The picture Mitch had given Adam was on the table. Jase stared at it wondering how the hell Madison had ended up so unlucky in life. He'd slept on the sofa, or at least tried to. The night had dragged on with him tossing and turning every five minutes, unable to get comfortable without the warmth of her by his side. The lack of sleep presented itself in the form of grey bags and bloodshot eyes.
"Stop torturing yourself," Sam said as he placed a coffee down in front of him. "Look on the bright side, as soon as she's gone, Mitch backs off, business picks up, people stop questioning shit. You'll bounce back in no time once everything is back to normal." Jase twitched a brow but didn't have the energy to muster any sort of response. Sam was trying his best, grasping at all the silver linings he could come up with. For Jase, there were none.
For the first time what constituted normal in different people's lives struck him as bizarre. Whilst guns, drugs, and sex were their normality, to anyone outside of the house, it was foreign and frowned upon. He couldn't help but think about what life would be like if he had a different type of normality. A safer, stable normality with a normal childhood and a normal job. His mind crept into the dangerous territory of what would happen had he met Madison under different circumstances and he quickly shook the thought. It wasn't worth dwelling on fantasies.
Sam sighed, deflated in the presence of Jase's stagnation. He'd never seen him like this and he didn't know what to do.
"I have tried to think of another way around this but I've hit dead ends everywhere. Giving Madison to Mitch is a last resort, but it's the only solution I've got," he swore. Jase, again, said nothing.
He missed being numb before experiencing feelings for someone, when it had endorsed his God complex and encouraged his cruelty in exchange for an ego boost. The numbness he felt now was icy and bitter, leaving a sour taste in his mouth and his skin too tight. He missed when the girls were nameless faces passing through and there was an element of respect from more or less everyone that crossed his path.
However, in summary, everything Sam stated was true. With Mitch making a racket, Ramon would eventually pull out of business with the house and that would be the girls done, their drug supply would dry up and the legal appearance of their earnings would be removed with it all. Ramon was the boss of bosses and if Madison were to keep making dents, they would get fired, which in their world often meant a bullet between the eyes to eliminate the risk of becoming an informant. It didn't matter what decision Jase made, one way or another, Madison ended up dead. It was the brutal reality of the game they played.
"It's fine," Jase finally replied. "I'm coming to terms with it. Madison was fun, now we have a job to do." He got up, leaving the coffee untouched and going for a drive.
Madison had clouded his thoughts since the moment he'd seen her on the sofa with her hands bound, before that if he was honest. Since the alleyway, he'd thought about her at least once a day.
*
"What's going to happen to Madison?" Janine asked once Sam finished lamenting about how down Jase was. He puffed his cheeks, pushing his hair back.
"If we go through with my plan, Jase turns her over to Mitch."
"Why does he have to do it? That's not fair, he's clearly already upset about things," she replied, surprised by the empathy she felt for the man that had spent years treating her like she wasn't worth the air she breathed.
Sam shook his head,
"He can't be on the back burner. Everyone is pretty much of the opinion that she's got him wrapped around her little finger. If he isn't the one to sell her down the river then none of this actually stops, they want to see Jase correct his mistakes-"
"Having feelings isn't a mistake," Janine contended to which Sam rolled his eyes.
"You know what I mean."
"But why? If you absolutely have to offer Madison up to that peace of shit, why can't you send someone else to take her to him? It's not like it matters, he still gets what he wants." She glared at Sam. Unlike Jase, Janine had allowed her anger to surface, and she blamed Sam for not being able to come up with another plan, finding the whole thing both heartbreaking and vaguely childish.
"Because if he goes into hiding it'll just confirm what everyone thinks, and anyone that fancies getting to him without having to get to him will see Madison as a means to do so," he replied in frustration, unsure if Madison would even be kept around long enough to be used as a target.
The corners of Janine's lips narrowed, her nails dug into the palms of her hands, quelling a small amount of tension in her body. It was profound how toxic the male ego could be, seeing treating women as people as some sort of pitfall.
"What will Mitch do to her?" she asked. Sam tucked his bottom lip in, he had tried not to consider the fate they were signing her over to, it didn't help in convincing Jase to let her go by thinking of what was going to happen to her. Not because Sam cared all that much, but because the people he cared about did. If Jase was capable of loving anyone, it would be Madison, and Sam wasn't blind to the fact that had Jase asked him to do the same thing with Janine, he'd be impotent. He justified his hypocrisy with the excuse that he'd known Janine for longer and they had history.
"I don't know," he said quietly. He didn't want to know, either. The only thing he wanted was for it to be over.
As the sky darkened, people started turning up to the house. Jase informed Sam via text that they were having a party to recoup some of the money they'd had to shell out for Ramon's club windows. There were six shots in total fired through the tinted glass at the entrance, shattering the doors. The bullets had lodged into the purple-papered walls inside.
"You coming down?" Sam asked, getting dressed and spraying himself with deodorant. Janine hadn't felt like finding a cute outfit and sitting at her vanity for hours, she'd barely bothered to put on mascara.
"Can I go see Madison first?" she asked. Sam shook his head, wishing she would take a page out of Jase's book and start putting space between them.
"No. You should start distancing yourself, she won't be here much longer."
Janine's posture dropped, her shoulders sinking with her heart as her last sliver of hope dwindled. She had really thought Madison was untouchable. At first, it seemed like a phase but after seeing how Jase looked at her, the idea of her being at risk was laughable, impossible. She'd even believed Madison had it in her to escape and now everything was being stripped away.
The disappointment was her own fault, she shouldn't have been surprised. This was Jase, he was renowned for being able to make tough decisions and cut people off when it was absolutely necessary, that was why he was Benny's Top Boy. He did the things no one else could - or would - do. Janine vowed to never allow herself to be consumed in the idea of a friendship under their roof ever again.
She followed Sam downstairs, grateful for the opportunity to drown her sorrows and hopefully get Madison alone for a moment or two to at least say goodbye. The regular crowd congregated in the living room, the sofa taken up by more people than there was space for, squeezed together like coked-up sardines. Kieran, Tommy, and Jase sat at the table, Jase leaned over his phone screen with a twenty-pound note rolled into a tube, a white line disappeared up it.
Sam bumped fists with the men and pulled Janine onto his lap, accepting the little button bag Tommy was holding out to him. Janine watched Jase closely as he threw his head back and took another deep breath through his nose, rubbing at it to soothe the burn of the chemicals.
"Fucking hell," he laughed, shuddering and grinning at Tommy, "where the fuck did you get that?" His body language was a wild contrast to how Sam had described him earlier. He didn't seem empty or paralysed with anguish. He looked fine, better than fine. It would take someone that really knew him to see through the jovial mask he so expertly wore. Someone like Janine who knew Jase didn't make a habit of trying cocaine he wasn't selling himself.
"Billy, down by the docks, reckons he's giving it up now his misses is back in the picture, gave it to me half price," Tommy replied, racking up his own line.
"That's decent, might have to see who his supplier is," Jase said, something else that gave him away- he would never outsource product from someone other than Ramon, a name Janine had been around long enough to know. She didn't enjoy this exaggeration that everything was fine, it pissed her off. How could he pretend with such ease? She wanted to bring him back down to Earth and remind him what was actually going on.
"Is Madison not coming down?" she asked, feeling Sam tense behind her. Jase curled his upper lip and rolled his shoulders, picking up the bottle of brandy and pouring himself a generous triple.
"Don't know, haven't spoken to her." He hadn't faltered. Anyone would think he never cared.
"Can I go get her?" she persevered, hoping that having Madison there would make him wind his neck in, remind him that she was a living, breathing human being that he couldn't just brush under the rug like she never existed. Jase grinned.
"Nope. We're going back to how things were, better get used to it again. Your bestie is going on a little holiday soon and she's only got a one-way ticket." She swallowed the abuse sitting on the tip of her tongue, glowering at him.
"Yeah, a one-way ticket and she's paying extra for baggage," Tommy said, erupting into laughter. Jase laughed as well, which only made Janine angrier as they carried on.