Lord of London Town

“They burned them alive,” I said. Cheska winced. My shoulders sagged, and the alcohol swam in my stomach and head. “I don’t know how to deal with it,” I said, immobilised, fucking exhausted on the floor at her feet.

Still, she stayed silent.

“This …” I said and looked up. Cheska was watching me, face shattered, fucking broken. “Feeling,” I confessed and saw the ice thaw from her expression. Ice that I knew—even in my drunken state—I’d put there.

“Arthur …”

“I shut it off. I shut it all off, after Mum and Pearl, after Dad … then after I left you that day in Oxford,” I said, letting it all spill out. All the fucking pain that I’d kept trapped inside me, that had soured and fucking rotted my flesh until it was nothing but a deadly virus running inside me, until I was numb to everything but death and rage.

Cheska shifted on the seat but still didn’t touch me. I knew she needed more. Needed me to tell her more. I closed my eyes and remembered her falling on the floor of my club. The fucking ache that started the minute she fell back into my life. Thirteen months. I hadn’t seen her in thirteen months, hadn’t felt a fucking thing in thirteen months but rage and bloodlust and darkness in the wake of our fathers’ deaths.

Then I’d seen her face. Her bloodied and beaten face, and the crack in my chest splintered through my protective walls. The feelings started stabbing at me, day by day, minute by minute, the more I was around her.

“You …” I remembered her pulling the lifeless bird from the container earlier tonight. The fucking fear, deep and gutting fear, when the container exploded and I thought I was too late. I’d thought Cheska was dead beneath me. That she’d gone. And I’d lost it.

Fucking lost it.

I swallowed the thickness in my throat, then met Cheska’s gaze. “You made me feel again. After so fucking long. After the blood and the death and all the dark thoughts …” I squeezed my eyes shut. “You made me fucking feel.”

I heard the rustling of clothes and smelled Cheska’s perfume suddenly floating around me. Hands touched my face, soft fucking hands holding my cheeks. I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it, if the whisky and vodka were creating a hallucination as strong as Vinnie’s. I wasn’t opening my eyes to have it all disappear. Cheska holding me took the pain away. She brought it crashing down, but she was also chasing it away.

The bringer and destroyer of everything I was.

“Open your eyes,” she said, her posh fucking accent sinking deep into my bones. Soothing all the severed and jagged-edged nerves that currently made me. The heat from her palms warmed my freezing body. “Baby, open your eyes.”

I did as she said, and there, right before me, on her knees too, was my Chelsea girl. The only one I’d ever fucking wanted. The only one I’d ever let in.

“I don’t know how to fucking do this,” I said, and Cheska’s eyes turned watery. “I don’t know how to fucking feel, how to let all the fucked-up in. How—” I touched her face, her soft skin like silk under my calloused fingers. “How the fuck do I do this?” I rasped, the emotion I was terrified of clawing through the broken tone of my voice.

“Arthur.” Cheska kissed me. Those fucking soft lips took mine, and the ache faded more and more, and so did the tar in my veins, the throbbing of my head as it replayed the video over and over again, the memory of Cheska on the ground, in my arms, unmoving …

I grabbed her waist, pulling her closer. I needed her closer. Her hands threaded into my hair.

“Let me in,” she said and kissed my neck. “Don’t push me away anymore. Please, just let me in. Fully. No turning back.”

“I can’t,” I said, instinctively trying to rebuild my walls. Close up the crack in my chest. “I fucking can’t.”

Cheska pulled back, then meeting my gaze head-on, said, “I love you, Arthur Adley. More than any woman has ever loved a man before.” The half-built walls fucking crumbled as those words tumbled from her mouth. The crack morphed into a fuck-off black abyss. “I love you, and I know you love me, even if you can’t say the words aloud.”

I groaned and clutched my head, needing the fucking pounding to stop. Eyes glazed, I looked up. “They killed them. The branded bastards who tried to take you. They killed my mum and sister. Burned them alive.”

“I know,” she said, and tears spilled over my eyes and down my fucking cheeks. She wiped at my face, and my head fell against her shoulder. I breathed her in. I fucking breathed her in and felt her fill my lungs. Felt her run through my body like a damn remedy to the poison that had been lying thick in my flesh and blood for far too long.