Page 43 of Crave

“I’m less interested in applause than I am in harm. And who gets to define it.”

Father rested his elbows on the desk in a way that would have drawn a rebuke from his own father. “You think I enjoy this? Dragging men like animals into a dock and asking strangers to judge them?”

“Yes.”

He smiled without teeth. “I enjoy being good at something. That is different.”

“Do you ever wonder who they are when they go home? Men you call by a first name only when you want the jury to dislike them.”

“They are defendants.” That word fell like a sentence of its own. “What they are at home is none of my concern, unless they make it mine.”

There it was. The family anthem. We are responsible only for what we decide matters.

I left the study, the lilies bleeding their sterile perfume into the hall, and all I could think to do, to slow the inevitable and stop replaying Ollie’s betrayal along with forgetting the rough hand of a stranger in an alley, was to drown myself in something looking like purpose.

So I said goodbye to Mother and Amelia, jumped in the waiting car and went to the university library, where I sat under its too-bright lights, surrounded by people pretending to understand justice, and buried myself in case law and moral theory until the words lost meaning and darkness spread over Bloomsbury.

If Father imposed order on chaos, I was trying to understand why the chaos felt more honest. Why a man from the gutter could make me feel seen when everything else was built to erase me.

Pathetic, maybe.

But at least it was real.

Even if he felt like a dream.

chapter ten

Razor

Sat in my motor, engine off, window cracked for the smoke to slip out, I glanced at the row of posh townhouses across the street. Islington. Clerkenwell side. Clean. Expensive. And I scrolled through the stolen iPhone, one eye on the movement outside.

Tariq’d been right; most of the phone had been wiped. Whoever owned it knew their way around a reset. Moneyed type. Probably thought a factory restore could hide their sins. Didn’t matter. I still pulled a few things out: recent messages, photos, one address. Enough to paint a picture.

Name on it, Benjamin Rothwell.

Messages between him and an Ollie Montgomery.

Both mouthing off about my club. Calling it “pathetic.” Laughing about how they were gonna make a mint flogging mep between them.

Seething didn’t cut it.

They’d nicked straight out of my line, cut a deal with Ghost’s lot, and had the fucking nerve to brag about it. On my turf. And for what? Not hunger. Not survival. Nah, these weren’t estate kids. These were the polished kind. Money-soft. Hands too clean to have ever bled for anything. Students. Not the grafting type, either. They weren’t working shifts to eat. These were private-school, trust-fund tourists playing gangster for the thrill.

And the worst part?

My gutter boy was mixed up in it.

Couldn’t be a coincidence, could it? Him turning up that night, right when I should’ve had my eyes on the floor, not on some pretty stranger with sharp cheekbones and a mouth that could ruin me. If someone wanted me distracted, sending him in was a smart play.

Only thing was… it didn’t make sense.

I’d kept what I liked buried deep. Concrete-deep. No one knew. Not a whisper. And if someone had talked? I’d have found out long before now. From a warning, a threat, or a message delivered in a bottle smashed across my skull. It’d take a bloody miracle for some random bloke to stumble on exactly the one thing that would have me looking the wrong way at exactly the wrong time. Which meant either I believed in miracles…or something here didn’t add up at all.

Didn’t change the job, though. The reason I was here. What I had to do. But it twisted the knife. Cause my priority was simple. Get back what I was owed: the stash Luca lost, the cash they’d stiffed him for and put it in my line. That’s how I kept the runners fed, the corners paid, the Firm breathing. But every time I tried to think like a boss, my head kept sliding back to the same useless question: why would some posh twat kneel for fifty quid?

And why come back for more?

So I got out the car. Had a nose. Noticed a back alley beside the house, and we all know how much I like them. I found a stupid bit of architecture, some designer ledge and a drainpipe that had no business being that climbable, leading straight up to a half-open bedroom window. Of course rich boys left windows open. What were they afraid of? Crime? They were crime. I got to it. One pull, one lean of weight, and the sash window gave. Easy.