“There’s a tube station around the corner,” I tell him. “Ride around for a couple of hours, take the heat off yourself, and add some kudos to your alibi should the cops pull you in for questioning.” I turn to run in the opposite direction with Ada.
“What about you?” he says, grabbing my arm.
“I’ll steal a car.”
“Frankie…” Something cold and silver gets thrust into my hand.
“What the hell is this?” I stare down at the key in shock.
“Planning is like foreplay, brother,” he says with a slow grin. “It loosens the friction. I stole a car on the way here, figured one of us might need it. Some dickhead owner left his keys in the ignition. It’s a black Mercedes. I parked it on August Street opposite the betting shop.”
I watch him sprint to the end of the road as the sirens grow louder, muttering a goodbye after him that sounds dangerously blunt and final.
We reach the Mercedes as the first wave of cop cars come zooming up the road, their red and blue lights flashing.
Guiding Ada into the passenger seat, I circle around to the driver’s side, keeping my body close to the paintwork to hide the bloodstains on my jeans. Pulling the door shut, I glance over at her as I adjust the mirror. She’s trembling from head to foot again. Her hand is clamped tight across her mouth.
“Ada?”
She shakes her head, and I can see that she’s crying.
Fuck.
I sit there for a moment, listening to her walls come down, her tears falling hard and fast, and cutting dirty trails into her cheeks and knuckles.
I don’t intervene because I see them for what they are. This isn’t the time for bullshit pats and soothing words. It’s not my job to make right what happened to her before me. It’s my duty to see that it doesn’t happen again.
“I promised my mother I wouldn’t cry for them,” she sobs. “This is the first—”
“You don’t need to explain.”
This is seven years-worth of her tears.
Seven years-worth of her hurt.
More cop cars come screaming past us.
Rooting around the Mercedes, I find a bottle of water in the side pocket. Pouring it over my bloody hands, I wipe the excess on my jeans. We need to leave the city. My spur-of-the-moment decision to kill her bodyguard means we’re running for our lives. We have less than an hour before O’Sullivan finds out Ada’s gone. Maybe a couple of hours before he gets a copy of the CCTV footage and has my face blasted out to every criminal network in town.
Sliding the gear stick into first, I click the handbrake off and crawl the Mercedes out of the space, taking care not to jolt her grief. She’s not crying anymore. She’s just a sad kind of silent now.
We’re nearly at the Blackwall Tunnel when she finally speaks again.
“Wait… We have to go back.”
I brake too hard at the lights. “Ada—”
“I’m serious, pull in here.”
Swerving into a BP garage, I find a parking bay away from the bright lights and slam the brakes on again. “Are you out of your goddamn mind? There’s no way I’m going back. Half the cops in the city are out looking for us, and they’re the least of our problems.”
“I know, but we need to do this.”
Her face is swollen, her cheeks red raw, but her eyes are sparking with that irresistible green fire again.
“I have a brother, Frankie. A whole other family I only found out about last week. A father I never even knew existed. They turned up at the house, and O’Sullivan killed them all, except…”
“Jesus. Ada.” No wonder she looks like hell.
“He’s been torturing him. I hear him screaming. He’s the same age as us…” she falters, before adding in a whisper, “I can’t leave him in that place. I just can’t—”
“What’s his name?”
She hesitates. “Razor. Danny Razor.”
It feels like another cold wave just smashed into me. “Wait. You’re Charlie Razor’s daughter?” She must have seen something terrifying in my face because she’s shrinking down into her seat. “As in the Red Compass Razors? The new fucking Firm?”
She nods as I fumble for my cigarettes in my jacket pocket. Ramming one between my lips, I spark up a light and inhale violently. This can’t be happening.
“How much do you know about my family, Ada?” I say, exhaling white smoke and bitterness.
“You’re mafia,” she answers quietly. “O’Sullivan betrayed your father and destroyed his Cosa Nostra London cosca, with the help of Kirill Semenov’s Bratva chapter and the British.”
“So, O’Sullivan’s a chronic oversharer as well as a murdering psychopath?”
“I wasn’t allowed to speak at the dinner table, so I listened instead.”
Just then, a couple exit the shop next to the garage. They’re laughing like they don’t have a care in the world. Because they don’t. Only the people in this car have that monopoly.
“I know Charlie Razor played his part in what happened to them, Frankie, but I think he regretted it. Soon after, he flipped on O’Sullivan.”
Should have flipped sooner. I suck in another lungful of nicotine, holding on to it for as long as I can because things seem to ache less when I do.
I can’t hate her, though. Even if she is a Razor. The same way I couldn’t hate her when I thought she was O’Sullivan’s daughter. There’s only one emotion I feel around Ada, and it’s not that. I want to protect her. Make it better. Give her a future that doesn’t hurt so much.
“I thought Razor was the reason O’Sullivan took me, but it’s something else… someone else.”
“Who?” I demand, exhaling another silver cloud, welcoming the head rush.
“Kirill Semenov.” She draws her knees up to her chest and wraps her arms around them, as if she’s protecting herself from his name. “I think he was stalking me as a child. I think my mother knew it as well. We moved around a lot. She pulled me out of school when I was eight. She never let me go to dance classes, even when I begged her to… O’Sullivan needed leverage over Kirill, more so than anyone else in the Red Compass. He didn’t have a majority control without him.”
I pause. “Did O’Sullivan let him touch you?”
It’s not my right to ask it, in the same way it’s her choice not to answer, but it’s written all over her face anyway.
Moments later, I’m chucking my cigarette out of the window and punching the steering wheel as hard as I can. “Those motherfucking bastards!” I punch it again and again, until the ache becomes a grim kind of pleasure. My violence is the equivalent of her tears, of seven years of holding it all inside me.
“Frankie, stop! Please stop. Please…” There’s a hesitant touch on my shoulder, and then my arms are full of her as she forces her way onto my lap. “It’s okay, Frankie. It’s okay. I’m okay.” She’s crying again as she shrugs off her coat, and then she’s wrapping her arms around my neck, my forehead slotting between her breasts as if we were made for each other.
I need her like air.