The Duke, the Boxer, and the Devil You Know — Book 2

The bathroom still smelled faintly of soap, steam, and blood. Jack sat on the edge of the tub, his bandaged shoulder throbbing beneath his skin while fever tipped the room half an inch sideways every few seconds. Eddie stood in front of him in a wet shirt that clung to his chest and shoulders, as if the storm had dragged him in and forgotten to let go.

His face was all control. Almost.

The skin around his mouth kept betraying him. That part looked wrecked.

Jack gave a rough laugh because admitting how much he liked being watched like that would have been worse. “You keep hovering, mate, I’m gonna start thinking you’re worried about me.”

Eddie’s eyes narrowed, dry and exhausted. “I am worried about you. It is unfortunately becoming a habit.”

Jack huffed, then hissed when the movement pulled at his shoulder.

Eddie moved instantly.

One hand closed around the back of Jack’s neck. The other steadied his ribs on the uninjured side. Not gentle, exactly. Careful. Somehow, that was worse. Jack’s grin faded, and for one reckless second the bathroom seemed too small for the heat between them, too warm for all the pretending they’d been doing since the shower.

His phone buzzed on the sink.

Then again.

Jack ignored it the first time. On the second, Eddie glanced toward the screen, and the name shining blue across the tiles made his mouth tighten.

Susie.

Jack muttered, “If that’s Bobby, I’m not answering.”

“It’s your sister,” Eddie said. Something sharp threaded through the words—warning and observation braided together. “Which means it is probably worse.”

Jack reached for the phone with his good hand, but Eddie caught his wrist first. The contact lasted barely a second. It still arrested him completely, pressure warming his skin while his pulse slammed against his throat.

Eddie looked at him for one beat too long.

Then he let go, as if he’d remembered himself at the last possible moment.

“Answer it,” he said. “Before she decides to send someone up here.”

Jack did, because he refused to let Susie weaponize his silence against him. Her voice came through calm as polished glass.

Never a good sign.

Susie:  “Tell me you’re alive and not being an idiot in your bathroom.”

Jack snorted. “Bit late on the second one.”

Silence followed. He could almost hear her filing the answer away, sliding it into whatever private catalogue she kept of his bad decisions. Susie always paused like that when she already knew more than she was saying.

Eddie turned slightly aside, offering Jack the illusion of privacy while remaining close enough to catch him if he swayed. It should have settled him. Instead, Jack became painfully aware of every inch Eddie chose not to take.

Susie:  “I need you both at the warehouse tonight. There’s movement on the route issue. Bobby wants names, figures, and a plan that doesn’t make him break something expensive.”

Jack looked up.

Eddie’s jaw tightened at Bobby’s name, but he gave a flat, resigned nod, as if he’d expected the summons. Irritation sparked through Jack before he could stop it. For no sensible reason. Or for one he didn’t want to examine while Eddie’s hand was still warm against his neck.

“We’ll be there,” Jack said. “Try not to frighten anyone before we arrive.”

Susie:  “That would be easier if you were less memorable.”

The line went dead before Jack could answer. Classic Susie.

He was still staring at Eddie when the silence returned. The bathroom had gone quieter, reduced to the drip of water somewhere inside the pipes and the hard, insistent beat of his own heart.

Eddie bent to retrieve Jack’s discarded shirt from the floor. When he straightened, his expression had shuttered again, though not completely. Heat lingered in it, restrained so fiercely it looked almost like irritation.

“You should rest before tonight.”

Jack gave him a crooked look. “You offering to nurse me, or are you just being bossy?”

“Both, probably.”

It should have sounded like a joke.

It didn’t.

The answer settled beneath Jack’s ribs beside the ache, warm and dangerous. Before he could decide whether to push Eddie away or pull him closer, Eddie stepped in and brushed his thumb over Jack’s jaw, wiping away a wet mark.

The touch was brief.

The effect was not.

Jack went still. Eddie noticed, of course. His gaze held Jack’s for one charged second, as if he were deciding whether to say the thing gathering between them—and choosing silence instead.

Then his phone lit inside his pocket.

Whatever Eddie had almost done, whatever he had almost said, vanished beneath the summons of the same ugly world they kept trying to outrun.

He glanced down at the screen.

This time, he went even more distant.

Somehow, that was the most dangerous thing in the room.

For the next few weeks, you make a religion of pretending nothing happened.

You let Eddie close the distance when a room falls quiet. Let your mouths find each other behind half-shut doors and in corridors with the lights switched off. Let his hands linger beneath your shirt, along old scars and the hard planes of muscle, then pull away first. Every time.

No names. No explanations. No looking too long afterward.

The second it threatens to become real, you turn it into a joke, a grunt, a cigarette burning between your fingers at an open window while Eddie stands behind you with that maddeningly controlled expression, pretending he’s as untouched as you are.

He isn’t.

Neither are you.

The rest gets uglier. You start drinking harder, faster, louder, as though bourbon and club lights might drown the shape of Eddie’s mouth. As though warm bodies with painted lips and expensive perfume could cling to your skin long enough to cover the scent of him. You make a point of going out with women whenever you can—laughing too much, leaning too close, letting cameras and the right people catch you where they can understand you properly.

Straight. Simple.

Jack Glass with a pretty girl on his arm and no complications worth mentioning.

The performance leaves you hollow and sour. You drink anyway.

The women are never the problem. That’s the embarrassing part. They’re often lovely, funny, willing. They touch you without hesitation, kiss you like they expect something in return, and remain utterly unconnected to the knot beneath your ribs—the one that cinches tighter whenever Eddie walks into a room looking as if he’s already judged the place and found it wanting.

You kiss them to prove something to yourself. To everyone else. Maybe to the stubborn piece of you that still wants to be the man you were before you looked at Eddie Horniman and felt your whole life tip sideways.

It never works for long.

Sooner or later, you think of Eddie in the middle of it: his mouth, his hands, the flat and dangerous calm he wears like armour. The thought curdles whatever pleasure you were chasing. By morning, you’re meaner than before.

Eddie sees everything, of course.

He never calls you on the women. Never asks whether you’re enjoying yourself or merely making a spectacle for the sake of it. That silence cuts deeper than a confrontation would. He only looks at you once—cool, measured, his mouth tightening by the smallest fraction when he catches whiskey on your breath or spots you returning near dawn with your hair rumpled and someone else’s lipstick on your collar.

Then he turns back to whatever paper, route map, ledger, or operational headache Susie has left in front of him.

That controlled indifference sends your temper sparking like a live wire.

The Glass business keeps moving around the edges of it all. Lost routes are replaced. Police pressure tightens. Bobby’s suspicion grows teeth. Susie runs the machine with immaculate precision, her awareness of you and Eddie sharpening into something almost amused, though she never says the words aloud.

Bobby notices the drinking first. Then the late nights. The sharper moods. The girls. The lies.

One evening, he looks at you across the table, his silver watch catching the light, and says nothing.

Which means he’s counting.

By the time you and Eddie end up alone again, you’re in the back office above one of the warehouses, both of you carrying the faint smells of rain, smoke, and expensive bad decisions. The city mutters through the walls. Somewhere below, a door slams, and the old building shivers around you.

Eddie shuts the door.

You see the shift in him immediately—the tiny tightening around his eyes as his gaze drops to the lipstick still visible beneath your ear. He looks away a second too late. His jaw locks.

For the first time in weeks, he doesn’t bother pretending it doesn’t bother him.

Something hot and reckless uncurls beneath your ribs.

There it is.

You can feel the fight coming before either of you says a word.

You angle in with that wicked little grin, shoulders loose, chin tipped up as if you’re daring him to make something of it. The space between you collapses fast.

Not touching. Almost.

Close enough for the air to turn hot in your lungs.

Eddie’s gaze skims your face, catches on the lipstick smeared at your neck, and hardens. Something cold settles behind his eyes. Dangerous. He doesn’t retreat. That’s the worst of it. He only watches you, jaw tight, as if he’s deciding whether to punch you, kiss you, or put you through the nearest wall for being impossible.

“What?” you ask, keeping your voice light, all swagger and appetite. “You look like I’ve nicked your last biscuit.”

Eddie lets out a short, humourless laugh. “You look ridiculous.”

“Yeah?” You drift a fraction closer, smiling like a bastard. “And yet here you are. Staring.”

That does it.

His hand snaps up—not gentle, never gentle,and fists in the front of your shirt. He drags you forward until your chests nearly touch, cotton pulling tight beneath his knuckles. The move is provocation. Restraint, too, stretched so thin you can feel it trembling between you.

Anger burns through him.

Underneath it, the other thing waits.

The thing neither of you names.

It hits harder than the whiskey ever did.

“You think this is funny,” Eddie says.

His voice is quiet. Controlled. That makes it worse.

You meet his stare with all teeth and bad intentions. “Bit. Yeah.”

The answer earns you the smallest, sharpest flick of his eyes, but he doesn’t let go. His thumb flexes once against your sternum. A tiny movement. A brutal one. He knows exactly what he’s doing to you, and he hates that you know it.

Outside the office, the corridor carries on without you. Someone laughs. A telephone rings, then keeps ringing. Faint footsteps pass the door.

None of it reaches you.

Eddie’s face is inches from yours, his breath warm against your mouth, his voice edged thin as broken glass. “You’ve been going out of your way to make a show of yourself.”

“You been keeping score?” you murmur.

His mouth twitches.

Not a smile. Worse.

“Someone has to.”

A laugh catches low in your throat. You lean closer until your breath brushes his cheek, until you catch the clean bite of soap beneath the whiskey on him. Eddie’s fingers tighten in your shirt. His knuckles press into your chest.

For one suspended second, you think he might finally lose patience.

The heat becomes unbearable. All that careful denial, all that bottled jealousy, all your stupid, bruised pride—everything rushes together until the only choices left are simple ones.

Kiss him.

Shove him away.

Your mouth parts.

The office door bangs open.

Susie stands in the doorway, immaculate in black, one eyebrow lifted just enough to make the room feel caught red-handed. Her gaze drops to Eddie’s fist in your shirt, climbs to your grin, then returns to him.

Her mouth settles into that thin, knowing line that always means trouble.

“Well,” she says. “This is either appalling timing or exactly what I expected.”

You shove Eddie back a fraction too hard—reflex, not judgment,and the moment snaps like a live wire. He absorbs the impact without stumbling, but his eyes sharpen at once, all that easy heat draining into something flat and dangerous.

Your grin arrives half a second late. Pasted on. Useless.

“Alright,” you say too quickly. “That was nothing. You’re getting dramatic.”

Susie’s stare moves between you like a blade drawn slowly from its sheath. Eddie says nothing. The silence lands harder than an argument, settling over the office while the corridor beyond carries on with its footsteps and ringing phones, indifferent to the fact that your life has become a complete fucking joke.

“Of course it was nothing,” Susie says, cool as ice in a glass. “Because if it were something, you’d both be unbearable.”

You laugh once. Rough. Forced.

Your hand finds the nearest drink. Eddie’s jaw works, but he doesn’t rise to the bait. Somehow, that is worse. He straightens his shirt, smoothing the fabric over his chest with careful fingers, then looks at you with that infuriating restraint while you drown in the knowledge that you’ve pushed him away in front of the one person in the building who can tell exactly what it cost.

The following evening, the cost comes back dressed in print.

You’re in the upstairs lounge of one of Bobby’s places when the first tabloid lands beside your hand, slapped down by a staff member with the careful neutrality people use around explosives. Another follows.

Then another.

Eddie’s face fills the front page of every one: caught in clean, cruel photographs beside a countess in pearls and velvet, both of them stepping out beneath a burst of camera flash while the headline leers about a “newly aristocratic affair.” The woman is elegant, smiling, entirely too composed for your liking. Eddie looks polished, remote, and annoyingly handsome in a way that makes your stomach twist hard enough to hurt.

You stare at the photographs until the paper blurs at the edges.

There’s nothing vulgar in them. That makes it worse. His hand rests at the countess’s elbow. His head is turned toward her in profile. She’s looking up at him as though she has every right to, as though she has already laid claim to him in public and he hasn’t objected strongly enough to matter.

Your throat tightens.

You don’t like it.

You don’t like it at all.

“Who arranged that?” you ask, aiming for casual and missing by a mile, because there is no version of this where you admit what’s actually happening inside your chest.

A staffer hurries off to find out. Susie arrives moments later, summoned by the same chain of gossip now running through the building. She takes one look at your face, then at the paper, and her expression turns faintly unbearable.

“Oh,” she says. “This is what jealousy looks like on you. I was beginning to wonder.”

“Fuck off,” you mutter.

Your eyes have already returned to Eddie’s photograph.

Susie lifts the paper, scans the article, and sets it down. “Useful, if nothing else. Everyone will assume it’s exactly what it appears to be. A respectable duke, a respectable countess, and no one worth mentioning in our business.”

“Useful,” you repeat.

The word tastes rotten.

She studies you over the top of the tabloid. “You’re angry because he’s been seen with someone else. Yet you’ve spent the last few weeks parading around with women you didn’t care about.” Her gaze drops briefly to the photograph, then returns to you. “That isn’t hypocrisy, Jack. It’s bad manners with better lighting.”

It would be easier if she were wrong. Easier if Eddie had done this to hurt you on purpose. Instead, the truth sits there, ugly and undeniable: he hasn’t done anything except look beautiful in someone else’s company, while you’ve made a fool of yourself in every room in London.

By the time Eddie comes in, the office has gone quiet enough to hear the radiator tick.

He stops when he sees the papers in your hands.

His face barely changes. It never does. But his eyes turn colder, and he knows at once—from the set of your shoulders, from the ugly stillness in the room,exactly what has happened.

The countess. The photographs. You.

He takes one step inside, then another, and the tension between you draws tight as piano wire.

Eddie’s mouth opens as though to explain.

You cut him off before he can.

“So,” you say, keeping your voice light in the most dangerous way, “having a nice little romance, are we?”

He looks at you for one long, punishing beat. The tabloid crackles in your grip. Susie says nothing now, which is probably the smartest thing she can do.

At last, Eddie answers, very calm and very precise.

“That depends. Are you asking as a colleague, or as someone who’s decided to behave like a complete arsehole?”

You snort and tip your head at Susie as if she’s said something so daft it ought to embarrass you both. “You’re being ridiculous,” you tell her, with enough bite to make the lie pass for confidence. “I don’t like men. And if Eddie wants to parade around with some walking hat stand who looks like she’d snap in a stiff breeze, that’s his business.”

Eddie’s expression goes still.

Susie’s mouth twitches once. Barely. Not amusement. Assessment. She leans one immaculate hip against the desk and folds the paper with neat, surgical precision. “A Countess is now a hat stand,” she says. “That’s a new one.”

You shrug too quickly. “She’s skinny. That’s all. What’s he meant to do, feed her?”

The line lands badly. You feel it the instant it leaves your mouth. Eddie’s gaze moves over your face with a tired disgust that cuts deeper than anger would have. He doesn’t rise to the bait. Somehow, that makes you feel smaller.

The room smells of old cigarette smoke and damp wool, crowded with the rustle of paper and the faint metallic hum of a building keeping its secrets beneath the floorboards.

Susie gives you a look that would have made most men apologise before they’d drawn breath. “You’re nearly as subtle as a dog in church.”

“Cheers.”

“Not a compliment.”

Eddie crosses the room only far enough to take the paper from Susie’s hand. His fingers brush hers, then retreat. Polite. Precise. That restraint, after the way his fist bunched in your shirt yesterday, strikes you like a slap.

He scans the photograph again, jaw tightening once, and you hate that you’re watching him look at somebody else at all.

He looks up. “Finished pretending you’re above it? We do have work to do.”

You laugh, sharp and ugly. “Above what? You taking tea with society birds?”

“At least I’m not throwing a tantrum because the newspapers can spell.”

Susie exhales through her nose, the closest thing to a laugh she’s likely to offer you in public. She slides a folder across the table, determined to haul the conversation back to the route compromise, the police heat, the problems Bobby expects her to solve before breakfast.

Too late.

The atmosphere has changed. Stretched thin. Brittle.

Because Eddie knows.

Not everything. Not yet. But enough to recognise the shape of the lie. You can feel it in the way he stands there, all that composure looking less like calm than discipline. He appears unbothered on the surface, but strain threads through the set of his mouth and the stiffness in his shoulders.

You can’t stand it.

The Countess becomes a weapon you can’t stop staring at. Every mention of her, every printed line in the tabloids, every room you imagine her sharing with Eddie drives your temper higher beneath your skin. You tell yourself it’s stupid.

Then you get worse.

You tell yourself you’re only irritated because Eddie is making himself useful to the wrong sort of people, and later you refuse a drink because the thought of seeing him with anyone else leaves your chest feeling caved in.

Bobby calls near midnight.

You hear his voice before you catch the words, cold and level through the speaker in Susie’s office while she and Eddie go over accounts. “What’s this I’m hearing about Horniman and a Countess?”

The room goes thin.

You lean against the wall with your arms folded, trying to look amused and failing. Susie’s eyes flick to you, warning tangled with curiosity. Eddie doesn’t move. Not a flicker.

But you know he’s listening.

That makes the next part worse.

“She’s a Countess,” Bobby says, as if the title itself is an inconvenience. “So I assume someone’s sold a story, or he’s got sloppy. Which is it?”

No one answers quickly enough.

That is never wise with Bobby.

His pause is brief, but it presses against your throat like a boot. “I don’t care about the romance,” he says. “I care about distractions. And I care about appearances. If he’s involved with anyone who can talk to the press, I want to know before it becomes a problem.”

The speaker hisses softly into the silence.

You force a grin that feels like broken glass. “Relax. It’s probably nothing.”

Bobby’s voice sharpens by a degree. “That’s what I’m counting on, Jack.”

The call ends.

Nobody speaks.

For a moment, the only sound is the clock dragging itself through another second. Susie looks at you as if she can see the denial rotting from the inside out. Eddie folds the paper with maddening care and sets it on the desk, then turns to face you properly.

His expression is unreadable.

The tension in it isn’t.

“You really want to keep lying about this?” he asks quietly.

Before you can answer, someone knocks hard on the office door. One of the lads from downstairs opens it without waiting for permission.

He looks shaken.

“Susie,” he says, breathless. “There’s a problem at the loading bay. Bobby’s asking for Jack too. Right now.”

You let the lad see you grin first—easy contempt, lazy amusement,as though Bobby’s summons is only another inconvenience in a life already spoiled by too much attention. It works on the room. For one second, anyway. The tension loosens by a hair.

Eddie’s eyes stay on you.

Susie’s expression turns faintly unreadable, which usually means she’s clocked the performance for exactly what it is.

“Right, then,” you say, flicking the tabloid against your palm. “Let’s go see what Dad’s got his knickers in a twist about.”

Bobby waits at the loading bay, hands still behind his back, his charcoal suit dark against the cold steel of the doorframe. The warehouse air tastes of damp concrete, diesel, and old smoke. A van sits half-open beside him, its engine ticking as it cools. Two men stand several feet away with their eyes lowered, the way everyone does when Bobby decides the world has become his problem.

Susie falls in beside him at once, immaculate and silent. Eddie lingers half a step behind, all restraint and tightly leashed irritation.

Bobby’s gaze lands on you first.

Then it slides to Eddie, and the temperature drops.

“You’re enjoying yourself, Jack?”

You spread your hands, harmless as a saint in a photograph. “Only slightly. You’ve called me down here, which is already an event.”

Bobby’s mouth barely moves. “Good. Stay amused.”

He turns his head toward the open van. Beneath the tarpaulin, boxes of product are stacked for a route that should have stayed clean. One has been slit open.

Not destroyed. Tampered with.

A message, perhaps. Or a mistake, depending on how much mercy Bobby feels like pretending to have today.

Susie steps closer, the sharp heels of her boots clicking once against the concrete before she stops. Her eyes narrow over the damage. Eddie’s jaw tightens. His attention snaps into that neat, surgical focus he brings to problems with teeth—problems that might become disasters if no one cuts them down quickly.

“Police?” Susie asks.

“Not yet,” Bobby says. “Someone’s sniffing around the route. Again. I want to know why a box was opened before it hit the depot.”

You glance at Eddie because you can’t help yourself.

He’s studying the evidence, not you, but the set of his shoulders says enough. You want the same thing he does: to keep Bobby from turning this into a referendum on loyalty. The trouble is, Bobby has already decided everything is a referendum on loyalty.

Your grin widens by reflex, sharpening at the edges. “Well, that’s charming. Someone’s trying to nick from us and failing miserably.”

Bobby looks at you for a long, deliberate moment.

“If you’re done performing, you can help.”

“Wouldn’t dream of missing it.”

His nod is barely there, but the men by the van jump into motion. Susie is already issuing orders in that cool, clipped voice of hers, turning confusion into a sequence of tasks. Under her hands, the whole operation folds back into control.

Eddie steps in beside her without hesitation. He reads labels, checks seals, asks the right questions in the right tone. He doesn’t look at you.

You feel the absence of it like heat.

You’re not bothered.

You tell yourself that so often tonight it starts to sound suspicious.

Bobby beckons you closer, away from Susie and Eddie. For a second, you expect him to needle you about the tabloid nonsense, the drink, or the smear of lipstick you haven’t quite managed to remove from your own bad judgment.

Instead, he leans in just far enough that his words belong only to you.

“Whatever game you’re playing,” he says quietly, “don’t play it where I can see it.”

Your smile stays in place by force alone. “You’re getting paranoid in your old age.”

Bobby’s eyes don’t shift. “I’m getting experienced.”

The loading bay feels smaller after that.

You turn away before he can read anything else from your face and find Eddie looking up at you from the van. Irritation scrapes across his expression, but it isn’t about the route. It’s about Bobby. About the way you’ve both been dragged back into the same orbit, close enough to feel each other’s gravity and stubborn enough to pretend it doesn’t hurt.

Susie slams the van doors shut.

The metallic crack echoes through the bay.

“We’ll clean this up,” she says. “Then we’ll have a rather unpleasant conversation about who thought it was clever to start leaking to outsiders.”

No one answers.

They don’t need to.

Bobby already knows the shape of the next problem, even if he doesn’t know its name. And you, standing there with your hands buried in your pockets and your smile barely holding, realise with a sick little lurch that the more amused you act, the more closely he watches you and Eddie together.

As if the joke has stopped being funny.

Some days later, you spot the pattern first—and hate yourself for how quickly it makes sense. Eddie’s dates with the Countess keep landing within hours of the route hits, as if the two are tied by a thread nobody else can see.

One night, he’s photographed leaving her townhouse in the clean gold of evening. By dawn, one of Bobby’s south-side warehouses has been broken into, product scattered across the concrete, a lock forced without the racket amateurs usually make. Another evening, Eddie misses a meeting with Susie. By the following afternoon, a different shipment has been hit hard enough to get the lads talking.

Not enough to panic.

Enough to notice.

Enough to turn your skin cold.

You catch Eddie alone in the corridor outside Susie’s office, half swallowed by shadow, his expression already sealed shut before you say a word. The Countess is still splashed across the front page in your hand—all pearls, posture, and perfect public innocence. You drag your gaze from the photograph and go straight for the wound, because there’s no version of this where you circle the point like a coward.

“Your little evening strolls are getting convenient,” you say. “Every time you go off playing duke with her, one of ours gets hit.”

Eddie’s eyes rise to yours, cool and instantly irritated. “Are you seriously accusing me of arranging the thefts because I have the poor taste to be photographed with a woman?”

“I’m saying it looks fishy.”

“It looks,” he says, his voice clipped, “like you’ve become intolerable since the moment this country discovered I can stand beside a Countess without setting myself on fire.”

The words land exactly where he intends. You feel the sting and let your mouth curl anyway, because if you stop grinning now, you might do something stupid.

“So that’s it, is it? I’m jealous because I noticed a pattern. Brilliant. That’s very you.”

His jaw shifts once. He folds the paper with maddening care, each crease neat, each movement controlled, and the restraint makes you angrier than shouting would have.

“You’ve been looking for a reason to dislike her since the first photograph,” he says. “If this is your way of asking whether I’m sleeping with her, the answer is no. If it’s your way of asking whether I care what you think, the answer is also no, despite your best efforts.”

You laugh under your breath. Sharp. Ugly.

“Bollocks.”

His gaze hardens. “If you had anything useful, you would have said it before now. Instead, you came here to perform wounded ownership and call it intelligence.”

You step closer before you can think better of it. Not enough to touch. Enough to make the corridor feel too narrow for both of you. Eddie smells faintly of smoke and starch, with the bitter trace of coffee clinging to his breath. You hate that you notice. You hate that you want to lean closer.

“Maybe I don’t trust your new little social circle,” you say. “Maybe I don’t trust any of it.”

His expression barely shifts, but something colder moves behind his eyes. “And yet you trust your temper enough to wander in here and accuse me with nothing but a bad mood and a newspaper clipping. That isn’t suspicion, Jack. That’s jealousy wearing a very stupid hat.”

You should walk away.

You don’t.

The Countess’s name keeps catching beneath your ribs, pulling tight every time Eddie says it, and he can call jealousy a joke if he likes. You know a knife when you feel one.

Around you, the warehouse keeps breathing. Men move through the lower levels. A phone rings somewhere below, shrill and unanswered. Susie’s door remains shut, which means she’s either working or listening. Bobby is somewhere else in the building.

That is somehow worse.

“I’m not telling Bobby this,” you say at last, your voice low enough to feel like a confession, though it isn’t. “Not unless I know more.”

That earns his full attention. His face stills, and the air between you changes—tightens, thins,into something neither of you can name without wrecking it.

“You think I don’t know that?” he asks quietly. “You think I need you policing my evenings?”

“No.” The word comes out rough. “I think you need someone not to be a complete idiot about it.”

For one second, he looks almost amused.

Almost.

Then the hint of a smile dies in his throat and leaves caution behind. He steps past you, close enough that his shoulder brushes yours. The contact lasts less than a heartbeat, but it shoots through you anyway, hot and immediate. Eddie doesn’t pause. Of course he doesn’t.

“Then find something real,” he says. “Next time, bring proof instead of your feelings.”

He leaves you in the corridor with the paper clenched in your hand and the ugly certainty that you may be right, which is nearly as bad as being ignored.

You stand there too long.

The anger settles first, then cools into something harder and more useful. Downstairs, a door slams. Someone shouts. The smell of dust, oil, and old timber hangs in the air while the Glass empire keeps turning around you, gears grinding under polished words and expensive suits.

Only now, it feels as though the whole machine is turning against itself.

Eddie is either in the middle of it—or standing too close to come away clean.

You can’t decide which possibility you hate more.

You don’t tell Bobby a thing.

You let the suspicion sour on your tongue instead, because the moment Bobby asks why you’re so interested in Eddie’s social calendar, the whole ugly mess becomes something worse. So you keep your mouth shut, your expression blank, and follow at a distance through rain-slick lanes and black trees until Eddie’s car turns toward a hunting lodge set back from the road—isolated stone, shuttered windows, a roofline hunched beneath a sky the color of old bruises.

The place feels wrong immediately.

Too still. Too clean.

No lamps glow in the lower rooms. No staff cross the grounds. Only the lodge, the dark woods, and Eddie’s car parked crooked beside the front steps while another vehicle waits off to one side, half-hidden where the gravel sinks into shadow.

You circle around back, boots whispering over wet leaves. The cold has teeth tonight. It bites through your shirt, through the bandage beneath your collar, through the temper you’ve been nursing for days. Eddie’s temper, too, if the crooked car means anything. You’ve learned the shape of his restraint—the way it goes rigid before it breaks,and the thought of finding him here, alone, makes something hot and reckless twist beneath your ribs.

A board creaks under your weight.

You freeze.

Every muscle locks as you listen to the rain ticking against the windows.

Voices drift from inside. Eddie’s first: controlled, careful, that low roughness he uses when he’s one breath from losing his patience. The Countess answers, light and amused, and the sound raises the hairs along your neck. Then comes a third voice, lower still, scraped raw by disuse.

Unfamiliar.

Your pulse kicks hard.

You edge toward the nearest window and look in.

Eddie stands beside the fireplace, jacket discarded, sleeves rolled to his forearms. One hand braces against the mantel as if he has already decided the conversation has gone too far. His attention is fixed on the Countess, but you catch the tension in his shoulders, the faint flex of his fingers against the wood. You know those hands. You know how careful they can be.

The Countess has turned half away from him. Her polished smile is gone.

A pistol rests in her hand, small and dark and horribly steady.

She’s pointing it at his chest.

The sight hits you like a fist.

Everything narrows to one brutal instant: her finger tightening, the hard line of Eddie’s mouth, his eyes flicking toward the door instead of toward her because he’s already done the arithmetic and knows exactly how little room he has.

You don’t think.

You crash through the door.

It slams against the wall. The Countess jerks. Eddie whips around. The pistol barks once, deafening in the enclosed room, and the shot punches into the mantel in a burst of splinters and dust.

Eddie moves at the same time you do.

All instinct. All violence.

The Countess stumbles back as you lunge for her wrist. She’s fast—fast enough to drive the gun downward and twist. The barrel smashes against your forearm. Pain flashes white.

You swear, grab higher, and wrench.

Eddie reaches her a heartbeat later, slamming her shoulder-first into the wall. The pistol skitters across the floorboards.

The room erupts.

The third man—the shape you saw in the dark,comes at you from the side with a knife. You catch his wrist, drive your forehead into his face, and feel cartilage give beneath the impact. He drops with a wet choke, blood spilling over his mouth.

Eddie has the Countess pinned now, one hand locked around her throat, the other flattening her arm against the paneling while she spits something furious and vicious into his face. He is close enough to her that you can see the pulse beating in his neck, but his gaze finds you for one sharp second.

Checking.

Making sure you’re still standing.

“Jack,” he snaps, without looking away from her. “Gun.”

You kick the pistol toward him, then spin as the knife man tries to rise. Your shoulder flares hot. Anger, old pain, and adrenaline twist together until the world turns brutally clear.

You stomp down on his wrist.

Hard.

The movement stops. You drive a boot into his ribs and send him sprawling back across the floor.

The Countess laughs once, breathless and wild despite Eddie’s grip. “You’re late.”

She aims the words at both of you.

The room goes still.

Eddie’s eyes cut to her, cold now, every trace of charm stripped away. “What did you just say?”

Blood marks her lip where his hand caught her mouth. She smiles anyway.

“You really believed I was here only for dinners and photographs?”

The realization comes in pieces. The dates. The timing. The smug public theater. The attacks along the route.

Then it locks together inside your chest with a sick, furious twist.

She wasn’t with Eddie.

Or not only with Eddie.

She was being used. Using them. Maybe both.

Outside, tires crunch over gravel.

Another car.

Then another.

Eddie hears it too. His head lifts toward the window, and something in his expression makes your stomach drop.

“We’ve got company,” he says.

Just like that, the lodge stops being a trap you walked into by accident. It becomes one you’re still inside—with the Countess grinning beneath Eddie’s hand and headlights sweeping across the dark outside.

You rip the Countess’s belt from the back of a chair, drag her wrists behind the lodge’s heavy dining table, and knot the leather until the wood groans under the strain. She spits curses at you, her voice sharpened by fury, but you’re already on the phone to Susie, pacing the narrow strip between the fireplace and the windows while Eddie checks the dead man sprawled across the floorboards and listens for the next car door outside.

“Lodge,” you bark into the receiver. “She’s not what she says she is. We’ve got company. Bring everything.”

Susie never asks stupid questions. Not when your voice sounds like this.

“Stay alive,” she says.

Then she hangs up.

The first shots hit the windows before the line properly dies in your hand. Glass bursts inward, bright and vicious, scattering across the rug. Eddie shoves you down behind the sideboard with controlled force and clenched teeth. A bullet tears through the paneling where your head was a second ago.

You come up firing on instinct.

Not because you expect to win cleanly. You have never once in your life been sensible when a room starts bleeding.

A man in the trees folds out of sight. Another staggers at the porch. The lodge fills with splintering wood, shouted orders, the hard crack of gunfire ricocheting off stone. Smoke scratches your throat. Cold air knifes through the broken windows. Then a hot sting cuts across your upper arm, shallow but bright, and blood warms the inside of your sleeve.

You swear.

It’s nothing. Barely worth naming. Except it makes your temper flare white.

Eddie is beside you, frighteningly composed until the moment he isn’t.

He steps into the line of fire to knock the Countess’s pistol away from her tied hands. That is when the round catches him.

The sound is wrong.

Not dramatic. Final.

Eddie’s body jerks once, as if the floor has shifted beneath him. Then he drops hard to one knee, one hand clamped to his side. For half a second, you can’t understand what you’re seeing.

Then blood spreads through his shirt.

“No.” You’re already moving, catching him as his weight folds against you. “No, no, no, Eddie.”

He tries to speak. Nothing comes. His face has gone blank with shock, his breathing thin and tight, and your hands turn clumsy with panic as you haul him behind the sideboard and press down over the wound. He hisses through his teeth. His fingers claw at your sleeve, not quite gripping, not quite letting go.

“You absolute bastard,” you mutter, because if you stop talking, you might hear the fear clearly. “You were meant to be difficult. Not fucking dramatic.”

His eyes find yours, unfocused at the edges.

Something tears loose inside your chest.

The next shot slams into the mantel above you. Dust sifts through your hair. The Countess shouts from the dining room, furious and useless, while headlights sweep across the windows again. Then Susie arrives, and the chaos splits around the steady violence of her authority.

She comes through the door with two men and a look sharp enough to skin a man alive.

One glance at Eddie is enough.

“Jack,” she says, already moving. “Get him up.”

You do, though your arms shake badly enough to shame you. Eddie weighs too much for how little color remains in his face, and the instant you drag him against your chest, you feel how terribly wrong this is. His blood soaks hot through your shirt. His head lolls against your shoulder before he forces it upright again, stubborn even now.

That nearly ruins you.

“Stay with me,” you snap against his ear, your voice rough and breaking at the edges. “You don’t get to go off on me now.”

His mouth moves. Maybe it’s a reply. Maybe only breath.

Susie is clearing the path, shouting for the car, ordering the Countess kept alive, telling someone to inform Bobby without giving him the wrong end of the story. You barely hear her. All you hear is Eddie’s laboring breath and the pounding of your own pulse as you half-carry, half-drag him through the shattered doorway and into the rain.

The cold hits like a slap.

Your shoulder screams. Eddie sags heavier as you get him down the steps, and by the time Susie throws open the back door, you’re holding him upright with both arms, desperate enough to believe your grip alone can keep the blood inside him.

He goes in first. You climb in after him, soaked, shaking, furious, sick with terror.

Susie slams the door, and the car tears toward the hospital, tires screaming over wet tarmac. You keep one hand pressed hard against Eddie’s wound and the other locked around his ribs, as if letting go would finish the job. Rain lashes the windows. The lodge slips away behind you, swallowed by darkness and spray.

Eddie doesn’t.

He stays in your arms, pale and bleeding and infuriatingly silent, while the whole night narrows to one brutal thought:

If he dies, you will never forgive anyone.

Least of all yourself.

The hospital strips the night down to noise and light.

Fluorescent glare. Rubber soles squeaking over linoleum. The sour-clean sting of antiseptic threaded with rainwater, blood, and wet wool.

You refuse the chair they point toward. Refuse the coffee. Refuse the careful little distance everyone expects from a man who is meant to be “waiting” while someone else gets cut open behind a curtain.

You remain outside Eddie’s treatment room, arms folded too tightly across your chest, your bandaged shoulder flaring with pain every time you breathe. Susie has gone downstairs to handle the paperwork, the calls, the questions the police might start asking if anyone gets stupid. Bobby has been informed in the clipped, minimal language Susie uses when she wants to survive a conversation.

None of it matters.

The only thing that matters is the thin wall between you and the sound of men trying to keep Eddie Horniman alive.

A nurse tells you, gently, that you can wait in the family room.

You stare at her until she gives up and moves on.

It is the same refusal you use in the ring, except there is nothing elegant about it now. You are not composed. You are not amused. Your hands keep flexing open and shut because if you stop moving, you can feel exactly how badly this is shaking you.

Then the door opens.

The surgeon steps through, tired in that brutally professional way that never means anything good. You are on him before he has finished adjusting his glasses.

Jack:  “Talk to me.”

He says Eddie is stable. Says the bullet missed anything immediately fatal, though it came close enough to make every sentence sound like an insult. Surgery was necessary. There will be pain. Recovery. Blood loss. A long list of things to watch for, followed by the firmest possible recommendation that Eddie avoid anything heroic, foolish, or physically strenuous for several weeks.

You almost laugh.

Almost.

Then they wheel Eddie out.

He looks small on the trolley, and the sight offends something deep in you—something that has always believed Eddie Horniman was too sharp, too stubborn, too dangerous to be reduced to a hospital bed. His face is pale and slack with exhaustion, one side of his hair flattened against the pillow. A pressure dressing disappears beneath the sheets. Monitors cling to him as if the room refuses to trust his body on its own.

His eyes open a fraction as they pass.

When he sees you still there, something unreadable crosses his face. Relief, maybe. Irritation.

Both.

You step close enough to take his hand before anyone can stop you.

His fingers are cold. Yours aren’t much better.

Eddie:  “You’re hovering.”

The words scrape out of him, barely audible, but they hit harder than they should. You lower your head until your forehead nearly touches the trolley’s metal rail, then look at him with a grin that refuses to hold together.

Jack:  “You got shot, mate. I’m allowed.”

The corner of his mouth shifts.

Not a smile exactly. Closer than that.

It makes your chest hurt in a different way.

They move him upstairs to a private room, Susie’s name on the paperwork and Bobby’s money smoothing every obstacle before it becomes visible. You still don’t leave. When a nurse mentions visiting hours, you tell her you’re family. She glances from you to Eddie, weighs the argument, and decides not to start one.

You take the chair only long enough to prove you can.

Then you stand again before anyone can mistake it for obedience.

Eddie is half asleep when you finally sink down beside the bed, his hand still caught in yours. The room smells of disinfectant, warm plastic, and the faint metallic trace of blood beneath the clean sheets. Each monitor gives a soft, steady tick. Proof. Proof. Proof.

He wakes later, just enough to find you there.

Eddie:  “You stayed.”

There is no surprise in his voice. Something quieter. More dangerous.

You shrug because there are too many honest answers, and every one of them sounds like a confession.

“Where else would I go?”

Eddie studies your face through the dull shine of painkillers and exhaustion, as if he is memorising the fact of you in the room. Then his grip tightens once around your fingers.

Small. Deliberate.

It says more than all your usual bullshit ever has.

Outside the door, Susie’s footsteps pass and fade. Somewhere far below, Bobby keeps arranging the world as if it owes him payment. But in this room, with the monitors ticking and the city washed pale beyond the glass, the fight has narrowed to one fragile point:

Eddie is alive.

You are not going anywhere.

For now, that is enough.

For now, it is also nowhere near enough.

You keep talking to him long after the room falls quiet. Not a proper conversation. Fragments, mostly. You tell him he was an absolute idiot for stepping into a line of fire, then tell him he was brave, which is worse because it comes too close to the truth. His hand stays in yours beneath the hospital blankets, warm now, his thumb giving the faintest absent squeeze whenever the pain eases enough to let him.

Eddie answers in half sentences and dry little cuts, the sort of thing he can manage even with medication blunting the edge of him. He tells you the Countess was a liability from the start. He tells you that you look dreadful. Then, after a pause stretched almost too long, he says he’s glad you came into the lodge when you did.

The admission lands softly. Almost too softly.

You don’t miss it. You sit with the words, turning them over like a blade, while your eyelids grow heavy and your shoulder throbs itself into a low, ugly rhythm.

You mean to stay awake. You really do.

But hospital air flattens the world. The chair bites through your clothes. The lights bleach everything white. Eddie’s breathing, steadier now than it was an hour ago, gives your body permission to stop fighting for one minute. Your head tips forward.

Then sideways.

Your cheek settles against the edge of the mattress, your fingers still laced with his.

Sleep catches you hard and fast.

You wake to voices.

Not Eddie’s. Not Susie’s. These are sharper, lighter, cut from an entirely different cloth. A woman stands at the foot of the bed, tall and severe in a tailored coat the colour of storm clouds, her composure so complete it seems to still the air around her.

Lady Sabrina, then. Eddie’s mother.

Beside her stands a younger woman with his eyes and something of his mouth, though hers is quicker to anger and far less inclined to hide it. Charlotte. Both have stopped dead in the doorway, staring at your hand wrapped around Eddie’s as if they’ve walked in on something they weren’t meant to witness.

Your head jerks up too late. Pain drives a spike through your shoulder, and you wince—which is about the least dignified thing you could do at a moment like this.

Lady Sabrina’s gaze takes you in at once: the bruised face, the bloodied bandage, the expensive but rumpled shirt, the fact that you’re still folded over her son’s bed in sleep. Her expression doesn’t turn hostile.

That would have been easier.

It turns precise.

“Good God,” she says. “You are the Glass boy.”

It should sound like an insult. Somehow, it’s worse because it doesn’t.

Charlotte’s eyes flick from your face to Eddie’s hand and back again. Her mouth opens, shuts, then opens once more.

“Mum,” she whispers, scandalised and fascinated in equal measure. “He’s holding his hand.”

You sit up too fast and regret it immediately.

“Yeah,” you say, because there’s no elegant way out of this. “Bit of a clue, I know.”

Eddie stirs at the sound of your voice and blinks awake in the middle of the disaster. One look at his mother and sister strips the last of the sleep from him. The wary, controlled expression settling over his face is so familiar it almost softens your embarrassment.

“Don’t start,” he says hoarsely.

Lady Sabrina moves closer, all silk composure and cool appraisal. In profile, the resemblance to Eddie becomes impossible to ignore. Her gaze drops to the dressing beneath the blanket, then to your hand still caught in his.

When she speaks, her voice is level. Almost amused.

“I was told my son had been injured in a criminal altercation, not that he had acquired a boxer with exceptionally poor bedside manners.”

Charlotte makes a choking sound that might be a laugh if she’s brave enough to claim it.

You give her your best grin, tired and crooked and entirely inappropriate. “Nice to meet you too, love.”

Eddie closes his eyes for one second, as if sheer willpower might bring the ceiling down.

Then Charlotte steps nearer the bed and looks at Eddie, not you. “You could have called us.”

His mouth tightens. “I didn’t want you involved.”

“That,” she says, pointing at him with dreadful sibling certainty, “is not your decision alone.”

Lady Sabrina says nothing for a moment. She watches them with the patient stillness of someone who has outlasted empires, marriages, and probably several family scandals. When she finally speaks, it’s to Eddie, though her eyes remain on you.

“You may release his hand, Mr Glass, if you’re capable of doing so without distressing either of you.”

The line is so dry you nearly laugh despite the pain.

You glance at Eddie. He looks pale, exhausted, and far too aware of how this appears. Then, very slowly, he gives the smallest shake of his head.

Not refusal. Not quite permission.

Resignation, perhaps.

So you keep holding on.

Outside the room, the hospital carries on without mercy. Somewhere down the corridor, Susie’s heels click once and stop, as if she’s arrived just in time to understand the shape of the problem and chosen to enjoy it quietly. A second later, she appears in the doorway, immaculate as ever, one eyebrow lifting at the scene.

“Ah,” she says. “So this is how the family reunion is going.”

Lady Sabrina turns to her with cool courtesy. “And you are?”

Susie’s smile is razor-thin. “The sister who usually cleans up after him.”

The room stills.

Eddie in the bed. You in the chair. His mother and sister at the foot of it. Susie watching all of you as if she’s already calculating the fallout. And your hand locked around Eddie’s beneath the sheet, as though you’ve forgotten how to let go.

Eddie looks at you once.

In that glance: pain, embarrassment, relief—and something far more dangerous than any of them.

His family has seen.

None of them looks ready to pretend they haven’t.

The truth hits all at once, ugly and cold.

You are terrified.

Not of the blood, the monitors, or Eddie’s mother and sister standing there, seeing far too much. You are terrified of Bobby finding out. Of what he would say first, and what he would do second. Of the shame of it, because he would not simply punish you. He would make you feel stupid for ever letting yourself care in the first place.

So you keep your hand where it is.

It is the only brave thing you have left.

Eddie notices the change before anyone else. His eyes lift, tired and sharp beneath the drugged haze, and his fingers tighten around yours once. A small pressure. Deliberate. As if he can feel the tension running straight through your bones.

You try to act normal.

You fail completely.

You look like a man waiting for the ceiling to cave in.

Lady Sabrina takes in your face, the rigid set of your shoulders, the fact that you have not bolted. Her expression softens by a fraction, though it never becomes kind. She carries herself like a woman who understands more than she intends to say.

“Mr Glass,” she says, measured and cool, “if you are going to keep looking as though you expect to be executed in the corridor, I suggest you sit properly.”

Charlotte makes a startled sound that turns into a laugh she clearly never meant to release. She hides it behind her hand. Fails. Her gaze flicks to Eddie, then back to you, and whatever she finds there makes her even more attentive.

Susie closes the door behind her with quiet certainty. She clocks your face, your grip on Eddie’s hand, the panic gathering beneath your skin like heat beneath a burn. Of course she does. Susie’s gift has always been making panic look less useful than it feels.

“Bobby isn’t here,” she says, almost lazily, though steel runs beneath every word. “And if he does come, he’ll be dealing with me first.”

That helps only a little.

The problem is that you know what Bobby is. You know how easily he can turn a private feeling into a weakness, then crush it because he finds the struggle entertaining. You know he would never forgive you for wanting Eddie. Worse, he would enjoy making that wanting sound pathetic.

The thought twists your stomach. Your mouth goes dry.

Eddie shifts against the pillow. Pain pinches tight around his eyes, but he still tries to sit straighter.

Stubborn bastard.

He glances at your face, reads the fear you are trying—and failing,to bury, then breathes out something almost like a laugh.

“You look dreadful,” he says hoarsely.

“Cheers.”

“It’s meant kindly.”

Charlotte stares at the two of you as though someone has just handed her the answer to a puzzle she never knew existed. “You’re ridiculous,” she says, not unkindly. “Both of you.”

Lady Sabrina moves to the bedside and smooths a stray crease from the blanket with elegant, economical fingers. The fabric whispers beneath her touch. She is nothing like Bobby, yet the room seems to shift when she speaks.

“Eddie,” she says, “you will recover. That is not in question. The question is who else now knows enough to make trouble.”

Susie answers before Eddie can.

“The Countess is alive. The accomplice is not. Jack called me in time. The police can be kept at arm’s length, for now.”

Her gaze slides to you, and a spike of unease goes through you. She has already pieced together more than you wanted anyone to know. Not the whole shape of it. Enough to understand that you were the one who dragged this disaster into the light.

The shame burns hotter than the fear.

For one second.

You stare at the floor, then back at Eddie. He looks pale and wrecked, his skin carrying the faint gray cast of hospital light, and somehow he is still annoyingly composed. He is alive because you made the wrong choice and then the right one in the same breath. Because you panicked. Because you shoved him away before. Because the Countess had been there. Because all your stupid, twisted jealousy helped drive him into the middle of a trap.

You should be able to leave.

That would be smarter.

Instead, you lean forward and adjust the blanket by his wrist, careful not to jostle the dressing. Your hand shakes once before you clench it still.

“If you need anything,” you mutter, refusing to look at Lady Sabrina or Charlotte because that would be impossible, “I’m here.”

Eddie goes very quiet.

The room holds its breath. Susie’s eyes narrow a fraction, as if she hears the weight beneath your words. Charlotte’s curiosity gives way to something more tentative. Lady Sabrina simply watches, deciding what sort of man leaves a sentence like that hanging in a room full of Hornimans.

Eddie’s fingers tighten around yours again.

Faint.

Deliberate.

Then, before anyone can make the moment unbearable, the door opens a fraction, and Bobby’s name enters the room without Bobby himself.

A suit. One of his men.

Not a threat yet. Close enough.

He looks pale and uneasy, and that is never a good sign.

“Mr Glass,” he says to Susie, his voice low. “Your father has heard there was an incident.”

Every muscle in your body locks.

Susie turns slowly toward the door. Eddie’s eyes find yours. Lady Sabrina’s face becomes unreadable. Charlotte goes very still.

The man in the doorway swallows.

And then he adds, far too carefully, “He wants to know where you are.”

You and Eddie pull back at the same time, the movement neat and automatic, as if you’ve rehearsed it in front of everyone in the room. Your hand drops from his. His fingers slide from yours.

The cold between you is louder than the hospital monitors.

You turn to Bobby’s man with your face arranged into something careless, bored. Something no one could mistake for fear.

“The Countess was the traitor,” you say. “Bobby can question the accomplice. She’s the one who lined the whole thing up.”

The man blinks once, visibly relieved to have a simple answer to carry back. “Yes, sir.”

Susie’s eyes cut toward you, sharp and searching. Eddie says nothing, but a muscle jumps in his jaw—a tiny betrayal that tells you he understands exactly what you’re doing.

Or pretending to do.

Lady Sabrina remains composed beside the bed, though her gaze moves between you and her son with the quiet precision of someone who has already decided this room contains far more than one criminal matter. Charlotte looks openly intrigued, which is almost worse.

The messenger hovers a beat too long, waiting for further instructions. You can feel Bobby’s shadow in him: the pressure of what will happen if he returns with anything vague, anything embarrassing.

So you give him no room.

“Go on, then,” you say. “Unless you want to keep Bobby waiting.”

He leaves fast.

The door clicks shut behind him, and the room exhales into a silence so tight it nearly hums. For a second, no one speaks. The monitors continue their soft, maddening rhythm. Eddie lies pale against the pillows, one hand empty beneath the blanket.

You have the stupid urge to put it back there.

Where it was warm.

Susie moves first. She crosses to the window and looks out over the dark hospital grounds, her face smooth and unreadable.

“That was sensible,” she says at last.

From Susie, it might as well be a hymn.

“It was efficient,” you mutter.

“It was also a lie,” Eddie says.

You glance at him.

He looks wrecked and exhausted, but the edge in his voice has sharpened again, small and controlled. Not accusation.

Worse.

Recognition.

You hold his gaze and keep your expression flat. “It was a temporary version of the truth.”

Charlotte makes a sound like a laugh caught in her throat. Lady Sabrina closes her eyes for the briefest moment, perhaps in prayer, perhaps in sympathy for her son. Either way, it seems like a fair amount of work for one evening.

Eddie stares at you for a long second, then looks away first.

That should ease something in you. It doesn’t. It leaves a raw little ache behind your ribs instead, tender as a bruise beneath a shirt.

He knows you covered for him. Knows you redirected Bobby’s attention. Knows you’re still trying to keep the whole business from collapsing into a different kind of mess.

Because if Bobby starts asking why the Countess mattered so much, his questions will wander.

Straight to you.

To Eddie.

To the stupid, dangerous thing neither of you has named.

Bobby’s man is barely gone before Susie’s phone begins buzzing in her hand. She glances at the screen, then silences it without answering. Her mouth tightens.

“He’s already in one of his moods,” she says. “Lovely.”

“Is he coming here?” Charlotte asks.

Susie’s smile is thin and cold. “Only if he thinks it’s useful.”

The words settle over the room like a threat.

Lady Sabrina finally turns from the bed, her tone cool and even. “Then let us ensure it is not useful.”

Eddie closes his eyes for a second. When he opens them, he finds you by instinct.

There’s something in that look—restrained, dangerous, deeply private,that makes the room feel too small. You want to say something stupid. Something easy. Instead, you stand with your hands shoved into your pockets, aware of your pulse beating hard beneath your skin and of the fact that your bravery has always been a bit of a con.

He notices that too.

“Jack,” Eddie says quietly.

Your name sounds different in his mouth when he’s tired enough to stop disguising things.

“You’re shaking.”

You scoff before anyone else can make a meal of it. “Course I am. I’ve had a thrilling night.”

The words come out thin.

Eddie’s eyes don’t leave your face. Susie sees it, of course she does. Lady Sabrina sees it too, though she has the good manners not to comment. Charlotte, younger and far less polite, looks between you and Eddie as if she’s just discovered the plot of a very expensive scandal.

Then raised voices break through the corridor.

Men.

Not the police.

Bobby’s.

The hospital seems to tighten around the noise. Susie’s head lifts. Eddie’s expression hardens. Lady Sabrina’s posture becomes pure steel. Charlotte steps back from the bed at once.

You hear Bobby before you see him, his voice low and furious, controlled in the way only a man like him can be controlled when he’s already deciding who to blame.

And then, just beyond the door, the conversation starts getting closer.

You step into the corridor before anyone can stop you.

The hospital air is colder out here—bleach, polished floors, the faint electric hum of the night shift settling into silence. Bobby is already halfway down the hall, two men behind him. His charcoal suit is as precise as ever. His face has gone flat and dangerous.

He hasn’t come to shout.

He’s come to measure the damage.

He looks at you once, and the corridor narrows.

“Well?” Bobby says. “Tell me what happened, Jack. Properly this time.”

You lean one shoulder against the wall with more swagger than you feel. It costs you. The bandage pulls across your shoulder; your ribs throb where the lodge fight caught you. Your pulse beats hard enough to sound ridiculous in your ears.

You keep your face loose anyway.

“The Countess was the leak,” you say. “We caught her at the lodge. She wasn’t just playing society gossip. She was involved. She had an accomplice. He’s dead.”

Bobby’s eyes stay on yours. “And Eddie?”

The question slides beneath your ribs like a blade.

“Shot.” You make yourself breathe. “He’s alive.”

One of Bobby’s men shifts behind him.

Bobby doesn’t look back. He doesn’t need to.

“Alive,” he repeats, weighing the word for weakness. “That’s good. Better be enough.”

You let out a short, careless laugh. “You want me impressed you’re not asking for blood?”

“I already know there was blood.” His voice lowers. “I’m asking who put it there.”

You hold his gaze. Don’t flinch.

That’s the trick.

Bobby can smell fear like smoke, and tonight you have plenty of it. None of it belongs to the obvious threat, though. It belongs to the corridor behind you, the room beyond it, Eddie lying in a hospital bed while Bobby decides whether the shape of this mess is acceptable.

“The Countess made the move,” you say. “She set the trap. Eddie walked into it because she’d been useful enough to look harmless.”

Bobby studies you.

One second.

Two.

Then his mouth shifts by the smallest fraction. Not a smile. Something worse.

“You’re telling me this because you want me to believe Eddie was a victim,” he says, “or because you’re protecting him?”

The question lands cleanly. Too cleanly.

You scoff before the silence can expose you. “Don’t be daft.”

Bobby steps closer.

Not close enough to touch. Close enough that the air feels claimed, and you catch the dry scent of his cologne beneath the hospital’s chemical sting. His eyes harden, steel catching the corridor lights.

“You’ve been getting careless,” he says. “Drinking too much. Picking fights. Running around with women when your head ought to be on the work. Now Eddie gets shot in a lodge with a Countess, and you expect me to believe none of it connects to you?”

Your jaw locks.

He isn’t wrong.

That’s the problem.

“Maybe it connects to someone trying to shoot him,” you say. “Maybe it connects to the snakes crawling all over your operation. You want useful? There it is.”

Bobby’s stare doesn’t soften. It sharpens instead, finding the seam in your armour with practiced ease.

“Useful,” he says quietly. “That’s what you think this is?”

“It’s what it is.”

For a moment, there is no sound but the lights buzzing overhead and the distant squeak of rubber soles against linoleum.

Then Bobby looks past you, toward the room where Eddie is still recovering.

Something changes in his face.

Not suspicion exactly. Calculation. He has always been good at those distinctions.

“Bring the Countess in,” he says to the men behind him. “Alive. I want her version before the police get involved.”

One of them nods and moves away.

Bobby turns back to you. “And, Jack.”

You force the grin onto your face. “Yeah?”

His voice drops until it nearly disappears into the hospital hum.

“If I find out you’ve been lying to me about anything else, I won’t ask twice.”

The threat isn’t loud.

That makes it heavier.

You give him a lazy two-fingered salute, because it’s either that or let him see the panic clawing up your throat. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Bobby watches you for one long beat, then turns toward Eddie’s room as if the conversation has already told him everything he needs.

You move before you think.

At the exact moment he reaches the door, you step into his path. Not a shove. Not a fight. Just enough to make him stop and look at you again.

His brow lifts.

You hear yourself speak before you can decide whether you’ve lost your mind.

“He’s not for your amusement.”

The corridor goes still.

Bobby’s face doesn’t change. But something in the space between you does—something old, terrible, immediate.

“Move,” he says.

You keep your body in Bobby’s way and tip your head toward the door with a careless little shrug, as if you’re only being practical. “Eddie’s family are in there,” you say. “His mum. His sister. You go barging in and it turns into a scene. Probably not worth the hassle, is it?”

Bobby’s eyes narrow at once. He reads the angle faster than anyone should. For one dangerous second, you think he might push past you simply to prove he can.

The corridor is too bright. Too quiet.

Every scrap of fear inside you feels exposed beneath your skin, but you keep your face loose anyway—almost bored,as though you have no stake in whether he believes you.

He studies you, then glances toward the half-closed hospital-room door. Through the narrow gap, you catch movement: Lady Sabrina’s severe outline, Charlotte pacing like a trapped match flame, Susie standing immaculate and still. Bobby’s mouth settles into a thin, unreadable line.

He hates surprises. He hates being managed even more.

But a public family complication? That he hates most of all.

“Family,” he repeats, flat as gravel. “Hornimans?”

You give a slight nod. “Unless Eddie’s been collecting a second set without telling anyone.”

The corner of Bobby’s mouth shifts. Barely. Annoyance, perhaps. Caution, certainly. He doesn’t want to march into a room where the duke’s mother can watch him like a vulture in pearls. He doesn’t want a domestic scandal tied to a shooting already splashed in enough mud.

“Fine,” he says at last.

The word lands as both reprieve and warning.

He doesn’t step aside immediately. Instead, he holds your gaze, weighing you as if he can sort the truth from the performance: loyalty to Eddie, loyalty to the family, or simple self-preservation.

You can’t let him find the answer.

So you hold his stare and pull your mouth into that familiar cocky shape—the one that has got you out of worse than this.

“Can’t have you upsetting his mother,” you mutter. “She already looks like she could skin us all alive.”

For the briefest moment, dry amusement flickers in Bobby’s eyes.

Then it vanishes.

He turns from Eddie’s door and strides toward the nurses’ station, his men trailing after him like shadows. You wait until he’s out of earshot before the tension finally loosens from your spine.

Even then, it doesn’t leave.

It sinks lower, heavier, settling in your gut like a stone.

When you return to the room, everyone inside knows something has happened. No one asks. Susie stands near the window with her arms folded, her face unreadable. Lady Sabrina wears the same severe poise you saw before, but now an edge sharpens her stillness—the kind reserved for men who assume access where none is owed.

Charlotte looks furious on Eddie’s behalf and curious about everything else.

Eddie is pale against the pillows. His attention fixes on you the second you enter.

“Bobby?” Susie asks.

“He’s gone to talk to the hospital staff,” you say. “And he’s being his usual charming self about it.”

Susie’s mouth twitches. Charlotte looks from you to Eddie and back again, already sensing that your answer contains more than the words themselves.

Lady Sabrina looks directly at you.

“You kept him out.”

Not a question.

Your throat tightens anyway.

“Only because he would have made it worse,” you say, too quickly. “And because your lot are in here. Didn’t fancy him turning this into some bollocks power play in front of Eddie’s family.”

Silence gathers.

Then Eddie, his voice rough with pain and fatigue, says, “You made that sound like a charitable act.”

You glance at him. A faint, tired amusement touches his face, but something more unsettled lives beneath it. He knows what you did.

He almost knows why.

You shrug, refusing to let anyone see how badly your hands are shaking now that Bobby is gone. “Don’t read too much into it. I just didn’t want him causing trouble.”

Charlotte lets out a small huff of laughter, then smothers it when her mother looks at her. Susie keeps her eyes on you, sharp enough to catch the lie wrapped around the truth.

Eddie watches you longer.

He has no intention of letting you escape behind that performance.

A nurse enters with a fresh chart and the exhausted expression of someone who has already had enough of your entire family for one night. She looks around the room, counts the bodies, and clears her throat.

“Mr Horniman needs rest.”

That should end it.

It doesn’t.

From the corridor, just beyond the door, Bobby’s voice reaches you again—lower now, clipped and cold. He’s speaking to someone outside. A man. One of his.

Then another voice answers.

Familiar.

Hesitant.

The Countess.

Heat surges through your blood. Whatever Bobby is doing out there, he isn’t waiting politely.

Eddie sees the change in your face and begins pushing himself upright despite the pain, his jaw tightening. Susie turns toward the door. Even Lady Sabrina’s composure shifts by a fraction.

Charlotte goes very still.

From the corridor comes Bobby’s voice, calm as a knife.

“Now,” he says, “tell me exactly who was meant to shoot Horniman.”

Susie takes control before Bobby can draw another breath from anyone.

She steps into the corridor with that precise, icy calm that makes grown men remember appointments they suddenly need to keep. One look at the Countess, and Susie’s expression hardens by a fraction.

Not anger.

Worse. Organisation.

“Don’t say another word,” Susie tells her softly. “If you mention Jack, you’ll regret it before you finish the sentence. If you mention Eddie, you’ll regret it after.”

The Countess has gone pale. She knows she’s lost the advantage. Her mouth snaps shut.

Bobby’s gaze flicks to Susie, then to you, then back to the woman who caused the shooting. He hates being managed, but he hates loose ends more. Susie gives him just enough to work with, steering the blame, the timing, and the route failures back onto the Countess and her accomplice without letting the conversation drift anywhere that might catch on you and Eddie.

You barely hear half of it.

The hospital lights have turned your skull to fog. Your shoulder throbs beneath the bandage. Your eyes burn. Every time you blink, you see Eddie on the lodge floor, blood spreading dark across his shirt.

Eddie. Alive now, but still pale as paper behind the glass of his room.

He’s watched you grow more ragged by the hour, and that makes what comes next worse.

He sends everyone except Susie out.

Then, with his head pressed into the pillow and his voice scraped down to something rough and tired, he looks straight at you.

“Go home.”

You open your mouth to argue.

He cuts you off.

“I’m not dying,” Eddie says. “You, however, are one bad hour away from collapsing into a chair and making a show of it. Go home, Jack.”

You give him a look full of offended pride and worse manners. “That’s cold, mate.”

“It’s accurate.”

Susie saves you from deciding whether to stay and fight or leave before you embarrass yourself further. “He’s right,” she says from the doorway. “For once. You’ve been here long enough to become irritating.”

Charlotte hovers near her mother, arms folded, pretending not to be fascinated by how naturally the whole room has settled around you and Eddie. Lady Sabrina watches you with composed, appraising eyes, weighing exactly how much of a disaster you are.

It’s humiliating.

It’s also the kindest anyone has been to you in hours.

You stand. Badly.

Eddie’s gaze follows the movement, and that nearly undoes you. He looks wrecked, exhausted, and annoyingly determined to remain the one giving orders from a hospital bed.

“Don’t start texting me nonsense from your bed,” he says.

You scoff. “Me? Never.”

His eyes narrow, but a tired curve appears at the corner of his mouth. That tiny shift sends stupid, dangerous warmth through your chest.

“Go,” he says again, quieter this time.

So you do.

The drive home dissolves into wet roads, sodium streetlights, and the sour taste of adrenaline finally wearing off. By the time you drag yourself upstairs and collapse into your room, the house is dark and still.

No Bobby. No Susie. No hospital monitors.

Just your bed, your bruised shoulder, and silence settling over everything like dust.

You text Eddie from beneath the covers anyway, your thumb moving before your brain can stop it.

Jack:  You bossing me about from a hospital bed now, yeah?

The reply takes longer than you want.

Eddie:  Yes.

You snort into your pillow, then wince because even laughing hurts. A moment later, another message arrives.

Eddie:  Did you get home alright?

You stare at the screen.

He asked because he meant it. Not out of politeness. Not because he was performing concern for anyone watching.

Because he wanted to know.

You type with one thumb.

Jack:  Course I did. I’m not made of porcelain.

Three dots appear, vanish, then return.

Eddie:  No. You’re much more irritating than that.

A laugh escapes you, small but real. You lie back, phone glowing in the dark while the rest of the house sleeps around you. It should feel like relief.

Instead, it feels like standing at the edge of something, with no idea whether you’re about to fall or finally step forward.

The last message arrives.

Your smile disappears.

Eddie:  Bobby asked who the Countess was meant to shoot.

The screen goes very still in your hand.

Then another message appears.

Eddie:  Susie covered it.

Your pulse kicks hard beneath your ribs. The room shrinks around you—too small, too quiet,as if Bobby’s shadow has followed you home after all.

You type back before you can overthink it.

Jack:  Send us a selfie. If that’s Bobby on your phone, I’d rather know now than get stitched up by my own stupidity.

The reply comes quickly enough to make you grin despite yourself. A second later, Eddie’s face fills the screen, pale and tired beneath the hospital’s unforgiving light, one eyebrow cocked in dry disbelief—as if even now he can’t quite believe you’re this much of a menace.

The angle is terrible.

The humor is perfect.

Eddie:  There. Satisfied?

You huff a laugh, then sit up against the pillows and point your phone at your own face. That’s the plan, more or less. Prove it’s you. Keep it simple. Keep it safe.

But your hair has fallen loose around your face, your shirt hangs open at the throat, and blood has seeped faintly through the dressing over your shoulder. The effect makes you look less like a patient than some bastard dragged through trouble and rewarded for it with good lighting.

You take the photo anyway.

Then you see the shot.

Too good.

Cocky eyes. Reckless mouth. An invitation barely holding itself back. The sort of picture that looks less like proof of life and more like a threat with excellent cheekbones.

You hesitate for one second.

Then send it.

Honesty has never been your strong suit. Neither has restraint. And some hot-headed, stupidly hopeful part of you wants Eddie to see exactly how far under your skin he’s managed to get tonight.

The message goes.

You stare at the screen, suddenly aware that you’ve just sent the sort of photo a man only sends when he’s thinking about far more than checking a phone.

Three dots appear almost immediately.

Stop.

Start again.

Eddie:  You could have simply said your name.

You grin into the dark, then wince when the movement tugs at your shoulder.

“Fuck off,” you mutter to the room.

The room offers only your own pulse in reply.

Jack:  Yeah, well. Now you’ve got visual proof and everything.

Another pause. Longer this time. You can practically feel him deciding whether to take the bait, weighing your words in that maddeningly careful way of his.

When the reply comes, it lands with irritating precision.

Eddie:  Unfortunately, I do.

The words should be harmless.

They aren’t.

They sit on the screen like a hand at the back of your neck—firm, warm, impossible to ignore. Your grin fades into something softer before you can stop it.

Across the city, in a private hospital room surrounded by your family, Eddie is probably glaring at his phone and pretending he isn’t affected. That’s the trouble with him. Even through a screen, even half-broken and stitched together, he can make you feel seen in places the photograph never touched.

A second message arrives.

Eddie:  You’re supposed to be asleep.

You glance at the clock. It’s far too late for anyone sensible, which means you’re right on schedule.

Jack:  You’re one to talk.

Eddie:  I’m injured.

Jack:  You were already injured when I left, mate. Don’t get cocky.

You can almost hear his exasperated sigh. The thought tightens something in your chest that has nothing to do with the bandage. You roll onto your side, holding the phone low, while the dark house gathers around you—quiet, watchful, full of everything neither of you is saying.

Then the phone buzzes again.

Not Eddie.

A new message from Susie appears.

Susie:  If either of you starts using photographs as evidence of feelings, I’ll end you both myself.

You stare at it.

Then a shocked bark of laughter escapes into your pillow.

A moment later, Eddie texts again.

Eddie:  She has a point.

The laughter fades into something warmer.

More dangerous.

You keep the phone in your hand and look at the stupidly sexy selfie still glowing on the screen: the bloodless bravado, the loose fall of your hair, the shirt slipping open at your throat. You know exactly why you took it.

You also know exactly why Eddie would never say that out loud.

Your thumb moves before you can stop it.

You begin to reply.

Then stop.

A knock sounds downstairs.

Not the house settling. Not a branch against the glass.

A real knock. Hard. Deliberate. Purposeful enough to turn your stomach.

Then another.

And because the night has become a talentless bastard, the front door opens on the third knock. Bobby’s voice rolls up the stairwell, low and controlled, asking for you by name.

The screen in your hand still glows with Eddie’s last message.

You no longer have the luxury of pretending this is only a text conversation.

You thumb the message out fast, half laughing at your own stupidity while your pulse kicks harder.

Jack:  Dad’s here right as I was about to get horny. Brilliant timing, yeah?

You send it before you can second-guess yourself. Then you swing your legs out of bed and cross the room barefoot, still wearing the rumpled shirt, the bandage tugging at your shoulder with every step. The knock comes again downstairs. Harder this time.

Bobby’s voice cuts through the house with that awful calm he wears when he expects to be obeyed.

You reach the front door before anyone else can. The hall is dark, the sidelights blurred with rain, and Bobby Glass waits on the step like he owns the weather. When you open the door, his gaze moves over your face, your loose hair, the flush you have absolutely failed to hide.

His expression goes flat.

“Evening, Jack,” he says. “You look like hell.”

“Cheers, Dad. Nice to see you too.”

He walks in without asking. Of course he does.

Wet wool and cold air follow him into the hallway, along with two of his men, both silent and watchful. Bobby’s eyes flick past you once, taking in the shadowed staircase, the closed upstairs doors, the hospital phone glowing in your hand.

He notices everything.

You hate that most.

You keep your face easy and step aside as if you’re merely being polite, but the entire house seems to cinch tight around his arrival. No shouting. That would be simple. Bobby doesn’t do simple when he wants control. He moves into the hall with measured patience, looking more annoyed than angry, which is somehow worse.

“You’ve been inconvenient,” he says. “Twice tonight.”

You snort. “Only twice? Must be slipping.”

His gaze drops to the bandage at your shoulder. “You should be in bed.”

“So should half your business model.”

The corner of his mouth shifts. Not quite a smile. Then his attention hardens and settles on the phone in your hand.

For one sharp second, you think of Eddie’s last message. The photo you sent. The ridiculous text still sitting in the thread.

Bobby takes another step closer.

“Who are you talking to?”

Upstairs, a floorboard creaks.

It barely makes a sound, but the air changes. Bobby hears it. His eyes lift toward the staircase, then return to you with a slow, deliberate scrutiny that makes your skin feel too tight.

“Susie,” you say easily. “She’s keeping Eddie alive, if you must know.”

Bobby studies you for another beat, then glances at the screen when it lights in your hand.

A new text from Eddie.

Eddie:  I am going to regret asking, but what exactly does “horny” mean in this context?

You nearly choke on a laugh.

Bobby’s expression changes by a hair. No one else would catch it. You do. He’s sensed the shape of a secret, and he hasn’t decided whether to break it open or use it yet.

Before he can ask, Susie appears at the top of the stairs, immaculate in black, her expression unreadable. Her gaze sweeps over Bobby at the door, you in the hall, and the phone clenched in your hand.

“Good,” she says. “You’re here before Jack makes this any more of a disaster.”

Bobby turns toward her, then back to you.

Now every piece is in the same room, and none of you are pretending very well.

Upstairs, Eddie is still waiting for an answer.

Bobby takes the phone from your hand before you can even think to stop him. His fingers clamp around it, and Eddie’s messages glare from the screen against his palm. For one sick second, nobody moves. The hallway contracts around the four of you. Rain ticks softly against the glass. The whole house holds its breath.

Bobby reads.

His face barely changes, which is worse than anger. Then his mouth twists with contempt—and something uglier, aimed straight at you.

“You little idiot.” His voice is low. Poisonous. “What have you done?”

You freeze.

Not because you want to. Because the old terror catches you by the throat, that boxed-in helplessness you hate more than pain. Your tongue refuses to work. Your shoulders lock. Bobby sees it and mistakes your silence for permission.

He shoves the phone against your chest, then catches you across the side of the face with the back of his hand.

The blow cracks through your cheekbone and snaps your head sideways. Before you can recover, he hits you again, then again—not clean blows, but a brutal, hurried flurry meant to hurt and humiliate. “Pathetic,” he spits. “Disgusting. You think I don’t see it? You think I’m blind?”

The words cut deeper than the strikes.

Your ears ring. Heat floods your face, then drains into a cold that reaches your fingers. Blood slicks your tongue where your lip splits. Bobby steps toward you again, anger finally tearing loose, and spits the names at you like filth he wants to scrape from his shoe.

He is beyond reason now. Beyond restraint. The room has gone frighteningly still around him.

Then Susie moves.

She crosses the space in an instant, one hand closing around Bobby’s wrist while the other drives hard into his chest. The force stops him cold. Her face is white with fury, but her voice stays level—flat enough to cut.

“That’s enough.”

Bobby jerks against her grip. Susie holds on.

“You want to behave like a brute in my house,” she says, each word clipped and lethal, “you will do it somewhere else.”

For a moment, Bobby looks as if he might turn that violence on her too. The house braces around the possibility. Your breath catches.

Then he stops.

Not because he has calmed down. Because Susie has made the cost clear.

Your breathing comes shallow and fast. Your cheek burns. Blood gathers at your lip. Bobby’s fury hangs in the hallway like smoke, thick enough to choke on. Somewhere upstairs, Eddie’s door opens a fraction.

You don’t look back.

You can’t.

Bobby throws the phone onto the hall table. It skids across the wood and clatters against the wall. “You are going to explain yourself,” he says, every word scraped clean of patience. “And if you’ve dragged that man into this family’s business as part of some twisted game, I’ll sort it out myself.”

Susie keeps one hand locked around his arm, holding him just at the edge of what he can tolerate. Her eyes flick to you once—quick, assessing. The blood. The shock. The way you’ve gone unnaturally still.

Then she looks back at him.

“Not in front of me, you won’t.”

The silence afterward is worse than the shouting.

Bobby breathes hard through his nose, his body still tight with fury. You shake now, barely, and the shame of it twists your stomach. Upstairs, Eddie’s footsteps shift. He heard enough. He knows something has gone badly wrong.

Bobby’s eyes settle on you again.

“This isn’t finished.”

No one disagrees.

But Susie is already steering him back a step, away from you, away from the phone, away from whatever he might do next. In the small space she creates, you draw one breath.

Finally.

It feels like your own.

Your phone buzzes in your fist just as Bobby takes another step toward you.

You glance down before you can stop yourself.

A new message from Eddie glows across the cracked screen, stupidly gentle amid the blood and shouting.

Eddie:  Are you okay?

The question catches somewhere behind your ribs.

Bobby sees your face change. Sees the name. Sees the screen trembling in your hand. Whatever restraint he had left snaps clean in half, and the hallway seems to contract around you, narrowing until the walls feel close enough to crush bone.

“Are you serious?” he says. “You’re texting him while I’m standing here?”

You open your mouth.

Nothing useful comes out.

Bobby hits you again.

Harder this time.

Your head snaps back, and white light bursts across your vision. Pain tears through your shoulder where the movement jerks the bandage. Blood floods your mouth—hot, metallic, immediate. The floor rolls beneath you. For one dizzy second, there’s nothing but the frantic pounding in your ears and the rough, furious rasp of Bobby’s breath.

“You’ve embarrassed this family enough,” he snarls.

There’s no warmth left in him. No brotherly anger he can pretend is concern. Only fury, and the ugly satisfaction of seeing you flinch.

“You want to act like a little fool for a man in a hospital bed, fine. But you’ll do it after you stop making a spectacle of yourself in my house.”

Your palm smacks against the wall. The plaster scrapes beneath your skin as you force yourself upright.

It hurts.

Good. The pain gives you something solid to hold on to. It keeps you standing when your knees want to fold.

Susie moves before Bobby can swing again.

She catches his wrist. Then the other.

Not with panic. With the cool, hard control she uses when the entire family is one bad decision from becoming a catastrophe.

“Enough.”

Bobby turns on her, shoulders tight, breath burning through his nose. For a second, you think he might tear straight through her to reach you.

Susie doesn’t step back.

She holds his gaze and drops her voice until it becomes more dangerous than shouting.

“You’ve made your point,” she says. “He understands it. If you keep going, you’ll only make this mess bigger, and you know it.”

Bobby’s jaw flexes.

His eyes cut to you—your split lip, your hand braced against the wall, your phone still shaking in your grip,then return to Susie. The anger remains. So does the urge to hurt you.

He simply hates her being right more.

From upstairs, Eddie texts again.

Eddie:  Jack?

Your name swims on the screen through the haze gathering at the edges of your vision. Your thumb twitches toward the message.

Before you can answer, Bobby snatches the phone from your hand.

The sudden absence of its weight leaves your fingers curled around nothing.

He glares at the screen as if the device itself has betrayed him, as if Eddie’s concern is an insult Bobby can punish. The glow paints his knuckles blue. Your pulse beats against your teeth.

Susie steps between you.

A physical line.

Bobby has to choose whether to cross it.

He doesn’t. Not now.

His eyes stay fixed on you for one long, cold beat. Then he exhales sharply through his nose and thrusts the phone back toward you.

“This is finished for tonight,” he says. “Susie will sort you out.”

You hear the disgust beneath the words.

The warning, too.

Bobby points once at the staircase, then at you, as though force of will alone might drag the whole situation back beneath his thumb. When he finally turns away, his anger follows him in every rigid movement—a man convinced the room has only delayed him.

Susie waits until he and his men disappear beyond earshot.

Only then does she look back at you.

Your cheek burns where he struck you. Your lip has split wider, and every swallow tastes like pennies. The house feels wrong now, too quiet around the edges, filled with the stale shock violence leaves behind and the faint electronic buzz of Eddie’s unanswered messages.

Susie’s expression softens by exactly one degree.

“Sit down,” she says. “Before you fall down and make this all much more tedious.”

Upstairs, the phone buzzes again in your hand.

Eddie:  Are you okay?

Susie gets a wet cloth from the bathroom and presses it to your split lip without ceremony, as if she’s cleaning a broken vase instead of your face. You sit on the edge of the hall bench, elbows braced on your knees, phone clutched in your uninjured hand while you type through the sting.

The message goes to Eddie with almost insulting simplicity.

Jack:  I’ll sneak into the hospital in a bit. Don’t start bossing me about.

A second later, the typing bubbles appear.

You stare at them as if they might bite.

Eddie:  You should be in bed.

A laugh scrapes out of you, ragged and painful. Susie glances at the screen, then at your face, and says nothing. She wipes the thin smear of blood from the corner of your mouth with the maddening calm of someone who has spent her life cleaning up other people’s mistakes.

The house has gone quiet. Bobby is gone. His men have gone with him. Still, the air feels bruised, thick with the aftertaste of shouting, as though the walls are holding on to his temper.

You swallow. Pain flares along your lip.

Then you look at Susie, because you can’t keep pretending you’re only angry about being hit. “Sorry,” you mutter.

She pauses, cloth suspended between you. “For what, exactly?”

You shake your head once. Your cheek throbs in answer. “For all of it. For making a right mess of things.” You try for a bitter grin, but it collapses before it reaches your mouth. “And before you start, no, I’m not gay. I just don’t know what the fuck is going on with me.”

The words hang there in the warm hall light.

Susie’s expression doesn’t change at first. Somehow, that’s worse than shock. She studies you with the same cool attention she gives route maps and ledgers, then folds the cloth and sets it beside her.

“Good,” she says at last, dry as dust. “Because if you expected me to be surprised that you’re confused, you overestimate how difficult you are to read.”

You bark out a laugh.

Pain snaps through your mouth.

You regret it immediately.

Her mouth twitches. “Jack, you are not some grand riddle because you’ve become emotionally unmanageable around one very controlled man.”

“That’s not helping.”

“No.” She tips your chin up with two fingers and examines the bruise spreading along your jaw. Her touch is brief, firm, entirely unsentimental. “It’s accurate. You were hit because Bobby is an animal. You were stupid because you sent Eddie a message while Bobby was in the house. And you’re frightened because, for once, you might actually care what happens next.”

You look away before she can see how cleanly that strikes.

The phone buzzes again.

Eddie has replied.

Eddie:  I am not bossing. I am recovering.

A snort escapes you. The movement pulls at your cut, and you wince.

Before you can overthink it, you type:

Jack:  Fine. I’m coming after dark. Don’t die before then.

The pause lasts long enough for your heartbeat to climb beneath your ribs and make itself impossible to ignore.

Then:

Eddie:  That wasn’t part of the plan.

You stare at the words.

The corner of your mouth lifts despite the pain, despite Bobby, despite every sensible instinct you’ve had since walking into this mess. Susie catches the change and gives you one of those thin, knowing looks that means she has already stored it away for later.

“Before you start panicking,” she says, “you are not the first stupid man to discover he wants something he cannot name.”

You meet her eyes. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“No. It’s supposed to make you quieter.”

She takes up the cloth again and cleans the last trace of blood from your lip. Then she folds her arms. For once, there’s no mockery in her face. Only the steady patience of a sister who knows you’re half a step from bolting and is prepared to catch you by the collar.

“Eddie is in hospital. Bobby is furious. The Countess is still alive, which means this isn’t over.” Her gaze sharpens. “Whatever you feel, you won’t make it worse by frightening yourself with labels and speeches. If you want to be near him, be near him. If you want to deny everything for another week, do that too. But don’t insult me by pretending this is simple.”

Upstairs, a floorboard creaks.

Then another.

Bobby is gone, but the house remains full of him—the way a room stays full of smoke after a fire. You force yourself upright, roll your shoulder carefully, and reach for your jacket on the hall table.

Your phone lights before you can move.

This time, it isn’t Eddie.

It’s Susie, though she hasn’t spoken.

Susie:  If you sneak into that hospital and make a drama of this, I will personally carry you back out by the scruff.

You look up.

She raises one brow, all steel and elegance and absolute certainty that she would, in fact, do exactly that.

Then the house phone rings from the dark front room.

Once.

The sharp sound cracks the silence open.

Susie’s eyes flick toward it. Your stomach tightens. If it’s Bobby again, or the hospital, or the Countess, the night is about to become much worse than bruises and confusion.

The second ring comes before either of you moves.

You let Susie finish cleaning the blood from your mouth and jaw, then head for the hospital with your bruises throbbing beneath your coat collar and your temper gnawing at the inside of your ribs.

The drive drags.

Every red light feels personal. Every glance in the rear-view mirror shows you a face you’ve spent your whole life pretending not to recognize: split lip, swelling cheek, eyes gone hard with shame. A man who has made a proper mess of himself and turned up anyway.

By the time you reach Eddie’s floor, the bravado has worn thin. The corridor lies quiet beneath merciless fluorescent lights, the air sharp with disinfectant and something faintly medicinal underneath. You catch your reflection in the dark glass of a fire door and nearly stop walking.

There it is. Bobby’s handiwork.

The bruise spreading along your jaw. The fresh swelling beneath your cheekbone. The red, ugly seam of your lip. Plain as day.

The sight hits hard enough to make you slow.

What the fuck are you doing here?

Eddie is awake enough to notice. He’ll see the damage. He’ll ask. Or worse, he’ll say nothing, and you’ll know he’s seen everything.

That thought makes you feel like an idiot. A proper one.

You stop outside his room with your hand on the handle and stare at the door too long, suddenly aware of every stupid thing you’ve done in the last twenty-four hours. The Countess. Bobby. The texts. The bruises. Coming here at all.

You almost leave.

You really do.

One step back. Already braced for the familiar shame of walking away, you hear the soft scrape of movement inside.

Eddie wakes before you can disappear.

The door opens a fraction from within, and there he is in the bed, pale beneath the hospital light, his hair flattened by sleep and pain. One arm remains bandaged beneath the blanket. His eyes find you instantly.

They go to your face, then lower to the bruises.

Something tightens across his features.

Not surprise. Not exactly. More like he’s had one furious, instinctive second to understand what Bobby has done.

Eddie looks wrecked himself—stitched, bruised, exhausted enough to hate the whole world for existing,but the moment he sees you in the doorway, his voice roughens with concern.

“What happened to you?”

You should joke. That’s the rule. You’ve always had a rule for things like this: make it funny first, before anyone can decide it hurts.

Instead, you give a weak, self-conscious huff and stay in the doorway like a prat caught doing something embarrassing.

“Nothing worth mentioning.”

Eddie’s stare hardens.

“Jack.”

One word.

It strips the nonsense away. It always does.

You drag a hand over your mouth and feel the split lip pull. Right. Brilliant. Catastrophic timing all round.

“It was Bobby,” you admit at last, the words bitter on your tongue. “He was in a mood. I thought I’d come check on you, and now I look like I’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards.”

For a moment, Eddie says nothing. His gaze stays fixed on your face, on the deepening colour beneath your eye, on the swelling along your cheek.

Then his mouth shifts.

Not quite anger. Not quite something else. Something hotter. Controlled, barely. It rolls through your stomach in a way that has nothing to do with the bruises.

“You came all this way,” he says quietly, “because you were worried about me.”

You let out a short laugh with no humour in it.

“Don’t make it sound noble. I was also being a tit.”

The faintest movement touches the corner of his mouth.

Not enough to call it a smile.

Enough to keep you from bolting.

He shifts carefully against the pillows and winces once, despite himself. The small sound catches beneath your ribs. His eyes never leave yours.

“Come here.”

You hesitate only because the room has gone too still, because the air feels thinner now, because every bruise on your face seems to announce exactly how badly this night has gone.

Then you cross to the bedside anyway.

Slower than usual.

You stop within reach.

Eddie studies your cheek with such focused attention that heat prickles up your neck. He smells faintly of soap, hospital linen, and the bitter coffee someone must have left cooling nearby. You have no business noticing any of it. You notice anyway.

“What did he do?”

You manage a half shrug. “What he does.”

His jaw tightens.

For one beat, you think he’ll tell you to sit down, call Susie, or start another argument about Bobby and the mess and the whole ugly family empire. Instead, Eddie lifts his hand.

His fingers stop just short of your bruised face.

The space between you turns electric.

Then he seems to think better of touching you there.

“Bastard,” he mutters.

The word is quiet. It lands warm.

From the corridor, the hospital carries on around you—rubber soles whispering over polished floor, a distant trolley rattling past, the soft electronic pulse of a machine keeping time. Indifferent. Unmoved.

Inside the room, Eddie looks at you like you are something worth worrying over.

And the humiliating decision to come here battered and bleeding stops feeling like a mistake. It feels, annoyingly, like the only thing you could have done.

Then he reaches for you, not quite smiling, and the whole night changes again.

You let the truth out on a breath too thin to carry it.

“He hit me over you,” you say, and the words strike the room like a glass dropped on tile. “Bobby. He saw the messages and lost his fucking mind.”

Eddie goes still.

The hand he lifted toward your face stops halfway, fingers hovering in the cold hospital air before curling slowly into a fist against the blanket. His eyes change first. Then his mouth. His jaw locks until the calm he wears looks less like composure and more like something holding back a violent break.

“He hit you,” Eddie says.

Quietly.

That makes it worse.

You give him one of your usual careless shrugs, but it comes out wrong—too tight, too small, dragging something younger and more frightened into the open. “Yeah. Bit of a romantic gesture, really.”

Nothing.

Eddie’s stare moves over your bruised cheek, your split lip, the darkening mark along your jaw. Something sharp and dangerous crosses his face before he forces it down again. He is pale from the surgery, bandaged and exhausted, but the fury burning through him is so clean it seems to leach warmth from the room.

“And you came here anyway.” Not a question.

“Course I did.” You reach for a grin and manage half of one. “You were in here looking like hell. Thought I’d keep you company.”

For one second, he looks ready to tell you exactly how stupid that was. Reckless, too. Possibly both. Instead, he lets out one short, disbelieving breath and turns toward the window, putting distance between you before he says something he cannot take back.

The machines tick softly beside him. Rain whispers against the glass.

When he looks at you again, his eyes are harder.

“Bobby should not be putting his hands on you.”

There is nothing casual left in his voice. No room for a joke. No easy way out.

You should bristle. You should toss back something smart and make him regret caring. Instead, the words twist low in your chest because he said them like they mattered.

Like you mattered.

Before you can answer, the door opens.

Susie steps inside, immaculate as ever, her black suit cutting a clean line through the flat hospital light. She takes in your face, Eddie’s expression, the space between you, and understands everything in a heartbeat.

“Right,” she says. “So that’s what happened.”

You open your mouth.

She raises one hand. “Don’t bother. I can already hear Bobby being an arsehole from here.”

Eddie’s gaze shifts to her. The fury remains, leashed now beneath every word. “He hit Jack because of me.”

Susie’s mouth tightens. “Yes, well, that does rather sound like Bobby.”

Then she looks at you.

The softness in her expression is brief, but you catch it. That almost makes the shame worse.

“You should have told me sooner.”

“I didn’t want him making it worse.”

“That,” Susie says, “is usually how these things get worse.”

The room closes around the silence that follows.

Eddie watches you as if he is trying to decide whether to be angry, protective, or both. Your bruises throb beneath his attention. Heat crawls up your neck. You came here to sit beside him, to make him feel less alone, and now you are standing in front of him with your split lip and your carefully practiced jokes, exposed in a way that leaves nowhere to hide.

Then Eddie speaks.

“When I get out of this bed, we’re dealing with Bobby properly.”

His voice drops low. Dangerous.

Your pulse kicks hard.

Susie looks from him to you, reading the shape of the mess gathering between you before either of you has the courage to name it. Eddie is still weak, still trapped beneath hospital blankets and white dressing tape, yet the promise in his voice feels heavier than any threat you have heard from Bobby.

For the first time tonight, the room stops feeling like a hospital.

It feels like the beginning of a war.

One no one has admitted they are already fighting.

The transfer happens before dawn, while the hospital is still half-asleep and the corridors glow too brightly for the hour. Eddie arranges it with the quiet authority that makes nurses stop asking questions. Susie smooths the paperwork with one phone call and a look that leaves no room for debate.

You are too tired to argue.

Too tired, and too aware that Bobby Glass could come through the wrong door at the wrong time and turn a bad night into something far uglier.

By the time you reach Eddie’s manor, the rain has thinned to mist. It beads on the hedges and turns the gravel drive silver beneath the security lights. The place looks unreal at this hour—dark stone, clipped grounds, windows glowing faintly against the black sky. Quieter than the hospital.

Somehow, that makes it feel safer and more dangerous at once.

Bobby is still out there in the world. The Countess is still a problem. But here, for the moment, the doors are locked, the staff are discreet, and nobody is shouting over a monitor’s relentless beeping.

Eddie is still pale from the move, still measuring every breath, but he refuses to be handled like glass. He has barely crossed the front hall before he starts giving instructions in that clipped, controlled voice of his, turning his own recovery into an inconvenience everyone else must manage efficiently.

Susie stays only long enough to make sure the right people are in place. Then she leaves with a warning look that promises consequences for stupidity or heroics before morning.

You offer a tired salute.

It earns you nothing.

Upstairs, Eddie’s room is warm and dim, the curtains drawn against the last smear of night. The bed is too wide for one person and somehow feels crowded the instant you sit down. Your bruises throb. Your split lip stings whenever you breathe through your mouth. All the exhaustion you have been outrunning catches up with you at once, heavy as wet clothes.

Eddie settles beside you with obvious care. Then, when he feels you shift, he looks over.

“You’re not leaving, are you?”

A rough laugh escapes you. You sink into the pillows. “Mate, I can barely keep my eyes open. If Bobby wants to kick the door in, he can do it after I’ve had a bloody minute.”

The corner of Eddie’s mouth moves despite himself.

He lies back carefully, one arm braced against the place where the wound still pulls, and turns his head toward you. There is no performance left in the room now. No argument. No denial. Only the two of you breathing in the dark, close enough that his warmth reaches you through the thick duvet, carrying the faint clean scent of soap and antiseptic.

You should move your hand.

Instead, your fingers drift across the sheet until they brush his.

Eddie’s hand goes still beneath yours. For one suspended second, you expect him to pull away. Then his fingers turn, slow and deliberate, and settle against your palm.

He lets you stay.

That is the last clear thing you remember before sleep drags you under.

You wake tangled in the after-dark quiet, one arm flung carelessly across the mattress, your hand still hooked around Eddie’s. For a second, you don’t know where you are.

Then the room settles into focus: the manor, the silence, Eddie beside you, asleep on his back with his face turned your way. The pale bandaging is hidden beneath the blankets. His lashes rest against his cheeks. Without the sharpness in his voice, without the hard lines of command around his mouth, he looks younger. More exposed.

The sight should embarrass you.

Instead, it settles somewhere beneath your ribs with a strange, aching calm.

Then you hear it.

A floorboard outside the room.

Soft. Deliberate.

Someone has stepped carefully, not stumbled. The manor is never truly empty—not tonight, not with Bobby still angry, Susie still on edge, and the whole business with the Countess hanging over the house like a blade.

Eddie opens his eyes at the same moment you do.

His fingers tighten around yours once, small and immediate. Sleep vanishes from his face, replaced by sharp attention. He listens. So do you. Neither of you speaks.

The room holds its breath.

A second sound comes from the door.

A quiet knock.

In the stillness that follows, Eddie turns his head toward you. His thumb presses once against your knuckles before he murmurs, very low, “That had better be Susie.”

You jerk properly awake when the knock comes again, and panic does the rest. It takes half a second too long to remember where your shirt is, another to find your trousers, and by then you are swaying on your feet, dragging fabric over bruised shoulders and split skin while the room tilts beneath you.

Your head hurts. Every movement feels like punishment for being stupid.

Eddie is trying not to laugh. He is failing badly.

“You do realise,” he says, his voice rough with sleep and dry amusement, “that you are making a disgrace of yourself in my bedroom.”

“Yeah.” You fumble with a button. “That’s sort of the plan.”

The door opens before you can get your shirt sorted, and Lady Sabrina steps inside as if she has every right to the room, the hour, and the air itself. She is dressed far too neatly for morning, dark coat smooth, hair pinned in place, composure sharpened to a point. It makes your frantic half-dressing feel even more pathetic.

Her gaze moves over the room once: Eddie in bed, you standing there with your shirt crooked and your face bruised.

She does not look shocked.

She looks kind.

Not soft. Not indulgent. Something steadier than that, and far more disarming.

“Good morning,” she says, as though she has walked into an ordinary inconvenience instead of the aftermath of a shooting and a family disaster. “I am sorry to interrupt, Mr Glass. Eddie told me you had been injured. He neglected to mention quite how badly you would be taking it.”

You blink at her, thrown off balance in an entirely different way. “He’s got a habit of underselling things.”

“That much I have noticed.”

Eddie closes his eyes for a moment. You can almost feel his wish for the floor to open and swallow him whole. Lady Sabrina’s mouth shifts, nearly a smile, as she watches the two of you in embarrassed silence. Then she crosses to the bed, checks Eddie’s colour with the brisk competence of someone who has spent a lifetime caring without fuss, and turns back to you.

“You should sit down before you fall down,” she says gently.

That nearly undoes you more than Bobby’s fist did.

You sit.

The room has begun swaying again, and refusing would only make things worse. The mattress dips beneath you, warm and solid. Eddie watches with an expression that says he knows precisely how much your pride is costing you.

Lady Sabrina notices that too, of course. Nothing slips past her. But she does not press. Instead, she reaches into her coat pocket and produces a small tin of mints, setting it on the bedside table as if this is the natural end to the conversation.

“For the nausea,” she says. “If your head is as bruised as your face, you will feel dreadful for a while.”

You stare at the tin, then at her. “You’re being weirdly decent about this.”

Her eyes meet yours without a flicker. “I have a son in a hospital bed and a young man who looks as though he was used for target practice. I can spare a little decency.”

The words land harder than you expect.

Your throat tightens. Stupidly.

Under the blankets, Eddie’s hand shifts. His fingers brush your knee, barely there, but you feel the touch through the fabric. He is listening now, quiet in a way you have begun to recognise—not indifference, never that. Attention held carefully in place.

Lady Sabrina speaks to him next, her tone changing only slightly. “Your sister is downstairs arguing with the staff over breakfast, and Susie Glass has already telephoned twice. Bobby is apparently in a vile mood, which seems consistent with the rest of the week.”

Eddie lets out a tired breath. “That’s reassuring.”

“It is not meant to be.”

A laugh escapes you before you can stop it. The motion sends pain flashing through your skull, and you wince hard enough to pull Lady Sabrina’s brows together.

“Easy,” she says. “You are not required to perform wellbeing for anyone in this room.”

You look away before she can see how much that helps.

Outside, the manor is waking. Floorboards creak somewhere below. A distant door shuts. Pipes knock softly in the walls—the quiet business of a house pretending trouble has not taken up residence inside it.

Eddie studies you from the pillow, pale but alert now. His mouth softens by the smallest degree.

Lady Sabrina catches that too.

Of course she does.

She gives you one last measured look, almost protective now in the strangest way, then turns toward the door. “I will send someone with tea, and something for the headache. If you insist on being dramatic, at least be hydrated.”

The door closes behind her.

The room falls quiet.

You sit very still, your shirt buttoned wrong, your pulse too fast, your stomach unsettled by panic and pain. Eddie turns his head toward you, and for once he does not look amused by your suffering.

He looks attentive.

Warm.

A little stunned by his mother’s easy acceptance of the scene she found.

“Well,” he says after a moment, voice low, “that could have gone worse.”

You let your head fall back against the pillows with a groan. “Don’t start. I nearly died getting dressed.”

Eddie’s mouth twitches.

The room feels different now—lighter in one small corner, more dangerous in another. Lady Sabrina has seen enough to understand there is something here. Not the whole shape of it. Not yet.

But enough.

Somewhere downstairs, with the house awake and Bobby still a threat in the wider world, the morning has already begun moving toward the next problem.

Eddie’s fingers find yours beneath the blanket.

Quiet. Sure.

This time, he does not let go.

You turn onto your side and murmur, half buried in the pillows, that you wish you could stay like this for days.

Eddie, already half-curled toward you beneath the duvet, makes a quiet, tired sound that nearly becomes a laugh. “Then do it,” he says, his voice roughened soft by sleep. “You’re not useful to anyone like this.”

The answer should be a joke. Maybe it is. But the room is warm and dim, and your head still aches in that distant, bruised way that slows everything down. You shift closer instead, careful of your shoulder, and Eddie meets you without hesitation. Your fingers slide into his hair at the temple, loose and soft from sleep, while his hand closes around yours and stays there as if it has every right.

It is absurdly easy to let go.

The pressure in your chest eases first. Then the noise. Then the sharp little shame that has followed you for days like a badly trained guard dog. Eddie’s breathing settles into a steady rhythm beside you, and your body, traitorous and exhausted, falls into it. The room blurs at the edges. The last thing you remember clearly is his thumb brushing once over your knuckles, gentle and deliberate, as if he is making sure you have not vanished.

When you wake again, the light has changed.

Morning has gone soft and pale, stretched thin across the curtains. The manor is quieter than before, though not empty. Somewhere below, voices drift upward in low, controlled fragments. A door shuts. Another opens.

Life, inconveniently, continues.

You are still on your side.

Eddie is still there.

His fingers remain tangled with yours, and your other hand is still in his hair, exactly where it fell asleep. For one dazed second, you do not move at all. He wakes before you can do anything stupid, blinking slowly, then looking at you with that dry, intent focus that always feels like being seen properly for the first time.

“Morning,” he says.

Your throat is dry. Your head is less murderous than it was, which counts as progress. “You’re still here.”

He gives you a look. “You said you wanted to sleep for days.”

“Yeah, well.” Your voice scrapes. “I meant it.”

The corner of his mouth shifts. Not quite a smile. Closer than that.

The door opens before you can decide whether to keep pretending this is normal.

Lady Sabrina appears first, composed as ever, carrying a tray of tea and toast as if she has spent her whole life bringing sustenance to compromised men in expensive beds. Behind her, Charlotte hovers with an expression caught between concern and delighted interest. Susie follows at a more deliberate pace, immaculate in black, and takes in the scene in one glance: you half-shielding Eddie without meaning to, your fingers still tangled in his hair, Eddie’s hand still caught in yours.

Susie’s brows lift by a fraction.

“Useful,” she says, setting a folder on the side table. “You two have at least managed to stop making your problems everyone else’s for the last six hours.”

Charlotte snorts before she can hide it.

Lady Sabrina places the tray down with unruffled grace. “He slept,” she says, looking at you with the same mild approval someone might reserve for a dog that has finally stopped chewing the furniture. “Good. He needed to.”

Heat climbs into your ears. “Cheers.”

“No, really. It’s a marked improvement.”

Eddie closes his eyes for a beat, as if he wishes himself anywhere else—and perhaps nowhere at all. Susie glances from him to you and back again, amusement sharpening into assessment.

“Bobby hasn’t been here,” she says. “Which is fortunate, because he’s still in the sort of mood that makes his movements everyone else’s problem.”

That brings you fully awake. “He knows?”

“Enough,” Susie replies. “Not enough to be useful to himself. Which is his usual state, really.”

Lady Sabrina lifts the teapot lid and nods toward the cups. “Drink something. Both of you. If Bobby becomes relevant again, I would prefer you caffeinated and less pale.”

Charlotte moves to the window and looks out over the grounds, her voice lighter than her expression. “The hospital called once. They wanted to know whether Eddie is still alive and whether Jack is as alarming in person as he is on record.”

You give her a crooked look. “And?”

She turns back, grinning despite herself. “The answer was yes on both counts.”

That earns a quiet, reluctant exhale from Eddie, and something in the room loosens with it.

For the moment, the danger has not gone. The Countess is still somewhere out there. Bobby is still Bobby. But the manor room is warm, the tea is hot, and your hand remains entwined with Eddie’s, as if neither of you can quite bring yourselves to decide that this means nothing.

It feels, infuriatingly, like a beginning.

Then Susie’s phone buzzes once in her pocket.

The small look she gives it is enough to make the air change all over again.

The family meeting starts the second you walk into Bobby’s room above the warehouse, because Bobby has never believed in letting a crisis breathe.

The place is packed tight with men. Susie stands near the wall like she was born for boardrooms and funerals, while Eddie waits beside her in a dark coat that does nothing to disguise how pale he still is. Coffee. Wet wool. The metallic scent of trouble.

Bobby stands at the head of the table, hands folded, his expression carved from stone. He doesn’t ask anyone to sit.

He looks straight at you.

Then at Eddie.

Then back at the room, making certain every pair of eyes follows him there.

“This”—Bobby lifts a folded newspaper, your name and Eddie’s face half-drowned beneath flashbulb glare,“has become embarrassing.”

The paper is open to the wrong page. The wrong photograph. The wrong headline. There you are in the manor corridor, mouth sharp and eyes bright with defiance. There’s Eddie at the hospital, bloodless beneath fluorescent lights. Questions stack over questions, all of them hungry.

You force a grin because your mouth knows only two settings when you’re cornered: joke or kill.

“Bit dramatic for breakfast, isn’t it?”

Bobby doesn’t even blink.

“I have spent too long covering for behavior I no longer wish to defend.” His voice carries easily through the room, level and polished. “Jack Glass has chosen to compromise himself, this family’s name, and every arrangement attached to both.”

He pauses.

Deliberately.

Cruelly.

“If he wants to lie with a man and turn it into a spectacle, he can do it outside my house, outside my business, and outside my family.”

The silence afterward is complete. It presses against your ears until the room seems to lose oxygen.

Eddie goes still.

Susie’s face doesn’t change, but you know her well enough to catch the flicker in her eyes—the instant calculation of exits, witnesses, damage. Around the table, men shift in their seats, not from sympathy but from the ugly fascination of watching a king cut off one of his own hands in public.

Then Bobby says the words that land like a gunshot.

“Jack Glass is no longer my son.”

For one breath, the sentence hangs there.

Then it settles.

It should feel unreal. Instead, it feels horribly clean. Final. Bobby says it in front of his people, in front of Eddie, in front of the press that has somehow already found the building and is battering at the lower doors with cameras and shouted questions. By the time he finishes, the story is running ahead of him. By the time you draw a breath, it’s on every screen in the city.

You keep your face lifted.

That’s the only thing left.

“You’re really doing this because of him?” you ask, your chin tipping toward Eddie before you can stop it. “Bit rich, given half your life’s been spent surrounded by men who’d sell their own mother for a route map.”

Bobby’s gaze turns on you like a blade.

“I’m doing this because you have embarrassed me.”

He says it in the flat, public way that makes shouting seem merciful. Not anger. Not disappointment.

Ownership, withdrawn.

The room tilts beneath your feet. Someone at the far end of the table looks away. Someone else fixes his attention on the wood grain. Susie’s mouth tightens, and Eddie’s hand curls once at his side, restrained so fiercely it nearly trembles.

Outside, the press grows louder.

Flashbulbs stutter against the windows. A voice calls your name. Another shouts Eddie’s. Your face is suddenly everywhere—on paper, on screens, in the mouths of strangers,and nowhere you want it to be.

Bobby gestures toward the door, dismissing you with the same casual cruelty he’d use to brush ash from his sleeve.

“You want the man?” he says, loud enough for anyone nearby to hear. “Take him. But don’t bring your disgrace back here.”

The room blurs after that.

Susie steps in first, moving between you and the nearest half-formed threat before it can become one. Her shoulder nearly touches yours. A shield. A warning. Eddie looks at you once, and whatever he sees in your face strips the blood from his own.

He starts toward you.

You’re already aware of the cameras outside, the staff freezing in the corridors, the people pretending not to watch, the whole ugly city waiting for the next headline to land. If Eddie touches you now, every lens will catch it. If you reach for him, Bobby’s version of the story becomes truth before you can draw another breath.

Bobby hasn’t merely thrown you out.

He’s made it public.

He’s made Eddie part of the reason.

He’s taken the private, impossible thing between you—the thing that still burns beneath your ribs despite every warning,and dragged it into the street for strangers to tear apart.

Now every eye in the building, and half the city beyond it, knows exactly who hurt you.

The only question left is whether you’ll let Bobby’s version stand—

or burn the whole family meeting to the ground in front of the cameras.

It hurts, and for one breath you lose the shape of yourself. The room, the shouting, the white burst of flashbulbs beyond the windows—all of it folds inward until there is only Bobby, standing rigidly in front of you, his face carved into something cold and final.

Your mouth opens before pride can stop it.

Jack:  “Dad.”

The word comes out too small. Almost pleading.

You hate that. You hate that the room hears it—the old need stripped bare, the childish reflex that still believes the right word, spoken in the right tone, might make him stop being what he is. Bobby’s expression barely shifts. That is the worst part. His eyes settle on the wound you’ve handed him, and something cruel tightens around his mouth.

Then Eddie moves.

Barely. A hitch in his step. A sharp falter as the damaged side catches him wrong.

It is enough.

You reach him before he can put his full weight on the bad leg, sliding an arm around his waist. He is heavier than he should be, solid and warm through his coat, every muscle locked against the pain he refuses to show Bobby. The scent of rain and wool rises from him. His breath catches once, low in his throat.

The contact snaps you back into yourself.

You straighten with Eddie braced against you and turn on Bobby, the hurt hardening at the edges.

Jack:  “Fine.”

Your voice is low. Ugly.

Every eye in the room is fixed on you. Every camera outside is waiting for another piece of this wreckage to carry away. Let them watch.

Jack:  “Fuck off, then.”

The words hang there.

One brutal beat.

Susie doesn’t move, but her gaze sharpens as she measures the nearest exit, Bobby’s temper, the damage he might try to cause if anyone gives him an opening. Eddie’s hand tightens against your side. He doesn’t argue. Doesn’t glance back at Bobby.

He simply lets you take his weight.

He trusts you with it.

Somehow, that feels worse. Better, too.

Bobby’s eyes narrow.

“Jack,” he says, and your name in his mouth is colder than everything that came before. “If you walk out that door with him, don’t come back expecting a place here.”

You laugh once. The sound is sharp and hollow.

“Yeah,” you say. “Thought that was kind of the point.”

Then you leave.

You get Eddie moving first, one careful step at a time, through the crush of bodies and the sudden, ugly silence of men who have never been asked to choose sides until now. His limp worsens as you cross the room. You tighten your arm around him, feeling the tremor he’s trying to hide beneath all that discipline.

Susie shifts aside. Her face gives nothing away, but her fingers catch your sleeve as you pass.

Not to stop you.

To steady the line you’ve drawn.

Outside, the press surges the instant the door opens. Cameras flare white against your eyes. Microphones thrust toward your chest. Rain freckles your cheeks, cold as thrown gravel.

“Jack!”

“Is it true?”

“Did Bobby Glass just disown you?”

“Is Eddie Horniman with you?”

You keep your head down and your arm locked around Eddie as though the two of you are the only solid things left in the world. His shoulder knocks yours once. He’s limping hard now, hiding it badly, but he doesn’t pull away.

You don’t let him.

One of Bobby’s men appears at the edge of the crowd, broad shoulders pushing forward, but he stops when Susie steps into the doorway. She says something you can’t hear. Whatever it is, the man’s expression changes.

Whatever happens back there, it is no longer yours to carry.

For the first time in your life, Bobby’s world is behind you.

Not in front.

Rain slicks your hair to your forehead and turns the pavement black beneath the camera flashes. Eddie breathes out through his nose, tight with pain and something else you can’t name yet. His jaw has gone rigid. His fingers remain curled in your coat, not quite gripping, not quite willing to let go.

He is here.

With you.

That is all that keeps your anger from becoming something uglier.

You get him to the car.

Barely.

When the door shuts, the press collapses into a muffled roar beyond the glass. Eddie sinks back against the seat, eyes closing for half a second before he forces them open and looks at you properly.

Bloodless exhaustion hollows his face. Rain glitters in his lashes. Beneath it, stripped of the practiced control he has worn for weeks, there is that same fierce intensity you’ve been circling since the beginning.

Only now, he has nowhere left to hide it.

You wipe rain from your mouth and glance once at the building.

Then back at him.

This is it.

No more pretending Bobby doesn’t know. No more acting as if this thing between you can stay hidden in the dark forever.

Eddie’s mouth twitches, faint and tired and almost disbelieving.

You let out a breath that sounds too much like a laugh.

Then you pull the door shut.

“Go,” you tell the driver.

The car rolls forward, leaving Bobby’s building, the cameras, and the life you were supposed to inherit behind.

The next day feels wrong from the second you wake.

Not dangerous. Not dramatic. Just wrong in a way that settles beneath your skin and turns every ordinary thing into evidence. Your head throbs from too little sleep and too much thinking. Eddie lies beside you, still recovering, his face softened by the pale morning light, and the sight of him sends a stupid, guilty jolt tightening through your stomach.

You hate that feeling most of all.

Not because it is him. Because it means the world has become complicated in a way you can’t swagger your way out of.

You stare at the ceiling until the cracks blur, then mutter, “This feels fucked.”

Eddie turns his head on the pillow and studies you with that infuriating calm of his. He looks tired too, rough around the edges from the night before, but his voice stays steady.

“Yes,” he says. “It does.”

That lands harder than it should.

You swallow. Force the words out before your nerve deserts you. “Not in a good way. I mean, all of it. Bobby, the papers, you, me. It feels like we’ve done something stupid and shameful.”

Eddie says nothing for a beat. Then he lets out a long, careful breath, as though he has carried the same thought through the night and has finally run out of strength to hide it.

“I know,” he says. “And before you start looking for some heroic explanation, I don’t think either of us wanted this to become public. Or political. Or whatever the hell Bobby turned it into.”

A short, humourless laugh escapes you. You drag a hand over your face and immediately regret it when your fingers brush the ache in your jaw.

The honesty stings.

The shame stings worse because it has company.

“I didn’t want to come out,” you say, because the phrase tastes ugly—too neat for the wreckage you’re in. “I didn’t want to make some announcement. And I didn’t exactly plan on being the sort of bloke who’s into a man.”

Eddie’s eyes flicker.

He doesn’t mock you. That would have been easier.

“Nor did I,” he says quietly. “If you want the truth, I still don’t know what the right words are. But Bobby made it public for us. That part I did not consent to, for the record.”

You snort despite yourself, then wince.

The movement barely registers, but Eddie catches it anyway. He always does.

His hand slides across the sheet and covers yours.

Warm. Careful. Entirely too intimate.

It should make you feel better. It does, a bit. That’s what makes it hard.

The room holds its breath around you. Only the low hum of the manor heating breaks the silence, along with the distant, careful movements of staff downstairs. No press hammering at the door. No Bobby. No Susie issuing orders.

Just you and Eddie.

Just the wreckage left behind.

You stare at your joined hands and feel the weight of the last twenty-four hours, the way something private has been dragged into daylight and abandoned there, leaving you both to stand exposed without a script.

“I feel like I’ve made a right cunt of everything,” you mutter.

Eddie’s thumb passes once over your knuckles.

“You and me both.”

After a pause, his mouth tightens into something that almost becomes a smile. “For what it is worth, I do not think either of us has suddenly become simpler overnight.”

That earns a real laugh.

Brief. Rough. It hurts less than before.

There is still embarrassment, still that raw, exposed feeling of being seen in a way you never asked for. But Eddie’s hand remains beneath yours, his honesty resting plainly between you, and with it comes the strange relief of not having to pretend the feeling isn’t there simply because you hate what people might call it.

The world has shifted around the edges. Bobby made sure of that. The press handled the rest. Susie knows more than she says. Charlotte and Lady Sabrina know enough to be dangerous in their own dignified ways. And you and Eddie, after spending so long refusing labels, have been shoved into a conversation neither of you wanted to have.

Neither of you likes that.

Neither of you can undo it.

So you lie beside him—annoyed, ashamed, and still very much here,while the morning light creeps across the bed and the manor breathes quietly around you. The mess is real.

So is he.

That is the part you can’t quite stop thinking about.

Over the next few months, Eddie keeps his contract with Bobby, because contracts and threats speak the same language in that house, and neither of you is naïve enough to pretend otherwise. He goes back to suits, back to meetings, back to the long, patient grind of making himself useful to men who would rather own him than thank him. You keep boxing. You train. You fight. You win.

The gym gives you what the Glass world never has: a clean answer. You land the shot or you don’t.

Between rounds, routes, late calls, and Bobby’s cold little check-ins, you keep finding your way into Eddie’s orbit whenever the two of you are alone. A corridor. The back seat of a car. A locked office after midnight. Nothing is discussed. Everything is understood.

The arrangement becomes its own kind of routine, which is almost worse.

Eddie turns up at matches when he can, expression flat and immaculate while you sweat through the last round, then grin at him across the ropes like an idiot with a split lip and a bruise darkening beneath one eye. Later, when the crowd thins and the cameras pack away, he finds you anyway. In the back of cars that smell of leather and rain. In borrowed rooms with unfamiliar soap on the towels. In the manor’s dark corridors after everyone else has gone to bed.

It is still heat and tension and denial, but now familiarity has worked its way into it too—the rasp of his breath against your throat, the weight of his hand at your waist, the way he knows when you’re about to pull away and catches you before you can.

That makes it harder to dismiss.

Harder to survive.

You still refuse to call it anything. So does he.

The trouble starts after a fight you should have won cleanly. Instead, you spend half the match on the canvas, tasting blood and old anger while the crowd pounds its approval into your skull. When the bell finally releases you, a reporter thrusts a microphone beneath your mouth before you’ve had time to think.

She asks about discipline. The comeback. The pressure.

You flash that cocky grin because your mouth has never met a bad idea it didn’t like, and say Eddie Horniman is the only bloke in the country who can make you behave.

The laugh comes at once.

So does the camera flash.

You mean it as a joke. Nothing more. But by the time you hear the words outside your own head, they belong to everyone else.

The paper the next morning is merciless. The headline is small, but the implication stretches across the page.

Eddie sees it before you do.

By the time you reach him, he’s holding the clipping between two fingers as if it smells rotten. His suit is perfect. His face is not. Every word has been sharpened before he lets it loose.

“Have you any idea,” he says quietly, “what it’s like for me to spend months keeping my private life out of Bobby’s hands, only for you to hand it to the press after a boxing match?”

You try to laugh. Try to shrug it off.

“They were making too much of it.”

“You made yourself the story.” His gaze cuts into you. “You made me the story.”

The anger in his face is cleaner than shouting would have been. It hurts more because he’s right—and because beneath the humiliation sits something you can’t punch your way out of.

You wanted to be seen with him.

Even if you’d rather lose a tooth than admit it.

That night, you go out harder than usual. Eddie is still furious. Susie is unimpressed. Bobby watches from the edge of the room, one hand resting on his glass, taking in every shift in the air.

You get very close to saying something stupid in front of all of them.

Then Eddie catches your wrist.

His fingers close over the pulse there, firm enough to stop you, gentle enough to make your chest tighten. He drags you through a side door and slams it behind you.

The room smells of dust, old whiskey, and the rain trapped in your coat. Eddie looks as if he wants to throttle you and kiss you in equal measure, which is not a useful expression when you’re half-drunk and still full of fight.

“I cannot keep doing this if you start announcing me to strangers whenever you fancy a laugh.”

You bristle. It feels too much like being told off. Too much like being cared about.

“I wasn’t announcing anything,” you snap. “I was joking.”

“That is precisely the problem.”

The argument burns hot. You throw words; he catches them and throws them back. Then the space between you vanishes.

His mouth finds yours with all the anger he’s been swallowing, and your hands fist in the front of his shirt. The kiss tastes of whiskey, blood, and everything neither of you has been brave enough to say. For one breath, his forehead presses to yours. His thumb strokes once over your wrist.

Almost tender.

Then you pull back first.

You always do.

When it is over, you both pretend the shouting never happened and return to the business of being alone together without using the words that might make it real.

But the shape of things has changed.

Susie notices the headline. She notices Eddie’s temper, and the brittle edge beneath your usual swagger. Bobby notices too, in the way he notices weather before anyone else does.

He says nothing.

Not yet.

The world keeps moving around you. Fights. Routes. Meetings. Press. But now, whenever you and Eddie occupy the same room, something new flickers beneath the old denial—more domestic, more dangerous. He remembers how you take your coffee. You know which silence means he’s angry and which means he’s afraid. Sometimes he straightens your collar before walking away, his knuckles brushing your throat as if the gesture means nothing.

It means everything.

He is still tied to Bobby by contract. You are still tied to boxing by ambition. And every so often, when no one is watching, you slip back into each other’s orbit as if it’s the easiest thing in the world.

All the while, the rest of it keeps threatening to come apart.

Eddie’s message reaches you before breakfast, plain and annoyingly brief.

Eddie:  Come to the warehouse off Mill Road. Don’t bring Bobby.

That last sentence makes you sit up properly.

You stare at the screen, then at your reflection in the dark glass: half-bruised, half-irritated, and already suspicious. Whatever Eddie is doing, he’s trying very hard not to sound as though he’s doing anything at all.

Which means he absolutely is.

The warehouse sits off a narrow industrial road at the edge of the city, tucked behind shuttered units and old loading bays that smell of damp brick, diesel, and last night’s rain. It’s one of Bobby’s quieter places, the kind of site men forget to mention because nothing dramatic ever seems to happen there.

That alone makes you suspicious.

The iron doors are half-open when you arrive. Cold air spills through the gap, carrying the metallic bite of machinery and the distant grind of a forklift. Inside, your shoes strike the concrete and send the sound skittering ahead of you. Somewhere deeper in the building, something beeps. Then stops.

Eddie is already there.

No suit jacket. Sleeves rolled to his forearms. His hair is a little less exact than usual, dark strands fallen loose above his brow. He looks as if he’s been working for hours and sleeping for none of them.

The sight does something stupid to your chest.

He looks up as you step inside, and relief crosses his face before he can catch it. It vanishes almost immediately, buried beneath the cool expression he prefers to wear when anyone might be watching.

Almost.

“That was quick,” he says.

“Yeah, well. You sounded mysterious.” You glance around the warehouse: stacked pallets, sealed crates, two of Bobby’s men pretending not to watch. “That’s always a red flag with you. What is this, then? Some filthy little secret room for your criminal hobbies?”

Eddie gives you a flat look. His gaze drops briefly to your mouth before returning to your eyes.

“I asked you not to bring Bobby.”

“You did.” You move closer, close enough to catch the scent of him beneath the warehouse dust—coffee, cedar, and the clean chill of outside. “Which is usually when I start assuming there’s something worth seeing.”

His jaw shifts, as if he’s suppressing a response. A smile, maybe. Or something more dangerous.

He turns and walks you past the loading floor toward a side office with the light on. You follow because you want to know what brought you here, and because watching the muscles move beneath his shirtsleeves is a terrible use of your attention.

Susie is already inside, standing over a spread of papers and a tablet. Immaculate as ever, she wears a black coat so polished it looks absurd against the warehouse grime. She doesn’t look surprised to see you.

That irritates you on principle.

“Excellent,” she says. “He came. I was worried his vanity might make him send a selfie instead.”

You narrow your eyes. “You’re enjoying this a bit too much.”

“I enjoy competence. Which, on rare occasions, includes you.”

Eddie closes the office door behind you. The latch clicks.

When he turns back, the easy dryness has gone from his face. What remains is sharper. Focused. There’s a tension around his eyes that makes you want to ask what happened before you ask anything else.

You don’t.

Not yet.

“We found another shift in the route pattern,” he says. “Not a theft. A diversion. Someone has been moving product through one of the old service bays, off-record, then replacing the logs with clean copies.”

You look down at the papers on the desk. Storage manifests. Timing charts. A handwritten list of signatures. Eddie’s handwriting runs across the top sheet in tight, precise strokes, each letter controlled enough to hide the strain underneath.

The whole thing feels familiar in the worst way, like a problem that ought to belong to Bobby’s old-world paranoia and instead has Eddie’s fingerprints all over it.

Susie taps one page with a long, manicured finger. “We’ve traced three movements already. All hidden beneath legitimate transfers. Someone with access is making the books tell a prettier story than the warehouse does.”

“An accountant,” you say.

“Possibly.” Eddie’s mouth tightens. “Possibly someone with enough access to know Bobby’s blind spots.”

You look at him. Then at Susie.

The pieces begin to lock together, forming a shape too ugly to be accidental.

“Bobby knows?”

“He suspects,” Susie says. “Which is why I wanted you here. He’s been watching the old sites more closely. If he starts asking questions in the wrong places, the whole arrangement gets noisy.”

There it is. The real reason for the message.

Not romance. Not secrecy. Business.

Still, Eddie’s gaze stays on you a moment too long after Susie finishes speaking. His attention catches against your skin, warm and unsettling, as if another reason brought you here—one neither of them intends to name in front of the men outside.

You drift closer to the desk and scan the log sheets. “So who’s moving it?”

Eddie hesitates for half a beat.

You know that pause now. He uses it when the truth is close and annoying.

“We don’t know yet.”

Your spine tightens.

“Eddie.” You lower your voice. “What aren’t you telling me?”

He meets your gaze directly. The office seems to shrink around the two of you, the stale air pressing close. “There’s a second set of numbers that doesn’t belong to any warehouse we officially use.”

Susie’s expression hardens. “And someone has been careful enough to keep it off Bobby’s desk.”

You let out a short laugh without humour. “Brilliant. So it’s either a traitor, a thief, or one of Bobby’s men getting ambitious.”

“Or all three,” Susie says.

The room goes still.

Not quiet. Still. The kind of stillness that comes just before a decision, when everyone understands the danger and waits to see who will reach for it first.

Eddie folds his arms. His shoulders tense beneath the rolled sleeves, and for one unguarded second he looks less like a duke and more like a man standing on the edge of being blamed for everything.

You catch it before he can hide it.

Without thinking, you reach out and tap the paper nearest him. Your knuckles brush his hand.

The contact is barely there.

It still sparks.

His eyes flick down to your fingers, then back to your face. Something shifts in his expression—warmth, gratitude, a question he refuses to ask. He doesn’t turn it into a joke.

You’re not sure which of you is more startled by that.

“Alright,” you say, forcing your attention back to the paperwork. “Show me the route that doesn’t make sense.”

“We need to check the bay first.” His voice has gone lower. “There’s a door in the back. If the logs are false, the physical trail should tell us which one of Bobby’s people has been getting clever.”

Susie gathers the papers into a neat pile. “And if we find something concrete, we tell Bobby only when we’re ready. Not before.”

You glance between them, then toward the warehouse floor, where one of Bobby’s men moves a pallet with studied indifference. The old family machine is still running—dirty, dangerous, impossible to stop without losing fingers.

But now there’s a second rhythm beneath it.

Your pulse picks up.

Not from fear alone.

From the awful, familiar thrill of being in the middle of it again with Eddie beside you, both of you pretending work is the only reason you’re here. His shoulder passes close to yours as he reaches for the door, heat brushing your arm through your clothes.

It isn’t only work.

Eddie turns to lead you deeper into the warehouse. You follow because this is what he asked for, because you want to know who has been lying to Bobby under his own nose, and because the question has already lodged beneath your ribs.

Why did he call you?

The answer waits somewhere beyond the loading floor.

So does he.

And, irritatingly, you trust Eddie’s cryptic messages more than you trust anyone else’s honesty.

You help move the accountant before lunch, the whole thing unfolding with the ugly efficiency these jobs always find once everyone stops pretending there’s still a discussion to be had. Susie handles the plan. Eddie handles the timing. You handle the part that requires steady hands and the willingness to look men in the eye while they realise they’ve already lost.

No panic. No heroics.

The accountant leaves the back office under the pretence of a transfer, then disappears quietly into a separate vehicle while Bobby’s people are kept busy on the far side of the yard. One more piece of the old machine lifted out and set somewhere new.

The new place isn’t Bobby’s. That’s the point.

It’s one of Susie’s secure properties on the edge of the city, a narrow industrial conversion with reinforced doors, hidden cameras, and a meeting room that smells faintly of coffee, dust, and fresh paint. By evening, the hidden operation has taken shape. Eddie and Susie have the routes. The accountant has the books. The Italians have the missing contacts—and enough muscle to make Bobby’s blind spots expensive.

For one dangerous moment, you let yourself enjoy it.

You lean back in a chair with a drink in your hand while Eddie and Susie work through the numbers, arguing over percentages and delivery windows like they’ve been building this bastard thing for years instead of weeks. The accountant sits at the end of the table, pale and sweating through his collar. Fair enough. He’s alive, useful, and now employed by a line of business Bobby doesn’t yet know exists.

You laugh once. Properly.

Susie has just informed him that he is now a very expensive employee. Eddie’s mouth twitches at the corner, and that tiny betrayal of amusement warms something behind your ribs.

For one brief hour, the three of you almost resemble a team instead of a disaster with a shared address.

The tension that has lived in every room since Bobby made his move eases enough for your shoulders to drop. You look at Eddie across the table—sleeves rolled to his forearms, fingers tapping once against the ledger, expression flatter than usual,and feel the odd, ridiculous urge to say something decent.

Instead, you lift your glass.

“Well. That’s one way to annoy Dad.”

Susie snorts into hers. Eddie actually smiles, just a little, and the sight knocks something loose inside you. You feel lighter than you have in months.

You toast badly, the three of you.

To routes. To leverage. To Bobby being kept out of his own business for once.

Almost celebratory. Almost normal.

Then Susie’s phone rings. She mutters something about taking the call and steps out, leaving the door half-open behind her. Eddie waits until her footsteps fade before setting down his pen.

“I need to tell you something before you hear it somewhere else.”

One look at his face, and your stomach drops.

“What now?”

He exhales slowly, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. For once, he looks less controlled than determined to stay that way. “The Italians want this arrangement formalised. They want a public tie. A seal, if you like.”

You blink. “A tie how?”

His eyes meet yours. Steady. Miserable. Far too calm for the words he’s about to say.

“I’ll be marrying the Italian boss.”

For one beat, the room stops making sense.

The chair beneath you feels unreliable. The drink in your hand goes utterly still. You stare at him as if he’s just mispronounced the entire English language.

“Right,” you say at last, because it’s the only sound you can find. “That’s a joke.”

“It isn’t.”

A laugh cuts out of you—sharp, disbelieving. “You’re taking the piss.”

Eddie doesn’t smile. “I’m not.”

Silence thickens between you.

Outside, a door closes. A phone rings. Somewhere down the corridor, someone drags a crate across concrete. The new operation keeps moving around the edges of your life while the centre of it tilts sideways.

You feel the reaction before you can name it. Shock first. Then anger. Then something hotter and uglier, something jealous and stupid that you refuse to examine too closely.

“You’re marrying someone,” you say, slower now, as if careful phrasing might turn the words into something you can bear.

“Yes.”

“For business.”

“Yes.”

Your jaw aches from how hard you clench it.

You lean back, though the movement does nothing to steady you. “And you thought that was worth mentioning after we’d all just celebrated putting together a secret little criminal empire behind Bobby’s back?”

Eddie’s expression firms, but fatigue shadows his eyes. “I thought it was worth mentioning before you heard it from someone else. I also thought you might understand why I didn’t exactly lead with it.”

The truth lands hard.

You look away first. Staring at him has become dangerous in a way it wasn’t ten minutes ago. The room still smells of coffee, paper, and victory, but a cold edge has slipped beneath it all—the outline of a future you never agreed to picture.

“So what, then?” Your voice comes out rougher than you intend. “This is it? You marry some Italian boss and that’s just part of the arrangement?”

Eddie’s mouth tightens. “It is part of the arrangement.”

“And where does that leave me?”

The question escapes before you can stop it.

The second it hangs between you, you want it back. It sounds too much like what it is. Not a business question.

Not really.

Eddie hears it anyway.

He studies you for a long, unreadable moment. Then his voice drops, careful and controlled enough to hurt.

“Exactly where you are now, if you want to stay there.”

It isn’t a rejection. That’s the trouble.

It’s worse.

It’s a choice, a boundary, and a warning laid neatly between you.

You swallow and glance toward the door as Susie’s footsteps approach. The operation is still waiting. Still moving. Still alive.

But the shape of your world has changed again, and there’s no joke sharp enough to cut through it.

Susie steps inside, takes one look at the two of you, and clocks the mood at once.

“Ah,” she says, dry as old paper. “I leave for five minutes and someone ruins the atmosphere.”

A short breath escapes you, almost a laugh.

Eddie says nothing.

Because now the victory sits beside the betrayal, and the secret war against Bobby has acquired a new, deeply inconvenient cost.

You look at Eddie and force the words out before you can stop them.

“Right. I see why you didn’t like me joking about us being together. You were always going to marry some woman.”

The room goes still.

Eddie’s face changes first. Not dramatically. Worse than that. A small tightening around his eyes, a hard line forming at his mouth, as if you’ve found the one place he never wanted touched and pressed your thumb into it anyway. Susie’s gaze snaps between you, instantly alert. The accountant discovers something fascinating on the tabletop.

“That is not what I said.” Eddie’s voice is clipped, controlled.

“It’s what it amounts to, isn’t it?” You hear the edge in your own voice and hate it at once. “All this, and in the end you were always going to marry a woman because that’s the shape of it.”

He goes very still.

Then his jaw sets.

“No.” The word lands cleanly. “That is the shape you’ve put on it.”

You laugh once, rough and ugly, because the alternative is letting yourself sound hurt in front of Susie, the accountant, and whatever invisible audience Bobby has trained you to imagine.

“Well, forgive me for not being thrilled about your grand business marriage.”

Something sharp flickers across Eddie’s face. “Do not make this cheap.”

The words strike harder than they should. Not because they’re cruel, but because he looks offended on principle, as if you’ve reduced his life to the very thing he’s spent years trying not to become.

Susie cuts in before the argument can turn uglier. “Enough. If you two want to insult each other, do it later. We have an operation to run and Bobby to stay ahead of.”

The accountant shifts in his chair, then seems to think better of it.

You push away from the table and stand before anyone can make you sit with the shame gathering beneath your ribs. The chair legs scrape across the floor.

Too loud.

Eddie doesn’t move, but his eyes follow you with that same stubborn, difficult focus you’ve come to resent and rely on in equal measure.

“You go ahead and marry your boss,” you say, making the words as flat as you can. “Seems like your sort of thing.”

The silence afterward is immediate and foul.

Eddie’s expression closes—not with anger now, but with a controlled hurt he would rather swallow than let you see. It unsettles you more than shouting would have. For one suspended second, neither of you moves, and you realise with a sick twist that you’ve done the one thing you always swore you wouldn’t.

You made him look at you as if you misunderstood him on purpose.

Susie’s mouth tightens. “Jack.”

But the damage is already spreading.

Eddie stands slowly, careful of the old wound, and every measured inch of the movement makes you feel more like an idiot. “If you want to be angry,” he says, quieter now, “be angry at the situation. Not at me for refusing to pretend the arrangement doesn’t exist.”

You open your mouth.

Nothing decent comes out.

Because the truth beneath the jealousy is uglier than the jealousy itself. He was always going to choose something that made sense in his world. Something public. Something useful. You know that. You know it, and still your gut twists as if he’s reached inside you and dragged something raw into the light.

Susie looks between you and exhales through her nose, the faintest sign her patience is thinning. “This is not the moment for wounded feelings. We have enough enemies without manufacturing one in this room.”

The accountant makes the mistake of shifting his chair.

Susie’s eyes cut toward him.

He freezes.

Eddie gathers himself first. Of course he does. He picks up the pen from the table, turns it once between his fingers, then sets it down again, pulling on the cold calm he wears whenever he can’t afford to be seen as anything else.

But the hurt remains.

It hangs in the cramped office like smoke.

You feel it in your chest, too—a stupid, shameful ache with nothing to do with Bobby, the Italians, or the arrangement. You understand what Eddie meant. Or part of it. That makes your own words feel even more foolish.

You step away from the table and head for the door. Standing there and pretending you’re fine would be a lie no one in this room would believe.

“Jack.”

You stop.

You don’t turn around.

His voice is lower now. Less guarded.

“I didn’t like the joking because it turned something private into a laugh.” He pauses, and the quiet draws tight between your shoulders. “Not because I was always going to marry some woman.”

The room tilts.

You keep your face turned away so no one sees what those words do to you.

Behind you, Susie closes her eyes for the briefest moment, as if she has just watched two idiots drive into the same wall from opposite directions.

The accountant clears his throat and, wisely, says nothing.

“You can be annoyed about the marriage,” Eddie continues, his voice flat and controlled, which somehow makes it more dangerous than shouting. “Fair enough. But don’t use it to decide what I did or didn’t feel.”

That hits harder than you want it to.

You nod once without looking back. It isn’t agreement. It isn’t an apology. It’s the closest thing you can manage without making the entire room watch your face come apart.

Then you leave the office and take the corridor air like a slap.

The warehouse hums around you. Men move beyond the door. Susie’s voice resumes behind you, calm and clipped, carrying the operation forward as if nothing has cracked. Bobby remains somewhere out there, a threat with a name, a mouth, and too much reach. The Italians are waiting. The accountant is still theirs for now. The secret network still exists.

But your chest is too tight for any of it to matter.

When Eddie finally catches up, it isn’t because he’s running. It’s because he chose to come after you anyway.

He stops one step away, pale but composed. The sharp scent of coffee clings to his shirt beneath the warehouse’s oil and dust, familiar enough to hurt. His eyes stay fixed on yours, full of frustration that looks a lot like hurt.

“You don’t get to decide my future for me,” he says quietly.

You swallow.

“No,” you answer. “Suppose not.”

Neither of you says the rest.

That is the trouble. The point. The thing that refuses to die, no matter how many different ways you try to bury it.

You stop in the corridor and look at Eddie as though the question has snagged on your tongue, caught there by some sharp little hook.

“Is that how it works, then?” you ask, aiming for dry and missing by a mile. Your voice catches on the last word. “Marry a woman, sleep with a man?”

There it is.

The crack in your voice makes you wince. Too honest. Too exposed.

Eddie’s expression changes at once. Irritation drains from his face, leaving something quieter and more careful behind. He doesn’t answer immediately, and the silence swells around you: pallets rattling somewhere beyond the corridor, a trolley squeaking over concrete, low voices murmuring behind closed doors. The warehouse keeps moving, pretending it can’t hear.

You drag a hand over your mouth. Your palm smells faintly of dust and metal.

“I’m fucking confused,” you admit, the words coming out softer than you intended. “All right? Properly. Confused as bollocks.”

For a second, Eddie only watches you.

No judgment. No joke.

That makes your throat tighten more than either would have.

He leans against the wall beside the fire door, moving with the cautious stiffness of someone still aware of an old wound. His sleeve brushes the chipped paint. When he speaks, his voice is low enough to belong only to the two of you.

“It is not supposed to work like a piece of machinery,” he says. “And no, before you ask, I do not think you need to make some grand decision this second.”

A breath leaves you, shaky and thin.

“Feels like I ought to know what I am.”

“People are always very keen on categories.” His mouth twists, not quite a smile. “Usually because admitting a thing is messy makes them less comfortable.”

The answer lands differently than you expect.

It isn’t neat. It doesn’t solve anything. But something in your chest loosens, just enough for air to reach the bottom of your lungs.

You look at him.

He looks back, tired and sharp and steady, the anger from the office worn down into something heavier. Something neither of you seems willing to name. The faint scent of coffee clings to him, threaded with cold air and the clean bite of soap.

At the far end of the corridor, Susie appears. She takes one look at the two of you and keeps walking.

Eddie notices. Then his attention returns to you.

“If you are asking whether I think you need to call yourself anything in front of a room full of idiots,” he says, “the answer is no.”

A laugh almost gets out.

Almost.

Instead, you huff through your nose and stare at the scuffed floor. “So I can just be… confused.”

“Yes.” A little dryness slips back into his voice. “You can be confused. Frankly, it would be strange if you weren’t.”

Annoyingly, that helps.

The pressure in your chest eases enough for you to stop bracing as though someone is about to hit you. The truth remains ugly and inconvenient. Bobby’s marriage talk still hangs in the air behind you. Eddie still has his contract, his Italian arrangement, his impossible future waiting in the wings.

But the shame has changed shape.

Less poison. More weight.

You glance up at him. “Didn’t think you’d be the one making me feel normal about this.”

Eddie’s mouth twitches. “Do not get used to it.”

A small laugh slips out of you then. It doesn’t hurt nearly as much.

The corridor feels different. Not safe, exactly. But no longer like a trap with the door locked behind you. Just somewhere to stand while the world rearranges itself badly around your feet.

From the office, Susie’s voice resumes—calm, efficient, already dealing with the next problem. The operation continues. Bobby remains a problem. The Italian arrangement still exists. Nothing has become simple.

But you are no longer choking on the question.

Eddie straightens. The movement pulls briefly across his face, and you catch it before he hides it. Then he holds your gaze for one moment longer than necessary.

“You do not need to decide who you are because I am marrying for business,” he says, quieter now. “Those are separate things.”

You nod once.

Slowly.

“Right,” you say. “Separate things.”

The words feel strange in your mouth. Not perfect. Not resolved. But they fit well enough for now.

When you finally move, it isn’t because the confusion has vanished. It hasn’t. It’s because you can carry it without feeling dragged behind it.

Eddie falls into step beside you as you head back toward Susie and the office. Your shoulders stay carefully apart. Neither of you touches. The space between you still hums with everything neither of you knows how to say, but you are no longer snapping at each other simply because the world has run out of names.

For the first time in days, that feels like progress.