Page 37 of Velvet Betrayal
It was cold enough to bite through my jeans, and unlocking a deadbolt with mittens and a sleeping kid in your arms was a feat of pure will. I propped Rosie against my shoulder, chinned the keys out of my pocket, and prayed the neighbors weren’t watching.
Kieran hung back, hands jammed deep in his coat, eyes scanning the block. Even asleep, Rosie curled into me—a baby animal trusting warmth over the hard edge of the world.
It undid me a little, the way she twitched against my collarbone. Her breath was syrup-sweet, sticky with forgiveness.
Inside, the living room was exactly as we’d left it: coloring pages scattered around, two mugs with cocoa crusted at the bottom, toys splayed out in a slow explosion from the sofa. I’d planned on tidying up when I got Rosie home from picking her up. Obviously that had taken longer than expected.
Kieran slipped in after, quiet, closing the door with a thumb on the latch.
I lugged Rosie up to her room, dropped her on the covers—shoes still on—and watched her drift deeper, fingers twitching in dreamland. Only when I was sure she wouldn’t wake did I carefully take off her shoes and her coat, then back out and shut the door.
The hallway light was brutal, drilling a line through my headache. Kieran stood in the kitchen, his silhouette framed by the open fridge.
“More coffee?” I asked.
“I’d prefer vodka, but it’s a little early for that.”
I scooped grounds into the basket, the rhythm of it steadying my hands even as my chest threatened to lock up. He moved to the window, leaned against the frame, and stared out at the roofs dusted white, at frost crawling up the glass. Outside, it could’ve been any year, any century; the block was so empty it felt staged.
“You want to talk?” he said, still not turning.
“No,” I shot back. “But you’re going to, so…”
He didn’t smile. “I think we did the right thing,” he said, “but I know you feel like you just sold your soul.”
I slammed the carafe into the base as gently as I could—barely trusting myself not to throw it at his head. “I don’t justfeel like it; Ididsell my soul. To your brother, of all people. I hope you’re happy.”
For a minute he just watched the window, like if he stared hard enough, the world would cough up a better ending—one where Rosie didn’t have a shadow for a father and a bullseye for a mother.
“You don’t think this will work,” he said quietly.
“I do,” I said. “I have to. For Rosie.”
He nodded, then: “But you don’t think it’ll last.”
I didn’t answer. He already knew. That was the thing about Kieran—he could read me better than I could read myself. Sometimes it felt like a gift. Sometimes like a trap.
I turned on the tap. The sound of the water filled the room, and for a second, I let myself pretend we were just tired, just quiet, just living.
“She’s safe today,” I said. “That’s all I know.”
“That might be all anyone ever gets.”
“That doesn’t comfort me.”
“It’s not meant to.”
He stepped closer, his hand coming to skate down my arm. “You can hate me if it helps. I don’t care. But I need you to believe I’m not going anywhere.”
I closed my eyes. “I hope you understand that I’ll never believe that. Not after what you did.”
The coffee finished with a gasp and a groan.
I stepped away from Kieran and poured one for myself, black as the threat hanging around us, and leaned against the fridge with the mug pressed to my chest.
My skin was still electric from yesterday—from the grind of his hands, the way he’d lifted me, the way I’d let him—but nothing about this now was tenderness. If anything, being with him was like tumbling through a crash that never ended; theimpact was years ago, and you just kept rolling, spent, through a world full of guardrails.
I sipped, let the bitterness burn away whatever else I might have said. Kieran came up behind me, quiet, close enough that his presence had weight but not heat.
