Page 80 of Velvet Betrayal
“Would you be able to?”
I shook my head. “No. Of course not.”
He nodded. “Then you back her. You clean up the mess. That’s the job. If you want me to run interference, I will. But don’t lie to me, Kieran. Not about her. Not about Rosie. Not again.”
“Okay.”
He leaned in, voice even. “She’s going to need more than a DA badge when this is over. You know that, right?”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“She’s a threat now. That makes her valuable. To us. To anyone watching. If she survives this, she won’t just walk away clean—she’ll have leverage. And if she’s smart, she’ll use it.”
“To do what?”
“Climb,” he said. “AG. Maybe something bigger. Once she’s in, she’s in. She keeps going, builds the profile, builds protection. Makes herself too public to hit, too useful to push out.”
I stared at him. “I can’t imagine she’ll let you use her. Ruby doesn’t play games.”
“She’s playing one now,” he said. “You think any of this is real life? It’s all stagecraft. She’s already got the story. All she has to do is let us direct the next act.”
“She’d never let you.”
“She won’t have a choice if she wants to keep you safe. ” He smiled, faint and razor-edged. “Don’t worry. We’ll make it look like it was her idea.”
Tristan looked up then, just in time for me to hear footsteps behind us. “You’re late,” Tristan said.
I glanced back to find Liam coming in, hair slicked back, his expensive coat sporting just a touch of blood on the cuff that he didn’t bother hiding. “Traffic,” he said. “You know how it is.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “We were just talking about that.”
He grinned, sliding into the booth beside me. “Hey, brother. Tristan said I should join.”
“Great,” I muttered. “A family reunion. Just what I needed.”
“If Ruby is going to go public with this, Liam needs to know about it. You don’t happen to have a picture of this Mickey Russell guy, do you?”
I shook my head. “Well, no, but I can give you his mugshot.”
I thumbed through my phone, dug up an old article about his arrest, and spun it across the table.
Liam caught the phone just short of his beer, thumbed once, and looked at the picture for a second. “Wait,” he said, turning to Tristan. “Why are you showing me this?”
“Because apparently, this man was employed by us. I don’t remember him. Kieran doesn’t remember him. Do you?”
Liam stared harder, knuckles blanching to white on the edge of my phone. A hesitation spread in his jaw, some circuit stuck between memory and denial. “Maybe?” he said. “Looks like a guy who ran pickups for Southie for a bit. Used to work with Yarrow’s crew. Quiet. Got the shit punched out of him in a garage, then vanished.”
“Think hard. You brought him in,” Tristan said, voice steady.
Liam stared at the mugshot. “Fuck.”
“You remember him?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He didn’t even try to spin it. “He came in through me.”
Tristan didn’t speak, which was somehow worse than shouting.
Liam looked up, jaw flexing. “It was a year back or so. He didn’t have any heat on him then—clean on paper. Southie needed a driver, I needed warm bodies. I slotted him in.”
