Hunted by the mafia, memories and secrets in Rome/Tom Kaulitz story

Chapter 45

Tom’s POV

Stirring slowly in the can of unidentified slob, I was debating on whether I should try to stuff the supposedly meat into my mouth. Chunks of strangely grey-colored bits, heavier than potato, were floating on the surface. Deciding I wasn’t going to try to force it into myself, I placed it on the table and shuffled it away.

-Not up for eating tonight? Bill asked humorless.  

Still sniffing the awful smell across the table from the can he was happily eating from, I nearly gagged. Bill looked like he actually liked the disgusting food. Or that’s what it looked like anyway.

If he tried to put up some kind of façade to show he wasn’t affected by the horrific food to try to make me eat it, I would be more than happy to know he didn’t enjoy it.

For days we had been cooped up in this stinking apartment. Without any good electricity, heat and a proper meal, I felt like I would crawl on the falls soon because my sanity felt at risk here. The place was a one-room apartment with a metallic bed shoved in the corner, a trashed old sofa and a small heating-plate next to the window.

 The floor was ill treated with marks and scratches everywhere. Last night I had spent hours counting every little spot of water or mold-damage there were on the walls and the ceiling. I started to shudder with repulsion when I finally lost count.

-Please don’t tell me you like this shit? I frowned. Bill shrugged his shoulders lightly before looking down into the can.

-It was all that was left.

-Really? Are you positive about that? I spit out, annoyed and walked up to the window, glancing outside at the frozen streets.

-Don’t get pissed at me. That was everything there was left and if you don’t like it, you can go out yourself and get the food, he snapped.

Huffing a breath, I didn’t have the energy to start a brawl. I hadn’t eaten a good, proper meal since we were in Moscow.

-Fine, be that way then, Bill growled before taking the can and spoon with him and stomped outside the front door and slammed it shut.

I barely had the will too look at him as he left but that was only because I knew he wasn’t going all too far. If I knew him right he would take a seat right on the floor in the corridor, keeping an eye out and finish his meal.

Looking around on the street I tried my best to see some kind of hope in this godforsaken small-town.  The ruined brick houses were barely holding together in the cold. Everything was layered in either a thin snowy quilt or big puddles of water.

The roads were hardly able to hold up the little traffic that passed, but it did the job for the bunch of people who were walking or bicycling through the town. I had no idea how we ended up here but for some reason, the mafia clans hunted us higher and higher up in Russia and suddenly we were in some crappy old town in the north, not far away from Siberia.

It was cold, shitty and frankly it felt like we had hit beneath rock bottom. For months we had been running, escaping the hands of the mafia clans. With small communications with Gustav and Georg in Tokyo, we had managed to avoid them almost fully, but just almost.

They almost caught us in Spain twice, and there was a really awful moment in England where I lost track of Bill and he got surrounded. I was just in time to shoot the handful of goons down so we could head for escape before the place got surrounded with mafia members from each district in the whole country.

Besides those incidents there were a couple of smaller encounters that involved a quick re-location to an even more closed off and murkier place. It got darker and darker for us when we tried to find places where they weren’t likely to find us.