25. Chapter Twenty-Five Ruby
Chapter Twenty-Five: Ruby
T he 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.
How had the night I’d become DA turned into…this? The headlines were already forming in my head: "Newly Elected DA Involved in Mysterious Death.”
“We need to handle this.”
Kieran’s voice cut through, too calm and collected to be real…right?
I looked up, blinking, dragging my mind back from the edge of the spiral. He was standing now, too casual, like there wasn’t a corpse cooling ten feet away. Like this was business as usual for him.
“Is there anyone else here?” he asked, his tone measured. “Your kid? Your ex?”
I couldn’t find my voice, couldn’t get past the block in my throat, the wall of pressure behind my eyes. I shook my head, forcing myself to focus. I could feel his eyes on me, see the way he was watching. Waiting.
His hands were suddenly on my arms, warm and wet with blood.
“Ruby,” he said. “Look into my eyes, okay? Okay. Good. You’re doing good. I need you to take a deep breath and I need you to answer all my questions, okay? It’s really important that you listen to me right now. Can you do that?”
I blinked. I tried to take a deep breath. Failed.
“I’m alone,” I said finally. My voice sounded strange to my own ears, too thin, too far away. Like it belonged to someone else, someone who wasn’t in the center of this.
He nodded, but his focus never shifted back to the body. He kept it on me, intent and careful, and I knew what he was doing.
“Good,” he said. “Good. See? That makes our lives easier. Okay. Silver lining.”
He had clearly done this before. Fuck, how often had he done this?
I couldn’t listen to him.
There were rules for this. Protocols. I should be calling it in.
I should be documenting the scene. I should be—my gaze drifted to Russell, to the way his head was twisted on the staircase, to his broken nose, to the blood on the hardwood, and my stomach gave a sharp, painful twist. He looked wrong.
The whole scene did. Unreal. It couldn’t have happened, not here, not to me.
And yet.
The weight of it settled back in, hard and brutal.
“Is your linen closet upstairs?” Kieran asked.
“What?”
“Your linen closet,” he said, as if I just hadn’t heard him. “Is it upstairs?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, it’s, uh, up the stairs.”
“Okay. You’re going to go get me a blanket. If you have a dark one, that’s better. Got it? Go there. Come straight back. Alright?”
I nodded, but didn’t move.
“Right now, Rubes,” he said. “We don’t have too much time.”
I told myself to tell him no. But I didn’t. I dragged myself upstairs instead, opened the linen closet, grabbed a dark blue sheet I only ever used for the guest room, and brought it back for him.
Kieran took it from me, his fingers brushing mine, his skin too warm, too close. He unfolded it, taking it away from me, looking at the elastic.
“Shit, it’s fitted? This is going to be a pain in the ass.”
He was about to lean down when I noticed his breath catch.
I forced myself to look at him, really look at him.
I wasn’t the only person covered in blood. His side was bleeding and his shirt was sticking to his body.
“You’re bleeding,” I said.
He glanced down like he’d just noticed, like it was an afterthought, then shrugged. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not,” I shot back.
My ribs didn’t feel so tight anymore.
The words felt raw, scraped out from somewhere deep. “It’s not,” I said again.
He opened his mouth, closed it. There was an uncertainty in the way he stood now, a break in the armor. I stepped toward him before I could second-guess myself, before I could remember that he had just killed a man with his bare hands. His skin was burning under my fingertips. He didn’t pull away.
“You need stitches,” I said.
“It’s not deep.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Let me handle this first,” he said, leaning down and draping the sheet over Russell’s body. “You don’t want to look at his face every time you walk past tonight. Trust me, this is the better option. Why do people even buy these sheets?”
I blinked, once again unsure if I’d heard him right. “They…stay on the mattress better?”
“Yeah, but a leg might pop out. Okay, just…try not to look at this if you have to go up and down the stairs, okay?”
“I—what?”
“There,” he said, wincing as he stood up straight. “Finished. Now at least you can’t see his face.”
His hand instinctively went to his side, which made something in me snap. I didn’t want to look at Russell. There was nothing I could do here…but I might be able to help Kieran.
For the first time since he kicked in my door, it felt like this was something I could control. I grabbed his wrist, ignoring the way he raised an eyebrow, and dragged him toward the kitchen.
“Sit.”
For a moment, I thought he’d argue. But he didn’t. He sank onto the stool like this was nothing more than a minor inconvenience—like he hadn’t just been stabbed. He rolled his neck with a wince and let out a breath through his nose.
“Take your shirt off,” I said.
He arched a brow, a ghost of a smirk tugging at his mouth. “At least buy me a drink first.”
“Not funny,” I snapped, even though—okay, maybe a little.
“Yes, it was,” he muttered, but the smirk faded as he peeled the bloodied fabric up and over his head.
I bit the inside of my cheek, hard.
There was blood. A lot of it. But not gushing, not pulsing. That was good. I forced myself to breathe as I stepped closer, letting my eyes track over the injury.
The cut was clean but angry—long, shallow, just deep enough to need stitches. Just enough to leave a scar. Enough to remind us both how close this had been. Russell had sliced him, not stabbed him. A warning. A message. But one that could’ve gone very differently.
My stomach turned.
“You’re lucky,” I said, reaching for a towel. “It’s shallow.”
He didn’t flinch. Just watched me. The whole time. Eyes dark, locked on my face like I was the only thing anchoring him in the room.
I pressed the clean towel to his side. He hissed between his teeth, but didn’t move. His hands braced against his thighs, knuckles pale.
“Jesus,” I muttered. “This is bad.”
“I’ve had worse,” he said, voice low and even.
I scowled, not looking up. “That is absolutely not the flex you think it is.”
He didn’t flinch. I wanted him to. Just once. But the only thing that moved was the curve of his mouth, a half smile that didn’t reach his eyes. They stayed locked on me, intent and unblinking.
I pressed the towel harder than I needed to.
He winced, the movement slight. “Do you feel better now?”
“Getting there.” I felt my own lips twitch, a hint of sadistic satisfaction.
Russell’s blood was still sticky on my skin, but Kieran’s was warmer.
And he was here, in my kitchen, bleeding, and it should have been more terrifying than it was.
I should have been thinking about the corpse in the other room, about how my life had spun out of control, about anything but the man in front of me and the way his breathing hitched when I got too close.
“What?” Kieran asked, his voice low.
“Nothing,” I said too quickly. I could feel heat rising to my cheeks, anger and embarrassment at the way he was reading me so easily.
“Really?”
“Yes,” I said.
The edges of the world felt softer.
“Why did you follow me?” I asked, needing to break the quiet. Needing to break the pull of him.
“You’re in danger.”
“Because of you.”
“Not just me,” he said. He sounded too calm, too reasonable. Like we were having an everyday conversation instead of this. Like we weren’t surrounded by blood and chaos. “I mean, clearly not just because of me. Someone broke into your house to kill you tonight, and it wasn’t one of our guys.”
“I got the jury to give him an attempted murder charge,” I said as I kept pressing the towel against Kieran. “He was trying to get off with a misdemeanor. His lawyer wasn’t able to talk him into a reasonable plea, including a restraining order, and I pushed for his case to go to trial.”
“He tried to kill you?” Kieran said, his expression darkening.