Page 58 of Crave

“There’s always strings.” He turned fully on me. “Whether you nicked that off the back of a fucking lorry or used your dirty money on it, the thing’s tainted. You think I want my babies in that?”

It burnt, hearing it. But he wasn’t wrong. He never was.

And there was the reason, glaring right at me, why I shouldn’t have come. So I stood. “You don’t have to struggle, Len. You don’t have to let her struggle.”

He glared up at me as if I’d spat in his face. “And you don’t have to put poison in people’s veins, but here the fuck we are.”

“Take care, Len.” I stepped around the table to the door. “Joe says stop by the caff, he’s got that bacon you like.”

“Was it you?” Lennon called after me.

I stopped. “Was what me?”

“The phone.”

“No,” I lied through sheer will to keep him from cutting off his pregnant girlfriend because I’d footed the bill of her smashed phone.

He held my gaze long enough for the weight of it to settle. “You could come work on the building site with me?” he said suddenly, the words tumbling out too fast. Too hopeful. As if he were gripping the wrist of a man already halfway off a cliff. “We need muscle.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d offered. But this time… it hit different. There was no banter in it. No elbow to the ribs. Just a plea with skin on it. But I said what I always said.

“On a zero-hours contract? Where the minute the job wraps, I’m back at the Jobcentre?” I shrugged, because shrugging hurt less than admitting anything.

Lennon turned back to the telly. Back to his plate. “Stay fucking safe, Rich.” His voice cracked on the last word. “I can’t bear the thought of seeing you on there one day.” He pointed his fork at the screen.

The news had switched to a local stabbing. A cordon. A sheet on the pavement. Someone’s kid. Someone’s brother. Probably someone I knew. Might even be Tiny. So I didn’t have anything to say to him. Because he wasn’t wrong.

And the odds were, one day he would.

So I left.

Leaving the buggy leaning up against a wall for someone else to take.

Chapter thirteen

Tristan

Focusing on my dissertation wasn’t ever going to happen.

No matter how long I sat at my desk, the house silent while everyone else was out, the words refused to fall into line. The sentencing data I was meant to be analysing, the row after row of numbers masquerading as people, justice stripped down to pattern and probability, couldn’t hold my attention the way it normally could. Somewhere in that spreadsheet was the evidence I needed, the proof for three thousand words on structural privilege in sentencing outcomes. But my thoughts were sadly elsewhere.

Razor.

The living proof of what I was critiquing.

And Oliver’s betrayal, of course. That loop wouldn’t stop either. I should’ve seen it coming. The signs were there. But I hadn’t wanted to see it. Hadn’t wanted to be proven that he’d only been with me for one thing. My privilege. Now, with the illusion gone, I could finally see him for what he’d always been. A social climber in a tailored suit, scaling my father’s dinner parties as if they were rungs on a ladder.

My mother used to warn me about gold-diggers.

She should’ve mentioned those who wore cufflinks and quoted The Economist.

Oliver Montgomery had become a stranger to me overnight. The man I’d spent two years circling and defending, had become a traitor. But the truth was, it hadn’t happened overnight. It had been a slow, polite decay. I’d seen it. Buried it. Focused on grades, on being better than my father and pretending perfection could keep the rot out. But what stung the most? What had me in utter fury was how he hadn’t even asked if I wanted to be part of his rebellion. This phase of him ‘trying something different’ as he’d put it. No, he’d asked Benji.

Of course it was Benji.

I couldn’t even bring myself to hate him for it. It was too predictable. Too on-brand. Benji Rothwell: five percent psycho, a hundred percent sociopath, and somehow still the centre of every room he walked into. If it weren’t for the Rothwell’s and the Hale-Fitzroy’s having shared social calendars since birth, I’d have cut him out long ago. But that was the problem with our world. Small pond, same fish. Everyone lying, networking or fucking their way through the same circle.

Did I believe they’d been fucking this whole time?