Page 78 of Velvet Betrayal
She didn’t sound convinced. But that didn’t matter.
As long as I kept her safe, I could live with her hating me for it.
Kieran
Ruby was being watched. She was being cared for.
And I needed to see my brother.
Tristan’s so-called office at the harbor wasn’t an office at all. It was a club, the kind that felt like an Irish wake crossed with a hedge fund’s afterparty. The sort of place you only visited if you had a death wish—or a damn good reason. I scanned the block twice, then jogged up the plank stairs. Even now, no one with half a brain loitered here after dark.
He was waiting, as always, in the back booth. Nobody sat across from him unless they wanted to get ruined, so the seat was clear—a challenge as obvious as a loaded gun.
I slid in, set my hands on the battered wood, and said, “You wanted a face-to-face.”
He didn’t bother with a greeting. “I would rather be home, playing with my kids.”
His Guinness sat untouched, sweating like a trophy.
“Yeah, I know,” I said.
He grinned, all teeth, then buried it and leaned over the table like we were old friends. “You’re not crashing with her again, are you?”
I shrugged, giving him everything and nothing. “She’s still breathing. So, yes. Thanks for the help.”
He waved it off. “I’m not that interested in her. Do you want me to put someone on your daughter, too? I know she’s staying with Ruby’s ex.”
I swallowed. Of course Tristan knew everything. Didn’t mean I had to like it.
He let the silence hang, then kept going: “Didn’t even know you had a daughter until…well, new world every day, baby brother. What’s next? You gonna join the Y?”
I didn’t want to talk about Rosie with him. But if there was a target on her, I needed every ounce of protection—even if it came laced with arsenic.
“She doesn’t even know I’m her father,” I said. “So don’t get clever about custody.”
I should’ve played it cooler. Tristan didn’t miss a thing. He rocked back, weighing the sentence with that wet-glass gleam he’d had since we were kids—the one that said every word counted, every word went in the ledger.
“Smart,” he finally said. “But it’ll be harder on her if this—” he circled the air with a finger-gun, slow and deliberate “—goes the way it could.”
“Don’t.”
Tristan’s lip curled, just enough to invite me to lash out. Classic move. But I kept both hands flat on the table, steady.
“She’s a child,” I said. By which I meant: She’s mine, and if you so much as run a background check on the wrong day, I’ll burn every shithole you ever made deals in.
Tristan nodded, once, like a judge passing sentence. “I’ll keep my hands off. No promises about everybody else, but family’s the line. Which is the reason I wanted to talk to you. I haven’t found anything else about the contract on Ruby, but I’m almost certain it’s someone in the city.”
“What do you mean?”
“Someone who isn’t in our business, Kieran. Someone legit.”
He let it ride. Watched me bite down on the urge to guess. Whatever citywide nervous system Tristan had built into his bones, he trusted it more than he trusted me.
“There’s a cutout, sure. But the order didn’t come from the feds or the regular scuz. It reads like a cop, or a judge, or one of your fine DA acquaintances—someone who wants her gone, but not so gone it boomerangs on their own career. You follow?”
I took a pull off his Guinness, steadying the tremor in my hands on the cold glass. “You’re saying it’s blue.”
“Could be blue. Could be black-robe. Could be someone in her own food chain. Point is, it’s not amateur hour. Whoever greenlit this knows the city, and they know how to move a body so it disappears on four levels at once.”
