His Realm

Chapter Six

Chapter Six

The drive over was mostly silent but not uncomfortable and once inside, Tom phoned down to the restaurant on the ground floor of the building to have some food sent up.

They made small talk through dinner, each avoiding the ‘talk’ that they both knew was coming. Tom opened a bottle of red wine, which they quickly polished off. Once the food was finished, they adjourned into the living room, but as they left the kitchen, Tom grabbed her arm and pulled her into a punishing kiss.

Ana returned his fervour and as he lifted her up, she wrapped her legs around his waist, allowing him to carry her into his bedroom.

It was hard and rough, full of repressed passion, panting, tearing and scratching. But it was inevitable and somehow, it felt right.

Afterwards, they lay in each other’s arms for a long time, both too sated and exhausted to talk for a while but slowly, they both felt the pressure to speak, and they knew that the conversation couldn’t be avoided for much longer.

There were no lights on, just the dim light of the moon and the city through his windows. They were too high up to be overlooked here, so there were no curtains.

“Tom… How did you get into this? What happened to you?”

Tom got off the bed and went to look out of the windows, to the city below.

Seeing the tension in his shoulders, Ana approached slowly, wary of upsetting him.

“Look beautiful at night, doesn’t it?” he asks. “The lights, twinkling against the night sky... it’s mesmerising.”

“It’s a lie,” she told him.

“I know,” he agreed. “My parents died at night.”

“The car accident?”

He turned to look at her and gave her a pitying look. Of all the lies he had told, she hadn’t considered that that could be one of them.

“My parents were murdered,” he said simply, quickly turning to look out over the city once more. “I was eight, I hid in the airing cupboard but the door was rotten and I could still see out through the holes.”

“I’m so sorry, Tom.”

“It happens.” He shrugged as if it was nothing.

“So that’s why you became a crime lord?”

He laughed. “Oh no, darling, that’s just the beginning. Things get a lot more complicated than that.”

He sighed and Ana waited patiently for him to explain the rest.

“I came from a poor family,” he confessed. She would never have guessed. “We lived on a council estates in South London, and my parents were… not nice people. My mother whored herself out, and my father dealt drugs. Well, he dealt what he didn’t use, at least. Mum had ideas of getting out of that hellhole though, and she thought the people Dad worked for were the key. She encouraged him to try and get higher in the organisation, to gather intel. He didn’t get far, but he did find out the date of a shipment. They sold that information to a rival gang, for a cut of the takings. The organisation they worked for didn’t like that, so they killed them. Mum stuffed me into that cupboard seconds before they broke the front door down, and I watched as they…”

Tom placed his hands on the glass and lowered his forehead to it, breathing deeply. He looked on the verge of a panic attack, and she had never seen him so vulnerable before.

“When they didn’t turn up to collect their cut, the rival gang sent someone to the flat, found my folks and searched the place, looking for any evidence that might implicate them. Then they found me. I knew too much but families were off limits, especially kids, so they couldn’t kill me. They brought me to Ben instead.”