Page 1 of Velvet Betrayal (The Dark Prince of Boston #3)

Ruby

T he snow was beautiful.

That was the first thing that made me want to scream.

Not the fact that my phone had been confiscated “for my safety.”

Not the fact that we were somewhere in the Berkshires, off-grid, off-map, off-everything. Not the fact that my daughter—my daughter—was laughing in the backseat like this was a Christmas miracle instead of the aftermath of a kidnapping.

None of this felt real compared to the way light played over snow drifts as we switchbacked up the mountain, powder iridescent as fairy wings, every branch sugar-frosted, every road sign blanked out by a soft, pitiless white.

I wanted to scream because I wanted to be home in my bed, or in my house, or in my office with a mug of conference-room coffee and the clean hum of computers, thinking about a homicide case, not keeping a running inventory of hypothetical escape routes from an Audi Q7 with bulletproof glass.

Rosie pressed her forehead to the glass, mouth open. “Mami, look! There’s so many deer!” I couldn’t see any deer, just the edges of the road going gray thatched with dirty flakes, but I made a pleased sound.

“There are,” I said.

“What?” Rosie asked.

“There are so many deer,” I said.

She groaned, satisfied, and kicked her feet.

The boots—she’d begged for them, furry and ridiculous, with a charm on each zipper—thudded rhythmically against my seat.

I let her. Let her thud, let her shake off the last hour, the last year, everything that hung like icicles from our voices and gestures now.

I glanced at her in the rearview, the narrow slash of her gaze flickering from the snowy verge to me, then away again.

She smiled, unbothered. Sometimes I thought Rosie existed on some parallel plain of delight to the rest of us, one I envied, or maybe resented.

The headlights knifed through the thickening storm, outlining branches before erasing them completely.

The road had felt infinite, and then, all at once, it was gone—a sudden elbow turn and we were crawling up the drive of a lodge that looked like it had been exhumed from someone’s idea of Old Vermont, wood-smoke scent faked and piped in, Christmas lights drooping along a warped porch rail.

The tires stuttered into a rut and for a second we just sat, engine idling, the snow hissing as it hit the hood.

Rosie hummed something close to a carol, off-key and blissful, while I studied the shapes on the porch.

There was no one here. No signs of tire tracks besides ours.

No footprints. Maybe the storm had scrubbed them away, maybe Kieran or whoever ran logistics up the Callahan chain had thought of that, ever-thorough, but I doubted it.

I felt watched anyway: the dilation of my own breath a kind of surveillance.

In the rearview, Rosie watched me back. Her face, shifting in the blue dashboard glow, seemed older than it should.

Could I run? Maybe. Maybe Rosie would think it was a game, at least for a few minutes. Then she’d be cold, hungry, pissed off. How would I get us home? How would I call for help without tipping him off?

Kieran killed the engine.

We sat in the silence, which was somehow louder than the storm outside—Rosie breathing fast, me bracing for whatever came next, Kieran patting his coat for a cigarette he wasn’t going to light.

The silence had broad shoulders; it could bear a lot before breaking.

He looked at Rosie first. “You want to see inside, Ro?” Not really a question, not really not.

Her face lit up. By the time I reached for the door, she was already fighting her seatbelt, tangled and whining.

I came around and helped her. She let me, small enough to curl into my coat against the wind.

I caught the scent of her hair, all floral bath bomb and leftover panic from the morning meltdown at the pancake house off Exit 24. It felt like a year ago.

Kieran’s boots broke the snow first, slow and deliberate. He swept the porch, checked the windows, then looped around the house. He was different out here—sharper, more animal. Like he expected trouble. That scared me more than anything.

Because fuck me. Maybe there was a reason he had decided to kidnap me after all. I didn’t like thinking about that at all.

“Can I have my phone?” I asked, again. Maybe for the fifteenth time.

“Later,” Kieran said. “Right now, we’re doing an adventure. Remember?”

I rolled my eyes. “Right. Is that where we’re staying?”

“Absolutely. Come on. You’re going to love it.”

I doubted that.

“Do you want to hop on the snow?” Kieran asked, grinning at Rosie. “It’s crunchy.”

Rosie demanded to be put down. We walked up the drive, single file, dodging the deepest drifts. Rosie hopscotched in her neon boots, Kieran drifting behind us, hands loose, face blank. The wind was all bite. I kept one arm around Rosie, part steering, part claiming.

Rosie squealed and pointed at the porch’s welcome mat, which had a bright, chirpy cardinal painted dead center, plastic beneath the packed snow.

“It’s winter, cardinals should go south,” Rosie said. “He’s lost.”

“Aren’t we all,” I said under my breath.

Kieran laughed.

Rosie looked at me like I’d just spoken in tongues.

Kieran unlocked the door. It swung open smooth—surprisingly so for an old country house.

The air smelled faintly of disinfectant, with a cinnamon-vanilla candle trying to cover it.

A blast of dry heat hit us. For a second, I imagined crackling hearths and cozy comfort, but the inside was bare. Spartan, but not neglected.

“Whose house is this?”

“Mine. And my brother’s.”

I swallowed. “Which one?”

“Tristan,” he said. “Don’t worry. It’s off the grid. For emergencies.”

“You brought me to Tristan Callahan’s house?”

Kieran tutted. “Well, no. It’s also my house.”

“Jesus Christ, Kieran.”

The house, in fairness, didn’t look like it belonged to anyone.

This looked like safety, rented by the week. Deep leather couches, the kind that absorb sound, a huge TV, a kitchen island decorated with fake fruit. Every horizontal surface was wiped to sainthood and the windows had thick, dark curtains drawn shut.

Rosie slipped out of my grip and launched into the living room. “I call main bed!” she declared, boots scattering ice everywhere.

I almost snapped at her not to track ice everywhere but checked myself, because wasn’t this technically not my house? What did you do for discipline when the parent was also sort of kidnapped?

Kieran followed, hauling a duffel. I watched his hands: scarred, steady, never uncertain.

He scanned the room, not even pretending to be a guest. I realized—hard and fast—I’d never seen him look at a place without measuring its risks.

Every glance at me felt like a calculation. What might save my life, or end it.

I forced a smile.

“The fridge is stocked,” he offered, as if that was what I cared about—like offering me food would repair what he’d done when he fucking kidnapped me.

I trailed into the kitchen, peered inside.

Milk, juice, deli ham, three kinds of yogurt, eight different sodas and mineral waters, a butter dish bulging in glossy gold foil.

A six-pack of Sam Adams. I almost laughed.

I went to check my phone, and once again, it wasn’t in my pocket. Fuck.

“Are you hungry, peanut?” I asked Rosie.

“No, I’m good,” Kieran replied.

“I wasn’t talking to you. Where is my daughter?”

“Upstairs,” he said. “She just claimed the master bedroom, remember? Hey, Rosie, your mum is calling for you.”

From the distant echo of a hallway, she hollered back: “I’m doing a snow angel with the blankets!” Thump, thump, closet doors rattling.

Kieran’s arm, braced against the island, flexed.

“For what it’s worth, she’s safer here than anywhere else.”

I opened the fridge again, this time like it had wronged me. My fingers found the apple out of instinct, not hunger. I needed something firm in my hand. I needed the sound of something cracking. I pulled a paring knife from the knife block, gripping it tighter than necessary.

“You keep saying that,” I said, coring the apple so hard the blade briefly stuck in the cutting board. “Why does it sound more like a threat every time?”

He snorted. “It’s not meant to. But things change. You know that better than anyone.”

The blood was up in my hands, prickling my wrists. I stopped, pointing the knife at him. “You could have told me first. About anything. You could have—”

“Hey, watch where you point that thing,” he said, holding up a hand. “You don’t want Rosie to come down here and wonder what’s going on.”

I set the knife down.

“She’s a smart girl,” I said. “She’s going to figure out something is wrong if you keep withholding my phone.”

His eyes dropped, just for a second, like he hated that he still wanted me to trust him.

“You’ll get it back,” he said. “Promise. Just let this settle.”

Every cell in me wanted to hate him, but the truth was that Kieran Callahan never lied to me. Or, if he did, the lie was always circled in neon, visible and engineered for maximum effect.

It was easy, with men like that: you only had to read between every line.

“Fine,” I said.

The apple’s flesh browned in the moment, and I threw the wedge in my mouth, chewing with the anger of someone trying not to cry. He smirked, a little—one of those edgewise, off-brand things he did when he thought I was being childish.

I hated that part of me still felt safer with him than without him.

I hated that part of me wanted to hand him the knife and ask him to cut me free.

I hated that part of me wanted him to kiss me, phone or no phone.

He stood up and walked to me in the kitchen. “You go and settle in,” he said. “At least take your coat off. I’m making dinner.”

“How long are we going to be here, Kieran?”

“Until I can make sure you’re safe.” He paused at the edge of the breakfast nook. "Two days, maybe three. Tops."