by Tillie Cole
“Right in front of me.” Betsy barely flinched as she said that. She pushed back my hair, then gathered it in her hand and tied it back into a bun to keep it from my face. “It’s all fresh for you. And this kind of event isn’t the norm in your life. But, from someone who sees this kind of thing more often, it gets easier. Not what happened to them, but the loss. The ability to move on.”
“It does?” I asked. But I was already starting to feel very little. As though the pain was being caged away into a deep part of me for safekeeping. Secured with a padlock until I was ready to set it free.
But when I thought of Arthur’s face, I felt it all. I felt every emotion I had ever experienced with him—love, and happiness and frustration and pain. But mostly need. A burning, consuming, all-encompassing need. Everything inside me was numb, safe behind high walls … except him.
He was the gatekeeper protecting their door.
Betsy sat down on Arthur’s chair and I held onto that need for Arthur. To his safe harbour.
“Eat, darling.” I robotically dipped the spoon into the soup and ate. I barely tasted it. The whole time, I felt Betsy watching me. I wasn’t sure if it was with suspicion or concern.
When I was finished, she took the tray away, leaving me alone for only a few minutes before she came back in. I heard her talking to someone in the hallway. My heart immediately kicked into a sprint at the thought of it being Arthur. I wanted to see him. I needed to see him. He made me feel safe. Strangely, he had always made me feel safe.
But when Betsy came back in, she was alone. She had a glass of wine in her hand. She sat on Arthur’s seat and studied me. “So,” she said, after a few strained minutes. “You’re her.” It wasn’t a question, rather a statement of fact.
“Her?” I asked, swallowing the shiver of unease that stirred inside me at the strange comment.
Betsy’s lip kicked up at the side. “The one who keeps a morsel of red in Arthur’s constant shroud of darkness. At least that’s how Vinnie puts it. As out-there as it is, I thought it was pretty fucking poetic.”
“I … I don’t understand.”
Betsy sipped her red wine. “I know you don’t. Because he would never tell you. Because my stubborn, self-sacrificing cousin would never take what he needed or wanted. Instead, he’d allow himself to be consumed by evil, day by day, to spare you, until there’s nothing left of him but a soulless ghost of who he once was, filled with only sin and murder and death.”
“Arthur?” I asked, trying to decipher the riddles she was speaking in.
The door opened, cutting me off, and I held my breath. But a blond-haired woman came through, closely followed by a stunning Afro-Caribbean woman holding her hand. They were both dressed in black three-piece suits, both wearing high heels. Even through my disappointment, I couldn’t help but think how striking they were together.
They stopped at the end of the bed. “Vera,” Betsy said, indicating the blonde. “And her girlfriend, Ronnie.”
“Hello,” I said, wondering who they were and why they had come in to see me.
“Well, you’re even prettier in person, and that’s with your face being in this sorry state,” Vera said.
Ronnie shrugged. “I get why he’s so hung up on her,” she said to Vera, placing her chin on Vera’s shoulder to study me some more.
Vera smirked, then looked at Betsy. “So? What are we thinking?”
“I think by the way she keeps staring at the door and holding her breath every time someone steps through, it looks promising.”
“What are you talking about?” An edge of anger crept through my heavy head-fog, igniting the numbness in my heart.
Betsy leaned forward on her chair. Vera crossed her arms over her chest. “Why were you getting married?” Betsy asked.
I tensed and stared at Betsy in shock. “What?” I whispered, refusing to picture Hugo on that chair, pleading for his life, only to get a bullet through his head for the pleasure.
“Why were you getting married?” Vera echoed, and I met her ice-blue eyes that were coldly fixed on mine. Ronnie’s expression was blank, but her attention was on me too.
“B-because I loved him.” The half-lie felt sinful as it slipped off my tongue.
Betsy sat back in her chair, seeming bored. “You loved him? Hugo Harrington?”
I glanced down at the ring on my finger and felt the energy drain from me, the pretence. I thought back to Hugo, on his knees, asking me to marry him a year ago, and the way my heart and stomach fell because he wasn’t who I wanted. Of how only one face came to mind when he did.
Arthur. Always Arthur.
“It was expected of me.” I slid the ring off. My finger felt light without it. I hated myself for thinking it, but it felt like a burden falling away. I held the four-carat diamond ring in my hand, the stone projecting spears of light from the lamp beside me onto the bed linen. “My father … he wouldn’t have allowed me to refuse.”
I blinked back the tears and the residual ache I felt in my chest at the fact that my father hadn’t ever really cared about my happiness. He’d needed the marriage to happen for Hugo to have rights to the business as my father’s heir. So that society would see us as a worthy match. He’d wanted all his ducks in a neat little row.
“Did you love him?” Vera asked. I looked up at her, shocked at the direct question coming from someone I didn’t know. “Hugo. Did you love him? And don’t lie. I can’t fucking stand liars.”
It felt like a betrayal to the newly dead, but I eventually shook my head and whispered, “Not like that, no.” I laughed without mirth. “But I think he loved me, if that matters.” I sighed. “I’d been with him for years. And it’s not like I had anyone else clamouring for my hand.”
“You sure about that?” Ronnie asked.
I frowned. “More than.”
“Do you love Arthur?” Betsy asked, just as directly as Vera. I whipped my head to her and felt the blood drain from my face. I shook my head, but unlike the truth that fought to escape when I was asked if I loved Hugo, the lie about not loving Arthur was less forthcoming.
A triumphant smile spread across Betsy’s mouth. She turned back to Vera and Ronnie, and an unspoken conversation was shared between them. “He doesn’t love me,” I eventually said, breaking their odd silent communication. That got their attention. “What does it matter if I love him if it isn’t reciprocated?” I straightened my shoulders and gathered all the fight I had left inside me. “I was his fuck buddy for five years, that’s all. He would fuck me and leave me. He wouldn’t let me into his life, tell me anything about it.” I laughed, and even to me it sounded bitter. “I was the posh bit of pussy he shagged because he could. Love didn’t even enter the equation for him.”
“You’re fucking blind,” Vera said.
I glared at her. “How so?”
She shook her head, laughing to herself.
“I said how am I fucking blind?” I snapped, no longer caring if she was part of the firm and could shoot me where I lay. What the hell did I have left to lose?
“Oh, hello. There she bloody is.” Vera looked at Ronnie, eyebrow raised. “What did Vinnie say? She had a thin line of darkness around her too? Looks like we’ve just tapped into it.”
Betsy got up from the chair and sat on the bed bedside me. “Cheska Harlow-Wright. What my sister-in-arms here is trying to tell you is that Arthur, my dear cousin, is hook, line and sinker obsessed with you. And that you, the”—she made air quotes—“‘posh bit of pussy’ he shagged are the only one in Arthur’s entire life who has managed to stir something inside him. The only person who has made his concrete heart crack enough to let in any kind of light.”
My breath was held even though my heart pounded like a fist. I couldn’t take in what Betsy was saying. She had to be lying … but why would she lie? “Cheska, if you think my cousin doesn’t love you—obsessively, possessively, and somewhat wickedly …” She smirked. “Then you’re not as smart as your many degrees from Oxford woul
d have us believe.”
“He left me,” I argued, something like fight igniting inside of me, eradicating the numbness that had blanketed me for the past couple of days. “That night, after …” I looked at the three women around me and realised that it was their fathers who would have died that night. “When you lost your fathers. After that night, he left me. Coldly. Brutally. I never heard from him again. He tossed me aside like scraps.”
Vera laughed again. The patronising sound grated on my nerves. “He came to you. In Oxford. We lost all our family’s leaders, our fathers. His father went into a coma, our gaffer, the head of our firm. The shit hit the fucking fan for us all, and he came to you. The heir to the Adley throne. He left us all here shell-shocked and broken and travelled to Oxford to you. And you think you were just a fuck?” Vera leaned over the foot of the bedframe. “You might be a good shag, I can imagine that, doll, but no bird’s cunt is so fucking good that a bloke like Arthur would drop all his responsibilities in the middle of a murderous shitshow just to get his end away.”
I stared at her, not knowing what to say, my pulse racing so fast I thought it would bring on a heart attack. “But the way he left …”
Betsy took the ring from my hand. She held it in the air. “He never said, and would never say to us—Arthur is a bloody fortress.” She studied the diamond. “But I think it might have had a little something to do with this.” My stomach plummeted. I remembered waking up to him holding my hand, eying the ring then tossing my hand back to the mattress like I disgusted him. No, not me. That. That bloody tarnished ring.
“It was the start of his ascension.” Ronnie sat on the end of the bed and leaned against the bedframe, casual in my company, like we’d been friends for years. “His ascension to Dark Lord of London.” She spoke that tabloid-given title with a tired roll of her eyes. “He came home that night changed. Whatever light he’d had left inside of him been stubbed the fuck out.”
“You,” Vera said, sitting opposite her girlfriend on the bed, the heel from her stiletto boot almost piercing the duvet. “That night he lost our dads, his dad, and … you.”
“You’re not some posh bird he fucked for a few years, Cheska. You’re the only one he ever let in, as little as that might have been. It was more of his soul than he gave to anyone else. You’re his bloody saviour,” Betsy said.
“From what?” I whispered, unable to process it all.
“From himself. From the darkness that’s almost completely devoured him,” Ronnie said. “That will take him under until he’s got nothing left inside him, no humanity, no fucking life.”
“Everyone is terrified of Arthur, and that’s why no one fucks with our firm. You can’t beat a man who doesn’t fear death,” Vera said.
“And as much as that serves us well as a crime family, we love our cousin more than our place on the top of the fucked-up London underworld,” Betsy said. “If he keeps living this way, he will die alone, never knowing love and constantly haunted by the ghosts of all the people who fell by his hand.” Betsy sighed. “Just like his father.” She sipped at her wine. “As much as I adored my Uncle Alfie, in reality, he died years ago. He died when my aunt and cousin burned in the house fire. And instead of loving Arthur harder, he moulded him into a man who could never be fucked with. Who would make the most formidable crime boss in London. He made his son impenetrable. Unfeeling. He made him fucking lethal.”
“And a geezer who couldn’t express his feelings. Uncle Alfie feared it would make Artie weak if he did.” Vera reached across and held Ronnie’s hand. “Love, Ches. Arthur was raised to think love was a fast track to ruin.” She smirked, but it was laced with sadness. “The strong and formidable Arthur Adley, who kills without remorse, runs far, far away at the first sight of love. Ironic, no? I’d say it’s the only thing in life that actually terrifies him.”
“Then along comes you,” Ronnie said. “Rich, posh, and poles apart from his way of life.” She shrugged. “I’m sure it was easy to convince himself that you two would never last, would never really start.”
She pointed at the ring. “And the one night he lets his walls down and admits he needs you by leaving us all behind to seek you out, he wakes up to that.” I remembered him crying, feeling the tears on my stomach and his arms tight around my waist as he told me they’d all been taken away. Then I recalled his cold, dead eyes as he left my flat without ever looking back.
I’d seen what they were describing. I’d seen the crack he’d opened in his thick armour. For a few cherished hours, I’d seen the man underneath, the man kept hidden behind an iron cage. And instead of caressing him, I’d plunged my sword into the fracture and pierced the fragile body inside, watching as he bled out.
“He’s keeping away from you,” Betsy said. I could barely see her through my blurred vision. “He’s put me in charge of you.”
“He’ll keep you safe, but he’s going to keep you at arm’s length,” Vera said.
“I don’t want him to,” I said, feeling a new kind of purpose pushing through me. One with Arthur as the goal. I would erase the hurt the unwanted ring had caused. I would heal, not widen, the crack in his armour.
“Doesn’t matter.” Vera tipped her head to the side. “He’s fucked up, you know?” She smiled, and I knew it wasn’t in pity toward Arthur. It was with pride. “He kills. A lot. He’s a fucking death-delivering master.”
“I know.” I thought back to the men in Marbella when we were eighteen. How he’d cut them down easily and made the fourth guy cut off his own dick.
“And it doesn’t faze you?” Vera asked.
I tried to find hatred in my heart for what and who Arthur was. But I had always known. I had always known about his family, about what he had done. I’d witnessed it and still gone back for more. And I couldn’t find it within me to hate something that had saved my life.
Twice.
He had now saved me twice.
The world was fucked up. Maybe it took being equally as disturbed to truly thrive. In this moment, with mostly numbness and bitterness running through my veins, it didn’t bother me at all.
“Not like it should,” I finally replied. The women all looked at each other. I saw something like relief, and maybe a hint of excitement, spark in their stares. It made me feel something. It made some cavernous part of me fill with something unknown. But mostly, I let the fact that they were saying Arthur loved me sink into my bones, eradicating the aches.
I couldn’t believe it. A part of me wanted to question them, believe they were winding me up, teasing me somehow, trying to get me to flee Arthur’s home. But I could tell by their open faces that they weren’t. They adored Arthur; anyone could see that. But they were scared for him too. Scared that this life they all loved was swallowing him, drawing him down to a level of hell from which he could never return.
“It won’t be easy,” Betsy said. I wasn’t sure if it was to me, to Vera and Ronnie, or to all of us. Her gaze was lost to the fire raging in the hearth. “He’ll fight it. He’ll test her. Push her to the limits to see what she can take.” Betsy blinked, bringing herself back to the here and now. “He will challenge you if you try to show him your love. He’ll resist, because it’s all he knows how to do. He’ll try to sabotage it. A future he was told he could never have, warned not to have.”
“That’s not a pass for him acting like a complete twat, of course,” Ronnie said, lip curling into a smirk. “Don’t let the arrogant fucker get away with anything that pisses you off. Don’t allow him to treat you like shit.” I found myself smiling at her. She winked. “Push him back. Challenge him back. Give him a taste of his own medicine.”
I tried to imagine a world where Arthur could love me and I could love him freely. I hadn’t ever let myself believe it outside of my deepest fantasies, so it was a difficult concept to grasp. But these women were telling me it was possible. That he wanted me as much as I wanted him. That it was there for the taking, if only I could wade through his darkness to find him.
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The flicker of light that apparently still remained.
I was drowning in grief. Crushing waves of sadness were swallowing me whole, dragging me down to the depths. But the possibility of having Arthur—loving him and him loving me in return—was akin to having his hand delving into the choppy, rough sea and pulling my head above water.
I thought of my life now. The strange and unfamiliar path that now lay before me, the one now built from blood and the deaths of those I loved. Unease shuddered through me … but not when I thought of Arthur walking beside me. Holding my hand.
With him in my grip, I was calm.
“I love him,” I said again, stronger this time, with more conviction. “I have always loved him. No one else. Only him.” I laughed, not caring that the cut on my lip burned as I did. I had harboured that confession for too many years, never confessing it to a soul. But I was confessing it now, as honestly as a Catholic pilgrim emptying their soul to their priest.
It seemed fitting that confession would be made in a converted church, and ironically about a man who was aptly likened to the devil himself.
“Good,” Vera said, and I caught her fleeting smile. Maybe she wasn’t as difficult as she made herself out to be.
“Now, on to other business.” Ronnie pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and laid a picture before me. It took me a few minutes to refocus from the ember of hope that had sparked in my broken heart. The picture featured a mark of some kind, a brand on someone’s skin. It was circular with a V-type shape inside. “Do you recognise it?”
“No,” I said, frowning. “Should I?”
“It was on your attackers,” Betsy said, then carefully looked to Ronnie.
Ronnie sat up and took off her jacket and waistcoat. She undid her tie and the top few buttons of her shirt and pulled her shirt aside. Her dark skin was smooth and beautifully rich in colour, apart from a small brand in the centre of her shoulder blade. I leaned in to look closer, and I stilled. It was the brand in the picture. The one the attackers wore.
“You used to work for them?” I said, feeling instant fear sink in deep.
