Tigress → Thomas Shelby

Tremble

For the first time since he had returned, Thomas found that he could not give into the dizzy, suffocating smoke that filled his lungs.

The dream was the same – it was always the same, and Thomas knew it would plague him until the end of time. The routine was the same too – eyes flying open, chest heaving, blinking wildly at the ceiling to ensure it was just cracked wallpaper and not the confines of a tunnel deeper underground than any coffin. Trembling fingers clumsily undoing the lock of the box he kept under his bed. Hoping for the rough wooden pipe to be there while wishing for it not to be at the same time.

But as the opium began to numb the edge of his serrated nerves tonight, he was kept awake by the woman in the same shade of red that stretched across Chinatown's borders.

"No docks, no opium, Mr. Shelby," he could see her lips form the words, like one of the movies Finn was obsessed with. "How will you fare at night?"

How did she know that? How the fuck could she possibly know that?

Thomas wasn't scared by the inability to fuel his habit. He couldn't remember the last time he'd dreamt peacefully anyways, so you couldn't lose what you'd never had. Besides, opium settled in like cancer. He had walked past the drugged creatures lounging around Chinatown's cheaper parlors (not the ones she resided in), had smelt their acrid breath and seen their glazed eyes. The drug had toppled nations – it could certainly topple him if he wasn't careful.

No; what scared him was how deep her spies went. If she knew about his opium, what else had she weaselled out of people?

She wasn't the only one with a talent for dredging up people's dirty laundry. The second his eyes met hers for the first time, Thomas hadn't hesitated to flex his own network of spiders.

"The new China lady?" A derisive snort. "What do you want with her?"

Thomas lit a cigarette. "What I want with her is none of your business, Gio."

Gio was a short, considerably overweight man with fists almost big as his head. Despite being in his mid-fifties, he had failed to work his way up the ladder of the Italian mob in his forty years of service. Abrasive, greedy and easily coerced, Gio didn't do himself any favors with a Gypsy mother and an Italian father. While Gio had watched Thomas grow from an oddly observant child to the leader of the Peaky Blinders, Thomas had watched Gio age physically but neglect to do so mentally. It was the passage of time as well as the Gypsy in them both that persuaded Gio to feed Thomas insider information about the Italians in Small Heath.

That, and the fact that Thomas knew the name and address of Gio's Gypsy lover, whose existence would lead to Gio's expulsion from the mob under accusations of disloyalty.

"You don't want to fuck her, do you? She's got tits the size of roach bites!"

Thomas sighed. "I'm asking for business, not pleasure."

"A whore, is she? In that case, there are plenty better looking..." Gio fell silent as Thomas gave him a stern look. "Okay, okay, sorry. Got carried away."

Another look, this time more pressing than sharp. Gio conceded. "None of us have been paying much attention. It's mainly you lot who talk to the Chinese, but we do have deals with them on some of the automobile parts coming in from outside the country."

"Go on."

"Well, I overheard a conversation between some of the guys who work on that side of things, and they seemed pretty pissed off. Said Missy Hi – "

" – Hu," Thomas corrected. "Ms. Hu."

"Yeah, her – the guys said she upped the Chinese's prices out of the blue. She hadn't asked; she just did. Usually, our guys wouldn't have stood for that, but that's easier said than done when you don't have twenty Chinamen surrounding you with guns. So our guys coughed up more than they should have."