you are haunted like every other holy thing.
what tried to destroy you didn't have the strength.
still you stand,
sturdy and smelling of smoke.
- little bird, clementine von radics
༒
in which tommy shelby finds his asylum
in the ver...
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When the front door slammed loudly against its frame, Winnow jerked awake for the first time in weeks—suddenly, almost painfully, as though a bucket of cold water had been thrown over her head. Gasping, she glanced around for the source of the sound and saw nothing but the closed door of the flat's single bedroom.
Behind it, she could hear muffled voices.
Before she could think beyond the moment, Winnow had torn herself free from the tangle of her sheets and hurried to the living room, wide-eyed and dizzy from short-lived vertigo. She knew what she would see before she saw it, but she felt her chest squeeze anyway, her eyes burning with unwelcome tears she wished wouldn't shed.
"Do you know how many weeks it's been, Fei-Hong?" their mother sobbed, hitting Albie's chest with weak fists. He held her steady with both arms and let her. "Do you know how many weeks it's been since I've seen my son?"
"I know, Ma—"
"I lost your brother. I lost your sister, too." Ru-Shi pulled roughly away from him and turned aside, wiping her tears with the heels of her palms. "And then you have the audacity to let me lose you."
"Ma," he said again, softly, placatingly, as if to calm her irrational thoughts. "You've never lost me."
"That's not true," Winnow said numbly, from the door. She heard herself speak as if from a distance, trapped in twin black gazes as they snapped towards her from across the room. "That's not true at all, Albie."
She spoke in little more than a whisper, but she knew her brother heard every word like a blow. She saw him flinch, saw his features twist as he stepped towards her with outstretched arms—
Instinctively, Winnow backed away, clutching her hands to her chest. Her thoughts were a swirl she couldn't decipher, still fogged from the remnants of her cold and so many days spent inside, but she could see her brother's wounded eyes through the haze.
"Winnow . . ." he started, but she shook her head to silence him, hating the sound of his voice, hating that she had missed it so badly. The last time she had heard him say her name, they had been fighting in the midst of the crowd outside the exhibition hall, and he had been shattering her heart to pieces with the truth.
The brother she had once known was gone, she reminded herself. Her enemies were his friends. The men who had held her down in the gutters, who had watched her bleed and laughed, who had forced a desperate Albie scream his pleas, were now the very same men with whom he drank and worked and probably lived.
"You shouldn't be here," she could hear herself saying, her voice still so far away, so cold. A tiny, distant part of her, buried in the back of her mind, screamed at her to accept his apology and keep him home, but it was drowned beneath the tide. "You left us here, Albie. Why did you bother coming back?"
"At least give me a chance to explain," he said, reaching out with a helpless hand. Winnow remained in the doorway, clutching its chipped frame like a lifeline. "Give me at least that. There's so much you don't know."
