Page 113 of Velvet Corruption

I had no idea what to say. She should have been looking at me like I was a monster, but she wasn’t.

Her gaze was level, steady.

But there was a moment—a flicker—where her eyes drifted to my hands and her fingers twitched at her side. Her gaze lingered on my skin, then it shifted to the dead man.

To the blood there. To the damage.

The air between us stretched tight, charged with something I didn’t have words for.

Her breath was shallow. Mine labored. My heart was beating so fast, I felt like I could hear it pulsing hammering in my ears.

His body wasn’t moving anymore. No last gasps, no twitches. Just stillness.

Ruby was right. He was dead.

And then, her voice. I was glad she spoke first, I was sure if I had, my voice would be shaking.

“You’re bleeding,” she said. “Are you okay?”

Chapter Twenty-Five: Ruby

The blood was already drying on my skin. I barely felt it.

Not because it didn’t matter—it did.

It mattered too much. I just couldn’t process it yet, couldn’t breathe around the weight of what had just happened. The room felt too small, the walls closing in, the silence pressing like a vice against my skull.

Kieran was the first to move. He wasn’t panicked, wasn’t shaken. He checked Russell’s pulse with the casualness of a man who’d done this before…a lot.

“You’re right. He’s dead.”

His voice was flat, factual. It wasn’t a relief. It wasn’t a horror. It was just a statement of reality.

The words should have felt heavier, should have had more impact, but they just lingered in the air, unresolved and floating, mixing with the taste of iron at the back of my throat.

Kieran leaned back, his gaze cool and unaffected. He was the only solid thing in a world that felt like it was dissolving into chaos.

I tried to inhale, tried to fill my lungs with anything but the thick, stifling air that pressed around me. It didn’t work.

My neck hurt so much. My head, my legs. My pulse pounded in my ears. I could hear a low buzzing sound coming from somewhere, but I wasn’t sure where.

So that was it.

Russell was dead.

His body was sprawled across the staircase like a Renaissance painting and I was the one with blood on my skin. Not Russell. Not Kieran.

Not the man who had kicked in my door and turned my world into this. Not the man he’d killed.

It didn’t make any goddamn sense.

None of it did.

The blood had soaked into my shirt, and I couldn’t look down, couldn’t look at myself, because if I did, I might see what I couldn’t process. Might see how deep this already went. And what was that smell?

The copper scent was so sharp it made me want to vomit.

My ribs felt tight, like my chest had locked around my heart, around the panic and the disbelief and the hundred other things that swirled in a jumble.