Page 49 of Velvet Betrayal
Not a cop, then. Not a fed. Just someone with the discipline to do surveillance without making it art, or maybe just daringus to make the next move. Someone withfederal plates.I hated that I couldn’t read the endgame.
Ruby walked steady, never looking back again. When she reached the crosswalk she bumped the button and bounced in place, the cold finally sinking into her bones. She didn’t seem afraid, but not because she wasn’t. She’d just decided—maybe years ago—that being seen afraid was always worse than whatever was coming next. My heart thudded thinking about what might be coming for her.
At the light, the muscle man fell in two paces behind, as if they were strangers headed the same way. I followed. The intersection dumped them onto a quieter side street—a shortcut to the subway, or in Ruby’s case, a direct route to her SUV in the garage three blocks down. I stayed even further back, letting the latticework of streetlamps and the early dark hide me, but I kept a running count of the moments, the angles, the distances.
She turned east at the Y, and the man crossed behind her, close enough to reach out, but not close enough for a snatch. He cut across an empty patch of sidewalk and ducked into the narrow mouth of an alley that ran parallel to the route to the parking deck.
She didn’t see him slip in.
I did.
I jogged ahead, crossing the street, my pulse three-alarm but my movements loose, casual. If he wanted to jump her in the alley, he’d have thirty seconds where the city wouldn’t see. I banked hard, sprinted to the other end of the alley, and waited, back pressed to brick, every sense flared.
I heard Ruby’s approach before I saw her: the tick of her boots, the sharp snap of her coat against her legs. Two footsteps behind, then silence. She must have felt it—the drop in sound, the density of a man-sized shadow. He was only five yards back, but now he was moving careful, soft.
I ducked my head around the corner. He was pulling something from his jacket. Didn’t look like a gun—it was dark, slender. Maybe a knife, maybe a multitool—street legal, but sharp enough to open a throat if it came to that.
Ruby had rounded the corner. She wasn’t going to see this.
Good.
My body made the move before my brain. I shot out into his path, grabbed the man’s wrist, and wrenched him around hard enough that his feet left the ground. The sound was abrupt, ugly—an animal yelp muted on the wind. I meant to just subdue him, but adrenaline, the years of violence, made it more. He slammed into the bricks, forehead hitting hard enough I saw a red starburst of blood on the pavement. The multitool skittered away. The man made a noise, tried to twist, but I had his wrist folded in half and my knee in the base of his spine.
For three seconds, we both just breathed, predator and prey locked together in a tableau no one else would see. He spat blood, eyes wide.
“Callahan,” he breathed, like he’d known I was coming.
I leaned in, lips at his ear. “You go near her again, I will put you in a hole you never trained for,” I said. “Do you understand?”
He nodded, teeth pink. I released him, then stepped back as he got up with a groan. He stumbled, hit the wall again, then righted himself. I thought he was going to scamper off…
…but he went to punch me instead.
Big mistake.
I evaded his knuckle, but he kneed me in the crotch, but it only grazed; I clamped his leg, twisted, and dumped him to the ground with a grunt. He slammed his elbow, cursed in a language I didn’t catch, and for a split second, our eyes met.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“My job,” he said. “Stay out of the way.”
“Fat chance, dickhead.”
He spat, wiped his lip, and did something nobody ever does: he started laughing. “You’re slower than you look, Callahan,” he grinned, eyes pulsing with the malice of the utterly unafraid. “She’s got you trained. Nice.”
I hauled him up by the collar, pressed him into the brick. “Who do you work for?” I said.
He rolled his eyes as the blood ran down his neck. “Doesn’t matter. You know how these things go, right? Nobody’s the client, everybody’s the vendor. Whole city’s a handshake in a storm. Let go, yeah?”
I squeezed his windpipe, watching his pupils balloon, then released a fraction of the pressure, just enough to let sound leak past the strangle. “Tell whoever sent you: she’s under my watch now. Touch her, and it gets biblical.”
His laughter, sapped now. He tried to bow, but the wall blocked him. “You ever think someone—” he wheezed, “—might want to see you in the ground as bad as her? You think you’re a shield? You’re a fucking beacon, man. Everybody’s aiming at the light.”
I considered breaking his nose for the trouble, but the cold clarity in his voice made me hesitate; he wasn’t an amateur, and he wasn’t afraid to die, not even for this. “Don’t come back,” I said, letting him drop.
He paused, gathering himself. My adrenaline was pumping. I wanted to check on Ruby. So I made a very, very stupid mistake.
I turned away without checking to see if Muscle had gone.
