here you’ll find all my peaky blinders imagines, one-shots, blurbs, and headcanons.
requests: open
minors: do not interact with mature content
last updated: 7/1/2026
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𝐓𝐡𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐬 𝐒𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐛𝐲
-Don’t Flinch Mr. Shelby (Imagine)
-Don't Flinch Mr. Shelby pt. 2 18+ (Smut)
-Almost Home (Req)
-Before I Knew Your Name (Req)
-Before I Knew Your Name Pt. 2 (Req)
-What Loving You Cost
-What Loving You Cost Pt .2
-Wrong Side of Time Series Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five
☾ Warnings: explicit smut, 18+ only, unprotected sex, creampie, blood/injury, split knuckles, mentions of fighting, hurt feelings, public teasing, john joking about marriage until y/n thinks she’s the punchline, emotional hurt/comfort, strong language, john shelby being rough around the edges but soft where it counts.
☾ Tags: @cookieann, @zablife
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John Shelby had a terrible habit of making serious things sound like a joke.
Everyone knew it.
He could walk into the betting shop with blood on his sleeve and a split across his knuckles, grin at Polly as if he had only been caught nicking sweets, and say something stupid enough to make Finn laugh before anyone thought to ask where the blood had come from. He could sit across from Thomas with a gun on the table and still find time to make some remark about the tea being weak. He could be angry, hurt, tired, half-drunk, or half in love, and somehow, his mouth always found a way around the truth before it let the truth sit plain.
You had learned that quickly after coming to work for the Shelbys.
John was never quiet for long.
Not like Thomas, who could fill a room without speaking. Not like Arthur, whose silence usually meant something had gone wrong inside him. John’s noise was easier. It came in laughter and teasing and quick remarks tossed across the room while he leaned too far back in his chair, cigarette hanging from his mouth, cap pushed low like he had been born daring the world to try him.
At first, you thought he talked that way to everyone.
Then, slowly, painfully, you realized he talked that way to you most of all.
“Careful, love,” he said one morning, watching as you stretched onto your toes to put a ledger back on the shelf behind Polly’s desk. “Keep helping around here like that and people’ll think you’re trying to make a husband of me.”
You nearly dropped the book.
Arthur laughed from the table by the wall, a low, rough sound around the cigarette between his fingers. Finn looked up too, grinning because John had grinned, and in the middle of the room, John sat there as if he had not just knocked the breath clean out of your chest.
You turned back to the shelf, pretending to fix the order of the books.
“I imagine people have better things to gossip about.”
“Not in Small Heath, they don’t.”
John’s chair scraped against the floor as he leaned back. You could feel his eyes on you. You did not look at him, because if you did, you were afraid he would see too much.
Polly only glanced between you both with the kind of look that made your stomach tighten. She saw things before people meant for her to see them.
“Get back to work, John,” she said.
“I am working.”
“You’re bothering the girl.”
John’s grin widened. “She doesn’t mind.”
You should have told him that you did.
Not because you hated it. Not because his attention was unwanted. That would have been easier. If John’s flirting had annoyed you, if his voice had grated on your nerves, if his smile had meant nothing at all, then you could have rolled your eyes and let the joke roll off your back with the rest of the Shelby noise.
But that was not the problem.
The problem was that every time John said something like that, you wanted to believe him.
And every time the room laughed, you remembered that you should not.
It became a pattern after that.
If you brought tea into the office and put his down before he asked, John would tap the side of the cup with two fingers and say, “See that? Wife material.”
If you scolded him for leaving ash on the betting slips, he would look across the table at Arthur and say, “She’s started on me already, and I haven’t even got a ring on her.”
If you passed behind his chair and he leaned back just enough for his shoulder to brush your hip, he would tilt his head up with a look that made your pulse unsteady and murmur, “One day, love.”
Always with a grin.
Always with someone near enough to hear.
Always with enough laughter in the room to make it impossible to know whether he meant anything at all.
You tried to play along in the beginning. You smiled when the others smiled. You shook your head and carried on with whatever Polly had asked of you. But there was only so many times a woman could be turned into a joke before she started to feel the shape of it settling around her.
John Shelby was handsome enough to make women foolish. He knew it too. That made it worse. He was all bright eyes, sharp jaw, rough charm, and restless hands, the kind of man who made trouble look like an invitation. You had seen women look at him in the Garrison as if waiting for him to ruin them. He smiled at them easily. He bought drinks without thinking. He leaned too close when he spoke, laughed too loudly when they gave him their attention, and left behind the kind of warmth that made a girl feel chosen even when he had chosen nothing at all.
You told yourself you knew better.
Still, some foolish little part of you kept count.
The times his hand found your back when passing through a crowd.
The times he reached above you for something he could have asked you to hand him.
The times he lowered his voice only for you, even when the room was full.
The times you caught him looking when there was no joke to hide behind.
Then he would open his mouth, and the whole thing would become funny again.
It was a gray afternoon when it finally went too far.
Rain had been coming down since morning, turning the road outside the betting shop black and slick. Men came in with wet caps and muddied boots, bringing the smell of damp wool, tobacco, and horses with them. The room had been busy for hours, a constant churn of voices and coins and numbers called out over one another until your head ached from it.
John came in just before closing.
You heard him before you saw him. Arthur cursed from the front room, Finn said something too quick to catch, and then John’s voice cut through it all.
“It looks worse than it is.”
That was never a good sign.
You stepped out from the small back office with a stack of slips in your hand and found him standing by the table, coat open, shirt marked dark near the collar. There was a cut beneath his cheekbone, not deep, but bleeding enough to have run toward his jaw. His knuckles were split. His lip looked swollen.
Your heart lurched before you could stop it.
“What happened?”
John looked at you, and whatever answer he had prepared seemed to catch for half a second. Then his grin came, crooked because of his lip.
“Missed me, did you?”
Arthur snorted. “He got clipped by a man twice his age.”
“He had a bottle.”
“He had a bad hip and a bottle.”
John pointed a bloody finger at him. “Still counts.”
You set the betting slips down harder than you meant to. “Sit.”
John blinked.
The room quieted just enough for you to notice.
“Sit down,” you said again, already turning for the clean cloth Polly kept in the drawer. “You’re bleeding on the floor.”
Arthur made a sound that might have been a laugh if he had not tried to hide it behind a cough. Finn leaned against the wall, watching with open interest. John, to your surprise, sat.
You returned with the cloth and a small bowl of water, standing between John’s knees before you had time to think about what that meant. He looked up at you from the chair, his cap tipped back now, lashes wet from the rain. The usual humor was there in his face, but softer around the edges. Almost pleased.
“You’re making a fuss,” he said.
“You’re making a mess.”
You dipped the cloth in the water and pressed it carefully beneath his cheekbone. John sucked in a breath through his teeth but did not move away.
For once, he sat still.
The room carried on around you after a few moments, but you could still feel the attention in it. You tried to focus on the cut, on the blood, on the task of cleaning him up without letting your hand shake.
John’s gaze did not leave your face.
“You’re very good at this,” he said.
“At wiping blood off reckless men? I’ve had practice since working here.”
Arthur barked a laugh at that, and even Polly’s mouth twitched from where she stood by the shelves.
John smiled, slow and proud, as if you had given him something. “Hear that? She’s already got the Shelby tone.”
You kept your eyes on the cut. “Hold still.”
He did, for about three seconds.
Then his hand lifted and caught lightly at your wrist, not stopping you, just resting there. His thumb brushed once over the inside of it, and the warmth of him went through you so quickly that you nearly lost your grip on the cloth.
“Not even married yet,” John said, loud enough for the room to hear, “and she’s already ordering me about.”
Finn laughed first.
Arthur followed, shaking his head as he reached for his drink. “God help the poor girl.”
John’s grin flashed. “I’ll have her at the altar by Christmas. Watch me.”
The room laughed again.
It should not have hurt more than the other times.
But your hand stilled against his face.
Something in John’s expression shifted, just slightly. His fingers loosened around your wrist.
You lowered the cloth.
“I’m finished,” you said.
His brows drew together. “Love—”
“I said I’m finished.”
You set the cloth down beside the bowl, wiped your hands on your apron, and turned before anyone could see your face clearly enough to understand. The back office was only a few steps away, but the walk felt longer with the silence following you.
You did not slam the door.
That would have made it easier for them to call you dramatic.
Instead, you closed it gently and stood very still in the dim little room, listening to the muffled voices outside.
You pressed your palms against the edge of Polly’s desk and took one breath. Then another.
Foolish.
You felt so painfully foolish.
It was not John’s fault, you tried to tell yourself. Not entirely. He had shown you what he was from the start. He joked. He flirted. He made people laugh. You were the one who had started collecting his words as if they meant more than entertainment.
Still, it had been cruel, whether he meant it or not.
A woman did not want to be married as a punchline.
The door opened behind you.
You did not turn.
“Y/n.”
John’s voice sounded different without the room behind it.
You folded your arms across yourself. “You should go back out.”
“I tried that.”
“Try harder.”
The door clicked shut. His footsteps came a few paces into the room, then stopped. For once, he did not crowd you.
A moment passed.
“Are you angry with me?”
You let out a quiet breath that had almost been a laugh. “Does it matter?”
“It matters to me.”
That made your throat tighten, which only made you angrier.
You turned then.
John stood near the door with his cap in his hands. He looked too large for the room, too damp from the rain, his face still marked with blood you had not finished cleaning. The sight of him made your chest ache with a tenderness you wished you could put down.
“Don’t do that,” you said.
His brow creased. “Do what?”
“Make me sound foolish in front of everyone.”
Something closed over his face.
“I didn’t.”
“You did.” Your voice was quiet, but it did not shake. You were grateful for that, at least. “Maybe you didn’t mean to, but you did.”
John looked toward the desk, then back at you. “It was only—”
“A joke,” you finished.
He stopped.
You swallowed against the soreness in your throat. “I know.”
“No, that’s not what I meant.”
“It’s always what you mean.” You hated how tired you sounded. “You joke. Everyone laughs. I smile because that’s what I’m supposed to do. Then tomorrow you do it again.”
John’s fingers tightened around his cap.
The room felt very small now.
You looked away first, because holding his stare made everything worse. “You shouldn’t say things like that to a woman, John. Not unless you mean them.”
He was quiet for long enough that you wondered whether he would leave.
When he spoke, his voice was lower.
“You think I don’t?”
You blinked and looked back at him.
He stared at you as if you had accused him of something worse than carelessness.
“What?”
“You think I don’t mean it?”
The question was so plain that you had no defense ready for it. You opened your mouth, then shut it again.
John took one step closer. Not much. Just enough for the lamplight to catch the anger and hurt sitting together in his eyes.
“I joke about plenty of things,” he said. “You’re not one of them.”
The words struck so cleanly that you had to look away.
There was no grin on his face. No laughter tucked into the corner of his mouth. No glance toward the door to make sure someone had heard him. He looked almost offended, but not at you. At the thought itself. At the idea that you had been standing in front of him for weeks, hearing his promises as mockery.
You gripped your own elbow. “How was I meant to know that?”
John’s jaw worked once.
You looked back at him, and the hurt you had been trying to keep neat slipped out before you could stop it. “You laugh when you say it.”
That landed.
You saw it.
The frustration in him faltered, leaving something quieter behind. He dropped his eyes to the cap in his hands, turning it once like he did not know what else to do with himself.
“I thought you knew,” he said.
The softness of it nearly undid you.
“How would I know?”
His mouth opened, then closed. For the first time since you had known him, John Shelby looked at a loss.
Outside the office, someone moved past the door, their footsteps fading toward the front. Neither of you spoke until the sound was gone.
John rubbed the back of his neck, wincing when the motion pulled at his split knuckles. “I’m not clever with it.”
A sad little smile tugged at your mouth before you could stop it. “With what?”
“This.” He gestured between you, then seemed irritated with the gesture and let his hand fall. “You. Me. Saying things without making them sound like I’m taking the piss.”
You watched him, afraid to hope and unable not to.
He came closer slowly this time, stopping at the corner of the desk. There was still space between you. Enough that you could have stepped away. Enough that he was making sure you knew it.
“I know how to talk in a room full of men,” he said. “I know how to get a laugh. I know how to make something sound lighter than it is because if I don’t, it sits there looking at me.” His eyes flicked over your face. “But I know when I want something.”
Your breath caught.
John’s gaze dropped to your mouth, then lifted again.
“And I want you.”
The words were not loud.
They did not need to be.
Your fingers tightened around your sleeve. “John…”
“I mean it.” He stepped closer, and this time you did not move. “Every time I said it, I meant it. When I said you’d make a good wife. When I said I’d marry you. When I said one day.” His voice roughened. “I was trying to tell you.”
“You were making everyone laugh.”
His expression twisted, as if he wished he could take back every laugh in the room.
“Then I’ll stop.”
You searched his face, waiting for the grin to break through, for him to soften it with something foolish, for him to save himself from the honesty.
He did not.
“That easy?” you asked.
“No.” His mouth moved, almost a smile but not quite. “I like making you smile.”
Despite yourself, something in you warmed.
John saw it. His eyes changed, focused on that small crack in your hurt like it mattered more than anything else.
“But not if it makes you feel like that,” he said. “Not if it makes you think I’m laughing at you.”
You looked down.
His hand lifted, paused in the air for half a second, then settled carefully against your waist. He did not pull. He only touched, giving you time to refuse it.
You did not.
“I never laughed at you,” he said.
Your voice came out smaller than you wanted. “Everyone else did.”
His thumb moved once against the fabric of your dress. “Then they can learn to shut up.”
That sounded more like him. Not playful, exactly. But steady. Certain.
You let out a breath, and the ache in your chest shifted into something more dangerous.
John was close enough now that you could see the rain still caught in his hair, the dark edge of blood near his jaw, the faint bruising beginning beneath his eye. He looked like trouble. He looked like every warning you had ever tried to give yourself.
He also looked like he meant every word.
“I don’t want to be another thing you say because it sounds good,” you whispered.
His hand flexed against your waist.
“You’re not.”
“You say things to women.”
“Not like that.”
“You flirt.”
“I breathe too. Doesn’t mean it’s the same.”
You tried not to smile, but he caught it anyway.
There he was, you thought. The John you knew. But the difference was in his face. He had not used the joke to escape. He had used it to stay.
His other hand came up, careful as it touched the side of your face. His thumb brushed near your cheek, rough from work and fighting, gentle enough to make your eyes sting.
“I’ll say it properly,” he murmured.
You hardly breathed. “Then say it.”
John looked at you for a long second.
No audience.
No laughter.
No grin.
“I want you,” he said. “Not for a laugh. Not because it gets Arthur going. Not because I like watching you get all flustered when I say something I shouldn’t.”
Your cheeks warmed, but he did not tease you for it.
His voice dropped lower. “I want you in my house. At my table. In my bed. I want your voice in the morning and your hands fussing at my collar when I’ve done it wrong. I want you telling me when I’m being an idiot, which will be often, so you’ll not be short of work.”
A laugh slipped out of you then, soft and unsteady.
John’s thumb moved along your cheek, his face easing at the sound.
“There,” he whispered. “That one I meant to earn.”
You closed your eyes for half a second, and when you opened them, he was watching you with such naked want that it made the room feel warmer.
“You really meant Christmas?” you asked.
His mouth twitched. “I meant tomorrow, but Polly would have my head if I didn’t give her time to interfere.”
This time, when the smile came, it did not hurt.
John saw that too.
He leaned in slowly, giving you every chance to turn away. You did not. Your hand lifted on its own and settled against his chest, feeling the hard beat of his heart beneath your palm.
He was nervous.
The realization moved through you like a flame catching.
John Shelby, who could grin through blood and guns and family shouting, was nervous because he was waiting to see if you would let him kiss you.
You rose onto your toes and met him first.
The kiss was softer than you expected.
John exhaled against your mouth as if he had been holding himself back for weeks. His hand at your waist tightened, the other sliding from your cheek into your hair, but he did not rush you. For one breath, then two, he kissed you like he was proving he could be careful with something he wanted.
Then your fingers curled into his shirt.
Something in him broke loose.
He made a low sound against your mouth and pulled you closer, both hands finding your waist now as he backed you carefully against the edge of the desk. The wood pressed into your hips. John followed, warm and solid and all around you, kissing you again before you had fully caught your breath from the last one.
This was not like the jokes.
There was nowhere to hide in it.
His mouth moved over yours with a hunger that made your knees weak, but every few seconds, he slowed, as if reminding himself. As if remembering what this was. His hand slid along your side, then stopped when your breath hitched.
“You alright?” he asked against your lips.
You nodded, but he pulled back enough to see your face.
“Say it.”
Your heart thudded.
“I’m alright.”
His gaze searched yours. Whatever he found there made his shoulders ease. He kissed you again, and this time you opened to him without hesitation, your hands moving up his chest, over his shoulders, into the damp hair at the back of his neck.
John groaned softly.
The sound went straight through you.
He pressed closer, and you felt the shape of his want in the way his body moved, restrained but unmistakable. He kissed along the corner of your mouth, then your jaw, then the tender place beneath it that made your fingers tighten in his hair.
“John,” you breathed.
He stopped at once.
You almost laughed at how quickly he went still.
“I didn’t mean stop.”
His eyes darkened, but his voice stayed careful. “Don’t say my name like that unless you want me forgetting every decent thought I’ve ever had.”
“Have you had many?”
He looked at you, caught off guard for half a second.
Then he smiled.
Not the loud one. Not the one meant for the room.
This one was yours.
“You’ll pay for that,” he murmured.
The warmth in his voice made your stomach turn over. “Is that another joke?”
His smile faded slowly.
He leaned in until his forehead nearly touched yours. “No.”
The single word settled between you, heavy and thrilling.
John’s hand moved to your back, drawing you off the desk and against him. He kissed you again, deeper this time, less patient now that you had stopped pulling away from what both of you wanted. The office seemed to shrink around the heat of him. Rain tapped at the window. Voices moved somewhere beyond the door, distant and unimportant.
Then someone laughed in the front room.
You tensed.
John felt it immediately.
His mouth left yours, his breathing uneven. For a moment, he only looked at you. Then his jaw tightened.
“Come with me.”
You blinked. “Where?”
“Somewhere they’re not.”
He took your hand, but he waited before leading you anywhere. That, more than anything, made your chest tighten. John Shelby had spent weeks dragging you into jokes you had not agreed to, and now he would not even move toward the door without your permission.
You laced your fingers through his.
He looked down at your joined hands.
When he looked back up, all the teasing had gone soft around the edges.
The walk out of the office felt impossible at first. You expected everyone to look. To laugh. To make some remark that would undo the fragile, trembling thing that had just settled between you.
He didn't stop until he had you inside his room. He shut the door with a heavy thud and leaned his back against it, breathing hard. The room smelled of stale cigarettes and damp wool. A fire was dying in the grate, casting orange flickers over his unmade bed and a coat tossed over a chair.
John didn't move for a second. He just looked at you, his blue eyes searching your face. He looked rough. There was a smear of blood across his cheekbone and his knuckles were split and raw.
“You’re bleeding,” you whispered.
John let out a short, nervous laugh. “I’ve had worse.”
You didn't argue. You found a cloth and some water, stepping between his knees as he sat on the edge of the bed. You began to dab at the cut on his face. John went completely still. He didn't make a joke. He didn't try to deflect. He just watched you, his expression softening.
As you moved to clean his knuckles, his hand twitched. He gripped your wrist, not hard, but enough to stop you. He pulled your hand up and pressed a slow, firm kiss to your palm.
“I saw your face back there,” he rasped. “When they were laughing. I hated it. I hated that you thought you were the punchline.”
He pulled you closer, his forehead resting against yours. “I’m a fool for how I say things. I make a mess of it. But you… you’re not a game to me.”
The tension snapped. You kissed him, and he groaned, his hands sliding to your waist to haul you up onto the bed. He was clumsy and desperate, his mouth crashing against yours with a hunger that felt honest.
He broke the kiss to bite at the skin of your neck, his breath hot. “Still think I’m joking?” he muttered.
“No,” you gasped, your fingers digging into his shoulders.
“I meant it,” he whispered, his voice shaking. “Every bloody time I mentioned it. Every time I said I’d put a ring on your finger. I meant it every bloody time.”
His hands moved under your clothes, finding the heat of your skin. When his palms hit your thighs, he stopped. He pulled back just enough to look you in the eyes.
“Tell me to stop and I will,” he breathed. “I won't touch you unless you want this.”
“I want you, John. Please.”
He stripped you quickly, his eyes devouring you. When he shed his own clothes, he looked tense, his muscles tight. He didn't say anything fancy. He just looked at you with a raw, heavy kind of need.
He entered you in one slow, deep push. He let out a guttural sound, his face contorting as he filled you. He stayed still for a moment, his forehead pressed to yours, letting you adjust.
“You’re so fucking beautiful,” he choked out.
He began to move. It was a steady, driving rhythm. He kept his eyes on yours, watching for any sign of hesitation. He gripped your hands, pinning them to the mattress and interlacing his fingers with yours.
“Look at me,” he commanded softly. He drove deeper, hitting the spot that made your back arch and a loud moan escape your throat. “I’m not laughing now. You believe me now, yeah?”
The friction built into a searing heat. John’s pace quickened, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He was pouring every bit of his frustration and his need into you.
“John!” you cried out, your body tightening around him.
He let out a shout, his body shuddering as he came deep inside you. He collapsed against you, his head dropping to your shoulder, clinging to you as if he was afraid you might vanish.
For a long time, the only sound was the rain hitting the window and the sound of your breathing. John didn't pull away. He stayed buried in you, holding you tight. He eventually shifted, rolling you onto your side and pulling a blanket over both of you.
He held you quietly, his chin resting on your head, his hand rubbing slow circles into your back.
“I’m trying not to ruin it,” he whispered, a small, genuine smirk returning to his voice. “The silence. I’m usually rubbish at the silence.”
He pulled back to look at you. He kissed your forehead, then your lips.
“I’ll marry you one day,” he said, his voice steady. “If you’ll have me. I’ll make it official. No jokes. Just you and me.”
He grinned then, a flash of the old John. “Though, I reckon Polly will have a heart attack when I tell her I’ve finally stopped being a brat long enough to settle down.”
☾ Warnings: time travel/time-slip, memory return, disorientation, fear/panic, 1919 Small Heath, violence, physical fighting, guns/gunshots, blood, injury detail, knife wound/cut to the side, torn clothing, police intimidation, Inspector Campbell, forced detainment, being grabbed/restrained, emotional distress, family betrayal, Grace/Vera tension, half-sibling reveal, fire, smoke inhalation, explosion, near-death experiences, Arthur and John being placed in serious danger, John being shot/grazed, Arthur nearly being trapped by fire/smoke, Tommy/Thomas being protective and emotionally intense, tragic romance, sacrifice, implied/depicted character death, grief, major angst, bittersweet ending
Rain struck the cobbles in thin silver lines. Smoke from the factories drifted low over the street, turning the lamps into blurred yellow halos. Vera stood between Campbell’s men with blood soaking through the side of her dress and the ruined coat clutched against her chest, the watch hidden in her grip like a second heart.
Thomas had his gun raised.
Arthur stood behind him with his jaw set and his shoulders lifted, ready to break the first man who gave him reason. His collar was already torn from the fight that had carried them through the street, one side of his coat hanging loose where someone had grabbed at him. Blood marked his knuckles. Rain ran down his face and made dark tracks through the dirt there.
John was on Thomas’s other side, cap low, eyes sharp, one hand inside his coat. He was breathing hard, but there was a grinless look about him now that made him seem more dangerous than when he smiled. His sleeve was ripped near the elbow, and one of Campbell’s men had left a bruise coming up along his jaw. He looked at Vera once, saw the blood at her side, and the last bit of boyishness went out of his face.
Campbell stood just behind Vera as if the whole street had arranged itself for his benefit.
“I wouldn’t, Mr. Shelby,” he said.
Thomas did not lower the gun.
He looked at Campbell as though he were deciding where the first bullet would go. His coat was wet through, the black wool shining under the lamps. Blood sat at the corner of his mouth, not enough to be serious, enough to make him look less like the clean, controlled man Vera had first seen in the Garrison and more like the man from her broken memories. His cap had been pushed back slightly, his hair damp beneath it, and his eyes had fixed on her with a force that made her want to move toward him and away from him in the same desperate instant.
Campbell noticed.
Of course he did.
“Remarkable,” he said, his voice carrying easily through the rain. “The devotion one can inspire in such a short time.”
Thomas’s face did not change.
Vera felt Martin’s grip tighten around her arm, fingers digging into bruises already left there. The other man held her right side too close to the cut, and every shallow breath pulled fire through her ribs.
“Let her go,” Thomas said.
It was not shouted. It did not need to be.
Campbell’s mouth curved. “You have no authority here.”
Arthur shifted. “Neither do you.”
Campbell glanced at him. “Arthur Shelby. Always eager to mistake volume for power.”
Arthur gave a short, humorless laugh. “Say another word.”
“Arthur,” Thomas said.
The warning was quiet, but Arthur heard it. He rocked back half a step, though his hands remained ready.
Vera stared at Thomas. He looked at her with the question she had been afraid of since the moment he appeared in the rain.
Why are you more afraid of me coming than of him taking you?
She wanted to answer. The words were lodged so deep in her throat they hurt.
You come for me.
They follow.
They die.
But she could not say it with Campbell standing so close, with Arthur and John already in the line of danger, with the rain making everything shine like the memory of blood.
Campbell stepped nearer to her. “I confess, Miss Hart interests me. No past, no papers, no sensible explanation for her presence here. And still, here you all are.”
John’s hand moved inside his coat.
“Don’t,” Vera said.
He looked at her, confused.
Not Campbell. Not the man holding her. John.
“Don’t,” she said again, and her voice nearly broke with it.
John frowned. “We’re trying to get you out of this.”
That was the trouble.
That had always been the trouble.
Arthur leaned forward, voice rough from the rain and anger. “Vera, love, you need to stand still and let us handle it.”
A laugh caught in her chest and came out as something almost painful. Let them handle it. That was what men like them did. They walked into fire with their brother’s name in their mouths and believed walking out was only a matter of will.
Thomas watched her too closely.
Campbell noticed that as well.
“You see?” Campbell said softly. “She understands better than the rest of you. One mistake here, and men will die.”
Arthur’s eyes went flat.
Thomas’s gun lifted by the smallest measure.
Vera felt Campbell’s men stiffen on either side of her.
Then everything happened at once.
Martin yanked her backward, maybe meaning to pull her clear, maybe meaning only to remind Thomas who held the leverage. His hand caught too close to the cut in her side. Pain burst through her so sharply that Vera cried out before she could stop it.
Thomas moved.
So did Arthur.
One of Campbell’s men raised his pistol. John saw it first and lunged sideways, catching the man’s arm just as the shot cracked open the street. The bullet went wild, smashing through a window somewhere behind Thomas. Glass exploded inward with a bright, awful sound.
Arthur hit Martin before Martin could drag Vera another step.
They went down hard against the wet cobbles. Vera stumbled free, nearly falling as the sudden loss of support made the world tilt. Thomas was already coming toward her, but another man came from the side alley and swung at him with a baton. Thomas turned into the blow enough to keep it from his head, took it hard against his shoulder, then drove his fist into the man’s stomach and dropped him with the cold efficiency of a man who had no time to enjoy violence.
“Vera!” he shouted.
The sound of her name should have anchored her.
Instead, it terrified her.
Arthur had Martin by the front of his coat and was driving him backward toward the Garrison doors. John was still fighting for the pistol, rain slicking his hair to his forehead, teeth bared as the man tried to bring the gun around again. Campbell had stepped away from the worst of it, not running, not joining in, simply watching his trap take shape.
Vera clutched the watch tighter and ran.
Not far.
She did not get far because her side was screaming and her legs were weak from blood loss and fear. She cut between two men grappling near the door and staggered into the narrow alley beside the Garrison, one hand on the wall to keep herself upright. The bricks were wet and cold beneath her palm. Her breath sounded wrong in her own ears, too fast, too thin.
Behind her, the fight crashed on.
Men shouted. Someone hit the Garrison door hard enough to rattle the glass. Arthur cursed so loudly it cut through the rain. John yelled Tommy’s name, not in warning yet, but close enough to it that Vera’s stomach turned.
She forced herself onward.
A hand caught her arm.
Vera twisted with a sound that was closer to a sob than a curse.
Grace.
Grace had followed her into the alley, one hand wrapped around Vera’s wrist and the other braced against the wall, blocking her from slipping past. Her fair hair had come loose from its careful pins, strands stuck damply to her cheek. The neat barmaid mask was gone. So was the cold little smile she had worn when she wanted people to underestimate her. There was only anger now, tight and frightened.
“What are you doing?” Grace demanded.
Vera tried to pull free. “Let go.”
“No.”
“You don’t know what you’re stopping.”
“I know exactly what I’m stopping.” Grace’s grip tightened. “You are going to get them killed.”
Vera laughed once, and it hurt. “You always did know how to arrive late.”
Grace shoved her back against the brick, not hard enough to break anything, hard enough that pain tore through Vera’s side. Vera sucked in a breath and nearly folded. Grace’s eyes dropped to the blood spreading beneath Vera’s hand.
Something shifted in her face.
Only for a second.
Then the anger came back, but thinner now.
“Stop fighting me,” Grace said.
Vera went still.
Rain ran down between them. Somewhere beyond the alley, a man hit the ground with a heavy grunt. Glass broke inside the pub. The world was coming apart in the street, and all Vera could hear was the echo of those words in another place, another life.
Stop fighting me.
Grace saw the change.
“What?” she asked.
Vera looked at her hand around her wrist. “That’s what you said last time.”
Grace’s brows drew together. “What are you talking about?”
“You found me once.”
The grip loosened by half an inch.
Vera was shaking now, from cold or pain or memory, she could not tell. The words were not coming from the part of her that had learned to survive by lying. They came from somewhere older than this rain, somewhere that still hurt when Grace looked at her like a stranger.
“You told me I was safer with you.”
Grace stared at her.
“No,” she said, but there was no strength in it.
Vera swallowed hard. “You said blood didn’t need a house to be family.”
Grace’s hand dropped from her wrist.
For a moment, she looked almost young. Not innocent. Grace Burgess had never been innocent, not in the way people wanted women to be. But young, yes. Young and frightened and suddenly forced to stand in front of a door she had spent a lifetime pretending was not there.
Her lips parted.
The alley seemed to narrow around them.
“I found you once,” Grace whispered.
Vera’s eyes burned.
Grace looked at her as if pieces were being placed behind her eyes one by one and each one hurt more than the last. “I thought that meant I could save you.”
The words should have softened something.
They did, maybe. Somewhere beneath the fear and fury, a place Vera had no time to reach.
“You didn’t save me,” Vera said. “You handed me to him.”
Grace flinched.
Not dramatically. Not enough for anyone else to have noticed if anyone else had been watching. But Vera saw it. She saw the guilt break through her face before Grace covered it with breath and rain and the practiced stillness she wore when she was trying not to feel.
“I didn’t know what he would do,” Grace said.
“You knew enough.”
Grace looked past her, toward the sounds of fighting. The alley flashed with light as another lamp outside the Garrison swung hard in the wind. Smoke began to thicken in the air, not from the factories this time. Sharper. Closer.
Grace turned back to Vera.
For one terrible second, Vera thought Grace would choose the same way again. That she would take her arm, drag her back, hand her over to Campbell because fear had always been easier to obey than love.
Instead, Grace stepped aside.
The movement was small.
It changed everything.
“Go,” Grace said, voice barely there.
Vera stared at her.
Grace’s face twisted, as if the word had cost her more than she expected. “Go.”
Vera did not thank her.
There was no time, and perhaps no forgiveness either.
She pushed away from the wall and stumbled back toward the mouth of the alley.
Behind her, Grace remained where she was, one hand pressed against the brick as if she needed the wall to stay standing.
The Garrison was burning.
Not all of it. Not yet.
The first fire had taken the back room, where the fight had shoved men through tables and against shelves stacked with bottles and crates. Vera saw it as she came out of the alley: orange light pulsing behind the side windows, smoke rolling through the cracks around the door, flames licking along the lower edge of a curtain that had already begun to curl black at the bottom.
Someone had knocked over a lamp.
A table had gone with it.
Broken whisky bottles glittered across the floor inside, and the spilled alcohol had carried flame faster than anyone could stamp it out. The fight had moved through the Garrison like weather. Chairs overturned. A stool lay split near the bar. One of Campbell’s men had gone headfirst into a shelf, and bottles had burst around him in a shower of glass and drink. The fire had found the mess and fed.
Men were still fighting.
That was the madness of it. The room was filling with smoke, and still they swung and grabbed and pulled guns. Campbell’s men were trying to force the Shelbys back, and the Shelbys were doing what they always did: refusing to be forced anywhere.
Arthur was inside near the bar, coat torn open, one sleeve ripped at the seam. Blood ran from a cut above his eyebrow and made a dark path down the side of his face. He had one man by the throat and another trying to haul him off from behind, and his whole body looked built from rage.
John was nearer the door, fighting the man with the pistol.
The gun came up again.
Vera saw it before she understood she was seeing it.
The barrel lined toward Thomas, who had turned halfway toward the alley, looking for her.
John saw it too.
“Tommy!”
He drove himself into the man with the gun. The shot went off as they hit the floor. For a second, Vera heard nothing but the crack of it and the ringing that followed.
John rolled onto his side with a curse, one hand going to his upper arm.
Blood spread through the torn sleeve of his coat.
Not dead.
Not dead.
The words struck through Vera so violently that she almost fell.
John was swearing, alive and furious, trying to push himself up while Thomas turned toward him. Arthur saw the blood and went madder. He threw the man he held into a table and started toward John, but the fire had found the floorboards behind the bar now, crawling toward the curtain, the shelves, the place where the heat began to thicken.
“John!” Arthur shouted.
“I’m fine!” John snapped, though he clearly was not.
Thomas moved toward him, but another man came at him from the side. Thomas caught the man’s wrist, twisted, struck him once, and dropped him. His face was set in that terrible stillness Vera had seen in memory. The stillness before the breaking.
Smoke pushed out through the side door in a hard gray breath.
Arthur bent to haul John up.
Then the back shelf gave way.
It did not fall fully. Not enough to crush. Enough to send burning wood and glass crashing across the floor, cutting Arthur off from the clean path to the door. Flames leapt higher with a hungry sound as more alcohol caught. Arthur stumbled backward, dragging John with him. Smoke swallowed them from the waist up.
“Arthur!” Thomas shouted.
There it was.
The sound from the memory.
Not exactly the same, not yet, but close enough that the world blurred at the edges. Vera saw Thomas trying to turn both ways at once. Toward Arthur and John in the smoke. Toward her in the street. His body made the choice before his mind could, stepping toward the brothers, then checking back toward her as if losing sight of her for even a second was unbearable.
This was how it happened.
Not because he did not love them.
Because he loved too many people at once and believed he could pay every price with his own blood.
Vera staggered toward the doorway. “Thomas!”
He turned.
For one second, the Garrison burned behind him like something remembered. Smoke coiled around his shoulders. Rain darkened the front of his coat. Blood marked his mouth, his knuckles, his collar. His cap was gone now, lost somewhere in the fight, and his hair had fallen damp across his forehead.
He saw her and started forward.
She shook her head.
“Get them out,” she said.
His eyes sharpened. “Come here.”
“Get them out.”
“Vera.”
“Please.” Her voice cracked on the word. “Please, Thomas.”
That reached him differently.
He looked back. Arthur had John by the back of his coat now, half dragging, half carrying him through the smoke. John was coughing, blood running down his sleeve and dripping from his fingers. Arthur was coughing too, eyes watering, face streaked black with soot. A burning beam had not fallen, not truly, but a strip of shelving had collapsed close enough that Arthur had to kick through broken wood to clear a path.
Thomas went to them.
He moved fast, grabbed John under the arm, and pulled him the last few steps toward the door. Arthur came with them, swearing, coughing, furious at needing help. They spilled out into the rain, all three of them staggering. John hit one knee and tried to get up immediately. Arthur shoved him back down with a shaking hand.
“Stay down, you daft bastard,” Arthur rasped.
“I said I’m fine.”
“You’re bleeding like a stuck pig.”
“It missed.”
Arthur looked at the blood on his sleeve. “Missed what, your fucking arm?”
Thomas crouched near John long enough to look at the wound. His hand was steady, but Vera saw the strain in his face. He had almost lost him. He knew it. Some part of him knew how close the bullet had come, even if he did not yet know why the sight made Vera press a hand to her mouth and tremble.
Then Thomas stood and looked at Vera again.
The fire roared behind him.
The back room was worse now. Flames had climbed higher, catching along wood, curtains, spilled drink. Smoke was pushing out in heavy rolls. Someone yelled from inside. Campbell’s men were retreating now, no longer trying to win the fight, only trying to avoid being trapped by the fire they had helped create.
Campbell himself stood across the street, hat wet with rain, face lit faintly by the growing glow from the Garrison windows.
Vera barely noticed him.
Thomas came toward her.
Slowly at first, as if sudden movement might send her running again.
She wanted to run.
She wanted to step into his arms.
The wanting of both tore through her so completely that when he reached her, she could not speak.
He looked at her side. At the blood beneath her hand. At the torn coat and the broken lining and the watch chain wrapped around her fingers. His eyes stopped on the watch.
The world seemed to draw inward.
“Where did you get that?” he asked.
Vera shook her head. Tears had already started, but she did not remember deciding to cry. “Don’t.”
Thomas looked from the watch to her face.
“Open it,” he said.
“No.”
“Vera.”
“You can’t.”
His jaw tightened. “Give it to me.”
“No.” She backed up half a step. “No, because if you see it, then you know, and if you know, then you’ll try to change it.”
Thomas took one step closer. “Change what?”
“The cycle.”
Behind him, Arthur coughed hard enough to bend at the waist. John sat on the curb with one hand clamped around his bleeding arm and his eyes fixed on Thomas like he knew something bad was coming but not what shape it would take.
Thomas did not look away from Vera.
“What cycle?”
Vera’s breath hitched. The firelight moved across his face, turning one side of him gold and leaving the other in shadow. He looked so alive. So present. So close to remembering that she could feel it like pressure in the air.
“It keeps happening,” she said.
His expression shifted. “What keeps happening?”
“You come for me.”
The words scraped her throat.
Thomas went very still.
“They follow you,” Vera said, looking past him to Arthur and John. “Something goes wrong. You lose them. Then I bring it back, and you find me again, and it starts over.”
Arthur’s cough stopped.
John stared at her.
Thomas’s eyes narrowed slightly, not in disbelief exactly. More like pain finding a place to enter.
“What did you say?” he asked.
“I made you forget,” Vera said. “I thought that would be enough.”
The watch ticked once in her hand.
Or maybe she imagined it.
Thomas heard it too.
His eyes dropped again.
Vera tried to hide the watch against her chest, but her fingers were shaking too badly. The casing slipped. The ruined chain swung loose, catching the firelight.
Thomas reached for it.
She tried to pull back, but he caught her wrist.
Gently.
The gentleness broke her worse than force would have.
“Don’t,” she whispered.
His thumb brushed near the place his hand had held her in another life.
The memory seemed to pass between them before the watch ever opened.
Thomas froze.
Vera watched it happen.
Not all at once. Thomas Shelby did not fall apart like other men. His face did not crumple. He did not stagger back or make some grand sound of realization. It came into him quietly and violently, like a blade slid under the ribs.
His eyes changed first.
The suspicion left.
Then the caution.
Then something older than this night moved behind them.
He remembered loving her before he remembered losing her.
Vera saw the moment it began. His hand on her wrist in some quiet room that was not burning. Her sitting in his office with one leg tucked beneath her, reading papers she had no right to touch. Her voice telling him he looked miserable even when he was pleased. Her asleep in his bed with her back turned to him because being held still frightened her at first. Her walking with him by the cut, arguing that his answer to everything could not be threatening men until the world behaved.
He remembered her at Watery Lane, standing stiff beneath Polly’s measuring stare, pretending not to care whether the family liked her. He remembered Arthur laughing at something she said and then trying to hide it behind a cough. He remembered John leaning in too close just to annoy Thomas and Vera swatting him away with a look that made John grin.
He remembered the first time she stayed.
Not in a room. Not in a bed. Stayed as in stopped looking at the door.
He remembered her fingers against his palm under a table where no one could see. Her mouth near his ear in the noise of the Garrison. Her anger when he tried to protect her without asking. Her fear when she thought wanting him would become another way to lose herself.
Then the rest came.
Smoke.
Gunfire.
Arthur shouting his name.
John falling where he should not have fallen.
Grace screaming from the bar.
Vera with the watch in her blood-slick hand.
Thomas’s own voice saying, “If I remember you, I lose you.”
His fingers tightened around her wrist, still not enough to hurt, but enough to tell her he was here now. Fully.
“Vera,” he said.
Not as a question.
Not as a test.
Her name in his mouth became something she had no defense against.
She shook her head. “No.”
He stepped closer.
“No,” she said again, crying harder now. “Please don’t look at me like that.”
Thomas’s face had gone pale beneath the soot and blood. He looked like a man standing in two lives at once and choosing the one that hurt most because it was true.
“I know you,” he said.
Vera tried to pull free. “You weren’t supposed to.”
“I know you.”
“Thomas—”
“You think forgetting you stopped me?” His voice roughened. “I still came.”
The words took the air from her.
Behind him, Arthur muttered something Vera could not hear. John shifted, grimacing as he pushed himself to his feet.
Thomas did not notice.
Or he did, and could not turn away.
“I found you once with no memory of you,” he said. “I’d find you again with nothing but your name.”
Vera covered her mouth for a second, trying to hold in whatever sound wanted out.
There were flames behind him. Blood on his collar. His brothers alive but hurt only yards away. Grace standing at the mouth of the alley now, one hand pressed to her chest as she watched the two of them like she finally understood the shape of what she had helped break.
Thomas reached for Vera’s face.
She let him.
His fingers were cold from the rain, rough at the knuckles, careful against her cheek. There was nothing neat about him now. No perfect mask. No untouched suit. No calm man sitting in judgment. His coat was torn, his mouth bloody, smoke in his hair, and still he touched her like she was the only thing in the street that might vanish if handled wrong.
“You’re not leaving me twice,” he said.
Vera closed her eyes.
For one second, she almost believed him.
That was the cruelest part. Not Campbell. Not the fire. Not the watch. That one impossible second where Thomas remembered her and wanted her and had his brothers alive behind him, and Vera’s tired, frightened heart reached for the lie that maybe this time love could be enough.
Then John coughed behind him.
A hard, painful sound.
Arthur’s hand gripped John’s shoulder to steady him.
The fire cracked loudly inside the Garrison.
Vera opened her eyes and looked past Thomas.
John was alive, but blood ran down his sleeve. Arthur was alive, but smoke had blackened the side of his face, and he was breathing like each pull of air scraped him raw. They stood together in the rain, battered, furious, confused, alive because the pattern had not completed itself yet.
Not yet.
Vera looked back at Thomas.
He saw the decision before she moved.
“No,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
His hand closed around hers. “No.”
“I can’t let it keep happening.”
“It won’t.”
“You can’t promise that.”
“I can.”
“No, Thomas.” She was crying openly now, past shame, past fear of being seen. “You can’t. Because you’ll always come.”
His face tightened.
“And I wanted you to,” she whispered. “God help me, I wanted you to every time.”
“Then stay.”
“If I stay, you try to keep all of us.”
“I will.”
“I know.” She gave a broken smile that hurt more than weeping. “That’s why I can’t.”
Understanding moved over his face and turned to horror.
Vera twisted her hand sharply, not away from his grip but into it, using the movement to slip the watch from between them. Her wounded side screamed as she pulled back. Thomas reached for her, but she was already moving.
“Vera!”
She ran toward the Garrison.
The heat struck her before she reached the door. Smoke shoved against her face, bitter and thick. The front of the pub was not swallowed yet, but the back room burned bright enough to turn the windows white-orange. The flames had climbed into the woodwork, licking along beams and shelves, finding every spilled drop and every dry edge.
Someone shouted behind her.
Thomas.
Always Thomas.
She heard him coming and knew without turning that he would follow her straight in.
Of course he would.
He had found her with no memory. He had come into the rain for a woman he did not understand. Now that he remembered loving her, there was no force in the world that would make him stop himself.
Except the brothers she was saving him for.
Arthur saw where she was running before Thomas reached the door.
He also saw the back room.
His face changed.
Not fear exactly. Recognition. The kind of practical terror men like Arthur had when they knew what was stored where it should not be. Crates in the back. Bottles. Powder. Things the Shelbys had no business keeping behind a pub and every reason to keep there anyway.
“Tommy!” Arthur roared.
Thomas did not stop.
Arthur lunged and caught him around the middle from behind, dragging him back with a force that would have dropped another man. Thomas fought him instantly, elbow driving back, body twisting.
“Get off me!”
“Tommy, there’s powder in there!”
Vera reached the doorway and looked back.
Thomas was fighting Arthur like a trapped animal, all control gone. John grabbed him too, injured arm close to his chest, using the other to get a fistful of Thomas’s coat.
“Don’t make us drag you out too!” John shouted.
Thomas nearly broke free.
Arthur slammed him back against the side of the doorway, not to hurt him, but hard enough to stop him for half a second.
“You go in there, you’re dead!” Arthur shouted into his face.
“She’s in there!”
“I know!”
The words ripped out of Arthur, raw and helpless, and for one heartbeat even Thomas stilled.
Vera held his eyes through the smoke.
She wanted the last look to be gentle. It wasn’t. It was wet with rain and firelight and grief, his face twisted with rage because she was choosing for him and he hated being chosen for. She wanted to tell him that she loved him. She thought he knew. She wanted to tell him she was sorry. She thought he knew that too.
The watch was hot in her hand.
Grace stood behind Thomas now, a few steps away, her face streaked with rain and soot. She looked at Vera, and whatever passed between them was not forgiveness. It was not enough for that.
But Grace did not move to stop her.
This time, she let her go.
Vera stepped backward into the smoke.
Thomas shouted her name.
Not Vera.
Not Miss Hart.
Her name as he had said it in every life she could remember and all the ones she could not.
She turned before the sight of him could undo her.
Inside, the Garrison groaned around her.
The heat was enormous. It wrapped around her, pushed at her, crawled into her lungs. Smoke lowered from the ceiling in thick black folds. The bar was half-hidden. Tables lay overturned. Flames had eaten the curtain near the back and moved along the shelves where bottles burst one by one with sharp cracks. Vera kept one hand pressed to her side and the other around the watch, moving toward the back room because some part of her knew that was where the fire had to reach.
The watch had started everything.
It had brought her back. It had dragged memory across time like thread through a wound. It had proved she existed. It had given Thomas enough to find her again.
Maybe it could end here.
Or maybe nothing could.
Vera did not know anymore.
She only knew Thomas would keep coming as long as there was a path to take. He would cross years, fire, grief, memory, forgetting. He would bring Arthur and John because they were his brothers, and they would follow because that was what love looked like in the Shelby family. Not clean. Not safe. Not sensible. Devoted unto ruin.
She could not let them make a grave of that devotion again.
A beam cracked overhead.
Vera flinched but kept moving.
The back room was nearly gone. The doorframe burned along one side. Heat poured from it in waves, and beyond it she could see the stacked crates, the broken bottles, the place where orange light had become white at the center. The sound there was different. Not just flame. Pressure. A building holding its breath before it came apart.
She stopped at the threshold.
For the first time since she woke in 1919, Vera felt no pull backward.
No alley. No Garrison wall. No watch tugging her toward another chance.
Only forward.
Her fingers closed around the casing. It burned her palm.
She opened it.
The photograph was still inside. Singed now from the heat. Herself beside Thomas in another 1919, both of them caught in a second that had no right to survive.
She looked at his face in the photograph.
Then she closed the watch.
Outside, Thomas was still shouting.
Arthur and John were still holding him.
Alive.
She stepped into the back room.
The explosion threw the street into white fire.
For a moment, there was no rain. No voices. No Garrison. Only heat and sound and the force of the blast ripping through glass, wood, and brick. The windows blew outward. The door burst from its hinges. Flames rolled out in a hard breath that knocked men from their feet and scattered burning splinters across the street.
Thomas hit the ground with Arthur over him.
John was thrown sideways into the curb, landing hard on his injured arm. Grace fell near the alley mouth, one hand over her face as glass rained down around her. Campbell disappeared into smoke and shouting, no longer the center of anything.
Then the sound came back.
Not all at once.
A ringing first.
Then coughing.
Men groaning.
Rain hissing against fire.
Thomas pushed himself up.
Arthur’s hand clamped around the back of his coat before he made it fully to his knees.
“No,” Arthur said, voice broken by smoke.
Thomas dragged himself forward anyway.
John, bleeding and half-dazed, grabbed his arm. “Tommy.”
Thomas shook him off.
Arthur grabbed him harder.
“Tommy, no!”
The Garrison’s back room was gone. What remained burned too hot to enter. Wood collapsed inward with a crash that sent sparks into the rain. Smoke poured black into the street. The heat drove everyone back, even the men who thought themselves brave.
Thomas fought them.
Not for long.
Long enough that Arthur had to wrap both arms around him from behind, teeth bared as he held on. Long enough that John, pale with pain, got in front of him and shoved both hands into Thomas’s chest.
“She’s gone,” John said.
Thomas stared at him as if the words made no sense.
John’s mouth trembled, just once. “Tommy, she’s gone.”
Thomas looked past him to the fire.
The fight left his body in a way that was almost worse than rage.
Arthur felt it and held him anyway.
Rain came down harder. It struck Thomas’s hair, his shoulders, the blood on his collar, the soot on his face. He stood in the street with his brothers alive on either side of him and looked at the place Vera had chosen to die.
Grace was on her knees near the alley.
She was crying, though silently, one hand pressed against her mouth as if she could hold the sound in. Vera’s blood marked her sleeve where she had grabbed her. The sight of it made her close her eyes, and whatever memory lived behind them was hers to carry.
No one spoke for a while.
The fire settled slowly into smoke.
Men moved around them. Someone shouted for water. Someone else called for a doctor. Arthur kept one hand gripped in the back of Thomas’s coat like he did not trust him not to run even now. John leaned against the wall with his injured arm held tight, breathing through the pain and watching his brother with a fear he did not try to hide.
Thomas did not move until something caught the weak light near the blackened stones.
Small.
Half-buried beneath ash.
He saw it before anyone else did.
Arthur said his name, warning low in his throat, but Thomas was already walking.
The heat was still strong enough to sting his eyes. Smoke curled around his boots. Broken glass cracked underfoot. He bent near the edge of the burned threshold and reached into the ash.
The watch was hot.
He took it anyway.
The face was ruined, blackened around the edges, the hands stopped beneath cracked glass. Thomas wiped his thumb over it, leaving a clean smear through the soot. His hand was shaking now. Not much. Enough that John looked away.
Thomas forced the casing open.
Inside, the photograph had survived.
Singed at the edges. Darkened by smoke. But there.
Vera stood beside him in a life only he remembered now, caught close enough that the space between them looked like it had already given up pretending to be distance. Her handwriting remained on the back, smudged but legible where the ash had not taken it.
Do not let him remember you.
Thomas closed his eyes.
For a long moment, the street, the rain, the fire, and the men around him seemed to fall away. He could feel her everywhere memory allowed. In the quiet office where she had stolen his chair. In the bed she had once pretended not to need. In the Garrison after closing, telling him one day he would regret standing close to her. In the rain, crying because he had remembered too late.
He opened his eyes and looked at the stopped watch in his palm.
Arthur was alive behind him, coughing hard with one hand fisted in the back of his coat, and John was on his other side, bleeding through his sleeve but breathing. Vera had given him exactly what she had meant to give him. His brothers. His family. Their lives bought back with hers.
Thomas stood in the ash with her name burning through every part of him, and for the first time in all the lifetimes she had found him, he understood that this was the one place he could not follow.
Are you still updating Before I Knew Your Name and Wrong Side of Time? I've absolutely fallen in love with your writing and would really appreciate it if you could tag me.
Before I Knew Your Name has been completed but there's one more part of Wrong Side of Time! Should be posted tomorrow 🤭
This time it’s about Michael. Reader is his assistant at work and he likes her, she likes him, but they don’t know that and the company this time doesn’t know either (I’m sorry for my lack of ideas and that it sounds similar to my first request!). But this time, Isaiah acts as a wingman by making Michael jealous so at the end, he has to admit his feelings to the reader. Again I’m in for the slow burn and the cutesy. But only if you want to write my slightly different request at all!
☾ Warnings: workplace romance/boss x assistant dynamic, jealousy, mutual pining, suggestive flirting, reader being a little inappropriate in front of men, men being dismissive/intimidating toward reader, Michael being possessive but restrained, Polly and Isaiah meddling, almost kiss, kissing/makeout, mild tension.
☾‧₊˚ ⋅ ───────────── ⋅ ˚₊‧☽
Michael Gray had learned quickly that a woman could ruin a room without raising her voice.
You did it often.
You did it with a pen between your fingers, a file tucked beneath your arm, and that look on your face that made men believe they had already won something from you when, really, they had given away half their hand before they even sat down.
Shelby Company Limited was full of men who thought themselves clever. Men with flat caps, polished shoes, bruised knuckles, and debts they tried to dress up as misunderstandings. They came into Michael’s office expecting him to be the problem. They prepared themselves for the sharp suit, the cold eyes, the Shelby name laid out behind a desk like a loaded gun.
Most of them did not prepare for you.
That morning, three men sat across from Michael with their hats in their hands and lies in their mouths. Michael listened without expression, leaning back in his chair, one hand resting near the papers you had placed before him. You sat to his left with your notebook open on your knee, writing only when it suited you.
The man in the middle, Mr. Lovell, had been talking for five minutes.
Michael knew this because he had been watching the clock.
You knew this because you had stopped writing three minutes ago.
“So, as I said,” Lovell continued, clearing his throat as though repetition might make his numbers less false, “the delay came from Camden. Nothing to do with us. We moved the barrels as soon as they arrived.”
You glanced down at the page in your lap.
Michael did not look at you, but he felt the shift all the same. You had gone still in that particular way you did when someone had said something stupid enough to interest you.
Lovell kept speaking. “Your men must’ve misplaced the receipt.”
“No,” you said.
The room settled.
Lovell blinked at you. “Sorry?”
You lifted your eyes from the paper. “No, Mr. Lovell. His men didn’t misplace it.”
Michael’s gaze moved to you then, slowly. He should have stopped you. He might have, had he not already known you were right.
Lovell gave a tight little smile. “I’m not sure this is—”
“The receipt was signed on Thursday,” you said, taking a folded slip from the file beside you. “By a man named Edward Pike, who I believe works for you, not for us. It says the barrels arrived at half past two. You sold them by six.”
One of Lovell’s men shifted in his chair.
You smiled at him.
It was not a kind smile, and that was the problem. Men often mistook your face for something soft until you showed them the blade underneath it.
“It was in an envelope addressed to Mr. Gray.” You leaned forward and placed the receipt on Michael’s desk, close enough that Lovell could see his own lie written out in ink. “So unless the postman has taken a sudden interest in bookkeeping, I’d say it’s ours now.”
Michael lowered his eyes to the receipt.
He did not need to read it. He had already seen it before the meeting. You had found it before breakfast, walked into his office, dropped it on his desk, and said, “He’s going to lie badly. Let him.”
He had let him.
Now Lovell looked at Michael, waiting for a rescue he had no right to expect.
Michael folded his hands over his waistcoat. “Pay what you owe by Friday.”
Lovell’s jaw worked. “Mr. Gray—”
“Friday.”
There was something in Michael’s voice that ended things. Lovell understood it. His men understood it. Even the office outside seemed to quiet for a moment.
You reached for your notebook again, as though nothing had happened.
Lovell stood. His face was unpleasantly calm, but his eyes stayed on you for half a second too long.
Michael saw it.
Of course he saw it.
He saw most things where you were concerned, which was becoming a problem he had no intention of discussing with anyone.
As Lovell buttoned his coat, you looked up at him with a pleasantness that did not reach your eyes. “Do be careful with the stairs on your way out. They’re terribly unforgiving when a man’s dignity gets heavy.”
The youngest of Lovell’s men made the mistake of choking on a laugh.
Michael’s pen paused against his desk.
Lovell left without another word.
The door shut behind them, and the silence that followed was not peaceful. Michael looked at the receipt. Then at the door. Then at you.
You were already gathering the papers into a neat pile.
“That was unnecessary,” he said.
You did not look up. “He signed, didn’t he?”
“That isn’t the point.”
“It usually is in business.”
Michael leaned back in his chair, watching you smooth the corner of a page with your thumb. “Men like that don’t enjoy being embarrassed.”
“Then they shouldn’t make it so easy.”
His jaw tightened, not because you were wrong, but because you never seemed frightened enough by being right. It was a dangerous habit, especially in Birmingham. Especially here.
You rose from your chair and came around the edge of his desk to place the file in front of him. You moved too comfortably in his office. You always had. Since the first week Polly had brought you in and told him you would be helping him with ledgers, letters, and whatever else he was too proud to admit had begun piling up.
Michael had protested at first.
Polly had ignored him.
Now, three months later, he could not imagine the office without the sound of your footsteps outside his door.
That, too, was becoming a problem.
“You should let men like that speak themselves into trouble,” Michael said.
You rested one hand on the back of the chair opposite his desk. “I did.”
“You enjoyed it.”
At that, your mouth curved, small and unashamed. “A little.”
Michael looked away first.
You noticed. He hated that you noticed.
Before either of you could say anything else, the door opened without a knock.
Polly Gray entered with a cigarette between her fingers and no apology on her face. She took one look at you, another at Michael, and seemed to understand more than any person had a right to.
“Lovell looked as though he’d swallowed a nail,” she said.
“He came in choking on one,” you answered. “I only pointed it out.”
Polly smiled.
Michael did not.
“You see?” Polly said, crossing the room. “That one knows how to make a man hand over the truth and thank her for taking it.”
“She’s careless,” Michael said.
Polly glanced at him, amused. “She’s got nerve.”
“She makes enemies too quickly.”
“No,” Polly said, taking a drag from her cigarette. “Men make enemies when they realize they’ve been beaten by a woman they were too busy looking at to listen to.”
You took the finished notes from the table and tucked them against your chest. “I’ll type these before lunch.”
Polly watched you go with open approval. “Good girl.”
You paused at the door, giving Polly a warm look before your eyes shifted briefly to Michael. “Mr. Gray.”
Then you left.
The door clicked shut.
Polly took a drag from her cigarette. “You’ll grind your teeth flat if you keep that up.”
Michael reached for his pen. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“No. You wouldn’t.”
“I’m trying to run a company.”
“You’re trying to look like you’re running a company.” Polly moved around the office as if it belonged to her, because in all the ways that mattered, it did. “She helps. You know she does.”
“She talks too much.”
“She talks when men need reminding that a woman in the room isn’t furniture.”
Michael said nothing.
Polly leaned slightly over the desk. “Keep her close.”
His eyes lifted.
There it was. That slight knowing edge in her voice.
“I already have,” he said.
“Yes,” Polly replied. “That’s what worries you.”
She left him with that.
For the rest of the day, Michael tried not to look through the glass panel of his office door.
It did not work.
You were at your desk outside, typing letters with your sleeves pushed up and your attention fixed on the keys. Men came in and out. Some spoke to you with respect. Others learned to. You smiled when necessary and sharpened when deserved. You handled papers, signatures, appointments, complaints, deliveries, and at least one bookmaker who arrived furious and left apologizing.
Michael watched all of it more than he should have.
He told himself it was because you were his assistant.
That was all.
Then Isaiah Jesus came in.
He had the easy step of a man who knew where he was welcome, which was almost everywhere, mostly because he never waited to be invited. He leaned one elbow on your desk, said something too low for Michael to hear, and your fingers paused above the typewriter.
Then you laughed.
Michael looked down at the ledger in front of him.
The numbers had not changed.
He read the same line three times.
Outside, Isaiah was still at your desk. You turned a page toward him, explaining something with your pen. Isaiah bent closer to see. His shoulder nearly touched yours.
Michael closed the ledger.
When he opened his office door, both of you looked up.
Isaiah’s grin was immediate. “Michael.”
“Tommy was looking for you.”
“No, he wasn’t.”
“He is now.”
Isaiah’s grin widened.
You looked down at your papers, but Michael could see the amusement at the corner of your mouth.
Isaiah pushed away from the desk. “Right. Wouldn’t want to keep Tommy waiting.”
“No,” Michael said. “You wouldn’t.”
Isaiah passed him on the way out and dropped his voice just enough for Michael to hear. “Careful, mate. You’re starting to look obvious.”
Michael’s eyes cut toward him.
Isaiah only laughed and went out.
You were arranging your papers with an innocence that would not have fooled a dead man.
Michael stood in the doorway. “Bring me the Camden account.”
You looked up. “You already have it.”
“I want the other copy.”
“There isn’t another copy.”
“Then find one.”
You held his gaze for a moment, and he regretted it instantly, because there was something bright and entertained in your eyes that made him feel as though he had stepped exactly where you wanted him.
“Yes, Mr. Gray.”
You said it too sweetly.
Michael went back into his office and shut the door.
By half past six, most of the office had emptied. The low noise of the day faded into the street outside, into the distant rumble of hooves, engines, men shouting, and Birmingham breathing smoke into the evening.
Michael remained at his desk.
Work was easier than thinking.
There were ledgers to check, letters to sign, payments to arrange. He kept his head bowed, pen moving steadily across the page, though every now and then his attention snagged on the quiet outside his door.
You should have gone home.
You had not.
He knew because he could hear you moving around.
A drawer opening. A chair scraping. The soft, steady rhythm of you putting the office back in order after a day of men making a mess of it.
Then there was a knock.
Michael did not look up. “Come in.”
You opened the door with a file in one hand and your gloves in the other.
“I found the other copy,” you said.
Michael looked from your face to the blank sheet of paper you placed on top of his ledger. He recognized the joke and refused to reward it, though the corner of your mouth lifted as if you had seen the response he was trying to hide.
“You’re still here,” he said.
“So are you.”
The answer came lightly, but you were already looking past him, taking in the untouched plate near the corner of his desk, the cigarette burned too low in the ashtray, the line of ink where his pen had rested too long.
“Polly asked me to see if you’d eaten,” you said. “You haven’t.”
Michael leaned back in his chair, watching as you moved around the side of the desk with the same unhurried confidence you carried everywhere in the building. You did not ask permission. You rarely did when you already knew the answer.
“You keep a record of that now?” he asked.
“I keep a record of most things.” Your eyes dropped to the open ledger, and something in your expression shifted. “Especially when they become predictable.”
Before he could answer, you touched the page and turned it slightly toward him.
“You signed this in the wrong place.”
Michael’s eyes dropped.
You were right.
His signature sat neatly on a line meant for the client.
For a moment, neither of you spoke.
Then you looked at him, softer than before. “You’re not usually this careless.”
The words should have annoyed him. Instead, they settled somewhere beneath his ribs.
Michael rose from his chair.
It was meant to put him back in command of the room. It had the opposite effect. Standing brought him closer to you, close enough that he could see the faint crease between your brows as you studied him, close enough that the scent of paper and smoke seemed to disappear beneath something warmer.
You did not move away.
Michael’s fingers curled lightly against the edge of the desk.
“You shouldn’t play games in this office,” he said.
Your eyes flickered over his face. “Is that what I’m doing?”
“You know it is.”
The room felt too quiet.
Outside the glass, the rest of the office sat empty and dim.
Only you, standing too close to Michael Gray while he tried and failed to remember why that was a bad idea.
You tilted your head slightly. “I think you like having something to be angry about.”
Michael’s gaze dropped to your mouth before he could stop it.
You saw that too.
Of course you did.
The amusement faded from your expression, leaving something more careful behind. Not uncertainty. Never that. More like patience. As if you had brought him to the edge of something and were waiting to see whether he had the nerve to step forward.
Michael lifted a hand.
He did not touch you.
Not yet.
His fingers hovered near your sleeve, close enough that both of you seemed to notice the distance at once. His breathing had changed. So had yours. The office felt smaller than it ever had, and Michael, who had built so much of himself on control, found himself standing in the wreckage of it with you watching him kindly.
That was somehow worse.
He leaned in.
Slowly.
Not enough to kiss you. Not yet. Just enough for the intention to become impossible to deny.
Your breath touched his.
Then you stepped back.
Michael went still.
A small smile found your mouth, not triumphant exactly, but pleased in a way that made his chest tighten.
You picked up your gloves from the edge of his desk.
“Goodnight, Mr. Gray.”
Then you left.
For several seconds, Michael did not move.
The door closed behind you with a soft click.
His ledger remained open on the desk, his signature still written in the wrong place, the blank sheet of paper resting above it like a private joke.
He exhaled once, sharply, and turned away.
A minute later, the door opened again.
Polly walked in.
Michael closed his eyes.
“Whatever you’re about to say,” he said, “don’t.”
Polly paused, cigarette lifted halfway to her mouth. Her gaze moved from the untouched plate to the abandoned ledger to Michael standing behind his desk like a man who had just lost an argument nobody else had heard.
Then she smiled.
“Oh, Michael.”
He reached for his pen, only to realize he had no use for it. “I’m working.”
“No, you’re not.”
He looked up.
Polly came further into the room. “She left smiling.”
“She often does.”
“Not like that.”
Michael’s mouth tightened.
Polly’s amusement softened into something more serious. “A girl like that won’t stand around forever while you decide whether wanting her is convenient.”
Michael looked toward the door despite himself.
Polly saw.
“You think keeping your hands clean makes you sensible,” she said. “Sometimes it only makes you late.”
“I’m her employer.”
“And I’m your mother.” Polly tapped ash into the tray. “That hasn’t stopped me wanting to shake sense into you.”
Despite himself, Michael almost smiled.
Almost.
Polly turned to leave, then stopped at the door. “Don’t make her do all the brave work. It’s unbecoming.”
The next morning was worse.
You arrived on time, dressed neatly, hair pinned as usual, manner entirely unchanged. That irritated Michael more than anything. You placed his letters on his desk, reminded him of an eleven o’clock meeting, corrected a figure in the Birmingham account, and said “Mr. Gray” with just enough composure to make him question whether he had imagined the night before.
He had not.
He knew because every time you leaned over his desk, he remembered the warmth of your breath near his mouth.
He knew because you did not look at him for too long, and that was more telling than if you had stared.
By noon, Isaiah had appeared again.
Michael saw him from inside the office.
Isaiah came in carrying a paper bag from the bakery and wearing the expression of a man who intended to be a nuisance. He said something to you, held the bag open, and you peered inside. A moment later, you laughed and took whatever he offered.
Michael stared at the contract in front of him.
The words blurred.
Isaiah leaned against your desk. You spoke with him while still sorting papers, easy and bright and entirely too comfortable. He said something else, and you swatted his arm lightly with the folded schedule in your hand.
Michael stood.
He did not remember deciding to.
When he opened the door, Isaiah looked over at him immediately.
You gave Isaiah a look that told him to behave, though it only made him more pleased with himself. Then you took your notebook and walked into Michael’s office.
Michael shut the door behind you.
The noise outside dulled.
You stood near the chair across from his desk. “Is something wrong with the schedule?”
“No.”
“The letters?”
“No.”
“Then I assume this is about Isaiah.”
Michael walked behind his desk, needing the space. “He spends a great deal of time at your desk.”
“He has legs. I can’t do much about where he puts them.”
“This is a place of business.”
“Yes, I had gathered that from all the business.”
Michael looked at you sharply.
You did not smile.
That was when he realized you were tired of the dance.
Good.
So was he.
“He distracts you,” Michael said.
“No,” you replied. “He distracts you.”
The words landed cleanly.
Michael said nothing.
You stepped closer to the desk, your notebook held against your waist. “If you want to be angry with me, be angry with me properly. But don’t call me in here and dress it up as concern for the company.”
Michael’s hands rested on the desk. His fingers spread over the polished wood. “You think I’m angry with you?”
“I think you’re angry that I know.”
The office seemed to shrink around that sentence.
Michael could hear the faint clatter of typewriter keys outside, the murmur of men downstairs, the muted pulse of the city pressing against the windows.
He could also hear Polly’s voice from the night before.
Don’t make her do all the brave work.
Michael lowered his eyes, then lifted them again.
“I don’t like seeing him with you.”
Your expression changed slightly.
Not surprise. Not victory.
Something quieter.
“Isaiah?”
Michael’s jaw moved once. “Not just Isaiah.”
The honesty of it made the room still.
You held his gaze. “You could have said that sooner.”
“I know.”
“You nearly did.”
Michael’s eyes sharpened.
You set your notebook on his desk. “Last night.”
He breathed out through his nose, a humorless sound. “You left.”
“You stopped.”
“I was trying to do the decent thing.”
That made you soften, but only a little. “No, Michael. You were trying to do the safe thing.”
He looked down at the space between you.
Maybe you were right. You had a terrible habit of being right when he most wished you would be careless.
“I have spent months,” he said slowly, “telling myself this is not something I can want.”
Your fingers touched the edge of the desk. “And?”
“And it has not made a difference.”
You looked at him then as if he had finally given you something worth keeping.
Michael came around the desk.
This time, you did not move backward. You stood your ground, chin lifted slightly, eyes on him. He stopped close enough that neither of you could pretend he had called you in for papers.
“I don’t want men looking at you in this office,” he said. “I don’t want Isaiah making you laugh at your desk. I don’t want to sit in meetings and watch men mistake your nerve for an invitation. I don’t want any of it.”
You were quiet for a moment. “And what do you want?”
Michael swallowed.
For all his suits, his numbers, his ambition, his careful manners learned too quickly in rooms where blood still stained the floor, the answer left him less protected than he liked.
“You.”
The word did not echo. It simply stayed between you.
You looked at him for a long second, and then your mouth curved. Not in mockery. Not this time.
“You made that very difficult, Mr. Gray.”
Michael’s gaze dropped. “Stop calling me that.”
“I thought you liked things professional.”
“I’m finding professionalism overrated.”
A soft laugh escaped you, and this time it did not make him jealous. It loosened something in him.
He lifted his hand and touched your arm, giving you time enough to step away if you wanted to.
You did not.
His fingers slid lightly to your wrist. The touch was careful, almost restrained, but the restraint itself said enough. You looked down at his hand, then back up at him.
“Are you going to stop again?” you asked.
“No.”
Michael kissed you.
There was nothing careless in it, not at first. He kissed you like a man still trying to hold the last thread of his composure, mouth warm and firm against yours, hand tightening only when you leaned into him. Then your fingers found the front of his waistcoat, and something in him gave way.
He drew you closer.
Not roughly. Not gently either.
Enough that the desk pressed against your hip and the notebook slipped from the edge, falling open on the floor with a soft flutter of pages.
Neither of you moved to pick it up.
Your hand rose to the back of his neck, and Michael made a low sound against your mouth that he would have denied to his grave if anyone had heard it. You smiled into the kiss, and he felt it, felt the confidence of you, the impossible nerve, the pleased little victory of a woman who had known what he wanted before he had allowed himself to say it.
When you finally pulled back, you were both breathing differently.
Michael’s hand remained at your waist.
His forehead nearly touched yours.
Outside the office, someone laughed.
The sound brought the world back.
Michael closed his eyes briefly. “This complicates things.”
You smoothed the front of his waistcoat, though it did not need smoothing. “Most worthwhile things do.”
He opened his eyes.
You looked far too pleased with yourself.
“You enjoyed this,” he said.
“A little.”
Despite himself, Michael smiled.
It was small. Quick. Almost gone before it arrived.
But you saw it.
Of course you did.
A knock came at the door.
Michael stepped back at once, straightening his jacket with all the dignity of a man who had not just been undone in his own office. You bent to pick up your notebook, biting back a smile as he cleared his throat.
“What?” Michael called.
The door opened before he received an answer.
Polly stood there.
Behind her, Isaiah lingered in the outer office, trying and failing to look innocent.
Polly’s gaze moved from Michael’s slightly crooked tie to your notebook clutched against your chest. Then she looked at the desk, the papers, the two of you standing too carefully apart.
Her smile was slow.
“Am I interrupting business?”
Michael’s face hardened. “Yes.”
“No, you’re not,” you said at the same time.
Michael looked at you.
Isaiah laughed from outside.
Polly’s eyes warmed with satisfaction. “Good.”
“Polly,” Michael warned.
She ignored him, looking at you instead. “You’ll still have those letters typed by four?”
“Yes,” you said, wonderfully composed. “Of course.”
“Excellent.”
Polly stepped back, but before she closed the door, she glanced once more at Michael. “About time.”
The door shut.
From outside, Isaiah’s muffled voice carried through the glass. “Told you.”
Michael stared at the door as if he could set fire to Isaiah by will alone.
You gathered the rest of your things from his desk. “I should get back to work.”
Michael turned to you. “Y/n.”
You paused.
For once, he did not seem perfectly certain of what to do with his hands. One slipped into his trouser pocket, the other rested against the desk.
“This changes things,” he said.
You nodded. “Yes.”
“At work, I mean.”
“Yes.”
“I still expect the letters by four.”
Your mouth twitched. “Of course.”
“And the Birmingham account corrected.”
“Already done.”
“And Isaiah can find someone else to bother.”
At that, you laughed properly.
Michael tried to look displeased. He did not quite manage it.
You moved toward the door, but stopped before opening it. When you looked back at him, the teasing had softened into something that felt almost private.
“Michael?”
His expression shifted at the sound of his name without the title.
“Yes?”
You smiled. “The next time you want to kiss me, don’t make me come all the way into your office first.”
Then you opened the door and walked out.
Michael stood there for a moment, listening as you returned to your desk and calmly began typing as though nothing had happened.
Outside, Isaiah said something that earned him a sharp word from you and a laugh from Polly.
Michael looked down at the ledger still open on his desk.
For the second time in two days, he had signed in the wrong place.
☾ Warnings: time travel/time-slip, memory flashbacks, romantic flashback, disorientation, fear/panic, 1919 Small Heath, sexism/misogyny, intimidation, alcohol, smoking, swearing, Inspector Campbell, police custody/questioning, threats, forced detainment, escape/chase scene, physical struggle, Vera being grabbed/restrained, knife injury/cut to the side, blood, pain, emotional distress, implied past tragedy, Arthur and John being placed in danger, Tommy/Thomas being intense and protective, major cliffhanger
Not because the quiet made the pub gentle. The Garrison would never be gentle, no matter how low the fire burned or how carefully Harry swept the glass from beneath the tables. Even empty, it held the shape of men’s voices. It smelled of whisky soaked into wood and smoke that never quite left the beams. It kept secrets in its walls and violence in its corners.
But when the last man was gone, when the door was locked and the street outside had dulled to rain and distant wheels, Vera could almost pretend the place belonged to no one.
Thomas sat at the table near the private room with his sleeves rolled to his forearms and a cigarette burning low between his fingers. He had been pretending to read the same paper for ten minutes.
Vera noticed because she had been pretending not to notice him.
“You’ve been on that line a while,” she said.
Thomas did not look up. “Have I?”
“Either it’s very interesting, or you’re not reading.”
He turned the page with deliberate care. “Perhaps I’m thorough.”
“You’re many things. Thorough is only one of the less irritating ones.”
That brought his eyes up.
The look he gave her was quiet, but there was warmth beneath it. Not softness exactly. Thomas Shelby never became soft in the simple ways. He only allowed certain edges to lower when he thought no one else would see.
Vera had learned to notice those moments. She had learned not to name them too loudly.
He set the paper aside. “Come here.”
She wiped the counter with unnecessary focus. “No.”
“You’re angry.”
“I’m working.”
“You’re angry and working.”
“I contain multitudes.”
A faint smile touched his mouth before he looked down, hiding most of it behind the cigarette. Vera hated how fond that made her feel. She hated it because the feeling had nowhere safe to go. There was nothing safe about Thomas, nothing safe about the life that gathered around him like smoke, and still there were nights when he looked at her across the Garrison and she forgot, for a dangerous second, that love could make a person stupid.
He leaned back in his chair. “I told you not to go near the docks alone.”
Vera’s hand stilled.
There it was.
The argument again.
She dropped the cloth onto the counter and faced him properly. “And I told you I didn’t go there for fun.”
“You were followed.”
“I noticed.”
“After they had you against a wall.”
Her jaw tightened. “I got away.”
Thomas stood then, the chair scraping softly beneath him. He did not move fast. He did not need to. The air changed when he rose, just as it always did, but Vera held her ground behind the bar and refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing her retreat.
He came to the counter and stopped on the other side.
“That isn’t the point.”
“It usually is when I’m the one bleeding.”
His eyes dropped to her wrist.
The cut there was small, already cleaned and wrapped, but Thomas looked at it as though it were an insult done to him personally. She knew that look. It was the one that got men hurt. It was the one that made her feel protected and frightened in the same breath.
“Don’t,” she said.
He looked back at her. “Don’t what?”
“Turn it into a debt someone has to pay.”
“They touched you.”
“And I’m still standing.”
“That does not settle it.”
“It should.”
“It won’t.”
Vera laughed under her breath, but it came out tired. “One day, Thomas, you are going to hate me for what follows me to your door.”
He said nothing.
That silence was worse than an answer. It gave the words room to sit between them, ugly and true. Vera looked away first, because there were some fears she could say only if she did not have to watch him hear them.
The fire shifted in the grate.
Thomas came around the end of the bar.
Vera should have stepped back. She did not.
He stopped in front of her, close enough that she could smell smoke on his coat and whisky beneath it. His hand lifted, not quickly, not with the force she had seen him use on other people. He took her injured wrist with such care that it unsettled her more than roughness would have.
His thumb brushed just beneath the bandage.
“You keep looking for the worst of me,” Vera said, quieter now.
Thomas’s eyes stayed on her wrist. “No.”
“No?”
“I found that early.”
Something in her chest tightened.
Then he looked at her.
“I stayed anyway.”
Vera’s breath caught before she could stop it.
That was the trouble with him. He could cut a room to pieces with silence, could stare a man into confessing, could make violence seem like arithmetic. And then, when Vera had prepared herself for cruelty, he said something plain and ruined her more thoroughly than any tenderness dressed up in pretty words could have.
“You don’t know what I am,” she said.
“I know enough.”
“You don’t.”
“I know what you are when you’re afraid.” His voice was low, meant only for her. “I know when you’re lying. I know when you’re about to run and pretending you aren’t. I know you think needing someone is the same as giving them a knife.”
Vera swallowed.
His thumb stilled beneath her wrist.
“And you’re still here?” she asked.
“Aye.”
“Why?”
Thomas looked at her for a long moment. “Because you are.”
The words landed with terrible simplicity.
Vera wanted to laugh at him. She wanted to tell him that was not an answer, that he could not build loyalty out of stubbornness and call it sense. But the Garrison was too quiet, and his hand was too careful on hers, and she was so tired of being the only person prepared to leave first.
“When this turns ugly,” she said, “you’ll regret standing close to me.”
Thomas’s eyes did not move from hers. “Then I’ll regret it standing beside you.”
A sound came from somewhere outside.
A shout, maybe. Or the street shifting in the rain.
Thomas turned his head slightly, listening.
Vera felt his hand tighten, not enough to hurt, just enough to hold.
“Where you go,” he said, still looking toward the door, “I go.”
The words should have comforted her.
For half a second, they did.
Then the fire snapped too loud.
The room tilted.
The warmth drained from the Garrison, leaving only smoke. A chair overturned somewhere behind her. Men shouted in the street. Glass shattered. Someone screamed Thomas’s name, and another voice answered, rough and furious.
Arthur.
Then John, closer, breathless. “Tommy, move!”
Thomas’s hand closed around Vera’s wrist.
The careful touch became a grip.
The Garrison darkened around the edges.
Vera heard herself say, “No.”
Thomas looked back at her, but his face was wrong now. Blood at his collar. Soot on his cheek. Fear in his eyes.
“Vera.”
“No,” she said again, but the room was already breaking apart.
She woke with a gasp.
For a moment, she did not know where she was. Her hand flew to her wrist as if she expected to find Thomas still holding it, but there was only her own skin, cold and damp beneath her fingers.
Not the Garrison.
Not the fire.
Not Thomas.
Vera lay on a narrow bench in a room that smelled of damp paper, old tobacco, and walls that had held too many frightened people. The ceiling above her was cracked. A lamp burned low on a desk near the door, its flame turned down until the corners of the room were thick with shadow. Somewhere beyond the wall, a man coughed. Keys moved faintly at someone’s belt.
Campbell.
The thought returned with the force of a hand closing around her throat.
Vera sat up too quickly and nearly doubled over as dizziness rushed through her. Her coat was beside her on the bench, folded badly, as if someone had thrown it there after deciding she was not worth gentleness.
The watch.
Her hands went to the lining before she had fully breathed.
It was still there.
Hidden beneath the inner seam, heavy and impossible. She pressed her palm over it, and only then did she let herself close her eyes for half a second.
The relief did not last.
The memory came back in pieces.
Thomas’s hand on her wrist, gentle first. His voice in the quiet. The way he had looked at her as if the worst of her had already been weighed and accepted. The promise that should have been the kind of thing a woman kept near her heart.
Where you go, I go.
Vera opened her eyes.
The words were not sweet anymore.
Not here.
Her stomach twisted.
He had loved her.
The knowledge sat inside her like something newly broken.
Not suspected. Not imagined from a photograph. Not built from the strange ache she felt whenever he looked at her too closely. She remembered it now, not all of it, not enough to understand the beginning or the end, but enough to know the feeling had been real.
Thomas had loved her.
And the Thomas she knew now had let Campbell take her.
Vera pressed her hand harder over the coat lining until the watch dug into her palm through the fabric.
That was unfair.
The thought came bitterly, unwanted. Current Thomas did not know her. He had no reason to choose her like the man in her memory had. He had suspicion, fragments, a strange woman lying badly in his pub and hiding something from his wall.
Still, the hurt remained.
It burned because somewhere inside her, another Vera had expected him to come.
That frightened her most.
Vera forced herself to look around the room.
A desk. Two chairs. A narrow window too high to reach without climbing, its lower frame painted shut beneath years of grime. One door. No proper handle on her side, only a latch plate where a handle had once been removed. A basin in the corner. Floorboards warped near the far wall.
She knew the window would not open before she tried it.
She knew the board by the desk would creak if someone stepped on it.
She knew there was a hook outside the door where keys sometimes hung, though she had no reason to know any of it.
Her breath shortened.
She had been here before.
Not this morning. Not in this life she understood. Before.
The realization did not arrive cleanly. It pressed through her body instead, making her palms sweat and her throat close. She saw nothing clearly, only flashes without enough shape to become memory. Her knees against the floor. A man’s voice telling someone to wait outside. Grace’s face turning away too fast.
Vera stood.
Her legs were unsteady beneath her.
She went to the window anyway and pulled at the frame. It did not move.
Of course it didn’t.
A sound came from beyond the door.
Footsteps.
Vera turned and grabbed her coat, dragging it around herself just as the lock shifted.
The door opened.
Inspector Campbell entered with the patience of a man who believed time belonged to him. Two men stood behind him in the hallway, not the uniformed officers from the Garrison, but heavier men with the look of hired force. One had a scar along his jaw. The other did not bother hiding the way his eyes moved over the room before landing on her.
Campbell closed the door behind him, keeping his men just outside.
“Miss Hart.”
Vera tucked one hand into her coat pocket and kept the other near the hidden seam. “Inspector.”
“You slept.”
“No one asked me not to.”
His mouth moved as if he almost appreciated the answer. Almost.
“You seem calmer now.”
“Give me time.”
Campbell stepped to the desk and removed his gloves finger by finger. “You have caused a considerable amount of trouble for a woman who claims to have no importance.”
“I never claimed that.”
“You claimed very little, actually.” He placed the gloves down. “No address. No family. No papers. No employer before Harry Fenton. No explanation for your sudden appearance in Small Heath.”
Vera said nothing.
Campbell looked at her. “And yet Thomas Shelby speaks for you.”
“He speaks for a lot of things. Doesn’t make them special.”
“No,” Campbell said. “But it makes them useful.”
The word slid coldly through the room.
Useful.
Vera had the awful sense that she had heard him say it before. Maybe not to her. Maybe about her. Her fingers tightened in the pocket of her coat until her nails bit her palm.
Campbell watched the movement.
“Why did you accuse Miss Burgess?”
Vera kept her face still. “Did I?”
His eyes sharpened. “Do not play stupid with me.”
“I’m trying not to overplay my hand.”
“Your hand is empty.”
“Then you’ve nothing to worry about.”
Campbell came closer by one slow step. “What did you see?”
Vera thought of the alley. Grace’s back turned. The word inspector slipping through the damp air. Grace’s face when she realized Vera had seen enough to be dangerous.
“Two people who didn’t want to be seen,” Vera said.
Campbell’s expression did not change, but the silence after her answer told her something had landed.
“You are either very observant,” he said, “or very well informed.”
“Can’t a girl be both?”
“Not a girl with no past.”
Vera’s jaw tightened.
Campbell’s gaze moved to her coat.
It was only a glance. Brief. Controlled. But Vera felt it like fingers against the hidden watch.
“You seem attached to that coat.”
“It’s cold.”
“You said that last night.”
“So did the weather.”
Campbell looked at the door. “Martin.”
The man with the scar opened it and stepped inside.
Vera’s body went still.
Campbell nodded toward her. “Search the coat.”
For a second, the room became very quiet.
Not empty.
Waiting.
Vera drew the coat tighter around herself. “No.”
Campbell’s eyes returned to her. “No?”
“You men do enjoy repeating me.”
“Search it,” Campbell said again.
Martin stepped forward.
Panic came up so fast that Vera nearly choked on it. Not the coat. Not the watch. Not the photograph tucked inside the watch with her face and Thomas’s and the warning that had started to feel less like a note and more like a sentence.
If Campbell found it, he would not understand all of it.
That might be worse.
Martin reached for her sleeve.
Vera moved before sense could catch her.
She grabbed the nearest thing on the desk, a heavy glass ink bottle, and threw it at the lamp.
The lamp did not shatter the way she hoped, but it tipped hard, oil spilling across the desk as the flame guttered wildly. Campbell cursed and stepped back. Martin lunged for her, but Vera shoved the chair into his legs and bolted toward the door.
The second man tried to block her in the hallway.
Vera lowered her shoulder and drove into him with all the strength fear could lend her. It was not graceful. It hurt. Pain shot through her arm where she struck him, but he stumbled enough for her to slip past.
Behind her, Campbell’s voice cracked through the hallway.
“Stop her!”
Vera ran.
The corridor ahead of her was narrow and badly lit, walls stained with damp, doors closed on either side. She should not have known to turn left at the end.
She turned left.
A man shouted behind her.
Boots hit the floorboards.
Vera nearly slipped at the corner and caught herself against the wall, splinters biting into her palm. She kept going, breath tearing in her throat, one hand clutched against the front of her coat where the watch lay hidden. The hallway dipped, then opened near a back stairwell.
She knew the third step would bow under her weight.
It did.
Her foot caught, and she nearly fell, but she grabbed the railing and dragged herself forward. A hand caught the back of her coat for one awful second. Fabric tightened at her throat. Vera twisted, half choking, and drove her elbow back into whatever part of the man she could reach.
He swore and lost his grip.
Her coat tore somewhere near the seam.
Terror sharpened into something almost clean.
The watch.
Vera slapped a hand to the lining. Still there.
She plunged down the stairs.
At the bottom was a door with a bolt high enough that she had to stretch for it. Her fingers fumbled, slick with sweat. The bolt stuck.
No.
Behind her, the men were coming down.
Vera lifted the door slightly on instinct before pulling again.
The bolt slid free.
She stared for half a breath.
Then the door opened, and wet air slapped her face.
She stumbled into an alley behind the building.
Rain had turned the ground dark and slick. Smoke hung low over the roofs, mixing with the damp until the world seemed made of gray breath and brick. Vera ran before she knew where to go, choosing the narrower passage because her body chose it first.
Campbell’s voice followed from the open door.
“After her!”
Boots hit the cobbles behind her.
Vera ran harder.
The streets blurred into sharp fragments. A puddle exploding beneath her boot. Brick scraping her sleeve. The stink of horse dung and rainwater. Someone shouting as she shoved past them. A cart wheel grinding over stone close enough that she felt the spray from it against her skirt.
She did not know Birmingham.
But she knew this path.
That was the worst part.
She turned down an alley before seeing the man ahead who would have blocked the street. She ducked through a gap between two buildings before understanding there was space enough for her shoulders. She crossed a narrow yard, climbed a low wall, and dropped badly on the other side, pain jarring up through her knees.
Every turn she took felt less like a choice and more like surrendering to something inside her that had run these streets before.
The men were still behind her.
One shouted, “There!”
Vera clutched her coat tighter and forced herself onward.
Her lungs burned. Her side ached before the wound ever came, a stitch opening beneath her ribs from running too hard and breathing too badly. Rain stuck her hair to her neck. Her boots slipped more than once on wet stone, each stumble wasting precious seconds.
She had the sudden, vivid memory of Thomas’s voice.
Where you go, I go.
“No,” she gasped, though no one could hear her.
Not him.
He could not come.
The thought made no sense and perfect sense all at once. She wanted him to come so badly that it hurt. She wanted the man from the memory, the one who had held her like he knew what she was and stayed anyway. But wanting it felt like reaching for a match in a room full of oil.
Another alley opened ahead.
Vera turned into it.
A mistake.
She knew it as soon as she saw the wall at the far end.
For one second, she stopped.
That was all it took.
A hand closed around the back of her coat and yanked her hard enough that her shoulder hit the brick. Pain flashed white behind her eyes. Vera twisted and struck blindly, nails catching the man’s face. He cursed and grabbed her arm, slamming her back again.
The man with the scar.
Martin.
“You little bitch.”
Vera drove her knee up.
He grunted, grip loosening just enough for her to tear partly free. The coat shifted, and something inside the lining dragged downward.
The watch.
She grabbed the coat with both hands.
Martin saw the movement.
“What’s that, then?”
“Nothing.”
He lunged for the coat.
Vera threw herself sideways, but the alley was too narrow. His hand caught the torn lining. Fabric ripped open with a sound that made her blood go cold. The watch chain snagged on a loose thread, glinting once in the dim rain.
Martin’s eyes dropped.
Vera shoved him with everything she had.
He stumbled back, but not far enough.
His hand moved to his belt.
She saw the knife only when it was already too close.
He did not swing like he meant to kill her. It was worse somehow, more careless than that. A quick, cruel slice meant to frighten, to stop, to punish her for fighting. Vera twisted away, but the blade caught her side.
Heat tore across her ribs.
For a second, she did not feel pain.
Only shock.
Then the pain opened, sharp and bright, and she gasped so hard she nearly lost her footing. Her hand flew to her side. When she pulled it back, her fingers were wet.
Martin grabbed for her again.
Vera swung the loose end of the watch chain without thinking. It struck his face, not hard enough to truly injure, but enough to startle him. He swore, and Vera used the second to rip the watch free from the torn lining and clutch it against her chest.
She ran.
The cut at her side screamed with every step.
She could not breathe properly now. Each inhale dragged against the wound. Warmth spread beneath her hand, soaking into her clothes, too much and not enough to stop her. Behind her, Martin shouted for the others, his voice echoing off the brick.
Vera turned out of the alley and into a wider street.
For half a second, there was space.
Rain. Smoke. The dull glow of lamps. A cart moving slowly at the far end. A woman hurrying across the road with a shawl over her head. The world had not stopped for Vera Hart bleeding in the street, clutching an impossible watch in both hands.
She staggered forward.
Maybe she could disappear.
Maybe the rain would take her shape and the smoke would swallow what remained of her. Maybe she could find somewhere to hide, somewhere Thomas would not think to look, somewhere Campbell would not reach.
Then she heard voices.
Not Campbell’s men.
A shout cut through the rain.
“Vera!”
She froze.
Arthur Shelby came into view first, broad and furious beneath the streetlamp, cap pulled low, one hand already reaching beneath his coat as if the whole street had offended him personally.
John was just behind him, moving fast, eyes scanning the road with a sharpness that made him look older than his grin ever did.
And between them, a few steps ahead, was Thomas.
For one impossible second, Vera felt relief so strong it nearly brought her to her knees.
He had come.
Even after the Garrison. Even after the silence. Even after the hesitation that had cut through her worse than Campbell’s questions. Thomas Shelby had come into the rain looking for her, and the sight of him cracked something open in her chest.
Then Arthur moved past a lamp, and the memory struck.
Arthur shouting Tommy’s name through smoke.
John’s cap on the floor, dark with something Vera did not want to understand.
A gunshot.
Thomas on his knees, one hand stretched toward blood spreading across Garrison boards.
Vera’s own voice saying, “This is because of me.”
The street returned with a sickening snap.
Thomas saw her properly then.
His eyes dropped to the hand pressed against her side, to the blood darkening her clothes, to the torn coat clutched tight against her chest. His face changed.
Not much.
Enough.
He started toward her.
Vera stepped back.
Thomas stopped.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Arthur looked between them, impatient and confused. “Tommy?”
John’s eyes sharpened as he saw her retreat. “Vera, come on.”
She shook her head.
Not at John.
At all of them.
“No.”
Thomas took another step, slower this time. “You’re hurt.”
“You can’t be here.”
His brows drew together. “Vera.”
The sound of her name almost undid her.
She pressed the watch harder against her chest and felt the blood slip warm beneath her other hand.
“You can’t bring them,” she said.
Arthur went still.
John glanced at Thomas.
“What?” Thomas asked.
Vera could hear boots behind her now.
Campbell’s men. Closer than before.
She looked past Thomas to Arthur and John, alive in the rain, angry and confused and ready to follow their brother into any fire he named. Her throat tightened until the words nearly broke coming out.
“Not for me.”
Thomas’s eyes held hers.
For the first time since she had met him in this life, the suspicion was not the first thing there. Something else had moved ahead of it. Concern. Anger. A question he did not yet know how to ask.
Behind Vera, hands seized her arms.
She cried out as one of them caught near her wounded side. The watch nearly slipped from her grip, and she clutched it harder, fingers locked around the casing. Martin had her left arm. Another man took the right.
Arthur surged forward.
John moved with him.
Thomas lifted his gun.
The street tightened into one breath.
Then Campbell’s voice came from behind her, calm enough to be obscene.
“I wouldn’t, Mr. Shelby.”
Vera did not turn. She could not. She kept her eyes on Thomas because if she looked away, she thought she might fall apart entirely.
Campbell stepped into the edge of her vision, rain running off the brim of his hat. “You’ve already made quite a public display for a woman you claim merely works in your pub.”
Thomas’s gun did not lower.
Vera felt one of Campbell’s men pull her backward.
Pain tore through her side, and she bit down hard enough to keep from crying out again.
Thomas took one step forward.
Vera shook her head, frantic now. “Don’t.”
He stopped, and that frightened her as much as if he had not.
Because he was listening.
Because some part of him had come close enough to remembering her that her fear mattered.
Arthur’s voice came rough from behind him. “Tommy, give the word.”
John said nothing, but his hand was already inside his coat.
Vera looked at them and saw them dead.
Not fully. Not clearly. But enough to feel the shape of the loss waiting behind the rain.
Her vision blurred.
Thomas had come for her.
And God help them all, he had brought his brothers.
☾ Warnings: time travel/time-slip, disorientation, fear/panic, 1919 Small Heath, sexism/misogyny, unwanted male attention, intimidation, alcohol, smoking, swearing, Tommy/Thomas being suspicious and intense, brief physical restraint/grabbing of the wrist, memory flashes, blood mention, Grace/Vera tension, Grace being cold, police questioning, Inspector Campbell, threats of arrest/questioning, being taken by police, emotional distress, implied past betrayal, major cliffhanger
The watch was closed tight in her fist, the metal still cold against her palm, the edge of it pressed hard enough into her skin that she could feel its shape. The photograph was hidden inside. Her face. Thomas’s face. The date. The warning in her own handwriting.
Do not let him remember you.
The words had not left her mind. They seemed to have lodged behind her ribs, sharp and impossible, making every breath feel too small.
Thomas looked from her face to her hand.
“What have you got?”
Vera’s fingers tightened.
“Nothing.”
It was a bad lie.
She knew it before his expression changed, and it barely changed at all. That was the worst of it. Thomas did not need to scowl or raise his voice to make the room feel smaller. He only looked at her as if he had already found the weak seam in her answer and was waiting to see how long it took her to split open.
“You found nothing in my wall?”
Vera glanced toward the fallen panel before she could stop herself.
His eyes followed.
Stupid.
She drew in a breath and made herself look annoyed because fear had never done her any favors. “Loose wood. Dust. If that belongs to you, I’m sorry for disturbing it.”
Thomas stepped into the room.
Vera’s body reacted before her mind did, shifting back half a step. He noticed that too. Of course he did. He noticed every small thing and kept each one like a coin placed in his pocket for later.
He closed the door behind him.
Not hard enough to be called a threat. Quietly enough that it felt more like one.
“Open your hand,” he said.
“No.”
The answer came out too quickly.
Thomas tilted his head slightly. “No?”
“I heard myself.”
His gaze remained on her fist. “You’re standing in my private room with something you took from my wall.”
“I didn’t take anything.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Then open your hand.”
Vera’s pulse beat hard in her throat. She could feel the watch against her palm as if it were alive. She had the awful thought that if he came any closer, he would hear it ticking. He would hear it and know. He would know before she understood what there was to know.
She moved toward the door.
Thomas stepped into her path.
Vera stopped.
There was still space between them, but not enough. The room held its breath around it.
“Move,” she said.
He did not.
“Vera.”
She hated the way he said her name. Quiet. Measured. Like he had already decided she belonged among his questions.
“I said move.”
“You’re frightened.”
She laughed once, though it sounded wrong even to her. “Am I?”
“Yes.”
“And what a brilliant detective you are.”
His eyes narrowed a fraction. “Open your hand.”
“No.”
This time, when she tried to move around him, he caught her wrist.
Not roughly enough to bruise. Not violently enough for the kind of pain that would make a person cry out. But his hand closed around her with purpose, his fingers firm beneath the bone, stopping her so suddenly that she drew in a sharp breath.
The room changed.
Or maybe she did.
Smoke seemed to thicken in the air where there was no smoke. The dying fire flared too bright. She felt another hand around her wrist, the same and not the same. Thomas’s voice, closer than it should have been, telling her to look at him.
Vera, look at me.
Her breath caught.
Thomas looked down at where he held her, then back at her face.
“Open it.”
For a moment, she could not answer. The memory from the night before pressed against the present until she no longer knew which version of him she was standing in front of. This Thomas with suspicion in his eyes. That Thomas with blood at his collar and fear stripped bare across his face.
If I remember you, I lose you.
Vera pulled once against his grip.
He held.
“Let go.”
“Then show me.”
“No.”
“Vera.”
Her voice broke sharper than she meant it to. “Let go of me.”
Something shifted in him.
Not softness. Not guilt. Thomas Shelby did not look like a man easily moved by either. But his eyes dropped once more to his hand around her wrist, then returned to her face, and he seemed to understand that her fear was not behaving the way guilt should.
His grip loosened.
Vera tore her wrist free and stepped back, holding the watch behind her hip with a clumsy movement she hoped he did not see. The place where he had touched her burned with the memory of pressure more than pain.
Thomas watched her.
“You found something.”
“I found out you don’t like being told no.”
“That isn’t new.”
“No,” she said, breathing too hard. “I imagine it isn’t.”
His gaze moved over her, slower now. “Whatever it is, you’ll hand it over.”
“I don’t have anything.”
“You’re getting worse at this.”
“Then stop asking.”
Thomas looked toward the wall panel, then at her hand. Vera shifted before she could stop herself, and his attention sharpened.
The door opened somewhere beyond the room, far off in the pub. A footstep overhead. Harry, maybe. The sound broke the hold of the moment just enough.
Vera moved for the door again.
This time, Thomas let her pass.
She did not mistake that for mercy.
As she reached the door, his voice came from behind her.
“Vera.”
She stopped with her hand on the knob.
“I’ll know what was in that wall.”
The watch seemed to grow heavier in her palm.
Vera did not turn around. “Then I suppose one of us has something to look forward to.”
She opened the door and stepped out before he could answer.
The Garrison was dark and empty beyond the low fire. Harry’s footsteps moved somewhere overhead, but he did not come down. Vera crossed the room quickly, careful not to run, careful not to look like what she felt.
She made it to the small room behind the bar before her knees threatened to give.
Only then did she open her hand.
The watch sat there, dull and old and impossible.
Vera stared at it until the metal blurred in her sight.
Then she hid it inside the lining of her coat.
She did not sleep.
Not properly.
She sat in the same chair near the fire with her coat wrapped around her, one hand pressed against the place where the watch was hidden, and listened to the Garrison settle around her. Every creak became Thomas returning. Every distant step became Harry finding her. Every breath of wind at the windows became the year itself trying to get in.
At some point before morning, Vera closed her eyes and saw Grace standing in a doorway.
Not the Grace she knew now, composed and careful behind the bar.
Another Grace.
Her face wet. Her voice shaking.
“I didn’t know he would take her.”
Vera woke with her hand clenched around the fabric of her coat.
The fire had gone low. Her neck ached. Her mouth was dry. Gray morning pressed weakly at the windows, and for a moment she could not tell whether the memory had been a dream or another piece of whatever broken thing was happening inside her.
She only knew that when Grace arrived an hour later, Vera’s stomach turned.
Grace stepped behind the bar without greeting her.
That was new.
Or maybe it was not new. Maybe it was only the first time Vera had noticed the absence of warmth. The neatness was still there. The calm hands. The quiet attention. But the softer tone Grace had used with her before had gone.
She hung her shawl on the hook and looked at Vera’s coat.
“You stayed again.”
Vera tied her apron. “So did the building.”
Grace did not smile.
Harry moved past them carrying a crate. He glanced from one to the other and seemed to decide immediately that he had lived long enough not to stand between two women with that kind of silence on their faces.
Grace reached for the clean glasses. “Did something happen last night?”
Vera felt the watch tucked into her coat like a second pulse.
“No.”
Grace lined up two glasses. Then a third. “You don’t look as though nothing happened.”
“I didn’t realize you’d made a study of my face.”
“I don’t have to study people who make themselves obvious.”
Vera’s hands slowed.
There it was.
The cold under the courtesy.
Grace did not look at her when she said it. She did not need to. Vera heard it perfectly well. Yesterday, Grace’s questions had been dressed as concern. Today, they arrived stripped down, bare and sharp, with none of the pretense that Vera might mistake them for kindness.
Vera looked at her. “Then stop looking.”
Grace set another glass down. “That would be easier if you stopped drawing attention.”
“Whose?”
Grace’s eyes moved to her then.
For half a second, Vera saw something in them she could not name. Irritation, yes. Suspicion. Something more personal than either, though neither of them had earned anything personal between them.
“You should be careful with Thomas Shelby,” Grace said.
Vera’s mouth tightened. “You first.”
Grace went still.
The words had come before Vera measured them. Too quick. Too pointed. And with them came another flicker.
Grace’s hand on her arm.
Grace whispering, “Do as I say for once.”
A door closing.
Vera’s own voice, younger in its fear, saying, “I thought you were helping me.”
Vera blinked hard.
The bar returned.
Grace was watching her now with open suspicion.
“What did you mean by that?” Grace asked.
Vera picked up a cloth and began wiping a counter that was already clean. “Nothing.”
Grace stepped closer, lowering her voice. “Whatever happened with him last night, it would be wise not to pretend it didn’t.”
Vera looked at her. “Nothing happened that concerns you.”
Grace’s expression hardened.
“Everything in this pub concerns someone.”
The words settled strangely.
Vera felt them before she understood them. A tightness low in her stomach. A warning without shape. The sound of Grace’s voice in a place that was not this one, saying a word Vera could not fully hear.
Inspector.
Vera looked down at the cloth in her hand and made a decision with a calmness that surprised her.
She would tell Grace nothing.
Not a guess. Not a fear. Not a single strange thing that had happened since the alley. If Grace asked whether the sky was gray, Vera would look out the window before answering.
The day crawled toward afternoon.
Thomas came in before the pub filled.
Vera felt him arrive the way the room did, in the small changes people made to survive being noticed by him. Harry’s shoulders lifted and settled. One of the early drinkers became interested in his glass. Grace’s spine straightened, though she did not turn immediately.
Vera refused to look up.
That refusal lasted three seconds.
Thomas stood near the end of the bar, cap in hand, rain darkening the edge of his coat. He looked first at Harry, then Grace, then Vera’s hands.
Not her face.
Her hands.
Vera curled her fingers around the cloth before she could stop herself.
A trace of satisfaction passed through his eyes, faint enough that she might have imagined it.
“Harry,” he said.
Harry came over quickly. “Tommy.”
“Any trouble?”
The question was ordinary. It did not feel ordinary.
Harry looked toward Vera for the briefest second.
“No,” he said.
Thomas let the pause sit. “Good.”
Grace moved to pour his drink. Her movements were controlled, but Vera saw the tension in them now. Yesterday she might have missed it. Today she noticed every small tightening. Every silence. Every careful glance that went in Thomas’s direction and returned with less than it wanted.
Thomas accepted the whisky and did not drink.
His eyes moved to Vera.
“Sleep well?”
Vera set the cloth down. “Beautifully.”
“In the chair?”
“It has many qualities.”
“That why you’re shaking?”
Her fingers stilled.
Grace looked at her.
Harry looked away.
Vera leaned one hand against the counter, refusing to give him the satisfaction of checking whether she really was. “It’s cold.”
Thomas’s gaze dropped briefly to her coat, hanging behind the bar.
The watch seemed to drag at its lining from across the room.
“Is it?”
Vera’s jaw tightened.
Before she could answer, the door opened hard enough to announce Arthur before his voice did.
“Tommy,” he called, stepping inside with John just behind him. “Tell John he’s a daft bastard.”
John looked offended. “I won the money.”
“You cheated a drunk man.”
“That’s called business.”
Arthur pointed at him with the hand holding his cigarette. “That’s called being a daft bastard who’ll get stabbed.”
John grinned. “Only if he sobers up.”
The noise should have relieved Vera.
It did, in a way. Arthur and John filled the room with something easier to understand than Thomas’s quiet. But it also brought the Garrison closer to life, and with life came eyes, ears, bodies, questions.
John’s grin found Vera almost immediately.
“You look worse.”
“Good afternoon to you too.”
“Did you rob a church last night?”
Vera reached for a glass. “If I had, I wouldn’t be here.”
Arthur laughed, but he was looking at her harder than John was. “Tommy’s got you jumpy.”
“I was born delightful.”
John leaned on the bar. “That’s not a no.”
Vera poured without being asked and slid a glass toward him. “That’s because I’m learning not to answer Shelby questions.”
Arthur laughed again. John looked delighted.
Thomas did not.
He had taken a seat near the private room, close enough to see her without making a show of it. Vera hated that he did not need to stare. His attention had weight even when turned slightly aside.
Grace noticed too.
Of course she did.
As the afternoon wore on, the pub filled in uneven waves. Men came in from the damp street shaking rain from their caps, calling for whisky, talking too loudly about work, horses, war, women. Vera moved through the work with the watch hidden close and her body wound tight around the secret.
Every time someone brushed too near her coat, she felt sick.
Every time Thomas moved, she felt the watch beneath the fabric as if it were responding.
Grace was colder than before, but not openly cruel. She did not have to be. She simply stopped making space for Vera. She stopped explaining things unless Harry told her to. When Vera reached for the wrong bottle, Grace corrected her in front of a customer. When a man made a comment about the new girl’s mouth, Grace did not intervene. She only watched to see what Vera would do.
Vera learned quickly.
Not the work.
The woman beside her.
Grace’s kindness had been a door. Now it was shut.
Near dusk, Vera saw her slip out.
It should not have mattered. Grace could step outside. Anyone could. The air inside the Garrison was thick enough to choke on, and Vera herself had gone out the day before to breathe.
But Grace did not leave through the front.
She moved toward the side door near the back, shawl pulled around her shoulders, her face composed in that careful way that now made Vera’s instincts sharpen. Harry was arguing with a man over a short payment. John was telling a story to three men who appeared to be enjoying it against their better judgment. Arthur had gone to the private room with Thomas.
No one else noticed.
Vera did.
She waited ten seconds.
Then she followed.
The narrow passage beside the Garrison was wet and dim, the brick slick beneath a smear of evening light. Vera stopped just inside the side door, keeping herself mostly hidden. Grace stood near the mouth of the alley with her back turned.
A man waited there.
Not close enough for Vera to see his face clearly.
She heard only one word.
“Inspector.”
The alley dropped away for half a breath.
A hard-lit room flashed through Vera’s mind.
Grace standing near a desk, twisting gloves in her hands.
A man’s voice, old and cold, saying something Vera could not make out.
Then the moment vanished before she could catch any more of it.
Grace turned.
Their eyes met.
Neither of them spoke.
The man at the mouth of the alley shifted, and Vera saw enough of him now: older, rigid, watchful in a way that made the hairs along the back of her neck rise. Not a drunk. Not a worker. Not a man who belonged to the street in any ordinary way.
Grace’s expression changed.
Not fear.
Calculation.
Vera stepped back inside before Grace could call out.
Her hands were shaking by the time she returned to the bar.
Inspector.
She did not know what any of it meant.
She knew enough.
When Grace came back several minutes later, she did not look at Vera at first. She removed her shawl, hung it up, and returned to the bar as if nothing had happened.
Vera was pouring whisky for a man with half his attention on John’s story.
Grace came to stand beside her.
“You shouldn’t follow people.”
Vera did not look at her. “You shouldn’t meet men in alleys.”
Grace’s jaw tightened. “You don’t know what you saw.”
“No,” Vera said. “But I know you don’t want Thomas to know I saw it.”
That hit its mark.
Grace turned her head slightly, eyes on Vera now. “Be careful.”
Vera gave a small, humorless smile. “There it is again.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
Grace’s voice lowered. “You are making enemies in a place where you have no friends.”
Vera looked at her then.
For a second, the anger inside her slipped, and something older moved beneath it. Hurt without a memory attached. Grief with no story. She did not understand it, and because she did not understand it, she hated it.
“Funny,” Vera said quietly. “I could have sworn you were trying to sound like one.”
Grace looked away first.
Before Vera could decide whether that meant anything, the front door opened.
The room quieted in a way it had not even for Thomas.
Not fully. The Garrison did not go silent all at once. It resisted, voices dragging to a stop in pieces. A laugh died near the window. A chair scraped. Harry looked toward the door and went pale in a way Vera had not seen before.
The man from the alley stepped inside.
Inspector Campbell looked around the room as if every person in it had already disappointed him.
He was not alone. Two uniformed policemen stood behind him, broad in the doorway, rain on their coats, hands resting where men rested hands when they wanted others to notice what they carried.
Grace’s fingers curled once around the edge of the bar.
Vera saw it.
Thomas emerged from the private room before Campbell had taken more than three steps.
Arthur came behind him, shoulders already tense. John’s grin had vanished.
“Inspector,” Thomas said.
“Mr. Shelby.”
The words carried enough dislike to sour the air between them.
Campbell removed his gloves slowly. “I trust I’m not interrupting.”
Thomas looked around at the pub, at the drinkers, at Harry, at the policemen in the doorway. “You are.”
Campbell smiled faintly. “Then I’ll be brief.”
No one believed him.
Vera stood behind the bar with the cloth in her hand and the watch hidden in the coat behind her. She felt suddenly exposed without it on her body, as if leaving it even a few feet away had been a mistake.
Campbell’s eyes found her.
She knew then.
Whatever Grace had said in the alley, whatever had passed between them, had been enough.
“You,” Campbell said.
The room seemed to tilt toward her.
Vera did not move.
Thomas did.
Not much. Only half a step, but it shifted him between Campbell and the bar in a way that was difficult to mistake.
Campbell noticed.
So did Vera.
That was worse somehow.
“What is your name?” Campbell asked.
Vera set the cloth down. “Vera Hart.”
“Hart.” Campbell repeated it like he was testing the weight of a counterfeit coin. “And where is home, Miss Hart?”
Vera felt Thomas’s gaze without looking at him.
London would not survive this.
She said it anyway.
“London.”
A pause.
Campbell’s smile deepened at the edges. “London is a large city.”
“So I’ve heard.”
John looked toward the floor as if suppressing the urge to laugh. Arthur did not. He looked ready to hit someone and was deciding how much he cared about the uniform.
Campbell took another step. “Which part?”
Vera’s mouth went dry.
Grace stood beside her, still as a figure in a painting.
Vera could feel her there. Feel every unsaid thing. Every cold glance. Every question tucked behind polite words.
“East,” Vera said.
Campbell’s brows lifted. “East London.”
“Yes.”
“Where, precisely?”
Vera had no answer.
The silence stretched.
Thomas’s jaw tightened.
Campbell looked pleased.
“Do you have papers?”
Vera stared at him. “Papers?”
“Identification. Employment record. A letter of reference. A family name that can be confirmed. Anything at all that proves you are who you claim to be.”
Vera could feel the walls again.
Not the Garrison walls. Worse ones. Legal ones. Social ones. The kind that had existed before she arrived and had no reason to bend for her now. She had no papers. No home. No family here. No person who could stand up and say where she came from without lying.
“I work here,” she said.
Campbell glanced at Harry. “Does she?”
Harry opened his mouth.
Thomas answered first.
“She works here.”
The room held still around the words.
Vera looked at him despite herself.
It was not warm. It was not gentle. It was not enough. But it was something placed down between her and Campbell, and she hated that part of her wanted to lean toward it.
Campbell turned slowly to Thomas. “Since when do you employ women whose names cannot be checked?”
Thomas took his cigarette from his mouth. “Since I bought the pub.”
A faint laugh moved through a corner of the room and died quickly.
Campbell’s eyes hardened. “I am asking about the girl.”
“And I answered.”
“No, Mr. Shelby. You claimed her employment. Not her innocence.”
Vera’s stomach twisted.
Claimed her employment.
Not her innocence.
The distinction hurt more than it should have. It should not have hurt at all. Thomas owed her nothing. He did not know her. Not this Thomas. Not in any way that mattered now.
But the watch said otherwise.
The photograph said otherwise.
Some version of him had held her wrist in smoke and told her to look at him like he was afraid she would disappear if she didn’t.
This Thomas looked at her like a problem.
Campbell stepped closer to the bar. “Are you in the habit of sheltering strangers, Mr. Shelby?”
Thomas’s eyes did not move from him. “Only when police come sniffing after them.”
Arthur shifted near the private room door.
One of the policemen at the entrance shifted too.
The air thinned.
Campbell seemed to enjoy it. “A young woman appears in Small Heath with no address, no papers, no family, and a story too poor to be called a lie. She sleeps in your pub. You take an interest in her. I’m merely curious.”
“Curiosity doesn’t bring two officers.”
“No,” Campbell said. “Experience does.”
Vera’s heart beat harder.
Thomas looked at her then, only briefly.
That glance was enough to make something inside her break loose.
Because there was still suspicion in it.
Even now.
Even with Campbell turning the whole pub into a courtroom, even with Grace standing beside her too quiet, even with Vera feeling as if the century itself had found a way to put hands around her throat, Thomas still looked like he wanted an answer from her before he decided how far to go.
She almost laughed.
She almost told him everything right there.
The watch. The photo. The warning. His hand around her arm outside the Garrison in 1919, both of them caught in a moment neither one of them remembered properly.
Instead, Campbell spoke again.
“Miss Hart,” he said, “you will come with me.”
“No.”
The word left her before she knew she would say it.
Campbell’s attention sharpened. “No?”
“No.”
“You are not being arrested.”
“How comforting.”
“You are being taken in for questioning.”
“That sounds like arrested with better manners.”
John muttered something under his breath. Arthur’s mouth twitched once, but his eyes stayed on the police.
Campbell’s face cooled. “You are a very careless young woman.”
Vera felt Grace move beside her.
Not toward her.
Away.
Only a small shift, but Vera noticed it because every part of her was searching for the blade.
Something in her stomach tightened.
Grace had stepped away like that in the alley too. Calmly. Carefully. As if distance could make her innocent. As if silence could keep blood off her hands.
Vera looked at her.
Grace did not look back.
That was when Vera understood enough.
Not everything. Not even close. But enough to know that Grace had not been surprised when Campbell walked through the door. Enough to know that the coldness in her had not come from fear.
It had come from being caught.
The anger rose so fast it nearly choked her.
“Why ask me?” Vera said.
Every head turned.
Grace’s hand stilled on the edge of the bar.
Vera did not know why the words felt older than the moment, only that once they started, she could not swallow them back.
“Ask Grace,” she said. “She’s the reason you came.”
The room went so quiet it felt dead.
Grace’s face emptied.
Campbell’s expression changed so quickly that Vera knew she had hit something real. Not enough to understand, but enough to wound.
Thomas turned his head toward Grace.
Slowly.
That was worse than if he had snapped.
Grace recovered first, because of course she did. “She’s frightened.”
Her voice was steady, but Vera heard the strain beneath it.
“She doesn’t know what she’s saying,” Grace continued.
Vera laughed once, soft and ugly. “Funny how everyone says that when I’m right.”
Grace looked at her then, and for one second Vera saw something break through the cold. Not guilt exactly. Not memory. Something that looked almost like pain.
Then Campbell moved.
“This girl is clearly unstable.”
Thomas’s gaze remained on Grace a moment longer before returning to Campbell. “Careful.”
“I would say the same to you.” Campbell gestured toward one of the officers. “Bring her.”
The first officer stepped forward.
Arthur did too.
The whole pub shifted with him.
Chairs scraped. Men rose without fully standing, caught between loyalty, fear, and the knowledge that violence in the Garrison had a way of becoming everyone’s problem. John moved quietly to Arthur’s side, all humor gone from his face.
Thomas did not raise his voice.
“No.”
Campbell looked at him. “No?”
“She stays.”
Vera could not breathe around the sudden, terrible relief that tried to rise inside her.
Campbell’s eyes sharpened. “On what grounds?”
“She works here.”
“We have established that employment at the Garrison now requires no background and no truth.”
Thomas stepped closer. “You don’t take people from my pub.”
Campbell smiled then, and there was nothing pleasant in it. “Your pub is not a country, Mr. Shelby.”
“No,” Thomas said. “It’s mine.”
For a moment, Vera thought the room might truly erupt.
Arthur’s hand lowered near his side. John’s eyes moved to the officers. Harry looked like he might be sick. Grace stood very still, caught between Campbell and Thomas and whatever Vera had just dragged into the light.
Campbell leaned slightly toward Thomas.
“If you prevent me from questioning her, I can return with enough men to turn this place over floorboard by floorboard.” His eyes moved toward the private room. “I wonder what I might find.”
Thomas said nothing.
The silence that followed was not weakness.
Vera understood that even through her panic. It was calculation. Thomas was measuring the room, the officers, the risk, the secrets hidden in the walls or under ledgers or in men’s pockets. He was deciding what could be lost if he turned one woman’s questioning into a war in the middle of his own pub.
One woman.
A stranger.
A liar.
Vera saw the decision before he made it.
Something inside her went cold.
Campbell saw it too.
“There we are,” he said softly.
Thomas’s eyes cut to him.
Campbell gestured again. “Miss Hart.”
The officer came around the bar.
Vera backed up once and hit the shelf behind her. Bottles rattled.
John took one step forward.
Thomas lifted a hand.
John stopped, but not happily.
The officer took Vera by the arm.
She jerked away on instinct, but there was nowhere to go. The bar hemmed her in. Grace stood to one side, pale and silent. Harry looked at the floor. Arthur swore under his breath. John stared at Thomas like he was waiting for the order that did not come.
Vera looked at Thomas.
His face gave away almost nothing.
Almost.
There was something in his eyes now that had not been there before. Not trust. Not even belief. But doubt had entered the room and found him. Vera could see it working behind his stillness, turning over what she had said about Grace, what Campbell had known, what Vera should not have known at all.
It was not enough.
The officer pulled her toward the end of the bar.
As she passed her coat, Vera’s hand shot out.
Thomas noticed.
So did Campbell.
Vera caught the coat in her fingers and dragged it down from the hook, clutching it to her chest before the officer could stop her.
“Cold out,” she said.
Her voice sounded distant to her own ears.
Thomas’s eyes dropped to the coat.
For one terrible second, Vera thought he knew.
Then the officer pulled her onward.
The room moved around her in fragments. A man stepping aside. Harry whispering her name like he regretted learning it. Grace’s breath catching as Vera passed. Campbell turning toward the door with the satisfaction of a man who had taken exactly what he came for.
At the threshold, Vera stopped fighting the officer’s grip.
She looked back.
Not at Grace.
At Thomas.
The words rose before she could make them softer.
“You really don’t know me.”
Thomas went still.
The pub seemed to hold the sentence after she said it.
It did not sound the way she meant it to sound. It did not sound like anger. Not only anger. It sounded like grief, deep and old and impossible, and Vera hated herself for giving him even that much.
Thomas said nothing.
But his expression changed.
Not enough for the room to read.
Enough for her.
The officer pulled her out into the rain.
The door shut behind them, cutting off the warmth and smoke of the Garrison all at once.
Outside, Campbell’s motorcar waited at the curb, dark and wet beneath the gray evening. The officer kept hold of Vera’s arm as he led her toward it. She clutched her coat tightly with her free hand, feeling the hidden weight of the watch inside the lining.
The watch was still there.
Still hers.
Behind her, the Garrison remained closed.
Vera did not look back again.
If Thomas Shelby wanted answers, he would have to decide she was worth following for them.
