Page 60 of Velvet Chains

“Could be a mole. Could be wiretap. Could be someone at the port looking to cut a deal.”

“Jesus.”

“They’ve got the dogs circling. If it stays in customs, we’ve got a day. If it goes to Homeland?” Liam paused. “You’re exposed, Kieran.”

I stood up, pacing now. “We scrubbed the manifests. There’s no reason for it to be flagged.”

“Unless someone told them where to look. When to look.”

My mind jumped to Ruby, then shoved the thought away before it could take shape. “You think this is about her?”

Liam thought for a few seconds. I didn’t know what he was thinking. “I think this is about you not keeping your head.”

I gritted my teeth. “Are you going to call Tristan?”

“Yes,” he replied. “He’s my call right after you. And Kieran, I know you don’t want to hear this, but I have to tell him everything.”

I swallowed, my throat suddenly dry. “Don’t tell him about my daughter.”

I heard Liam swear under his breath, quiet and annoyed. “Fuck! Fine. But you know that doesn’t make my life any easier, and it just complicates things for you?”

“They’re after the Callahans, one way or the other. And this clearly isn’t just an overzealous DA trying to make a mark,” Liam said. “This is big ops shit.”

“So you don’t think the feds will use her?”

“Jesus Christ, lad, focus. This is huge. Way bigger than your crush,” Liam said. “You start slipping, you don’t just fall. You take all of us with you.”

I looked down at my hand. Still twitching.

“Get ahead of this,” he said. “Now.”

Then he hung up.

And just like that, the high was gone. All that was left was her name in my mouth, the scent of her still clinging to the pillow, and the tightening snare of something closing in.

I was going to fix it. All of it.

Starting with her.

Chapter Seventeen: Ruby

Iwoke up with a headache and a pit in my stomach, and for once, it wasn’t the coffee withdrawal or the hangover or too little sleep. It was him.

And then I sighed…because who was I kidding? Those things were just a symptom of the cause.

The cause was always him.

Kieran Callahan had a way of getting under my skin like the best kind of drugs…an addiction that killed you soft and slow, that made you feel good as it suffocated you. One night. One goddamn night, and I couldn’t stop replaying the way he had pushed me against the wall, the way his hands felt on my thighs, the way he looked up at me like he was kneeling at an altar.

I couldn’t mean anything to Kieran. He couldn’t mean anything to me. We both knew that. And yet…Rosie was halfway through building a stack of toast with everything but structuralintegrity, looking up at me with peanut-butter-smeared cheeks and sparkling green eyes—Kieran’s eyes, damn it. She’d woken up before me, sliding out of bed and—I guess—making herself breakfast.

“You’re awake?” I asked.

“Yeah, an owl woke me up. I think there was one right outside my window.”

“How do you know?”

“He kept asking who-who.”