Chapter 23
Cigar smoke sticks to everything, the phantom scent of it already invading my nostrils.
I grew up with the smell, it feels like rot and decay, but warmth, on occasion. Almost like the woman we”re visiting today.
Flint drives us through multiple territories with the windows rolled all the way down, despite the frosty December temperatures, because I need to feel it, the air. To know I’m not locked inside a box, a cupboard, a shipping container, a trunk.
With my eyes closed, resting myself back against the headrest, I let the cold air rush over my face. My lips feel dry, and my cheeks feel chapped, but I feel free. And knowing Flint is driving, albeit erratically, as per usual, through the too-busy London streets, I know he will never let anything happen to me, which is why I expect his next question more than my next breath.
“You’re sure you want to go? We can still turn around, if you’ve changed your mind.” I swallow, but I don’t open my eyes, I don’t look at him. “It doesn’t make you weak, Cherub,” he reassures me, as he always does, his hand coming off of the gear stick to rest on my jean covered thigh. “We can go for burgers instead; at that little place you like. Milkshakes, fries, one of those weird, sickly ice things you always get with the sherbet shit on the top.”
“I want to go,” I tell him quietly. “It’s been a long time since we’ve been.”
“You don’t have to go ever, Nix,” he reminds me, not for the first time in so many years.
I hear what he doesn’t say, They’re not your family anymore, you’re mine.
Protective and obsessive, possessive, of me. It makes my heart flutter just like it always does.
“I know.”
I feel him sigh more than hear him, but he doesn’t say anything else as we continue the drive through the city, onto quieter roads with open fields.
Only opening my eyes when the car slows, the track beneath the tyres changing from potholed tarmac to loose gravel and muddy puddles.
The scenery hasn’t changed much, the big farm still the same, overgrown grass lining the mile-long driveway, the gravel beneath the wheels lumpy and uneven, holes Flint has to steer us around, no faster speed than ten-miles an hour. The old farmhouse comes into view, large and looming and dark.
Shuttered windows and burgundy wood cladding. A rickety wooden porch wrapping around its base, three floors of old rooms, nothing having been changed since the place was built in the twenties, not even the tobacco stained wallpaper.
It haunts me still sometimes, as much as it warms me just a tiny amount. Confliction always wars inside the cavity of my chest when I think of this place.
Somewhere I was dropped off as a tiny boy, malnourished and beaten. I thought this was my refuge, but many years later I left it in much the same way.
Flint parks the car, killing the engine as I turn to look at him. His bright blues concerned, tight at the outer corners, his usually smiling mouth turned down into a frown.
“We can go,” he says again as my eyes are unconsciously drawn back to the house.
I hum, but I’m removing my seatbelt, my fingers going to the door handle. Flint moves much more fluidly than I, even when he’s rushing. And he’s rounding the car, sliding across the bonnet so he’s there in time to open the door fully for me, offering me a hand as he does so.
“Such a gentleman,” I praise him with a soft smile as he closes the door at my back, keeping the windows rolled all the way down.
He doesn’t even bother to lock it as we walk hand in hand up the creaky wooden porch steps, his free hand curled to knock on the wood of the old red door.
It’s the cigar smoke again, just a vivid inside my memories as it is now when I inhale it. One of her soldiers pulls open the door, eyeing us both, cataloguing the weapons Flint carries on full display. The man grits his teeth, the corner of his jaw tight as he allows us through without securing our weapons. Something that’s likely been ingrained in him since he got his job here, greet visitors, remove their weaponry, give them thorough pat downs, get them to remove their boots.
It must kill him and every other one of her soldiers in this room to just let us walk on through, knowing we’re armed.
Wordlessly, Flint releases my hand, taking the lead through the open hallway until we reach the room at the very end. There’s a large, forest-green, leather armchair, a high back with worn material over the top of it on one side. Where her most loyal soldier’s hand always rests, but he’s not here today.
Never when I visit.
“Nixxy.” The old woman sitting in it greets with a rough, raspy voice. “Come sit, son,” she instructs, her wrinkled lips tight around the end of a fat cigar, swirls of dense grey smoke filtering slowly towards the high ceiling.
Circling around her, I move to sit down on the pouffe that matches her chair, only a foot of space between her knees and mine, but this piece of leather furniture is much less worn. It’s only ever had one use, even before I was born. A seat for her grandchildren to sit when they’re summoned. Only one difference between that and my visit today.
I’m not summoned.
I’m invited.
Her short, curly hair is a dark auburn now, still being dyed, still being styled away from her natural blonde tones that match mine. The makeup painted on her leather aged face sits heavily in the deep crevices of her fair skin, a dark plum colour painted on her thin lips. I cock my head, staring into eyes which perfectly match mine and offer her a small smile.
She coughs a laugh, this thick, smoke filled rasp, “Ah, my boy,” she beams, reaching out with her free hand to chuck the underside of my chin. “I’ve missed you.”
“Hello, Nan.”
Flint stands at my back, in the only corner of the room without a window at his spine. He’s far enough away to make Nan and I feel like we’re not being listened to, but close enough that he can do just that, and whip out a weapon and dart in front of me to protect me if he felt so inclined. He’s never had to. But he could.
“How have you been, my angel?” she husks, puffing on her cigar, sending circles of smoke towards the yellowed ceiling.
“Good,” I reply softly, folding my fingers together to stop any nervous fidget, she’ll slap my hands if she catches me doing it and I don’t want Flint to have to use his ninja skills to dive in front of me and break her eighty-something year old fingers.
She’s still the Matriarch of the Butcher family, my family, and leader of the Butcher Boys.
“How’re the pigs?” I ask her casually, just to get an idea of business.
“Full,” she replies flippantly, a grunt as she puffs out smoke. “How’re the smiles, Nixxy?”
That’s exactly what I do then, smile at her, my lips curling up into a tidy little curl, “Plentiful.”
She grins back at me, teeth clenched around the end of her cigar, “That’ssa lad,” she pats her old hand down on my knee. “You want tea?” she asks, but she’s already snapping her fingers.
Bangles around her wrists clicking together as she holds her fur coat covered arm into the air, fingers just visible above the high back of her chair.
In no time at all, she’s laughing, a deep husky chuckle, as she regales me with stories I’ve heard a million and one times before from her younger days. Running a gang, killing her way through three enemy territories, and then feeding them to her father’s pigs. It’s what the Butchers are known for. Getting rid of evidence.
For the right price, of course.
There are motorcycles rumbling, speeding up the driveway, the sound making my spine snap straight, Flint prance forwards, gun drawn and aimed at the open double doors we entered into the room through not so long ago. His hand finds my shoulder, fingers curling tight over my tense trapezius muscle as he prepares for my three worst nightmares to enter the room.
My oldest cousin, Nyjah Butcher, is first through the doors, his all-seeing pale green eyes stark against his warm, medium brown skin tone. Tight dark curls hang long on the top of his head, the sides shaved bare to expose his tattooed scalp. Casually, he shrugs off his black leather jacket, revealing more of his inked skin in a loose white vest top that exposes more than it covers, chest, sides of his pecs, arms, shoulders, all on full display. He reaches down to his laced black boots, tight black jeans tucked into them, and lazily pulls out a long curved blade.
That’s all before he straightens, bringing his gaze up onto Flint, because he only sees one real threat in this room, and it certainly isn’t me.
“Thatcher,” he greets Flint using his surname with a smug smirk, pale green gaze dropping to his knife, he spits on it before swiping it against the thigh of his jeans, and then makes a grand show of sliding it back into his boot, raising both hands, palms out in a mockery of submission. “Easy, big boy,” he smirks at my lover, silver tooth glinting in place of his right canine, “I come in peace.”
Nyjah pointedly ignores Flint’s silence, coming to stand at our nan’s back, his hand going to that worn patch of leather on the top of her chair.
Her number one soldier, the man set to replace her when the time inevitably comes. He doesn’t even look at me, as Nan speaks, glaring up at him with anger flaring in her brown eyes.
“What the fuck are you doing back already, boy?” she grunts at him, blowing a lungful of smoke up and into his face, something he’s used to at his clear lack of reaction.
“Gotta run some urgent business by you, ma’am,” he informs her, his eyes not softening, but not appearing quite as hard as they were a mere moment ago.
They share a silent conversation, that is only interrupted by the tightening of Flint’s fingers over my shoulder, as the twins come barrelling down the open hallway.
Kru and Kelix are next through the door, all pale skin and dark eyes, hair as light as mine, but theirs is straight to my curly, even styled in an identical way, flopped to one side and tucked behind an ear. The only physical difference between the two of them that I’ve ever noticed is in the roughness of their hands when they encircled my throat, but I am still, somehow, able to tell them apart. Even though they dress the same. Black jeans, black boots, white t-shirts, inkless skin, that I know of. I haven’t had the displeasure of looking any of them in the eye for the last few years.
They look the same, just bigger.
Nan never lets them be here when I’m invited for a visit.
“Oh, loooook,” Kru says, cocking his head, blonde hair falling across his face, “Runt’s come home for a visit.”
It makes me shudder inside, but I manage to keep it that way, out of sight.
“Say that again, you dozy little cunt,” Flint says coldly, lazily, like it doesn’t affect him in any way to hear me insulted, but I know inside of him his blood is on fire.
Flint swings the gun in Kru’s direction, Kru’s dark eyes lighting up like a nuclear bomb explosion at staring down the barrel of a gun pointed directly in his face. Excitement. Kru licks his lips, stepping closer until the muzzle is digging into his forehead, his arms slowly lifting out to his sides, spreading wide, like a dare, his eyes on Flint’s.
Kru licks his lips, grinning wide, he whispers mockingly, “Kaboom.”
Flint cocks the hammer, Kelix yanks his brother back by his collar, stepping in front of him with the hard etch of anger on his clean shaven face.
“Put your gun down, you mongrel piece of shit,” he snarls at Flint.
But the problem with that is, I know Flint, and they might think they do. From the rumours they hear, gossip that spreads throughout gang leaders and their foot soldiers like wildfire. But only I really know him. Better than anyone, that’s how I know that words like that, orders given by an enemy, will always have the opposite desired effect on him.
It takes everything in me to stand up, step between them, my back to Flint’s chest, his arm still extended, over my shoulder, the gun remaining aimed at my older cousin, but his finger slips from the trigger at my body wedging between theirs.
“We’re going,” I rasp dryly.
Flint’s free hand curling around my hip, something that draws all three of my cousins’ eyes as he pulls me gently back into the hardness of his groin. I don’t flinch feeling it, the solidness of his cock, knowing it’s like that for me, because I’m standing my ground. I feel lightness in my chest that makes me want to smile for him, but I won’t do that here, not in front of these people.
“Stop your fucking posturing you little shits and sit the fuck down!” Nan snaps at us all, and every single one of us takes a step away from the other.
Flint pulls me sharply into his front as he drops his arm with the gun but doesn’t put it away. There’s an audience now, hovering just inside the room, armed members of Nan’s crew all ready to protect her and her precious legacy trio. She frowns up at me, and for the first time since we arrived, she plucks the cigar from between her lips, stubbing it out in the half-full ashtray at her side.
It takes her a long moment for her to work her way up to standing from the chair, her three boys not moving to aid her, something they’d possibly lose a hand for, but not me. I’m different.
I offer her my hand and her old bones click and crack as she uses me to heft herself up to stand. Only four-foot-nine, over a foot between us, I lean down and press a kiss to her leathery cheek, something that she’d likely slap one of the others for daring to do. That’s how the problems started as children. Her softness towards me.
My cousins hated me because she treated me like a son.
“You’ll come again. Soon,” she informs me, and I hold her gaze, ignoring the glares on me and her from the rest of the room, as I nod my head. “Don’t leave it as long as last time, Nixxy.” Nyjah snorts at the nickname, and she snaps her head over her shoulder to scold him without words, before slowly turning her gaze back onto me. “Be a good boy, come back soon. I’m an old hag, there’s not a lot of life left in these old bones, and I’d like to see you again before they crumble to ash, son.”
The tips of my ears burn at the word.
Son.
Because even the first day I arrived here all those years ago, that’s how she’s always treated me.
Even now.
I look her in the eye, a soft curl to one corner of my mouth, and I find it surprisingly easy to lie straight to her face, “I promise.”