Thomas Shelby

It's been a while since Thomas has checked in on Nina. The odd schedule has made it difficult to say hello to much anyone except for some of the convenience store clerks. But he has a couple days off, and he's finished his morning check on Roach, so he thinks it's a perfect time to go and see her.

There's no fancy, fast car this time, no question of going out for a drive. He does have coffees, one for each of them. Thomas shows up at her building and lets himself in, heading up to her door. He knocks and then, rather casually, tries the doorknob. Unlocked. He lets himself in, already speaking.

"Nina, are you decent?" He rather hopes not. "I brought coffee."

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.