Chapter Twenty-Four Tristan
Chapter Twenty-Four
Tristan
By Monday morning, the silence had teeth.
I’d known quiet from him before. Gaps I’d learnt not to press against. The unspoken rules I had to accept if I wanted Razor to keep coming back to my bed. Don’t ask, don’t cling, don’t pretend this was anything it wasn’t.
But this was different.
His absence had weight. It pressed down on me, followed me from room to room, clinging to the back of my throat as if it had substance. Even after I’d left the flat, it lingered, trailing behind me as if it were a scent I couldn’t wash off.
Twenty-four hours.
That was all it had been.
Lot could happen in twenty-four hours, though.
But there had been longer silences before.
Weeks, even. And I hadn’t unravelled like this.
Hadn’t paced. Hadn’t checked my phone with a sharp, humiliating jolt of hope every time the screen lit up.
Somewhere in my stupid brain, something had shifted.
A fault line I hadn’t noticed forming until it split.
He’d said he wouldn’t be long.
He’d said to keep the window open.
And somehow, I’d let myself believe that meant Sunday. That it meant I’d see him again before the week turned over. As if he dealt in promises. As if men like him came back because I wanted him to.
This, I told myself, was my punishment.
For falling in love with a man who did bad things.
No matter how carefully I’d dressed them up.
No matter how good I wanted to believe he could be.
I didn’t get to want both safety and someone like Razor.
And even though he wanted me to call him Richie, as that’s who he was when he was with me, Razor still existed out there.
Outside the safety of my Hale-Fitzroy walls.
So I had to choose. Or the world would choose for me.
I repeated that to myself as I dressed, knotting my tie with hands refusing to steady.
As I stood in my kitchen staring at the coffee machine, unable to remember whether I’d already filled it with water or had only thought about doing so.
I called myself a whole catalogue of names.
Pathetic. Needy. Delusional. I was all of it for letting twenty-four hours do this to me.
Twenty-four hours was nothing.
It wasn’t even long enough to be concerned. Not in his world. Not with the things I knew—didn’t know—about how he lived.
Still.
He hadn’t come back.
And no amount of telling myself that this was normal, expected, deserved even, could make the hollow in my chest feel any less real.
It followed me out of the flat, down the stairs, and into the street, clinging as I walked towards Baron’s Court tube.
I moved on autopilot, letting myself be absorbed into the press of other commuters, bodies and sweat and breath, all of us funnelled forward without thought.
Somewhere between the platform and the carriage, I checked my phone again.
Nothing.
That was it. No more. I wouldn’t look again. I wouldn’t.
I got off at Holloway Road and walked the rest of the way to Highbury Magistrates’ Court, the route familiar enough that my feet knew it even while my head didn’t.
The same steps. The same facade. The same place I’d seen Razor all those weeks ago, spiralling us into whatever the fuck we were.
And for a ridiculous second, I half expected him to pull up in his car beside me again.
To tell me to get in. Maybe blindfold me, kidnap me, disappear me into whatever dangerous orbit he lived in.
And fuck it, I’d go.
Willingly.
But nothing happened. No engine. No shadow. No voice cutting through the morning.
So I climbed the steps alone.
And went to work.
Highbury had a way of pulling me back to earth. No grandeur. No echoing marble halls or hushed reverence. Just scuffed floors, fluorescent lights, and the faint, persistent smell of disinfectant and burnt coffee. Justice at its most functional. Most unromantic.
I signed in, nodded at a clerk I vaguely recognised, and took the papers Imogen’s assistant handed me without really seeing them.
“Court Three,” she said. “You’re observing today. She mentioned you’d be interested.”
I nodded, trusting myself not to speak.
Court Three was half-full when I slipped inside. Duty solicitors murmured to anxious clients. A CPS lawyer flipped through a file. Two security officers leant against the back wall, chatting quietly.
Routine.
Ordinary.
I took a seat on the wooden bench reserved for observers, smoothing my tie and grounding myself in the familiarity of it all.
This was where I belonged. The world I understood.
And the list in my file was long. Assaults.
Breaches. Drunk and disorderly. A steady procession of small catastrophes I could argue against.
I forced myself to focus. To listen. Learn.
Time passed strangely. Stretching, snapping back. I made notes I would barely remember writing. Names blurred. Faces blended into one another.
Then the clerk spoke again.
“Call on the matter of Rex versus Richard Slade.”
My gut twisted. As if it had knowledge I didn’t. And I felt the sharpness all the same. The wrongness. I looked up from my notes as the side door opened, the defendant coming in flanked by two dock officers.
Grey joggers. Grey T-shirt. Prison issue.
And yeah…he’d been right. They suited him.
He’d been born to wear them.
And the air left my lungs in one brutal rush.
My hands shook, the pen slipping against the page as fear and rage and disbelief crashed together so hard I thought I might be sick.
I couldn’t stop staring at him. At the familiar line of his shoulders beneath clothes stripping him of everything he’d chosen for himself.
I wanted to stand. Shout. Scream no! This was wrong, this wasn’t happening, this couldn’t be him.
But the court moved on, because courts must.
The clerk read the charges.
“Mr Slade, you are charged with conspiracy to supply Class A controlled drugs…”
Hands cuffed in front of him, eyes fixed on a point somewhere above the magistrates’ bench, Razor said nothing.
He didn’t look for anyone. Certainly not me.
He wouldn’t know I was there. And he stood where he was placed, waiting for the inevitable.
For once again someone else to determine his fate. Where he belonged.
I stopped hearing the specifics. I already knew them.
The sections. The language. The weight. I’d read them a hundred times in textbooks, argued them in hypotheticals.
None of it prepared me for the way my own name for him caught in my throat.
I kept looking at him in the dock. At the rigid line of his shoulders, the way he stood too straight, eyes fixed ahead.
He didn’t scan the room. Didn’t look back.
He had no idea I was here. He’d accepted, blindly, that he was alone.
The CPS prosecutor rose. I recognised her immediately. Serious crime. Always composed. The kind the CPS sent when they didn’t intend to lose. “Your Worships, this is an application to remand the defendant in custody.”
My stomach dropped.
No.
I glanced down at the court list, fingers numb against the paper.
Organised supply. Crown opposition to bail.
SEROCU involvement. This wasn’t about previous convictions.
Though I didn’t know if he had any. But those grey joggers back at his apartment now made sense.
Of course, he’d been in the system before.
Probably low-level stuff. But this wasn’t about that.
This was about scale. Risk. And the Crown deciding whether he mattered enough to lock away before a trial had even begun.
The CPS continued, “The Crown opposes bail on the grounds that there are substantial reasons to believe the defendant would fail to surrender, commit further offences, and interfere with witnesses.”
She paused. Long enough for me to get my legal head back on.
“The defendant is alleged to occupy a senior position within an organised supply network, with access to resources, contacts, and funds that would facilitate absconding.”
Each phrase, each careful escalation, felt like a sucker punch to my gut.
The defence leapt to their feet. “I note for the record, Your Worships, that the prosecution case is intelligence-led and framed as conspiracy. My client faces no charge of possession.”
I blinked. No possession charge. Conspiracy. Intelligence-led material.
I waited for him to follow it.
But he didn’t. He didn’t press. Didn’t ask what had actually been recovered. Just parked it like a box ticked. Giving prosecution the chance to keep twisting in my knife.
“Further, Your Worships,” Prosecution gave a snide glance to the defence, “the defendant is currently under investigation in relation to a fatal incident at a commercial premises in Battersea.”
Fatal?
The word rang in my head, sharp and hollow.
Fatal meant dead.
Meant someone hadn’t walked away.
It meant—
No.
No, no, no.
“The deceased was found at a location linked to the defendant’s alleged activities. While no further charges have been brought at this stage, the investigation is live and complex.”
Live and complex. The phrase prosecutors used when they wanted to say we’re not done yet without admitting how much they didn’t have. When they wanted the shadow of something far worse to do the work for them.
I felt sick.
I looked at the defence solicitor, a ridiculous, desperate urge tightening in my chest. Say something. Do something. Stand up and tear this apart the way I knew it could be torn apart. Remind them that under investigation was not charged. That implication was not evidence.
That the man in the dock was not a murderer.
“Your Worships, my client strenuously denies any involvement in the matter referenced by my learned friend. He has not been charged in connection with that death, and it would be inappropriate—”
“Inappropriate,” the prosecutor said mildly, “but not irrelevant.”
The chair raised a hand. “One at a time.”
The defence pressed on. “Mr Slade has strong ties to the community. He has family in London. He is willing to submit to strict bail conditions. Curfew, tagging, surrender of travel documents—”
“Your Worships,” the prosecutor rose again, smooth as glass, “the Crown submits that no set of conditions would adequately mitigate the risks in this case. The seriousness of the offence, the scale of the alleged operation as indicated by intelligence, and the ongoing homicide investigation combine to make this an unsuitable case for bail.”
Homicide…I looked at him then.
Razor. In the dock. Richie. With his head bowed, hands clasped loosely in front of him, cuffs hidden by the angle of his body. He hadn’t moved since the submissions began. Hadn’t reacted. As if this were being done around him rather than to him.
I couldn’t tell what that posture meant.
Acceptance.
Resignation.
Control.
Or maybe it was simply the only way he knew how to survive this. By not giving them anything.
My chest ached, sharp and furious all at once. I wanted to cross the room, shake him, and demand answers. I wanted to wrap my arms around him and pull him out of that dock by force of will alone. And beneath it all, like a poison threading through everything else, came the guilt.
If he’d stayed in my bed.
If I’d fought harder.
If I’d said the words he’d been waiting for, that my world could make room for him, that I could, maybe he wouldn’t be standing there now.
The bench leant together, heads close, murmuring just long enough to make hope cruel.
Then, the chair straightened. “Mr Slade, we have considered the submissions. Given the nature of the allegations, the risk factors identified, and the ongoing investigation referenced by the prosecution, we are not satisfied that bail can be granted at this stage.”
A pause. Formal. Final.
“You are remanded in custody.”
I was on my feet before I was aware of moving, the chair shrieking back across the floor, a sound far too loud and yet utterly meaningless in a space that had collapsed to a single point of impact.
Razor lifted his head.
It was the first time he’d done so since being brought in, shoulders squared, jaw locked, eyes fixed somewhere beyond the bench as if he’d been bracing for this exact moment.
His gaze swept the courtroom once. Detached.
Searching. Then he found me. And I saw the breath he took.
The subtle rise of his chest. The way his composure fractured just enough to let the rawness slip through.
Those eyes held me the same way they always had. As if I were the only solid thing left. As if the law, the dock, the officers at his back were all secondary to whether I was still there. Still looking. Still seeing him.
It was the same look.
Long before charges and procedure. Long before oak panels and robed authority.
In a dark alley months ago, under glittering light and bad decisions, he’d looked at me exactly like that.
Trying to be hard, desperate not to be. Guarded, violent, aching to be recognised for something other than what he was made to be.
He didn’t say a word.
Neither did I.
But something passed between us anyway. Silent. Helpless. Devastating.
And we held each other there, across the measured distance of dock and gallery, of statute and blood and everything that had been taken from us. Across the line between the life I understood and the one he’d been trying, and failing, to escape.
For a heartbeat, the law receded.
There was only him.
And me.
And the terrible knowledge that this was the last time I would be allowed to see him.
The dock officers moved in, hands closing around his arms. As they turned him away, his gaze finally broke from mine, the moment snapping shut as if a door had been slammed in a storm.
Then a voice breathed close behind me.
“Well. That was rather a good one, wasn’t it?”
I turned.
Lord Wolfe stood in the aisle behind me. Had he been there all along? Or had he slipped in during the confusion, when my attention was fixed entirely on the dock? His expression was composed, almost pleasant. The faintest curve of satisfaction touched his mouth.
“It’s a good day in court when people are reminded that the system does eventually give everyone what they deserve.”
His hand closed briefly around my shoulder.
Not a grip.
A claim.
I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t even tell him to go to hell without shattering whatever was still holding me upright. Then Wolfe released me and turned away, merging with the flow of solicitors and clerks and black gowns, disappearing as if he’d never been there at all.
The courtroom emptied.
The law carried on.
And I sat there, hollowed out, knowing two things with absolute, devastating clarity.
That Razor was gone and Richie wouldn’t return to my window.