Roguish Women- Tommy Shelby

The Fate of Plans

//goodness me, sixty parts. 

            There was a tentative agreement put in place by the Irish. For the time being, there would be peace for the factions that had split after Frank's death. Since there was a semblance of unity, Kate was able to get to work. She sent the Forty Elephants into the North End, hitting up all the speakeasies that the top players in the Italian mafia frequented.

There they would loosen the lips of the men, coaxing the deepest secrets from their lips. Kate thought it was hilarious how men never saw how vulnerable they were to women.

After more than a month of being in Boston, The Forty Elephants had obtained a list of all the men in the Italian mafia, their rank, their weaknesses, and their involvement in Frank Wallace's murder. It was a ladder right up to Filippo Buccola.

Kate knew how to get the attention of a gang boss. For better or for worse she'd done it many times over. But she didn't want Filippo's attention just yet. Before she faced him, she needed to weaken his organization. That way, when they did come face to face, he was unable to decline her offer.

She kept in regular contact with Tommy and Alfie. Alfie gave her updates on the twins and Freyda. He listened to her strategies and offered advice where he could. Tommy didn't say much about what he was up to and that troubled Kate greatly. She knew it meant things weren't going well. If he told her the truth, she would be compelled to return home.

~~~~

Kate seldom walked the streets of Boston without at least two armed men escorting her. It was a practice that had come and gone in her life. As a young girl, she was free to roam the streets without a care in the world. But as she built up power, she found it useful to be protected even when she was perfectly capable of defending herself. Three guns against one usually led to a better outcome. At her decline, she found herself only able to trust the only person she knew wouldn't turn on her, herself. In her time with Tommy, she once again found herself trusting others to help look out for her safety.

In Boston, it was necessary. The boundaries of gangs were blurred now and there were no buffer zones anymore.

Kate turned down a street and stopped in front of a row of buildings. They were fairly new, built in the last couple of decades. Kate knew this because it was the spot of her old apartment building. The one Santo had burned to the ground.

She stopped across the street from where she once lived. The men shadowing her remained a few feet away. They stood at attention, not questioning what she was doing there.

Kate remembered the smell of the fire and how scared she was. It was irrational, Santo's ferocious drive for retribution, to gain what he thought he was owed. She could never understand it.

But perhaps she was starting to. No matter how far she thought she had come from that little apartment building, she was still in the trenches digging herself out. She thought she'd made a life for herself, a name for herself. She had twins and a home and a husband. Yet she left it all behind in England to return to a place she swore to put behind her.

But the past wouldn't relinquish its cold grip on her. She was forced to finish what she once started.

Sometimes Kate didn't remember what had started everything. She had been so lost in the mire; she forgot what had brought her to that point. After her father passed, it seemed like no legitimate occupation would ever hoist her family out of the debt he had accrued.