Page 33 of Velvet Betrayal (The Dark Prince of Boston #3)

Ruby

I didn’t go home right away. I just drove.

Past the Charles, past the old district court where I’d once tried five cases in a month, past the alley where a homeless guy used to feed pigeons from his jacket, past the Thai place with the best drunken noodles in the state, past a Walgreens that still had my name in the system from when I’d needed Plan B in law school.

The city was a time-lapse—same streets, different season, everything moving, nothing really changing.

Eventually, I turned toward home. Parked two blocks away. Walked the rest, slow and deliberate, like I was rehearsing my own alibi. The house was dark except for the bedroom window, and I already knew what that meant.

Kieran was back.

I didn’t bother calling out when I opened the door. He hated being startled. Didn’t matter, though—he was already standing in the hallway, barefoot, coat open, eyes on me like I’d just gotten off a plane from somewhere dangerous.

“You’re late,” he said.

I dropped my keys in the bowl. “I stopped at Julian’s.”

His jaw twitched, but he didn’t say anything. Not right away.

“Rosie’s staying with him,” I added. “For a bit. She’ll be safer there.”

He didn’t nod. Just looked at me, like if he blinked, I might vanish. “You okay?”

“No,” I said. “But I’m not on fire.”

He almost smiled. “Good baseline.” Then, quieter: “I was hoping you’d go back to my house.”

“I can’t be seen going back to your house,” I said. “But there’s something I need to talk to you about, and you’re, well, a shadow. I figured you wouldn’t be far.”

He actually grinned at that. “It’s cute you’re getting used to it. Can I take your bag?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. Just took it from my shoulder, like it was his right. “C’mon,” he said, nodding toward the kitchen. “I’ll make tea. Or whiskey, if you want the kind of help that sticks.”

I followed, feeling the day’s failures drag behind me like an old injury. The kitchen was exactly as we’d left it—Kieran pulling two mugs from the top shelf, setting one out for me without asking, the soft clunk of the water carafe like it had never been put down anywhere else.

“You saw Julian,” he said, dropping the tea bag into the cup so hard the tag vanished into the water. The air filled up with bergamot, or maybe licorice.

“Yeah. I don’t like Rosie staying there,” I said. “I miss her. But we have shit to work out.”

“She’s my daughter. She should be with her family.”

“I’m not getting into this with you,” I told him. “Julian is her father. He’s the only father she knows.”

He stared at me, unblinking but not cruel, and I could see how much it cost him to let it go. “I hate that she doesn’t know she’s mine.”

I took a sip of tea. “Thanks for the tea. I had a really long, hard day. I don’t want to talk about this.”

He exhaled, slow. “You have to tell her. Someday. It can’t be like this forever.”

“Don’t tell me how to mother my child, Kieran.” I meant it sharp, even though part of me hated the chill in my own voice.

“I wouldn’t,” he said, but his hand gripped the counter so hard the laminate shuddered. “I just want her to have the truth. Not the lie.”

“Yeah, well, in my experience, the truth only ever costs people more.” I didn’t look at him, but the words hung in the air. “If I tell her, everything else becomes a lie. Her home, her father, her whole goddamn life—”

“Her mother’s the DA,” he cut in, softer than I expected. “She’ll learn about betrayal and power whether you prep her for it or not.”

I closed my eyes. It was already too late for prep. Rosie walked the tightrope between our secrets every day, somehow smiling through it, like kids have a secret math for lies and only subtract what they can survive.

In the silence, Kieran swapped my mug for a fresh one, his knuckle brushing my wrist. The touch was nothing. It was everything.

“Why are you here, anyway?” I asked, barely louder than the radiator ticking. “The real reason. Not the shadow-bodyguard horseshit.”

He actually laughed. “I mean, that was part of it. But also, I missed you. Is that a crime?”

“Not in Boston,” I said, raising the mug. The tea had gone bitter. “If it is, it’s a misdemeanor at best.”

He smiled, but it was private, twitching at the edge of his mouth.

His hand rose and fell on the counter, like a reflex he hadn’t managed to kill despite years of practice.

Under my ribs, something wanted to dig my nails into his arm, call up the old muscle memory, but I reminded myself: this wasn’t safety. This was two bombs sharing a fuse.

“I booked an appointment with my tattoo artist next week,” he said, showing me the underside of his arm. “Think a rose would look good here?”

I blinked. I’d seen that patch of skin before, mapped it a thousand ways—whole, cut, bandaged, shadowed in the morning after sex—but the idea of a rose there threw me. Not because it was sentimental, but because I knew exactly what it meant, who it would be for.

“You’re not serious,” I said.

He shrugged, tracing a bruise above his wrist. “It’s the only thing that fits. Honestly, it’s happening whether you want it to or not. I guess, for some weird reason, I wanted your approval?”

“My approval doesn’t mean anything to you.” I tried to sound like I was joking, but it came out thin. Something inside me had cracked in the last twenty-four hours—a stress fracture, invisible until now.

He looked at me, searching for the joke, then realized there wasn’t one.

“Don’t do that,” he said, voice low. “Don’t minimize what you are to me.

I know I’m a dick, but… I’ve learned a few things since the last time I burned my life down for someone.

” He pushed away from the counter, coming closer.

“I’ll show you the sketch tomorrow,” he said, so quietly it barely made it across the three feet of air between us.

I wanted to reach for him, or slap the words out of the room, but I just tapped my mug against my thigh, pretending the heat was something I could manage.

“I know you care about her, Kieran. Do you understand why I kept you from her now? Do you get it?”

His voice had gone ankle-high, a hush leaking under the kitchen door. “Of course I do,” he said. “You wanted her safe from everything that made me.”

He said it so plain it hurt. I remembered Rosie looking up from a Lego construction, or behind a book, asking a question I couldn’t answer without inventing a whole fraudulent family tree.

I remembered, with sick clarity, the exact moment I decided to never say his name to our daughter—at the hospital, when Julian asked, Is there anyone else in the family who needs to know?

and I lied: No. It’s just us. I’m all she’s got.

For all his faults, Julian never pushed me. Never asked. He fell in love with Rosie when she was just an idea, body parts on a magnet on my fridge.

And that—God help me—had seemed, for a long time, enough.

“I should’ve tried harder to reach out to you. To find you, so I could tell you,” I whispered. “I was a coward.”

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 offered it 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.