Lord of London Town

“They won’t get her here. They won’t even know to come looking. She’s not going anywhere while those cunts are still out hunting her.”

“She’s staying with you then?” Betsy asked, and I saw that fucking spark of something in her eyes. Something like hope. “In your bedroom?”

“It’s not like that,” I said, knocking back another glass of Bombay Sapphire and feeling it flooding my stomach. I turned to the bar and fought back the image of Cheska pinned to the mattress beneath me, screaming out my name as I wrapped my hand around her throat and sank my dick inside her wet pussy. “She doesn’t fucking belong in this world.” Something caved in my chest as I said that. I looked up at the mirror on the wall and saw myself looking back. But as I stared, all I saw around me was a black shadow and every inch of me covered in blood—not my own.

Never my fucking own.

“Wouldn’t you say that’s up to her?” Betsy pushed. I tore my eyes from my bloodied reflection and pointed at my cousin. She just stared back at me blankly, un-fucking-afraid, as per usual.

“Don’t,” I warned, my voice thick with command. Command to stay the fuck out of my business and back the hell off.

“Just saying,” Betsy said, rising from her seat to move beside me at the bar. She poured herself a port and faced me. “You’ve never cared about excluding women from the Adley fold. Our fathers weren’t even cold before you welcomed me, Vera and Ronnie into the firm, guns in hand and, hours later, Russian blood under our fingernails.”

“It has nothing to do with her being a fucking bird,” I snapped.

“No.” Charlie moved beside his sister. “It has to do with the fact that Ms Harlow-Wright is your bird. Isn’t that right, Artie?” I glared at my best friend. He wasn’t taking the piss. I knew Charlie as well as I knew myself. I knew he was concerned for me, had been for a while now. He’d barely left my side in the past thirteen months, since I’d taken the gaffer’s role in this fucked-up family. He walked beside me, step by unholy step, as I fell deeper into the fucking abyss. And he never complained once. But I knew he was scared I’d be lost to the depravity of it all—the killing, the blood, the underworld that I ruled with a fucking iron fist.

I faced Betsy, ignoring Charlie. “You’re in charge of Cheska. You’ll watch out for her while she’s here. Stay with her and protect her.”

“It’ll be my pleasure,” Betsy said, then went to sit beside Vera on the settee.

“Your colours match,” Vinnie said when the room got silent. Vinnie lived with me now. His old man had watched out for him when he was alive—we all got that Vinnie couldn’t be left alone. He needed to be watched. Given too much of a wide berth, the fucker would be out like Jack the Ripper, murdering Londoners for fun in the most fucked-up ways. Plus, he’d told me Pearl was clearer to him in the church. It was the first hint he’d ever given me that he knew Pearl was a hallucination and not actually my sister, all grown up and standing beside him, flesh and blood.

“What you on about, mate?” Eric asked, frowning at Vinnie.

Vinnie’s eyes were pinned on me. His hand was beside him on the couch, open like he was holding someone’s hand. “All around you is black.” Vinnie shook his head, his shoulder-length blond hair covering some of his face. “It never used to be. It used to be red too.” His hand tightened around thin air. “It was because of you that the blackness first came,” he told what I assumed was his hallucination of Pearl. “When you and your mum burned. Some of the red went and was taken over by black.” Vinnie lifted the invisible hand to his mouth and kissed it. He faced me again. “When your old man died, more and more red was replaced by black. Month by month, I watched it turn more and more black until I thought there was no red left.”

“But?” I asked, feeling like I was going insane too, actually listening to what Vin had to say.

“There’s a bit left. But I only realised it when you held Cheska. She made your red light flare.” My chest fucking tightened. Darkness. I always knew it had come for me, had taken me under … Vinnie saw it clear as day.

That bit of red that remained was all Cheska Harlow-Wright.

“Hers is mostly red,” Vinnie said. He smiled, and it looked like the smile of the Rottweilers we kept at our docks to guard the place. “But there’s a thin line of black around her too. The darkness has infected her. She might not know it yet … but she will.”