Page 8 of Velvet Betrayal (The Dark Prince of Boston #3)

Ruby

K ieran dropped his hand, but it wasn’t a full retreat. “If you want to call Alek,” he said, “I’ll let you use my phone. Five minutes. Blocked number.”

The offer was so unexpected my brain fumbled it. I almost asked if this was one more trick, some subtle trap. “Seriously?”

“You can’t tell him where you are,” he said. He rummaged in a drawer for a second and placed a burner flip phone on top of the kitchen island. “I have to be there when you make the call.”

I considered saying no, just on principle. But five minutes was five minutes more than zero, and a blocked number still might be enough to make Alek call in every favor he had to get a trace. It was the least Callahan move Kieran had ever made, which only made me distrust it more.

I slid the phone off the counter and flipped it open. Kieran stepped back—not out of earshot, but into a stance of calculated nonchalance, like a dad at a playground who claims to be reading a newspaper, but actually clocks every perimeter threat from behind the print.

I keyed Alek’s number from muscle memory. I’d memorized it a while ago, when we were both in law school.

He picked up before the second ring. “Hello?” His voice was a haze of static and sleep deprivation, but so familiar it stung.

I breathed through it. “It’s me.”

A pause, then: “Ruby. Where the fuck have you been?”

I bit my lip. “I’m safe. Rosie’s safe. I need you to tell the DA’s office that I had a personal emergency. We’re…on a short trip. Can you cover for me? I’ll be back in less than forty-eight hours.”

“Is Rosie with you?”

“Yes, of course.”

I heard him audibly swallow. “Okay,” he said. “I can cover for you for a little bit, but I assume this is Kieran? If Julian finds out, he’s going to freak the fuck out.”

I swallowed. “He’s not the problem this time. There’s something…off. I think we’re being surveilled. Not the feds. Something new, and he’s—” I looked at Kieran, watched the grip tighten on his mug. “He’s helping.”

A sigh, jagged and shaking. “Goddammit, Ruby. You should have told me. You should have—”

“I didn’t know. He didn’t tell me.”

Alek was silent so long it was almost a dial tone. Then: “Jesus Christ, Ruby, does he have your phone? Are you calling from something else?”

“He does. I’m using, uh, a burner. It’s fine—he’s letting me talk to you.

Just…” I dropped my voice, even though the house was empty except for us.

“Please don’t trace this. Don’t call the police.

Don’t tell Kitsuragi. I’m fine. I don’t want this to get out to the press, okay?

I don’t want to escalate things even more. ”

“Copy that. But you need to come home. You know that, right?”

“Two days. Maximum. Can you do it?”

A breath, then a sigh stretched to the breaking point. “Yeah. Of course I can.” Underneath it: I always do. “But Ruby—don’t stay one hour longer than you have to.”

I considered saying something else. That I missed him, that he was the only person who’d ever made logic feel like a gift, not a maze.

But it was too much, or too dangerous, or maybe both.

And so instead, I said, “Thank you,” and hung up with the bitter finality that comes when you know the next call might be the last.

Kieran was careful to keep his face neutral, but some tension in his jaw barked at me: Was I grateful? Was I angry? Or was I just here, in exile from the city, a ruined queen in borrowed fleece?

He held his coffee mug for a long time, eyes fixed on the window above Rosie, who was now fully absorbed in children’s television.

“I’m not trying to make this hell for you,” he said, not looking at me. “But you can’t go back yet.”

“We’ll see,” I said.

He looked so tired—overgrown stubble, dark circles under his eyes. For a second I remembered what it was to feel sorry for the man.

Not love, not hate, but that old uneasy mercy that had dogged me since I first met him—because I knew he was a prisoner of obligations he barely understood.

“You have to take me back in two days. The police will come here if you don’t and even if they didn’t…I’m being sworn in, Kieran. You don’t have a choice.”

He cocked his head. “That was a dumb play.”

“That was my only play, Kieran.”

He scraped his thumb along the inside of his mug.

“Just…use today to rest. There’s nothing to do yet but keep the doors locked and listen for engine sounds that aren’t ours.

” He started to say something else, but it hung, uninvited, between us.

He drank instead and squared his shoulders for the next emergency.

That was how it went, the first day. We made snacks, played board games from some ancient Parker Brothers box in the den, and kept our sentences short enough not to trip over the tension.

Rosie, absorbing the mood, colored quietly and watched cartoons with the sound too high. I called it homework, and she pretended to agree.

By noon I started to feel the walls. My phone might as well have been at the bottom of the snowed-in driveway.

I’d briefed Alek and buried my own panic; I was, for all legal purposes, in hiding.

My timeline of obligations ran out at zero hour tomorrow.

By then, I was supposed to...what? Come up with a plan?

Pray whoever was after me lost interest?

Sob into one of Adriana Callahan’s neglected camisoles?

Instead I did dishes, stalked the perimeter of the ground floor, and found the old rotary phone in a kitchen drawer. It was unplugged, its cord brittle as fossil. I plugged it into the wall anyway, just to see if the universe would humor me. There was no dial tone.

Fuck.

I was repositioning the curtains to maximize sightlines when Kieran leaned in the kitchen archway, arms folded, and watched me with equal parts worry and awe. “You okay?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said. “But you don’t want me to be, right? You want me nervous. You want me contained.”

“I don’t care how you feel as long as you’re alive.”

I gave him a look and dropped onto the rug beside Rosie, who was still mangling a puzzle.

It was a mess—missing corners, weird texture like someone spilled juice on it three Thanksgivings ago.

I wasn’t even sure what the picture was supposed to be.

Either a mountain or a pelican. Or a pelican on a mountain.

Kieran hovered nearby with that hovering energy he had—like if he bent down too far, his soul might break. He offered me a mug of coffee. I took it. My hands were shaking less now. Rosie grinned and said she’d finished “the middle.” It was all sky.

I tried to wedge a few pieces together while Kieran sat across from me, long limbs folded, looking like the last kid picked at recess but trying not to take it personally. Rosie leaned on my shoulder and handed him a piece with a smudge on it. “You do the next one,” she said.

He gave her a solemn nod. “Yes ma’am.”

I snorted. “Careful, she’s a known dictator. You’ll be sentenced to puzzle court.”

“I’ve survived worse.” He locked eyes with me as he said it.

We finished the border in silence—two people pretending they weren’t in exile, just snowed in, and one little girl who had no idea what the fuck was happening.

“I want to go for a walk,” I said.

“The storm is too bad,” Kieran said.

Rosie was, thankfully, on my side. She crossed her arms over her chest. “I want to make snow angels.”

Kieran’s eyes flickered to the window, where the storm was still doing its best impression of a whiteout.

"Fine. I'll dig out the steps and get you boots. I think my niece left some here, so you should have some that fit. They might be a little big, sweetheart.”

Rosie shrugged. “It’s okay!”

He left, and I started wrestling Rosie into her puffer, gloves, and two hats, knowing we’d be outside maybe ten, maybe five minutes. She shrieked about snow angels as I tried to zip her up.

“Come on,” I said. “I need to find boots for myself.”

I looked for boots in the hall closet, found a pair that almost matched my size and jammed my feet in. Stiff soles. Not made for running, but enough to get through the drifts.

Rosie pounded down the porch, stumbling once and flailing snow everywhere. Kieran had cleared the steps and was systematically shoveling a perimeter. His face was ruddy and his breath fogged.

The wind had let up but it was biting, each inhale strip-mining the inside of my nose. The world was absolutely still, the sky the color of a healing bruise, the woods surrounding the house so quiet it felt like a dare.

I watched Rosie wipe out, get up, and immediately start brushing snow into rough angel shapes. Kieran watched her too, and for a second, in the odd silence, our eyes met above Rosie's head.

For a second, it didn’t matter what he said. I got it. In the only way he knew how, he was trying to protect our daughter.

But something about that knowledge only pissed me off more.

I edged closer. The boots were so awkward, I almost tripped getting through the shoveled channel. “You thought of everything, didn’t you?” I said.

Kieran shrugged, leaning on the shovel like it was a prop. “It’s basic survival. But—yeah.”

We stood like that for a moment. Rosie, chugging ahead to make one, then two, then three snow angels. Kieran, fiddling with the cuff of his glove as if he needed new busywork. I watched the windows, the road, the woods, but nothing moved, not even a crow.

He kicked the snow pile. “I always wanted to take you away somewhere. Not quite this remote, but—” He left the rest unsaid.

I snorted. “Yeah, Paris seems less likely these days.”

Kieran just looked at me. Eyes softening, the tiniest crease appearing at the bridge of his nose. A look that, for a second, made me remember the boy who had once read Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabela Allende novels just to impress me.

“I know you’re angry. But I would do anything to keep you safe. Even if it upsets you.”

“You can’t strip my choices away like that.”

He dropped his voice to a whisper. “I can, and will, do whatever it takes to keep you alive. How you feel about it sucks, but it is what it is. You can be angry all you want, but all I have to do is breathe close to you to see how you really feel. I can practically smell how wet it gets you. You have a pretty mouth, but you’ve never learned to lie. ”

“Fucking hell, Kieran.”

He grinned. “You like it when I talk to you like that, Ruby.” He stepped closer. “But I can stop if you want. Tell me.” The old ache surfaced, curled through my throat, and I couldn’t decide if it was hate or need or both. Maybe they were always the same thing—just different temperatures.

“I don’t want you to stop,” I said, and I couldn’t look at him. If I did, I might forget the part where I should be plotting escape.

“Good,” he said, his breath a whisper against my ear. “I don’t want to stop.”

He stood with the snow shovel braced against the crook of his arm and let me drink him in for a heartbeat longer.

There was an arrogance to how little he shivered, as if hypothermia would be a welcome reprieve if it got to mean one more hour of watching me guard Rosie in the yard.

I could tell he was baiting me—he always baited me—yet there was something true caught in his voice, something I was dumb enough to want to believe.

"I can't just let you run," he said. "Not yet."

"And after all this, then what?"

“I don’t know,” he said. “And honestly, it doesn’t matter, as long as you stay alive.”