Page 63 of Claim

Fuck knew how many days crawled past since Tricky had walked out and left me with something I didn’t trust. Hope was a liability in here. I could’ve marked the wall, kept count, but I’d seen how that ended for some poor bastard before me. Scratches gone crooked. Lines turning into spirals. Same as the bloke who’d made them.

So I didn’t count.

I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling instead, tracing cracks in the paint as if they might spell something out if I looked long enough. My ribs throbbed in a steady, dull rhythm. Less knife, more reminder. Shoulder still wrong. Knuckles stiff, skin tight and healing ugly. I flexed my fingers, feeling the pull, the protest.

“Days, not weeks.”

His voice kept slipping into the silence whether I wanted it or not.

I’d played the meeting over and over, because what the fuck else was there to do in here? The way he looked when they brought me in. The way he’d stayed, fought, made them bring me up. When he’d cleaned my wounds and let me, for the briefest moment, touch him. What he must’ve done on the outside to make that happen. To put himself opposite me, alone, and say he’d act for me.

That took something.

Bravery. Or stupidity.

Either way, it took balls.

And yeah…when I thought about him too long, the inevitable happened.

I was glad of the solitude then. Though it wasn’t helping my hand to heal.

The hatch rattled open again. Water. Pills. I didn’t take them. Pain kept me present. Reminded me where I was and why keeping my head straight mattered. So I did a few press-ups until my shoulder protested. Then moved onto squats until my legs burnt. Finished by shadowboxing the air, pulling punches before they landed. I wasn’t trying to win anything. I was reminding my body it still belonged to me.

By the time they took me out for yard, the sky was the colour of dirty tin.

The yard was a cage. Concrete underfoot. Wire overhead. One officer watching from a distance as if I might suddenly sprout wings. I stood still for most of it, head tipped back, breathing cold air for it to scrub me clean.

“Think of the lake.”

I could see it if I tried. The water flat and grey, stretching out far enough for me to stop buzzing. Tricky on the bank, skin shiny and gold, pretending he wasn’t watching me as if I’d disappear if he blinked. Pretending I wasn’t the sort of man who could sink himself if left alone too long.

That memory was the only clean one I had.

Everything else was tainted. Grit under fingernails, Hackney asphalt, blood on concrete, a long trail of stupid decisions I’d convinced myself were inevitable. Even my childhood was threaded through with it. Noise. Violence. No way out.

But the lake…

That weekend in the Chilterns, wherever the fuck that was, had been different. Quiet. Space. A stillness I’d never known how to ask for, offered anyway by someone who’d known I needed it before even I knew myself.

Thing is, I’d got no frame of reference. No blueprint. No family dynamics to tell me what love looks like. The only role models I had growing up were hard men on the street, flashing cash and gear, telling me if I did what they said I’d have everything they had.

Only they never actually had any of it.

The cars were hired. The phones were nicked. The clothes lifted off someone else’s back. They made it look legitimate. Earned. But it was all smoke and mirrors and bullshit, and by the time I realised I was in too deep to walk away clean.

So yeah. Knowing what love felt like? That wasn’t something I understood. Not in any way that counted. But there’s a lot of time to think in segregation. And sometimes, when the noise finally drops away, I could see the lies for what they were. And the quiet things for what they could be.

If I hadn’t fucked it all up.

But my hour pondering that in the breeze was up, and it was back in the box.

I lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, but sleep wouldn’t come. It kept looping instead. The realisation settling heavier every time.

This had been a setup.

Cormac had known. Maybe someone had clocked me easing back. Maybe something I’d said, or hadn’t done, had reached him sideways and curdled into suspicion. Either way, he’d guessed I wanted out and that maybe I was a liability because of that. Pretty Poison had never been about expansion. It had been a test. Give me something traceable. Tie it to my hands. Then organise a drop and see whether I carried it like a good soldier or flinched.

If I’d walked in with the real thing, clean of him and scrubbed of ownership, and the feds turning up had genuinely blindsided everyone, I’d still be here. No question about that. But I’d be here with his blessing.