruby. You should have told me. You should have—”
“I didn’t know. He didn’t tell me.”
Alek was silent so long it was almost a dial tone. Then: “Jesus Christ, Ruby, does he have your phone? Are you calling from something else?”
“He does. I’m using, uh, a burner. It’s fine—he’s letting me talk to you. Just…” I dropped my voice, even though the house was empty except for us. “Please don’t trace this. Don’t call the police. Don’t tell Kitsuragi. I’m fine. I don’t want this to get out to the press, okay? I don’t want to escalate things even more.”
“Copy that. But you need to come home. You know that, right?”
“Two days. Maximum. Can you do it?”
A breath, then a sigh stretched to the breaking point. “Yeah. Of course I can.” Underneath it: I always do. “But Ruby—don’t stay one hour longer than you have to.”
I considered saying something else. That I missed him, that he was the only person who’d ever made logic feel like a gift, not a maze. But it was too much, or too dangerous, or maybe both. And so instead, I said, “Thank you,” and hung up with the bitter finality that comes when you know the next call might be the last.
Kieran was careful to keep his face neutral, but some tension in his jaw barked at me: Was I grateful? Was I angry? Or was I just here, in exile from the city, a ruined queen in borrowed fleece?
He held his coffee mug for a long time, eyes fixed on the window above Rosie, who was now fully absorbed in children’s television.
“I’m not trying to make this hell for you,” he said, not looking at me. “But you can’t go back yet.”
“We’ll see,” I said.
He looked so tired—overgrown stubble, dark circles under his eyes. For a second I remembered what it was to feel sorry for the man.
Not love, not hate, but that old uneasy mercy that had dogged me since I first met him—because I knew he was a prisoner of obligations he barely understood.
“You have to take me back in two days. The police will come here if you don’t and even if they didn’t…I’m being sworn in, Kieran. You don’t have a choice.”
He cocked his head. “That was a dumb play.”
“That was my only play, Kieran.”
He scraped his thumb along the inside of his mug. “Just…use today to rest. There’s nothing to do yet but keep the doors locked and listen for engine sounds that aren’t ours.” He started to say something else, but it hung, uninvited, between us. He drank instead and squared his shoulders for the next emergency.
That was how it went, the first day. We made snacks, played board games from some ancient Parker Brothers box in the den, and kept our sentences short enough not to trip over the tension.
Rosie, absorbing the mood, colored quietly and watched cartoons with the sound too high. I called it homework, and she pretended to agree.
By noon I started to feel the walls. My phone might as well have been at the bottom of the snowed-in driveway. I’d briefed Alek and buried my own panic; I was, for all legal purposes, in hiding. My timeline of obligations ran out at zero hour tomorrow. By then, I was supposed to...what? Come up with a plan? Pray whoever was after me lost interest? Sob into one of Adriana Callahan’s neglected camisoles?
Instead I did dishes, stalked the perimeter of the ground floor, and found the old rotary phone in a kitchen drawer. It was unplugged, its cord brittle as fossil. I plugged it into the wall anyway, just to see if the universe would humor me. There was no dial tone.
Fuck.
I was repositioning the curtains to maximize sightlines when Kieran leaned in the kitchen archway, arms folded, and watched me with equal parts worry and awe. “You okay?” he asked.
“Not really,” I said. “But you don’t want me to be, right? You want me nervous. You want me contained.”
“I don’t care how you feel as long as you’re alive.”
I gave him a look and dropped onto the rug beside Rosie, who was still mangling a puzzle. It was a mess—missing corners, weird texture like someone spilled juice on it three Thanksgivings ago. I wasn’t even sure what the picture was supposed to be. Either a mountain or a pelican. Or a pelican on a mountain.
Kieran hovered nearby with that hovering energy he had—like if he bent down too far, his soul might break. He offered mea mug of coffee. I took it. My hands were shaking less now. Rosie grinned and said she’d finished “the middle.” It was all sky.
I tried to wedge a few pieces together while Kieran sat across from me, long limbs folded, looking like the last kid picked at recess but trying not to take it personally. Rosie leaned on my shoulder and handed him a piece with a smudge on it. “You do the next one,” she said.
He gave her a solemn nod. “Yes ma’am.”
