Page 44 of Corrupt

I couldn’t move. I was stunned into immobility. And about forty minutes later, my phone buzzed again.

Nice gaff.

I shot upright, nearly upended the poke bowl, and bolted for the door. I rushed down the communal stairs two at a time to the main entrance and flung the front door open to find Razor parked across the street. The driver’s window was down and there he sat, cigarette burning between his fingers, smoke drifting into the warm night. He watched me. Slow. Intent. And I desperately tried to stay calm, while my pulse threatened to sprint out of my neck.

He took his time with the last drag, holding my gaze through the window, then flicked the cigarette onto the impossibly clean pavement of W14 and opened the door. When he stepped out, heat punched straight through me.

He was all in black. Shirt, jeans, boots, the lot. The short sleeves strained around his biceps, fabric damp with sweat and clinging to the solid breadth of his back, tracing every hard line of muscle beneath. His open collar showed a hint of his tattoo, and those dark jeans did criminal things for his thighs. And when he shut the car door with a solid thud and swaggered towards me while I stood there barefoot in boxers and a faded tee, hair a scruffy disaster from lying on the sofa too long, my pulse raced.

The contrast was as blatant as our home postcodes.

But when he climbed the three concrete steps up to me, smoke curling around him, around us, locking us in, I couldn’t have cared less. Especially as he leant in, going to kiss me right there on the communal steps.

But my instinct kicked in and I tilted back. “You’ll need a resident permit to park there.”

He edged closer, mouth near mine. “Couldn’t give a fuck, Tricky.”

“You might get a clamp.” I absolutely should’ve thought about that earlier. Should’ve grabbed a visitor permit. Should’ve done anything except sit immobilised by the thought of him coming. But this wasn’t a normal visitor on a normal Sunday, popping round for a normal bloody Sunday lunch.

This was a drug dealer.

A gang lieutenant.

A fully fledged cog in organised crime who, by every professional standard, should be nowhere near me.

And yet…

He slid his hands on my hips, fingers heavy and sure, guiding me back through the communal entrance, past the row of post-boxes, kicking the main door shut behind us, I couldn’t think of a single reason he shouldn’t be here.

Not one that mattered.

“How about I clamp you?” He pressed me back against the wall, breath hot on my mouth, and pinned me with an intention stealing the floor out from under me, kissing me as if he’d been starving for it. Or would have if the door on the ground floor hadn’t rattled, and he jerked back.

Lara opened her flat door and stepped out in her recital clothes, all bright colours and earnest energy. I’d never felt more naked in my life. Razor stepped away fast, looking at literally anything that wasn’t me or her.

“Tristan,” she said politely as she squeezed past and left through the main door.

Razor exhaled slowly. “You…got housemates?”

I huffed a laugh. “It’s three flats, not one house.”

“Ah.”

I jerked my chin upward. “Third floor. Door’s open.”

He gave me a narrow-eyed look before planting his boot on the first step. The whole staircase shuddered in protest as he climbed, each step creaking under his weight. I followed, heart climbing into my throat with every groan of the wood.

At the top, Razor pushed open the door and stepped into my flat. My space. And he looked around with the same sharp, unsettling appraisal he’d used months ago when he’d slipped through the Clerkenwell window, brushing his fingers over surfaces, over the frames on the wall: a few prints I pretended to understand, a photograph of my brother and Eloise at their wedding, a candid of Henry and me at the Oxford formal. His gaze didn’t linger on any of them, but he catalogued them all the same.

It wasn’t a big flat. Not even close. Two bedrooms, with one really an office I rarely used, a bathroom, and a small living area bleeding into the kitchen. The balcony off the front room was just big enough for a two-seater bistro set and the potted plants my mother insisted would “bring life into the place,” all of which I’d promptly killed.

But space wasn’t why people lived here.

Not in W14.

Here, the currency was the postcode. Boutiques, arthouses, tree-lined crescents, and the Tube close enough to be in central in under ten minutes. The flat had been in my family for decades. My father lived here in his bachelor years; my brother and Eloise used it before graduating to Chelsea. Now it was my turn to inhabit the Hale-Fitzroy reliquary.

Having Razor in it was… strange.