Chapter Twenty-One Razor
Chapter twenty-one
Razor
Six months. That was all it took for my life to empty itself out and refill with different shapes.
“Think of the lie-ins.” Lennon came up behind me, cheerful in the way only someone who was finally getting rid of me. “Got to be better than waking up with twins bouncing on your bad ribs, right?”
I snorted. For the past six months, that was exactly how I’d woken.
Baby twins. His baby twins. Amara and the boys had eventually come back to their own place, which had left me on the fold-out in the living room, waiting for my life to restart.
Or end. Or rebrand itself into something I could live with.
And six a.m. with twin boys launching themselves onto my chest and demanding I fix whatever toy they’d broken overnight wasn’t something I’d miss.
And something I very much would.
“You’ve lived in worse.” Lennon stepped past me, dropping the last box onto the narrow kitchen counter.
Kettle. Mugs. The stupid plant he’d insisted on.
He’d done most of the heavy lifting, if I was honest—calls, forms, chasing people who didn’t return them unless your name still carried weight.
Mine didn’t anymore. That was the point.
“I’ve also lived in better.” I eyed the tiny room. “South of the fucking river, mate.”
“And west,” he shot back. “They’ve shoved you so far out you’re officially someone else’s problem.”
I set the keys down and ran a hand over the worktop of the tiny bedsit in a converted housing block.
Laminate. Cheap. Unpretentious. Mine, I supposed.
I’d been rehoused because it was safer. Starting again only works if you actually leave the place that keeps pulling you back.
And this bedsit, courtesy of the rehabilitation programme, came with a leaflet, a phone number, and a gentle suggestion that I might consider retraining.
I binned the number. Kept the leaflet.
“You good?” Lennon turned to face me.
“Yeah.” I meant it. The truth of it surprised me. “I’m good.”
He looked at me for a moment. I’d seen that look on him before. Quiet, careful, hopeful. One day he’d give it to those boys when they packed up for university. Because they would. He’d make sure of it. We both would.
Education doesn’t fix everything.
But it was a road out. One we’d never had.
“Your new life, Rich.” Lennon clapped a hand on my shoulder. “You can finally breathe.”
I nodded. I’d heard it already, variations of it. From Mercer, Imogen, people who spoke as if outcomes were things archived and moved on from. But it landed differently, standing there with nothing hanging over me. No clock ticking. No conditions. A fresh start I didn’t yet know how to inhabit.
And a pitiful emptiness that had gone nowhere.
Still, it was over.
For me, at least.
For Cormac and Doyle, though, their sentence had only just started.
They never left custody. They tried, of course.
Lawyers were briefed. Money shifted hands.
Favours were hinted at, then quietly declined.
But the warehouse froze everything in place.
Guns, blood, phones, timelines refusing to bend no matter how hard anyone leant on them.
And, of course, the witness testimonies.
Doyle went first.
He couldn’t hold silence. Couldn’t sit in it without clawing for air.
For a man who’d said very little on the outside, he sure knew how to use his voice on the inside.
His story slipped, then unravelled. He pleaded on some counts, talked on others.
Not enough to save himself, but enough to close doors behind him.
Enough to make sure there was no way back.
Cormac fought it.
Silence was his armour. Posture his power. He carried himself as if someone higher up would intervene, sweep the mess away before their own names surfaced. As if they’d risk exposure rather than admit they’d been doing business with a man like him.
No one came.
Strangely not even his old pal Lord Wolfe.
And as such, he was remanded at every hearing.
Eventually sent up to the Crown Court with charges stacking high and heavy.
Organised crime, conspiracy, violence. Words that, at last, meant what they were supposed to mean.
And for the first time, his reputation didn’t shield him.
It buried him. Men the CPS had been circling for years came forward.
Men who’d lived under his threats, his boot, his shadow.
They cashed in. Not in the money sense but in the sense that the streets were finally clear of his reign. Not for justice.
For closure.
Of course someone would take his place. Someone always does.
Maybe one the men who’d chucked him under the bus.
Maybe whoever had been grooming Ghost. Maybe someone had already stepped in the moment the space opened.
But that wasn’t mine to worry about anymore.
Now I couldn’t give a fuck if Ghost took my line. Let him have it.
Because I was out. Properly out.
And I hadn’t needed to flip to do it. No deals. No statements bought with fear or favour. Which meant I wasn’t anyone’s leverage anymore. Not Cormac’s, not Lord Wolfe’s, and not the police.
No one owned me.
Tyler disappeared, though.
Cooperation papers signed. Sentence cut down to being survivable. New postcode. New job. No contact. The system’s version of starting again. He didn’t ask about me. I didn’t ask about him. Some things were better left buried if I wanted to keep breathing.
What he did, though…I’d always be grateful for that.
Yeah, he’d taken Tristan from the courthouse and shoved him into that van.
He’d done it on orders, and I couldn’t hate him for that.
I’d followed orders once too. More than once.
But after that, after the warehouse, after everything, he didn’t stay quiet.
He confessed. Properly. No half-measures. The man fucking flipped.
Braver than me.
I reckon his bird had something to do with it.
She’d always liked me. Always told him when he was being a coward.
Maybe she finally made him choose something other than survival.
To make up for all those times he’d fucked up and I saved him.
But he told them everything. Including Kyan.
And between his statement and mine, Cormac and Doyle went down for murder too.
I hope it was worth it.
Sadly, though, not everyone got what they deserved.
Wolfe hadn’t touched a cell yet.
Men like him don’t.
And he slid out of my case as if he’d never been there at all, which told me exactly how close he’d been. Last I heard, he was keeping a lower profile and pretending that was a choice. I’d got him banned from getting his gear. That, I could live with.
As for me?
No further action.
No bail. No tag. No conditions. No one counting down the hours until I slipped.
A clean slate, on paper. A new start, if you believed in that sort of thing.
I’d walked away light. Time served or whatever.
I was a fucking lucky bastard. But the truth was, it wasn’t luck.
It was because I owed far more than the system could ever be bothered to collect.
We all knew it. The CPS knew it. The police knew it.
I knew it best of all.
But dragging my history into open court would’ve meant building cases on witnesses who lied for a living or vanished when things got real.
And if they’d pushed it anyway, if they’d thrown me back inside on what they did have, it wouldn’t have been justice.
It would’ve been a handover. Straight back into cells with the same men I was meant to be walking away from.
They knew that. Knew I’d be pulled back into the fold before the door even slammed.
So they wiped me clean instead. Not because I was innocent. Because it was safer. Because it closed more doors than it opened. It wasn’t justice. I’m not pretending it was. But for a man like me, it was a small miracle.
And I wasn’t about to waste it.
Lennon’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out, checked the screen, and answered while I wandered into the bathroom to dump the cheap toilet rolls under the sink and take stock of the place properly.
Mould creeping into the grout. Yellowing around the shower tiles.
Curtain rail hanging on by one screw and optimism.
Fuck, I missed my old shower back in the Wick.
I could get two people in that one without trying.
I had. Me and Tristan. The memory was alive in my mind like all the others.
But it wasn’t as if I’d have anyone to join me in this telephone box of a shower.
Lennon tapped my shoulder. “For you.”
I took the phone, eyeing the unknown number as if it might bite.
I didn’t have a mobile. No burner. Not even a cheap smartphone.
It had been safer that way. No way to reach me.
No threats sliding through DMs at three in the morning.
The only people who needed to speak to me were my lawyers, my sister, and Mum.
And they all had Lennon’s number. Somewhere along the way, he’d become my personal secretary.
Which was probably why he was smiling at me.
Cause he wouldn’t have to come off the building site to pass on my messages anymore. Mostly from Keeley.
She and Maisie were still at that mother and baby unit out north.
The private charity was covering them until she turned eighteen and the council would have to step in properly.
And Darren—somehow—had been released as well.
Time served or something like that. No custody though; supervised visits only.
He was trying. I’ll give him that. But he was still stuck in Hackney.
And men like him didn’t tend to reinvent themselves.
Maisie would probably grow up barely knowing him.
Might not be the worst thing.