Chapter Two Razor #3
The living room was next. Keeley was curled on the sofa, patting her baby’s back in a half-asleep rhythm. My sister. Pregnant at fifteen, a mum at sixteen. Some grim cliché out of a council report.
“What you doing out here?” I whispered.
“Darren couldn’t sleep with the noise.” She nudged her chin towards her bedroom across the hall.
“You’re fucking kidding me.” The words came sharp, a blade in my throat. “He’s kicked you out to the sofa?”
That sofa was mine. Had been since Kee got too old for us to share a room.
Same reason I took to the streets when I was a kid.
And why I crashed at Tyler’s, fucking a girl I had no interest in.
Sometimes, when I look at my sister now and what she’s left with, I wish I’d stayed in that tiny box with her, kept her closer, then she wouldn’t have ended up pregnant before she’d even finished school.
Regret’s a slow thing. Sits behind your teeth and waits.
What I should have done then is book a room.
Have a proper bed. Quiet telly. No piss in the carpet.
And a bloke on the other side of the sheets who gave me something I didn’t have to explain.
I could forget who I was for a bit. Play at having what weren’t meant for me: a warm body, a decent fuck with someone I could go down on without thinking what it made me.
But the alley kept looping in my head, and the way that rent boy looked up at me at the end.
His cocky little smirk, as if he’d chosen it.
Pissed me off.
Pulled at me too.
Loosened the tightness in my chest I didn’t want undone.
For a second, I wanted his number. A hotel and him…
that would’ve been perfect. Not just the hit but the other things I never said out loud.
But I don’t do seconds. Not anymore. And not with some bloke taking cash on a street corner.
That’s why the rules exist. Why I’m still alive.
And why it rattled me knowing he’d swallowed me down as if he wanted it.
That’s not how it works. Shouldn’t have been. Tonight, that rule cracked.
And for one stupid second, a weak, gnawing part of me wanted to leave it broken.
But I buried it to spin and slam open the door to Keeley’s room.
My stomach turned for a different reason then.
Darren, seventeen going on permanent disappointment, all attitude, no substance, sprawled on my sister’s bed.
The skinny little runt who dressed as if he was running a line when he couldn’t even run a bath, with his sharp buzzcut he thought made him look hard and patchy chin fluff he refused to shave, Darren was a wannabe badman wrapped in knock-off swagger.
I was about to lay it on thick when a box half-hidden beside the bed caught my eye.
I knew what it was without looking. But I fucking crouched anyway and flipped the lid.
Metal winked back at me. A gun, broken into pieces.
Barrel, slide, magazine, all tucked neatly in bubble wrap. Not for show. Not a toy.
Real steel, stashed under my roof.
My blood went ice and fire all at once. First Tyler, now this.
Kids sitting on iron. The one thing I swore would never cross my doorstep, never touch my line.
Blades I could live with. Every estate kid carried steel, part of the game.
But guns? That was the hard line. No crossing it.
No second chances. Only one crew moved with that kind of weight, and everyone knew their name.
“Wake the fuck up.” I kicked the bedframe so hard Darren jerked upright. “You got some fucking explaining to do.”
“Fuck, Razor!” Darren tried for brazen, scrambling for the act but failing miserably when I hauled him to his feet by the hood of his jumper and got right into his ugly mug.
“Who gave you that to hold?”
“Fuck off. Don’t matter who.” He spat out the lie as if it were a coin.
“You’re one step from A&E, mate. Don’t give me that ‘I’m a dad’ bollocks either. You’re a pathetic one if you’re sitting on this.”
Keeley padded in then, rubbing the baby’s back as it nuzzled into her shoulder. “Rich—”
“Stay out of it, Kee.” I didn’t want her in the ring. Didn’t want her watching me make this choice.
Like Tyler had said, I should have dealt with him the day Keeley showed me that blue line.
“Fuck’s sake, Rich. Don’t hurt him. He’s got a college interview in the morning.
” Her plea was soft and stupid and exactly what boys like Darren used as an excuse.
I knew it was a lie. You don’t get offered college when you’re holding iron for Ghost. He’d told her that so she’d let him sleep in her bed, undisturbed by the baby that was half his.
So I asked again. “You tell me who gave you that to stash, and I’ll make sure you walk away with your bones intact. You don’t tell me, and I’ll make sure whatever’s left of you regrets it.”
He flinched, bravado draining. “Tripper…”
Yeah. That one landed.
Tripper wasn’t just a name, it was a warning.
Leon “Ghost” Morris’s right hand, the man who enforced loyalty in the Fenboys.
Ghost’s equivalent of my Tyler. I dropped Darren back onto the mattress and snatched the box from beside him, its weight ugly and wrong in my hands.
Weapons meant escalation. But as I passed Keeley in the doorway, I paused.
Took in her troubled face, and the little baby in her arms who didn’t deserve any of this, and bent to kiss the baby’s head.
“Make sure he gets to that college, yeah?” I brushed Maisie’s head with my knuckles, then turned, eyes cutting back to Darren. “You show me an enrolment form, proof you’re serious about a college course, and maybe I’ll let this slide.”
“What am I meant to tell Tripper?” Darren sniffed. “He’ll cut me if I don’t have it.”
“You come find me.” I fixed Darren with a look, the menace I’d earned in cheap, dirty alleys.
It was a comfortable skin, but it chafed.
Respect ought to be earned, not extracted with a blade.
Regardless of my name. “And if he so much as leaves a mark on you, he knows he’s started a war with me.
Tell Tripper that. He knows what that means. ”
I smiled at Keeley, though she looked back at me as if I’d cursed her baby to grow up fatherless, same as us.
Truth was, if Darren carried on the way he was, that’d happen without me lifting a finger.
Least Keeley and Maisie had me. I was a better dad than the piss-poor one we’d had, or the one taking over Keeley’s bed cause his mum threw him out.
Tucking the box under my arm, I left.
And that thought of a hotel, clean sheets, and a pretty mouth replaying in my head? Gone. Burnt away. Same as everything else.
That life didn’t belong to me.
Never could.