Page 34 of Velvet Betrayal
Ruby’s lip trembled. Barely. Her jaw set hard enough to crack a tooth, and I knew that look—knew how much it cost her to keep still. To keep quiet. To let Tristan speak over her like she was just a chess piece instead of the sharpest mind in the room.
If it had been just the three of us, she’d have cut him down with a look. But Rosie was watching. So Ruby blinked fast, pressed her tongue to her back molar, and didn’t break.
I wanted to touch her. Slide my hand across the table, link fingers, tell her without words that I was here. That I’d fix it.That she’d never have to beg for safety again—not while I was breathing.
But I didn’t move.
Because Tristan was watching. And every twitch, every glance, every heartbeat—he’d use it.
Ruby opened her mouth, closed it, then said—soft, careful—“Rosie, why don’t you go look at the fish tank?”
Rosie shrugged, wiped sugar on her shirt with the studied indifference of a bored second-grader, and wandered off. She paused at the threshold, spun on her heel, and gave me a little salute—like she knew the next minutes were for the grown-ups and didn’t want to mess up the flow. It almost made me laugh.
God, I loved her.
Tristan nodded, approving. “She’s poised,” he said.
“She’s just a kid,” Ruby snapped, voice tight.
“She doesn’t need to understand the rules yet,” he said. “God knows mine don’t. But they will.”
Ruby’s expression tightened. “And that doesn’t scare you? That they’ll grow up and see what you are?”
He smiled—a wolf’s smile, predatory and sharp. “They already see me, Ruby. They don’t know the details yet, but they know I don’t flinch. They know I keep them safe. One day, when the world tries to tear them open, maybe they’ll understand the cost of that.”
His eyes slid back to me, then to Rosie. “Truth isn’t what scares me. It’s what saves us. Because the world’s going to make them choose who to believe—what they hear, or what they’ve lived. And if I’ve done my job, they’ll believe me.”
He took a sip of coffee, calm as anything. “Your daughter will know, too. Not all at once, but eventually. The headlines, the news feeds—they’ll reduce you to bullet points. But she won’t. She’ll know the woman who ran into fire for her. That’s what sticks.”
It hit me then—sudden, sickening: if Rosie ever learned the truth about me from someone else, through a headline or a courtroom whisper, not from me—there’d be no undoing it. No way to claw it back.
The thought made my stomach turn. I’d burn the city to the ground to keep her safe, but I couldn’t control what she’d believe once the world got to her first.
Tristan clasped his hands. “You said Darnell told you something in confidence. I’d like to know what it was.”
Ruby stared him down. “I don’t like this.”
He didn’t stop smiling. “You asked me to handle the Crew. I will. But I need to know what I’m walking into. That’s not control, sweetheart. That’s strategy.”
“She doesn’t owe you shit,” I said, but he ignored me.
She didn’t bother to lawyer herself out of it. Maybe she was too tired, maybe she just didn’t care. “She told me that Mickey Russell had infiltrated the Callahan operation. She said he was an informant who had important evidence for them and that, when he died, he didn’t show up to see the FBI agent that he was meeting every month.”
“He wasn’t a CI for your office.”
Ruby shook her head. “He made a deal with the DOJ, not the DA. That’s why he was granted parole.”
Tristan let that hang, his only tell the tap of a ringed knuckle on wood. “And what does that have to do with you, Ruby?”
“Nothing, I don’t think. He broke into my house.”
“I took care of that,” I muttered.
“Nothing to do with Callahan business?” Tristan pressed.
We both looked at Ruby. Rosie was humming to the fish. Ruby was watching her.
“I don’t think so. He wanted to kill me because I went after him for murder.”
