Page 25 of Velvet Chains

We baked together. Always something overly complicated. He liked pastry; I liked frosting. We were a good team. We once stayed up all night trying to make croissants from scratch. We burned the first batch and ate them anyway, sitting on my kitchen floor with our backs against the oven, butter on our lips and grease on our hands. We put on a marathon of bad heist movies and yelled at the screen every time a lawyer character did something wildly unethical. We did shots when the bailiff would have tackled someone.

We munched on our overbaked pastries, laughing so hard we hurt ourselves, our heads tossed back against the edge of the sofa, neither one of us even thinking about sleeping.

It was the closest I’d felt to safe in a long time.

And when I found out I was pregnant, when I sat on that same kitchen floor with a test in my hand and a knot in my chest so tight I could barely breathe, he was the one I called.

I hadn’t even finished the sentence. I’d just said, “Alek, I just took a pregnancy test, and I think, fuck, maybe, I don’t know, what if I’m pregnant? And I think this guy I’m seeing—he won’t pick up my calls, I—”

I heard his car start, his keys turning in the ignition. He was already on his way over.

He brought soup and a notebook full of checklists, one for if I decided to terminate the pregnancy and one for if I decided not to. He didn’t try to fix it. He didn’t say anything stupid. He just sat next to me and said, “Whatever you decide, I’ve got you.”

And he meant it.

So yeah, I remembered.

Of course I remembered.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told you before.”

I looked up at him.

“I went to find him. When you told me, I mean. I think Rosie was three? I don’t know. We got drunk and you told me, and I felt like I should go find him. Not because I wanted to bring him into Rosie’s life or anything, but I really needed to know why he had ghosted you. You know how I am about unresolved questions.”

“What?” I asked. “You went to…what do you mean, you went to find him?”

“I went to the places you told me you had met up,” he said. “The coffee shop, the gym. When that didn’t work, because I assume you had done that, I looked him up in the system. I didn’t want to go to his apartment because that felt like stalking but I did find some of the Callahan pubs and clubs in the system. I went to the pub and saw him.”

“You talked to him?”

Alek shook his head, a small smile pulling at the corner of his lips. “No,” he said. “They immediately clocked me as someone who shouldn’t have been there. But I saw him, you know? With his brothers. With Tristan and Liam Callahan. And with Adriana and Carmen Orsini.”

“Jesus.”

“They didn’t pay attention to me. But as soon as I got there, I…I don’t know. I guess I realized that you would be better off without him. I should’ve told him that you needed him, that you were pregnant, but how could I? You’re who you are now in spite of him, Ruby. Not because of him.”

I stared at him. My throat ached, not from the bruises but from the weight of everything he wasn’t saying.

“You should’ve told me,” I said quietly.

“I know,” he replied, just as quiet. “But it wasn’t my choice to make.”

“You didn’t trust me to handle it?”

“I trusted you to survive it,” he said. “But I didn’t think he deserved to be part of that survival.”

There it was. Not anger. Not judgment. Just bone-deep belief. He thought I had clawed my way out of the wreckage, and that Kieran had been the fire.

And maybe he wasn’t wrong.

But it didn’t make it easier to breathe.

“I think about it sometimes,” he admitted. “What would’ve happened if I’d told him. If he’d shown up. If he’d fought for you.”

“And?”

He looked at me, eyes clear. “And I’m glad he didn’t. Rosie has a family. Okay, so Julian’s a smug asshole, but he loves that little girl as much as you do. And I—” He stopped, then shrugged like the truth was obvious. “I’ve got you. Both of you.”