Bête noire → Peaky Blinders [Tommy Shelby] [ BOOK 1 ]

Twenty.

Chapter twenty: In the bleak midwinter 

While Billy remained speechless, Freddie Thorne, who was heavily armed with a machine gun, grazed over Ada's form, especially her hands which were wrapped around the handlebars of the carriage she pushed his son in.

"Ada!"

"Shut up and listen." Ada hissed back from the middle of the warfare.

He retorted. "Have you lost your mind?"

She stopped in her tracks. "I said shut up!" 

When Billy exchanged a dumbfounded expression with his men, she continued. "Now, most of you were in France. So you all know what happens next. I've got brothers and a husband here and Caroline's got a father here. You've all got somebody waiting for you."

Caroline took over and spoke directly to Billy with sorrow in her eyes. "Now, we're wearing black in preparation. I want you to look at me. I want you all to look at me! Who'll be wearing black for you?"

Ada walked back and forth, her voice booming her point between the echoing walls in the road. "Think about them. Think about them right now. Fight if you want to but that baby ain't moving anywhere, and neither are we."

After a stifling silence, Billy, with his hands in his pockets, turned to his men. "They're right, you know. Why should all you men die? It should just be them who caused it!"

A bullet pierced the air with the aftermath of utter chaos. She should've saw it coming, but it was without warning that Billy raised a gun from his hand and shot Tommy in the chest and Danny Owen several times until the man fell to the ground, engulfing a nearby puddle with his blood.

And it was also without warning that Tommy, from his knelt position as he tried to recooperate from his injury, shot up and marched straight for Billy, and in return for his friend's death, he took the life of Caroline's father.

"No!"

By the time she'd fallen down by his side, a scarlet liquid had drenched his white shirt, the light had left his eyes as the colour from his rosy cheeks vanished as if ice had struck him. The gaping hole in the middle of his forehead spewed blood and trickled down his face, and somehow, Caroline, who'd succumbed to the grace of bereavement, held his cheeks as though her touch could cure him of death. He wasn't coming back.

She awoke to find herself not in her age-stained bed, or even in the protection of her house. She awoke to find herself in another world, a world of suffering. As the numbness of grief slowly embraced her heart, she felt grit poking into her knees, like tiny needles. She opened her eyes and gasped in a breath, but nothing came and she choked on her own dry tongue. There was no air in this menacing world; lack of oxygen descended on her mind in a panic, in desperation she sucked in another breath, burning her lungs with a ferocity that consumed her. Mist descended on her eyes. 

Through the misty veil surrounding her eyes she could barely make out Billy's decaying features as he laid lifeless, sprawled out in the middle of the road, his indecency displayed for all on standby to view. She could feel my heart beating against her rib cage, slowing every second. Realisation dawned on her, Billy was dead. She tried to move her lips to give him her final words, but nothing came out, other than a loud battle cry that indicated that she was far from fighting. Perhaps to repay his debts, she'd take revenge out on Tommy, the one who broke her heart twice all in the one day.

"Kimber and me fought this battle one on one. It's over. Go home to your families."

With Tommy's words, Kimber's men looked to one another before approaching the body of their fallen leader. A man who dared to put a comforting hand on Caroline's shoulder was swatted away by the woman's bloody palms. She ought to shoot them for even considering to look at her tear-stricken features. She wasn't supposed to show emotions, not to anybody, but she'd always let her guard down for her father who helped her. Now, who had she left to pick up the pieces?