Page 5 of Velvet Betrayal
I sat at the counter, picking the seat that gave me a clear view of him and the front door.
He slid a bowl toward me, the fork tapping the edge like it meant something.
“I thought about waking you,” he said, voice rough, throat-scorched, like he hadn’t spoken in hours. “But you looked likeyou needed it. And it’s eight. Figured it was Rosie’s bedtime. I don’t know much about kids.”
His jaw tightened, then went still. I was waiting for the drop—for that moment he would give me shit again about keeping his daughter from him—but he didn’t say a word.
I twirled the pasta too hard, nerves making my grip too tight.
“She’ll be out for at least nine hours,” I said. “She’s a super sleeper.”
“That’s good,” Kieran said. “I added mushrooms. Hope that’s still on the approved list.”
The food was good, I had to admit—creamy, with a tang of something citrus lingering in the back of the mouth, the kind of thing you’d pay twenty-six dollars for in an Italian place with a single-word name. “Okay, I’ll bite,” I said, after a moment. “Why here?”
Kieran didn’t look up. “Because Tristan has the only off-grid fiber in the Berkshires, and I needed the option to work remote.”
Of course. “You mean so no one could trace us, or so no one could traceyou?”
He shrugged, then ripped off a piece of bread. “Both. You want wine?” He gestured at the counter, where an unopened bottle of something expensive and Italian sat waiting with two glasses—not wine glasses, just thick-bottomed whiskey tumblers. The glasses were right there in the cabinet, but Kieran just hadn’t bothered.
He was distracted. Or worried. Or both.
I poured anyway. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on, or are we just…eating carbs and waiting to die?”
“That one. The latter one.”
He looked at me full, then burst out laughing. If you’d never loved a man like Kieran, it was hard to explain the sound, why it could press a finger to your heart and keep it still, how it echoed through every bad argument and every dumb soft moment you’dever shared. He had a mouth born for contempt but he used it, rarely, for real joy.
I took a defiant mouthful of wine and waited.
He let the laugh die. “Someone was trailing you. Someone that had nothing to do with the Callahans. Someone who wasn’t FBI. You’re already in trouble with my brother. Someone else has a hit out on you and on my daughter. I’m not letting anything happen to either of you.”
I hadn’t expected the phrase “my daughter” to detonate me from the inside—concussive, then hollow. I stared, forkful of pasta suspended under my nose. “Excuse me?”
He was busy building a moat of sauce around the bucatini, like this was a war game and not dinner. “I said, you and Rosie are targets. I don’t know who, yet.” He paused. “But I’m not letting my guard down.”
I said nothing at first, waiting to see if it was a mistake, if maybe under stress he’d let slip a pronoun he didn’t mean, but his eyes remained in orbit on me. So I fought back: “How do you know? Is this a vibes thing, or are we talking credible threat?”
He snorted, and for a second looked twenty-something again—the way he’d been when we first met. “You think I’d drag you up a mountain for a vibe?”
“Yes. A hundred percent.”
“There’s an app. I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s an app. It’s called The Crew. Decentralized. Gets pawns to do things like keep eyes on targets. Eyes on people like you. I was following you and noticed someone doing the same.”
“You were following me? Again?”
“Yes,” he said. “So I keep you protected.”
He said it like a contract, like “protection” had ever meant anything simple between us. Like it hadn’t always been the word for cage, or threat, or every reason we’d ever blown up. The old anger welded to anxiety came up, familiar as breath.
I shoved my bowl forward, hard enough to slide it a third of the way across the counter. Kieran clocked it, and me, and adjusted—just that tiny shift in posture that meant he was already ten moves ahead. I hated that. Hated that he was right about me. Hated that he was right about the threat.
“Why not tell me?” I managed. “Why not just say ‘Hey, Ruby, someone’s out to kill you, let’s pack up and do a snowed-in holiday together?’”
His mouth twisted, and just for a second the calculating mask gave way to a strange, almost adolescent embarrassment. “Would you have believed me?” He braced his arms on the counter, knuckles whitening. “You’d have called someone, tried to run, and either pissed off Tristan or gotten yourself in more trouble. You don’t hide well, Ruby. And…would you have come with me? Would you have wanted to?”
“That was my decision to make.”
