(no subject)

[bookmaker_boss]

What proof do you have that the priest is a spy, Tatiana asked him, three times, and three times Tommy answered, I give you my word. This was the way things were done. Tommy loaded the marked bullet into his revolver and spent the day looking for Hughes and felt no remorse when he tracked him down. He’d killed better men for worse reasons.

What proof do you have that the priest is a spy sang in his skull, as Hughes loomed over Tommy in the back of his car and told him to come with a formal apology. He had, but not before warning Arthur and John that the mission was bust, watched, sabotaged, cursed. Cursed, like he was. Cursed like that bloody sapphire necklace. Not before asking Ada a favor she could only give for the love in her heart for a dead man.

They were all dead men.

What proof do you have that the priest is a spy?

Hughes’s penance felt like poison in Tommy’s mouth when he spoke it, but he had. Tatiana watched in confusion, but her face was a blur, a mess of color and shape that Tommy knew only because he’d watched it so closely two nights ago. And when he left, it was with poison in his mouth, poison and bile—but the bile was real. He wretched three time in the street on the way from the dinner with Hughes and the Russians to Ada’s house.

Everything was a blur by then, everything heavy and throbbing and wrecked. Tatiana’s voice was no longer hers in his head. It was May’s. It was Grace’s. It was his mother’s

Halfway through telling the Special Adviser to the Soviet Consul the plan that Hughes and the Odd Fellows had concocted, Tommy lost his sight entirely. The world went all dim and black and awful. The last time it was so dim and black and awful was in the tunnel. But Ada was there. Ada was there for him to warn, to explain, to tell—

“Drive me to the hospital, Ada,” he told her, and remembered nothing else of what he said. He could feel the words, but he couldn’t recall them. Everything was a throbbing, messy blur in the dim and black and awful pain of it all. He could hear Grace, his mother, every friend he ever lost in the war. He could see his father, standing there, and the scars on his face. He could—

I told you, I give you my word.

Thomas Shelby was not conscious when he arrived in Darrow, but he was far from dead. This was a state of things that he was intimately familiar with, a war hero and gangster. He’d been beaten within an inch of his life more than once in the last three years he’d been running the Peaky Blinders. He’d been shot at and maimed. He’d been nearly crushed to death in mine collapses back in France, breathed in the gases on those killing fields and lived to see the next day. Father Hughes and his thugs from the Kings’ army in India would not be the end of him.

The mad gypsy bastard was too stubborn to know when to lay down and die. Even when the ghost of his father came to give him the advice for a moment.

Comments

[every_blossom_blooming]

"Yes. Matthias, who loved me and tried to kill me at least twice, and Kaz, who is a businessman."

Nina absently stroked her fingers over the crow and cup. Sometimes she wondered why she still had it - she could remove it, easily, and yet there it remained. She'd kept the white roses, too.

"Who knows, maybe there'll be someone familiar to you here already."

[bookmaker_boss]

Thomas isn't sure if he wants any of his family or anyone he knows in this place. Looking out over the skyline, unfamiliar and strange, clear of smoke and industry, he thinks that his brothers and cousins would not be sure what to do in a place like this. Johnny Dogs and his gypsies, Esme, even Aunt Pol would be hemmed in in a place like this.

Tommy can feel the edges of it pressing around him. This is an unfamiliar place to him. For a man that spent nearly eighteen years in and around a single city, he can't imagine this sudden captivity.

He watches her touch her arm. He can make out the dark stain of ink, though the tracing is, itself, a little muddled. They're bolder, newer, than his own tattoos. "You haven't had them long," he points out, lifting his eyebrows in place of nodding at her arms.

[every_blossom_blooming]

"They're just about two years old, now. Maybe a little more. A crow and cup for the Dregs, then two white roses for the brothel I worked in. They were required after I signed my contract."

Nina wrinkled her nose, but shrugged. It was no different than wearing the livery of a mercher's house, she supposed. Especially for her: she could remove the tattoos whenever she wanted to.

"The Kerch like to mark what's theirs."

[bookmaker_boss]

Two years, still fresh enough to have good thick ink, but also in a place that might have gotten sun and stretch on a girl that worked a little more. He thinks of all his, and how they've worn down--but the oldest of his, if it were a boy, could drink and smoke and fight in a war; the youngest, Charlie's initials, is but two years old as well.

He hums vaguely, breathes out smoke in a wreathing thing between his nose and mouth. "You worked in a bawdy house? Is that the business this Kaz was in?"

[every_blossom_blooming]

"The White Rose is a house with ties to the Dregs," she said with a shrug. "Kaz also owned shares in half a dozen other ventures. And they needed to put me somewhere, I had to be of some use to the gang to make good on my contract and to pay it off."

Nina sipped her tea.

"The Dregs peddled in protection, gambling, thieving, and they took a cut from the White Rose because their hawkers encouraged patrons their way." She shrugged. "Like every other gang in Ketterdam."

[bookmaker_boss]

We're all whores, Grace.

The Dregs, of course, sound a bit like the Peaky Blinders. Protection, gambling, and a cut of it all. Like every other gang in Birmingham and London, like every official making attempts at the whole damn country.

"You owed him for something else," Tommy speculates. He shifts and breathes out in pain a bit. It's not hard to breathe through the pain, but the pain does linger. "And he got a witch."

[every_blossom_blooming]

"I needed protection. As powerful as we might be, grisha aren't safe in Ketterdam. Many of them are from other countries, trying to find a better life. It's easy to get swept up in an indenture contract that they don't understand. It's legal slavery. I had no money, no friends, no resources. And I couldn't just leave-- someone was wrongfully imprisoned because of me, and I had to get him out. So I signed the contract that Kaz offered me, because it was better than I'd get anywhere else."

Nina sighed and pushed her hair back as she looked out the window. "At least my association with the Dregs would keep me safe. I could earn money to buy my way out of my contract, and I could keep trying to get Matthias out of Hellgate. And Kaz Brekker got a Heartrender."

[bookmaker_boss]

Tommy thinks of all the people who work in service, whose families have worked in service--but that is very different than an indenture. Slavery has been illegal in the Isles for nearly sixty years before he was born, but just because a thing is illegal doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. It just gets another name.

"Was he your blood?" he asks. "This boy you had to get out of jail? This boy you loved, and tried to kill you?"

[every_blossom_blooming]

"No," she said quietly. "And our countries are at war, in a way. But he didn't deserve to be in prison - the charges were false. Maybe we were never meant to be together, but I could at least try to get him his freedom."

Part of her wondered if she could have ever felt the sale about another Druskelle. Nina sighed and lolled her head to look at Thomas.

"You're absorbing an awful lot over there. Why don't you tell me more about yourself, Birmingham boy? One of those tattoos looked military - did you serve?"

[bookmaker_boss]

Tommy nodded. "Four years, in the Great War. We were part of a volunteer unit. I was a Tunneler, and a morale officer. I was given medals. They're in the cut now, thrown in just after we came home from the war."

He rolls his shoulder a little. "Most of them are stick and poke. It's a miracle I didn't lose an arm, getting inked in the mud."

[every_blossom_blooming]

Nina rolled her eyes but she still smiled. "Soldier boys and Barrel boys with your poke ink. Yours look to have healed well enough, at least."

She knew, vaguely, what the Great War was. She certainly knew what a tunneler did, and a morale officer.

"My country just finished a civil war," she said. "A good part of the Second Army was wiped out."

[bookmaker_boss]

"The star's my only poke," Tommy says with a smile. "Everything else was done very neatly."

He doesn't ask what the Second Army was, because he supposes it's rather obvious. The thought of it, an army made up of witches and all that sort of thing, doesn't put him off entirely. There were certainly times when they thought it of the Germans, in one way or another. If Nina's fellows were half as powerful as her, they'd be formidable to go up against.

[every_blossom_blooming]

"Oh good, you've sense enough not to risk lead poisoning or saints know what else more than once," she said with a smile his way.

"How is your stomach feeling? You're going to need to have more than tea and whiskey eventually."

Maybe she'd stick to simple things, like soup and bread, but he still needed something in his system if his body was to do the work that it needed.

[bookmaker_boss]

"I could probably do bread or porridge or something like that," Thomas says. He ought to, is what he means, because he's got no desire for it. He just keeps thinking of Hughes, and it puts him off the idea of food entirely.

"And I can definitely survive on tea and whiskey a while longer. I'm romany."

[every_blossom_blooming]

"I don't know what that is, but I'm sure even they need to eat now and then. We'll try some toast."

Nina rose lazily and headed into the kitchen. Some toast with cinnamon, maybe. She knew some herbal healing and she knew cinnamon could be a decent anti-inflammatory and besides that, it tasted good. Maybe she'd sneak a tiny bit of ginger in to help with any lingering nausea.

She found her phone and texted Inej to ask her if she'd ever heard of romany people. Her eyebrows lifted when she got a fairly quick response: They're like the Suli. Well, that could be useful. Maybe she'd try making skillet bread later.

Nina came back with a few slices of toast with butter, cinnamon, and a little bit of sugar. "Here, try this."

[bookmaker_boss]

He works his way through a single cigarette and, because this isn't his space, he leaves it at that. He was just contemplating moving back to the bed when Nina reappears with a plate of toast smelling strongly of cinnamon.

He eats slowly, but the whole plate of toast. It doesn't do much to energize him. After the plate is empty, he looks out the window again.