Chapter One Razor #2
He put down the sort of poncy hors d’oeuvre costing a fortune that wouldn’t feed a family of four. Funny how that worked: in my tower block, people queued at a food bank for a tin of beans meant to last all week, and here they paid through the nose for a mouthful of rocket they left on the plate.
Whatever. Can’t say it didn’t sting. But I was over it.
I got down to business. “What you after from us?”
Trentham selected one of the tiny bites and popped it into his mouth. “My investors are opening two more venues in Shoreditch this year. We’re expanding, diversifying the clientele, keeping things…” He paused, searching for the right word. A polite one. “…reliable.”
He looked at me as if I should applaud his excellent business venture.
As if I didn’t know he’d been born with a safety net and a silver card.
Men like him didn’t build empires; they inherited the scaffolding and paid others to climb it.
And what he was really saying there was We’re attracting the sort of people who party hard and pay well, without inviting the riffraff who bleed on the furniture.
“Reliable,” I echoed, letting it hang. “Nice way of saying you don’t want dead bodies near your VIP tables.”
He laughed. “Let’s call it brand protection.
” He ran a finger along the rim of his glass, checking for imperfections.
“My clientele pay for an experience. They expect exclusivity, safety, consistency. They don’t want some backstreet concoction cooked up by…
enthusiastic amateurs.” He smiled, apologetic.
Not sorry. “I’m talking reputation, not revenue.
If I’m to associate with your organisation, I need to know the product’s pure, the movement discreet, the logistics watertight.
I’m not interested in messy headlines or bodies in car parks.
” He watched me, testing how much insult I’d swallow for the promise of his money.
“Twenty percent of the profits from the takings on the door for peace of mind seems fair, doesn’t it? ”
I watched his mouth move, letting the words crawl over my head rather than into it.
The bottle of whisky between us caught the light, gold turned violent along its edge.
For a second, I pictured smashing it into his pretty teeth, watching that composure slip on its own blood.
The thought sat in the middle of my chest, hot and steady.
Not tonight. Not in this shirt. Not with Doyle watching.
“Fair?” I leant forward, choosing my poncy snack. “That’s a funny word to use when you give me that number.” I popped whatever it was into my mouth and wished I hadn’t. Salt and fish eggs and money on a bite. Disgusted, I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.
Overhead at the bar, Doyle shifted. Enough for me to feel it. Don’t fuck it up. Don’t fold either. He glanced my way, too. He didn’t speak, but I felt his silence like a lead weight on my back. Remember who’s listening. Who owns your oxygen.
I’d learnt to breathe around the leash.
Yeah, I was at least fifteen years younger than them.
A twenty-seven-year-old street thug like me shouldn’t be sitting in a place like this, eating fish eggs on a sliver of pancake.
Not with men who counted profits by quarters, not coins in a jar.
Truth was, I belonged in Wormwood or six feet under.
That was my yellow brick road. This seat wasn’t for the faint-hearted.
I could ruin Trentham with one clean punch, make his Turkish pearly whites fly across the room and have them in someone else’s gob by the time the steaks came.
But if I did that, his deal dies, his clubs stay whole, and our product drops back to street level.
Choices, I’d learnt, were a different violence.
I leant back, holding Trentham’s gaze, wiping my hands down my jeans. A reminder. I wasn’t born in his world; I’d climbed here through the rot, and I wasn’t about to pretend otherwise.
“You think you’re buying powder? You’re not.
” I didn’t sell chaos. That was the difference.
Chaos stayed underground, buried beneath layers of civility.
No ambulances, no police, no headlines. This was quiet clients who paid to forget what they were doing.
“Powder’s cheap. Any idiot with a Telegram handle and no conscience’ll flog you something that glows in the dark.
” I let my eyes rest on his. “What you’re paying for is my control. Over your floor.”
One of his eyebrows ticked up. “Enlighten me.”
“Supply, security, silence.” I sniffed, ran a hand over my close shave.
“That’s the order. My people don’t cut with shit that kills, they don’t push to kids, they don’t sell to anyone who can’t handle themselves.
Nobody’s cooking in a bathtub. Product comes in lab-bagged or not at all.
If something’s off, it never makes my floors. You know why?”
“Because your ‘brand integrity’ matters?”
I almost smiled. “Because my boss don’t like headlines either. And I don’t like funerals unless they’re useful. You want in on that, you’re not buying drugs. You’re buying the feeling that nothing touches your people while they’re in my city.”
“And your cut of the illusion?”
“Thirty-two percent.” I folded my arms. “Net. Off your gross.”
His laughter came out sharper that time. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it?”
I let him look at me and see what he wanted to see.
A lowlife high-rises thug with street stories and a clever mouth.
Underneath, I ran the sums. Cost of import, cost of storage, cost of the boys on the doors, the watchers on the street, greasing the right palms, cleaning up the wrong mess.
Cost of peace. And I don’t mean I did maths. I mean, I worked out what I was worth.
And it was more than what he thought I was.
Always had been.
“You came here,” I said. “You asked for my routes. My discretion. My people. You don’t want to build from scratch, and you don’t want the risk.
You want your Shoreditch darlings high and happy without a single wrong pill in their veins.
” I nodded towards the restaurant, visible through the smoked-glass partition. “See any ambulances outside?”
Trentham’s head turned instinctively, glancing at the street beyond the tall windows.
The pavement below was clean. Valet cars, no sirens.
He’d noticed on the way in that no one stumbled past the ma?tre d’, that the laughter here stayed tidy, and the servers didn’t flinch at the clientele.
Even the bouncers at the door smiled. Polite, unbothered, lethal.
He just hadn’t named it yet.
“This is a restaurant.” I leant forward. “But everything underneath it—the lounge, the club, the whole glittering rot you want a piece of—runs because I keep it that way. No chaos, no police, no corpses where your customers can see them. You think that happens by chance?”
I let the question hang there, let him feel the distance between the candlelight on our table and the heartbeat thumping beneath the floorboards. The city’s filth didn’t vanish here. It had learnt to wear a suit.
“My customers leave on their feet,” I said. “They come back with friends. You get that. You get product that don’t embarrass you. You get my word that if one of your boys fucks about, I handle it before you even know his name. That’s thirty-two.”
“Twenty-five,” he countered, quick. Habit. “For the scale I bring—”
“You bring venues,” I mocked. “I bring safety. Door’s that way if you think you can buy that cheaper.” I watched him flinch at the word cheaper. “Your investors can go shopping with the Telegram cowboys. Roll the dice on purity. See how the brand holds up when somebody’s kid drops dead in the VIP.”
Doyle had drifted away to light a cigarette somewhere. Now that was trust.
So I went in again.
“Thirty-two and you get peace of mind. Routes the Met won’t sniff at. Me on your side instead of bored and selling to your competition. That’s the fee.”
He held my gaze, blank and cold. I watched the gears behind his eyes. Cost versus risk. Ego versus survival. The same arithmetic keeping men alive in rooms like this. He’d learnt when to fold a little. I’d learnt when to bite.
The server returned with two plates of steak.
“I’ll let you think about it while you get your chops around that.” I jabbed my knife at his plate as if I could carve him open from here, then sat up straighter, scanning through the glass, catching Tyler’s brief nod.
Yeah, I had my second here, too. And he stood by the glass partition, a wall in a black shirt with a coiled temper tucked under the collar, watching the restaurant filling up for the evening.
Tyler knew my rhythms. When to move, when to disappear, when to hit hard and when to stare until someone rethought their life.
And as he’d been with me since the beginning, when we were both feral and hungry and one wrong night off a cell or a grave, I kept him close, not just because I trusted him, but because Cormac trusted him too.
Also made him dangerous, though. If Tyler ever flipped, half my world would go down with him.
So I fed him loyalty. Kept him busy. Made sure he never had a reason to look elsewhere by giving him something close enough to a career he could tell his mum about without choking.
He ran the day-to-day drops and pickups, coordinated the door, made sure no one touched what was mine.
Still had his temper. Cheated on his girl more than was decent.
But the women were on the payroll now, not junkies clearing debts, and he never skimmed a note that wasn’t his.
Not clean. Never claimed clean. But he was loyal.
Loyal counted more than confession. And he stood there, waiting for my instructions, which would comprise either removing this man from the place if he didn’t play nice or fetching me the pen to sign.