Page 75 of Velvet Betrayal
He shook his head, short and almost fond. He didn’t move, though. He knew I didn’t want to be touched. Not yet. Instead, he leaned back against the counter and stared at the ceiling, like if he looked hard enough, he’d see me as a better version, a mother who wasn’t ground up by circumstance before the kid could spell her own name.
“You’re not a coward, Ruby. You’ve just been at war longer than you think.” His voice was gentle. “I’m not mad you kept her from me. Well, not anymore. It was smart.”
“That’s the first time you’ve admitted it,” I said. I realized I was smiling, broad and blissful and a little insane, like the kind of woman who might actually say yes if asked to torch a city for love.
“Had to let it simmer,” Kieran replied, looking so at peace with the idea of us as a scar that for a minute, I forgot what the world outside our kitchen wanted from either of us. “Are you still mad at me for ghosting you?”
“Not mad, exactly.” I spun the mug on the counter, watched the rim leave water-rings on the laminate. “More like…permanently recalibrated. I know who you are now. I know what you’re capable of.”
“So you’ll never trust me again.”
“That’s an exaggeration, Callahan.” I half-laughed, then sobered. “I trust that you are who you say you are. You never lied to me. When we first met, you told me you didn’t have a girlfriend because you couldn’t commit. You told me who you were. If I wasn’t listening, Kieran, that’s on me.”
He was about to say something, but I kept going. “You told me the plan was to ruin me. I thought it was just, you know, dirty talk. You talked me into fucking you without a condom, and you did exactly what you said you were going to do. I fell in love with you and you disappeared.”
He stared, silent, scanning my face for sarcasm and finding only exhaustion. The air between us was thick with nostalgia—rough and unglamorous, like the lingering scent of cigarettes after a party.
He swayed toward me, and I saw in that microsecond the thousand ways the night could break, what he wanted, what I’d let him have. I flinched on purpose, just to see if he’d back off. He did. Half a breath, then all the way.
“You were working under DA Lenta. You were so ambitious and smart and so fucking put together. You clawed your way to your position. You worked so hard for everything you had. Every time you told me about a scholarship or a part time job or money you had to send to your mum…I would’ve derailed everything, Ruby. Not just if we’d been found out, but if you told anyone you were in love with me. It was just like you said. Untenable. From the beginning.”
He let the words settle. The sounds of the house—radiator wheeze, faint drip in the sink, the late-night shuffle of some neighbor’s TV—took over. Kieran reached for the fridge, pulled out a beer, and cracked it open with one hand. He offeredit to me, a liquid olive branch. I took the bottle, studied the condensation before drinking.
“I didn’t keep trying to talk to you because I was in love with you,” I muttered. “I was, you know, pregnant. The being in love with you part was incidental. But don’t pretend you were doing it because you wanted to protect me. Don’t insult my intelligence like that. You ghosted me for you. Not for me.”
His laugh was bitter, but not fake. “You’re right. I did it because I was terrified I’d fuck up your life for good. If you wanna call that selfish, I’ll take it. But I think I was just practical. I knew we had zero future. I just—I didn’t realize it would cost that much to check out for good.”
He half-smiled, but the edge was gone. “Turns out, I missed the work. Not just the sex, or the lying, or the risk. I missed you, with your brain on fire all the time, and your eyes like you wanted to eat the city alive before you let anyone else tell you how to live in it. And I was, fuck, Ruby, I was so lost. You don’t listen to mad men, do you? I was not in my right mind. Things were going down with my family I couldn’t tell you about. My father had just died, my brother and uncle were in a turf war, he nearly died like, a countless amount of time that year. None of those are excuses. But I saw what it did to Adriana, and she was raised in this world. She’s Orsini royalty. You’re smart as a fucking whip, but you’re also just a regular citizen. Fuck, not even that. You’re the law.”
He trailed off, looking for the point in the bottle where his excuses might dissolve, then finding there was no end to it. “You were the only honest thing I had. I couldn’t bear to break you myself, so I let the world do it. That’s on me. But I never wanted you to pay for my sins.”
“I did anyway,” I said.
“Yeah. I know.”
Neither of us moved. His words just hung there, scraped raw and bleeding between us.
And then I reached for him—because I couldn’t not. Because my body didn’t care how much I’d bled for him. It just wanted him, wanted skin and heat and the sound he made when I kissed too hard.
There wasn’t a choice. There never was.
I’d been starving for him for years…and I’d finally stopped pretending otherwise.
Kieran
She didn’t say anything at first. Neither did I. It felt like if I so much as breathed too hard, she’d disappear—vanish like smoke, like every other version of her I’d already lost. But then her hand rose, tentative but real, and pressed flat against my chest. Small. Warm. Steady.
And just like that, I knew: she was here. She was choosing to stay.
At least for now.
I didn’t move. I let her come to me—let her decide how it started, even though I already knew how it would end. Her mouth on my skin. Her name carved into every breath. Every jagged, shame-ridden inch of me cracked wide open, desperate for her to see it and still reach back.
“Ruby,” I said, and it sounded like prayer. Like surrender. Like the only true thing I’d said in years.
She kissed me.
It was a mess—her teeth scraped mine, our noses knocked—but I didn’t give a single fuck. Her fingers gripped at my hair like she was testing if I was real, and that was it. That was all it took. I came apart like I always had with her: hungry, half-ruined, already begging in the way I kissed her back.
