Lord of London Town

“You’re fucking blind,” Vera said.

I glared at her. “How so?”

She shook her head, laughing to herself.

“I said how am I fucking blind?” I snapped, no longer caring if she was part of the firm and could shoot me where I lay. What the hell did I have left to lose?

“Oh, hello. There she bloody is.” Vera looked at Ronnie, eyebrow raised. “What did Vinnie say? She had a thin line of darkness around her too? Looks like we’ve just tapped into it.”

Betsy got up from the chair and sat on the bed bedside me. “Cheska Harlow-Wright. What my sister-in-arms here is trying to tell you is that Arthur, my dear cousin, is hook, line and sinker obsessed with you. And that you, the”—she made air quotes—“‘posh bit of pussy’ he shagged are the only one in Arthur’s entire life who has managed to stir something inside him. The only person who has made his concrete heart crack enough to let in any kind of light.”

My breath was held even though my heart pounded like a fist. I couldn’t take in what Betsy was saying. She had to be lying … but why would she lie? “Cheska, if you think my cousin doesn’t love you—obsessively, possessively, and somewhat wickedly …” She smirked. “Then you’re not as smart as your many degrees from Oxford would have us believe.”

“He left me,” I argued, something like fight igniting inside of me, eradicating the numbness that had blanketed me for the past couple of days. “That night, after …” I looked at the three women around me and realised that it was their fathers who would have died that night. “When you lost your fathers. After that night, he left me. Coldly. Brutally. I never heard from him again. He tossed me aside like scraps.”

Vera laughed again. The patronising sound grated on my nerves. “He came to you. In Oxford. We lost all our family’s leaders, our fathers. His father went into a coma, our gaffer, the head of our firm. The shit hit the fucking fan for us all, and he came to you. The heir to the Adley throne. He left us all here shell-shocked and broken and travelled to Oxford to you. And you think you were just a fuck?” Vera leaned over the foot of the bedframe. “You might be a good shag, I can imagine that, doll, but no bird’s cunt is so fucking good that a bloke like Arthur would drop all his responsibilities in the middle of a murderous shitshow just to get his end away.”

I stared at her, not knowing what to say, my pulse racing so fast I thought it would bring on a heart attack. “But the way he left …”

Betsy took the ring from my hand. She held it in the air. “He never said, and would never say to us—Arthur is a bloody fortress.” She studied the diamond. “But I think it might have had a little something to do with this.” My stomach plummeted. I remembered waking up to him holding my hand, eying the ring then tossing my hand back to the mattress like I disgusted him. No, not me. That. That bloody tarnished ring.

“It was the start of his ascension.” Ronnie sat on the end of the bed and leaned against the bedframe, casual in my company, like we’d been friends for years. “His ascension to Dark Lord of London.” She spoke that tabloid-given title with a tired roll of her eyes. “He came home that night changed. Whatever light he’d had left inside of him been stubbed the fuck out.”

“You,” Vera said, sitting opposite her girlfriend on the bed, the heel from her stiletto boot almost piercing the duvet. “That night he lost our dads, his dad, and … you.”

“You’re not some posh bird he fucked for a few years, Cheska. You’re the only one he ever let in, as little as that might have been. It was more of his soul than he gave to anyone else. You’re his bloody saviour,” Betsy said.

“From what?” I whispered, unable to process it all.

“From himself. From the darkness that’s almost completely devoured him,” Ronnie said. “That will take him under until he’s got nothing left inside him, no humanity, no fucking life.”

“Everyone is terrified of Arthur, and that’s why no one fucks with our firm. You can’t beat a man who doesn’t fear death,” Vera said.

“And as much as that serves us well as a crime family, we love our cousin more than our place on the top of the fucked-up London underworld,” Betsy said. “If he keeps living this way, he will die alone, never knowing love and constantly haunted by the ghosts of all the people who fell by his hand.” Betsy sighed. “Just like his father.” She sipped at her wine. “As much as I adored my Uncle Alfie, in reality, he died years ago. He died when my aunt and cousin burned in the house fire. And instead of loving Arthur harder, he moulded him into a man who could never be fucked with. Who would make the most formidable crime boss in London. He made his son impenetrable. Unfeeling. He made him fucking lethal.”