Page 62 of Velvet Betrayal
Finally: “Text me the address. I’ll meet you in front.”
I hesitated. “Alek, don’t do something—”
He cut me off. “Just text it.”
So I did.
Then I sat in Kieran’s kitchen and drank the last of his coffee, which tasted like burned dirt filtered through a gym sock, and tried not to imagine how Alek would handle any of this. Upstairs, I could track the soft thumps of Kieran’s footsteps, the way the air shifted when he moved. The memory of the man in the alley kept replaying, the look he’d given Kieran—somethingdark and intimate, like they’d been through this before. Kieran had explained it to me once: after a real fight, you either wanted to kill the guy, fuck him, or never see him again. Sometimes all three.
The oven clock crawled forward. At exactly 9:27, Kieran came down, barefoot in sweatpants, a towel thrown over his shoulders like a cape. His eye was black from where he’d been bleeding yesterday, his lip split. He looked like a mess. He took one look at me, head cocked, and said, “Were you crying?”
I rolled my eyes. “Does it look like I was?”
He shrugged, honest as ever. “A little.” He poured himself a glass of orange juice and downed it in two gulps, the thin scar at his temple wrinkling with each swallow. “Don’t you worry about me, sweetheart,” he said. “I’m not easy to kill.”
I scowled at him. “I’m just…thinking.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“No,” I said, sharper than I meant. “But I need you to know Alek is coming over.”
He chewed the inside of his cheek, then: “You want me to go?”
“This is your house. I can’t ask you to go.”
He put the glass down with a click, lining it up just so. “But you want me to.”
I stared at the counter, palms flat to the stone. “I want him to see I’m fine, that’s all. Otherwise he’ll blow this up. You know how he is.”
“I do,” Kieran said. No hurt, just resignation. “I’ll keep it polite.”
“Thank you.”
We let the silence stretch, the way you only could with someone you’d already spent half a life sleeping next to, or fighting with, or both. I sipped my coffee, watched the sky cycle through shades of dirty gray, tried not to notice the way Kieran’spresence filled the room. But it was impossible. Even standing still, he had gravity. I caught myself wondering how Alek would compare, both of them in the same space.
We barely spoke. Just sat there, side by side, until the bell rang.
Kieran tapped his phone. “Come in,” he said. “Door’s open.”
Alek’s shoes barely touched the threshold before he was inside, his anger expanding to fill every cubic inch of air. He took in the towel around Kieran’s neck, my hands white-knuckled on the counter, and skipped right past hello.
“Are you fucking kidding me with this?” Alek barked, the Russian in his Boston coming out strong. “You’re here, after what happened, and I’m supposed to—what, congratulate you for surviving the night?”
Kieran grinned. “Good morning, Ivanov.”
The only thing scarier than Kieran’s misplaced calm was Alek’s lack of it. I’d seen him win trials without raising his voice, browbeating senior partners with nothing but silence and the weight of his stare. But now, he looked at me like I was about to lie to a grand jury.
“Are you safe or not, Ruby?” Alek said, eyes fixed on me, refusing to even glance at Kieran.
“Yes,” I said. “For now.”
He didn’t buy it. “You think this keeps you safe?” He gestured at Kieran, but wouldn’t look at him. “This means you’re fucked.”
I shook my head. “You don’t get it. There’s someone else after me. Someone tried to kill me today. Why do you think Kieran looks like roadkill?”
Alek froze, recalibrating. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Kieran stepped in, voice steady. “Networking-based hit. Crowdsourced. She was the target. They sent a guy after her when she left City Hall.”
