Chapter Eighteen Razor
Chapter eighteen
Razor
I should’ve been used to waiting by now.
Prison trained me for it. Waiting for doors. Names. Shit I didn’t get told until it was already decided.
Still, waiting in this corridor scraped at me.
The hard bench bolted to the wall was cold through to my arse, the cheap suit Lennon had bought me with his week’s wages no real barrier.
I needed to pay him back for it though. And I would.
Drug and blood-free. But I had two custody screws posted up nearby, pretending not to watch me.
Though they were. The hearing was done. I could walk out.
Yet I was still fucking here.
Still tagged. Parked. Not being told which way my life was about to go.
I checked the clock. Then again.
The other reason I was antsy? Cause I was waiting for Tristan.
Five minutes. Ten. Enough time for a judge to wreck or save him.
Enough time for Imogen to come out and say it was all fucked up because I’d touched him.
Enough time for Tristan to stand in front of me and say he wasn’t allowed to stand in front of me ever again.
That I wasn’t allowed to touch him ever again either.
Yet nothing.
I slid my forearms on my thighs, eyes up. Let them think I was restless. Barristers drifted past. Clerks. Court staff. Black gowns, low voices, paper under arms. Nobody I wanted. Not the wig and gown I was hoping for.
Then Imogen appeared.
She stopped when she saw me still there. “Where’s Tristan?”
I shook my head.
Her mouth tightened. That couldn’t be a good sign.
She adjusted her gown, then her gaze snagged over my shoulder.
I glanced over it, following her line of sight, and sat straighter.
Fucking stupid. It wasn’t even the man I wanted.
Strangely, it was his father, coming down the corridor as if he owned the fucking building.
Older. Immaculate. A man who didn’t step around people cause they moved for him.
Hale-Fitzroy. I hadn’t known that was coming.
Tristan’s old man. On the other side of this. No wonder Tristan hadn’t come back.
I saw the resemblance straight away. Not just the eyes. The colour. The cut of him. But the restraint. The discipline. The way everything about him was sealed shut and weaponised. That was where Tristan came from.
And fuck—
I loved breaking that apart in him.
Loved the moments when Tristan forgot how to hold himself.
Forgot who he was and where he came from.
When he shook under my hands. When his breathing went wrecked and uneven, as if he didn’t belong to that world at all and instead belonged to me and my dirt.
When all that polish cracked and it was him and me and heat and want and him coming apart, begging for more as if he didn’t care what it cost.
Seeing all that perfect posh polish standing there in his father’s face…
It rolled, old and violent, through my chest.
Yeah. Inappropriate. Considering I was sitting there tagged, waiting to hear if I was going back inside, with his old man ten feet away on the wrong side of the aisle, built to put men like me away. Didn’t change it, though. Didn’t soften it. I’d taken his perfect son and made him mine.
And I fucking loved that. Fucking loved him.
Fuck.
I love him.
Imogen stepped directly into his path. “Have you seen Tristan?”
He paused, frowned, the same brief calculation, then looked around.
“No. I assumed he was with you.”
I stood.
If you’ve lived long enough watching rooms, or streets, instead of people the way I’ve had to, you learn early that faces lie, bodies don’t. Noise fades, patterns don’t. There’s a second, a moment, where everything lines up wrong and your gut goes cold.
That second hit right fucking then.
I lifted my gaze over the crowd, not fixing on anyone, but scanning. Heads. Shoulders. Movement. Flow. I wasn’t looking for something. I was looking for the thing that didn’t belong.
Then I saw it.
“Tyler,” I breathed.
Wrong place. Wrong side of the room. Wrong energy.
He hadn’t been in the public gallery; I’d’ve seen him and I hadn’t.
It had been empty. Which should have been an indicator all on its own.
I’d been expecting the threat. Braced for Cormac sending someone to stand in that gallery and stare me down the way I had Darren all those months ago.
I’d half expected it to be Tyler, sent to remind me what I was, what I did, who I answered to, and what would happen if I didn’t toe the party line.
Plead guilty or end up in the hole.
But no one had been in there. Yet there Tyler was now.
Cutting through the thinning crowd, head down.
Then he looked up. Straight at me. And shoved someone in front of him.
Not obvious. But enough to steer. To keep whoever was in front of him moving where he wanted it to go, angled into him in that way I knew.
I’d taught him that.
So I moved. Purposeful. Quick, but not running.
Not yet. Running spooks prey. I threaded through bodies, shoulders low, pace steady, eyes locked on the back of Tyler’s head.
Someone shouted something behind me. Probably the guards.
But they had no jurisdiction over whether I left after my case was done. So I ignored them.
All that existed was Tyler and the gap between us.
A head I’d smashed more times than the one that left the scar under my hairline.
Then he was gone.
“Oi!” I ran, bursting through the doors into cold air and chaos. Traffic. Voices. Courthouse steps spilling people in every direction. I scanned left, right, and caught sight of a white van fishtailing at the edge of the grounds.
Then it was gone.
Fuck.
I moved again, harder, cutting across the pavement, shouldering past people who hadn’t clocked the danger yet.
Tyler was ahead of me, full sprint. Ragged.
Panicked. I could smell it on him. He’d always been too loud in his fear, too reckless to hide it.
He glanced back, swore, and pushed for more speed.
So did I.
And I was faster.
I took him before he hit the corner. Full-force with my shoulder, sending us both crashing to the ground. He screamed as his face met concrete.
“Where the fuck is he?” I snarled.
He tried to scramble but I hauled him up by the collar and drove him back into the ground, the question landing with him.
“Where. Is. He.” I could’ve shouted. Could’ve grabbed someone. Could’ve done this the clean way. But clean doesn’t get answers. And this was what I was trained to do. So I smashed his face into the pavement again, splaying my hand over his cheek and forced him harder into the concrete. “Talk.”
“Alright, alright!” he mumbled. “Fuck! Let up!”
I hauled him upright, locked him back to my chest and tucked my hand straight to his pocket.
Not the obvious one. The hidden one. And there it was.
Plastic handle. No metal. Nothing to alert anyone to anything, not even a pat-down would show this.
I’d made one of them. Back in prison. I’d almost used it.
Funny how things go full circle, innit?
“You don’t answer me,” I pressed the shank into his side, “I’ll open you up right here.”
“Was told to take you there eventually, anyway.” Tyler nudged his chin forward. “Car’s close. Round the back.”
I shoved him forward.
The car was parked half a street away. Engine still warm. He scrambled in. I followed.
“You know,” Tyler started the engine with shaking hands, “I’m driving you straight to your funeral.”
“As always, bruv,” I sat back, “you’re coming with me.”
The car lurched forwards and Tyler took the turns too fast, tyres screaming as London smeared past the windows.
Lights, junctions, pedestrians stepping off kerbs without knowing how close they were to dying by being in the wrong lane.
I kept my eyes ahead, the plastic shank pressed into his side. Steady as a promise.
“What do you know?” I asked.
Tyler looked away from the road for a moment. “Enough to know you ain’t walking away from this.”
“Yeah?” I widened my eyes in challenge.
“Yeah.”
“We’ll see.”
He didn’t answer that.
After a while, he slowed. Turned. Pulled up outside a warehouse I recognised instantly.
Battersea. Same place I’d been dragged to before.
Same concrete. Same rot in the air. Ironically, Tyler had been here too.
On the floor, bleeding, when I’d been told to make a point of him.
I recognised the van parked outside and breathed out slow.
If I’d had a phone, I might’ve called this in.
But that was the thing about growing up the way I had. You moved first. Thought later. And sooner or later, that habit caught up with you.
Like now.
I’d always known this was how it ended. One way or another. Prison or a box. And as it looked like prison weren’t getting to me, this was the insurance policy finally being cashed. And guess what? They had leverage, at last. The thing I’d spent years making sure they never had.
And it was waiting for me inside.
“This a joke?” I turned to Tyler.
Tyler shook his head. “Ain’t laughing, bruv.”
“Me either.”
“You could run, y’know? Get the fuck out of here.”
I snorted, looked at him properly. “No. I can’t.”
He gave a thin smile. “Yeah. That bleeding heart finally did you in, eh?”
“Like you said it would.” I got out of the car.
I don’t know why I kept hold of the plastic bit of shit in my hand, it wouldn’t be worth anything in there if what I expected was waiting for me, but it was something.
A reminder. That there were always options.
That pain could still be dealt if it came to it.
A safety net. Better than walking in empty-handed.
So I tucked the plastic shank in my pocket and shut the door.