ɪᴛᴀʟɪᴀɴ ꜱɪʀᴇɴ

primo capitolo

Small Heath 1921

Birmingham was quiet. Too quiet for a night like this.

And the silence felt unnatural, as though the city itself were holding its breath. The Garrison stood dark at the corner of Garrison Lane, shutters drawn and windows filmed with grime, its interior abandoned in the careless way only familiar places could be. Chairs were overturned on tables, glasses left half-drained, ashtrays overflowing where men had stubbed out cigarettes mid-conversation. The smell of stale beer and smoke clung stubbornly to the wood, woven so deeply into the walls that no amount of scrubbing would ever truly remove it.
Arthur Shelby's pub bore the marks of work well done and rules barely followed.

The street outside was still. No laughter spilled into the night, no music drifted through cracked windows. Only the faint, contained sounds from the back office disturbed the silence, muffled by thick walls and a locked door.
It was ironic, really. Arthur owned the place. His name was on the license. His temper haunted every table and corner of the room. But this was Thomas Shelby's kingdom. It was him who claimed the back office whenever he wanted, who bent the pub to his will as easily as he did people.

Inside that office, the air was heavy with heat and cigarette smoke. A single lamp cast a dull glow over the desk, stretching shadows across the floorboards. The room felt smaller than usual, as though it were shrinking around the two bodies within it. Tommy moved with measured control. There was no urgency in him, no reckless hunger. Every motion was deliberate, as though even this required discipline. For him, it was not about closeness or affection; those were luxuries he had long ago learned to distrust. This was something practical. A means of quieting the relentless churn of his thoughts. A way to momentarily silence the war that had followed him home and taken up residence in his head. This wasn't love. This was release. A way to empty his head of noises and ghosts even if only for minutes at a time.

Lizzie Stark knew the difference between desire and necessity and she understood which one she represented. Her hands rested against the edge of the desk, her breathing uneven but restrained. There had been a time when she searched his face for something softer, something human that might surface if she waited long enough. But that hope had died long ago.

Tommy had loved once. The memory surfaced rarely and never gently. Greta an Italian girl from before the war, from before France stripped him down to something harder and more distant. He remembered her laugh more than her face now, remembered the way she had spoken about the future as though it were inevitable. That version of Thomas Shelby had believed in such things. He had believed in love, in ideals, in causes worth bleeding for. But France had corrected him and the tunnels had changed him. By the time he returned to Birmingham, whatever softness had once lived in him had been buried alongside the dead. What remained was colder, sharper, and far more useful.

When it was over, he stepped back without ceremony. He did not linger. He never lingered. Lizzie straightened slowly, smoothing her dress, fixing her stockings with steady hands. The lamp cast shadows across her face as she watched him button his shirt with the same meticulous care he applied to everything else in his life. His expression was already distant, already somewhere beyond the walls of the Garrison.

For two years, this had been their arrangement. Every Friday, after business was settled and tempers cooled, after blood had been threatened or spilled, he came to the back office and she would already wait there. It had become ritual. Predictable. Contained. In a world that shifted daily, repetition held a strange comfort.

"Tommy" she said quietly, her voice measured.

He adjusted his cufflinks before looking at her.