ᴀꜱʏʟᴜᴍ :: ᴛ.ꜱʜᴇʟʙʏ

xii: mourning black

Three hours later, the doors to Tommy's office opened with such force that they crashed against the walls with two twin bangs, half as loud as the round of shots he wished to send through the wall. He stormed towards his desk and flung his coat down on the chair, reaching for his cigarette case with unthinking desperation. His fingers fumbled on the metal, trembling against his will.

"Tom . . ."

"Shut up," Tommy ground out through gritted teeth. "Don't you say a fucking word, Arthur."

Arthur didn't, standing halfway into the room with his hands anxiously clutching at one another. For the love of God. The last thing Tommy wanted to see was his brother crumbling for the hundredth time. With his first lungful of smoke, Tommy sunk into his chair and closed his eyes.

Fuck.

The hours he had spent after the dawn were hazy, twisted by the pain of the field and the half-second before two bullets and their empty shells struck mud. He had gone to Winnow's decrept corner of Birmingham as if caught in a daze, a fever dream. Nightmarish memories had toyed with his thoughts and his sanity—Aberama in a pool of his own blood, staring blindly at the stage lights; Barney's ruined skull and discarded sniper rifle; Mosley smiling after the rally as though everything had gone to plan; the barrel of the gun pressed against Tommy's own temple in a terrible half-second he had almost grasped—but the sight of Winnow's innocent smile had been the most jarring thing of all, an impossibility after the course the night had taken. How could she still look as though the world held so much promise?

She had been so soft, so untouched by war, a tiny sparrow dressed all in white. The whites of her dark eyes were bloodshot with tears, but all it took was the sight of a cat to brighten her morning. An impossibility. A paradox. Her words crept under his skin, shadowed by the darkness of her past yet lit with a type of strange, effervescent hope Tommy couldn't possibly fathom. She made no sense to him.

It didn't matter. It didn't fucking matter, and why he still bothered to think about it when he had far more important things to consider was beyond him. He had been driven by the desire to hear something close to what his dead mother or his dead wife might have given, but he shouldn't have come—not when Arthur had met him with news almost worse than the note on which he had departed.

"Now say it again," Tommy rasped, once the cigarette halfway down to ash. He had drawn each inhale so deep and so long that he could already feel his head swimming, the air around him thick with smoke. "Say it again, and say it slow."

After a moment, Arthur crossed the office to settle in the seat across from him. After another moment, he reached into his breast pocket and pulled free a tiny vial filled with snow. Only once he was wiping the remnants of two thin white lines from his nose did he begin to speak.

"Michael and Gina are gone, Tom," he said, inhaling the last of the drug with a long sniff. "Him and that American bitch disappeared on the first ship out of Liverpool. They knew what was fucking coming, I'm telling you. They knew."

Red light flickered across Tommy's features as he took another slow drag. He said nothing, and Arthur continued through the silence.

"The shipment's gone, too," he said, "and so are half the men we had protecting it. There's a whole lot of bodies to take to the kiln. Someone found out where it all was and took everything. Two hundred and fifty thousand pounds' worth of pure opium crystals." Another pause, broken again by Arthur. "It could only have been Michael."

The meeting with the IRA, the strange circumstances of his arrival back in England, his cold confrontation in the pub. Since the day Wall Street had crashed, Tommy had sensed something amiss about him. Black fucking cat, indeed. If Michael wanted Tommy to step back from his throne—if he thought he could handle what it meant to lead the Shelby clan—he had something else coming.