Page 17 of Velvet Betrayal (The Dark Prince of Boston #3)

Ruby

I f I was being honest, I was still fucking terrified of Tristan.

By the time we pulled up to the house, Rosie was dead asleep in the backseat—mouth slack, arms flung wide, one sock halfway off like she’d gone down swinging. She’d fought it, sure—mumbled something about finishing her muffin, about cartoons—but sleep took her out in the first round.

Kieran parked two doors down, always the cautious one. He didn’t say anything as I slid out and opened the rear passenger side—but he did step up as I gently unbuckled her seatbelt, as if he wasn’t eight years too late.

“Want me to carry her?” he asked.

“Absolutely not,” I said. I could feel him weighing my answer, trying to decide if I was being stubborn just to spite him or if I was still pissed. Probably both, so I gave him a look that said, We’re done here, and turned away.

It was cold enough to bite through my jeans, and unlocking a deadbolt with mittens and a sleeping kid in your arms was a feat of pure will. I propped Rosie against my shoulder, chinned the keys out of my pocket, and prayed the neighbors weren’t watching.

Kieran hung back, hands jammed deep in his coat, eyes scanning the block. Even asleep, Rosie curled into me—a baby animal trusting warmth over the hard edge of the world.

It undid me a little, the way she twitched against my collarbone. Her breath was syrup-sweet, sticky with forgiveness.

Inside, the living room was exactly as we’d left it: coloring pages scattered around, two mugs with cocoa crusted at the bottom, toys splayed out in a slow explosion from the sofa. I’d planned on tidying up when I got Rosie home from picking her up. Obviously that had taken longer than expected.

Kieran slipped in after, quiet, closing the door with a thumb on the latch.

I lugged Rosie up to her room, dropped her on the covers—shoes still on—and watched her drift deeper, fingers twitching in dreamland. Only when I was sure she wouldn’t wake did I carefully take off her shoes and her coat, then back out and shut the door.

The hallway light was brutal, drilling a line through my headache. Kieran stood in the kitchen, his silhouette framed by the open fridge.

“More coffee?” I asked.

“I’d prefer vodka, but it’s a little early for that.”

I scooped grounds into the basket, the rhythm of it steadying my hands even as my chest threatened to lock up.

He moved to the window, leaned against the frame, and stared out at the roofs dusted white, at frost crawling up the glass.

Outside, it could’ve been any year, any century; the block was so empty it felt staged.

“You want to talk?” he said, still not turning.

“No,” I shot back. “But you’re going to, so…”

He didn’t smile. “I think we did the right thing,” he said, “but I know you feel like you just sold your soul.”

I slammed the carafe into the base as gently as I could—barely trusting myself not to throw it at his head. “I don’t just feel like it; I did sell my soul. To your brother, of all people. I hope you’re happy.”

For a minute he just watched the window, like if he stared hard enough, the world would cough up a better ending—one where Rosie didn’t have a shadow for a father and a bullseye for a mother.

“You don’t think this will work,” he said quietly.

“I do,” I said. “I have to. For Rosie.”

He nodded, then: “But you don’t think it’ll last.”

I didn’t answer. He already knew. That was the thing about Kieran—he could read me better than I could read myself. Sometimes it felt like a gift. Sometimes like a trap.

I turned on the tap. The sound of the water filled the room, and for a second, I let myself pretend we were just tired, just quiet, just living.

“She’s safe today,” I said. “That’s all I know.”

“That might be all anyone ever gets.”

“That doesn’t comfort me.”

“It’s not meant to.”

He stepped closer, his hand coming to skate down my arm. “You can hate me if it helps. I don’t care. But I need you to believe I’m not going anywhere.”

I closed my eyes. “I hope you understand that I’ll never believe that. Not after what you did.”

The coffee finished with a gasp and a groan.

I stepped away from Kieran and poured one for myself, black as the threat hanging around us, and leaned against the fridge with the mug pressed to my chest.

My skin was still electric from yesterday—from the grind of his hands, the way he’d lifted me, the way I’d let him—but nothing about this now was tenderness.

If anything, being with him was like tumbling through a crash that never ended; the impact was years ago, and you just kept rolling, spent, through a world full of guardrails.

I sipped, let the bitterness burn away whatever else I might have said. Kieran came up behind me, quiet, close enough that his presence had weight but not heat.

“Are you going to offer me coffee?”

“Help yourself,” I said. “You seem to help yourself to everything else.”

He ghosted his palm down my spine, squeezed my hip, and for a second I wanted to turn and break the mug against his chest.

For a second, I wanted him to keep his hand there, to see if comfort could ever untangle the terror now braided into my every waking minute.

I did neither.

I set my mug on the counter and stared at the black rectangle of the microwave, watched my own face glitch and blur in the glass until I had no choice but to meet my own eyes.

He poured his coffee, careful not to disturb the fragile truce. He took a sip, let the silence spool out.

“Can I stay?” he asked finally.

I’d been expecting it. I’d also expected it would set off something in me, some adrenaline rush, but instead all I felt was the slow, sinking sense of settling into the life I’d ended up with. “For now,” I said. “But tonight, you sleep on the couch.”

He nodded, no argument. “That’s fair.”

The day blurred with the rituals of homecoming.

Laundry. Fridge triage. Rosie woke up long enough to demand apple slices, then crashed again in a mountain of pillows, cocooned and snoring like a small, drugged bear.

The aftermath of running for your life, apparently, was fatigue and a sudden, greedy hunger for comfort.

Kieran hung his coat in the hall closet, his movements so at-ease I could almost believe we weren’t squatting in borrowed time.

He even swept the kitchen floor, with a kind of absent, bad-boy penance that made me want to laugh and throw a dish at his head.

It felt like an apology he didn’t know how to say.

We fell into a limbo—neither partners nor exes nor hostages, but something rawer.

I hated the necessity of his presence—the unspoken contract that protection was worth more than pride.

Still, as the sun started its pale midwinter fade, a hollow peace settled over the house.

We said nothing about the future, which I guess was a kind of truce.

At six, after Rosie had watched two straight hours of TV, Kieran made dinner—fried eggs and toast, a little cheese melted onto the plate for Rosie because she liked it that way. She inhaled it, then turned on Kieran with the same judgmental stare I used in court.

“Mami says you’re not good at cleaning up,” she accused.

Kieran shrugged, unbothered. “That’s true,” he said, like it was a badge of honor. “But I’m learning.”

She narrowed her eyes, as if to say she’d be monitoring this claim.

After dinner, Kieran attacked the mountain of towels like it had personally offended him.

He folded fast, methodical, like he needed to keep his hands busy or risk saying something we’d both regret.

I didn’t help. I just watched. Sometimes men, when cornered by silence, back themselves into confessions.

I waited for it to happen with him. It didn’t.

Rosie turned the piles into a fortress, slinging towels across chair backs, draping one over his head like a battle standard.

He let her. Let her boss him around, rearrange him, decorate him.

For fifteen minutes, it looked like a life we could’ve had—messy, easy, normal.

It was sweet enough to give me a fucking cavity.

When she got bored and announced she was switching to LEGOs, he gave her a dead-serious salute and stacked the towels without complaint. Then he turned to me—not challenging, not apologizing. Just...waiting. Like whatever came next was mine to decide.

I gave him nothing. Let him stew.

He didn’t push. He watched a baking show with Rosie, carried her upstairs when she fell asleep during a commercial, and tucked her in like it was muscle memory. Like this was his bedtime routine.

Like she’d always been his.

When he came back out, he didn’t say a word. Just stared at her door, still and unmoving, until I wanted to shake him.

Or drag him into my room and climb him like a tree.

I hated how good he was at this. Hated how badly my body wanted him anyway.

If we hadn’t been enemies, I would’ve called it love.

He sat next to me in the kitchen. “She’s wonderful,” he said. “So bright and funny.”

“She’s my favorite person,” I replied. I aimed it at the fridge, then caved and looked at him. It wasn’t shame on his face, but something closer to longing. He wanted to tell me, again, that he should’ve known. That he would have changed everything.

I didn’t look away from the laptop screen.

Six unanswered work emails, two flagged urgent, one flagged by Alek as “curious, but not catastrophic.” I ignored all of them.

The thing I couldn’t let go was the digital page in front of me: a personnel file for Mickey Russell, the dead man, Kieran’s nightmare, and maybe—now—the only leverage I had left.

Kieran tilted his head. “You’re still on the clock?”

“It helps me not think about being murdered,” I said, and realized as soon as I said it that my voice didn’t match the words.

He pulled an orange from the fruit bowl and started peeling it, rind dusting flecks onto the counter. “You always had the skill for compartmentalization.”

“Go to hell,” I said, but my mouth was smiling.