Bancroft - Peaky Blinders Reverse Harem x Reader

Chapter 33

It happens lightning fast. I squeeze the trigger, four five six times, not wanting to miss, and a separate gunshot rings out also. My thigh sears with pain and I drop to the ground, feeling as though somebody's pressed a red-hot poker through my skin. I clamp my jaw shut, trying to suppress the cries coming from deep in my throat.

Tommy walks over to the men. I killed two men and they lay dead, the other's still alive and whimpering. He grabs this man by the lapels and hauls him to his feet. I notice, in the headlamp light, I've blown the man's hands off. There's a dark patch of blood forming over his dirty yellow shirt. But the rest of him is still intact, though white as a sheet from the blood loss. He looks vaguely familiar, and as he lifts his head in a grimace, I recognise him.

It's the boy I punched when I was younger. The one I went to school with. The one who'd mocked me and my father.

Who'd taken his revenge out on me when my father won the fight.

"Peter?" I call out in shock, stifling the pain.

His face twists. Tommy glances back at me. "You know him?" He asks.

I nod. I try to stand to my legs, but my quad muscle sears in a pain unlike anything I've felt before, and I fall down again. "He's a piece of shit," I spit out, as infuriated with myself for being unable to stand as I am with his presence. "He gave me black eyes when I was nine. He..."

But that's more than enough for Tommy. His face sets at my words, and he rips his cap from his head and slashes it across Peter's face. Peter bellows in pain, holding up his arms in a futile attempt to defend himself. By the time Tommy's done with him, he's disfigured, and half alive spread out across the road.

Tommy's thunderous as he walks away, and bends down beside me to examine my leg. I can't look at first as he rips the fabric to see what we're dealing with, but then steel myself and glance down.

"You're lucky the bullet was small," Tommy says. "Gonna be harder to remove, though. Come on." He scoops me into his arms. "Let's get you to a doctor."

"What? No way. Put me down." I try to wriggle from his arms, but he's holding me tight.

"And let you bleed out? Not a chance."

"Tommy," hysteria creeps into my voice now. "There's two more trucks coming this way. Remember? One every half hour, three in total. We need to clean this up and get this truck to the drop-off point."

But he continues walking as though he doesn't hear me.

"Tommy!" I grasp his face in my hands, squeezing his cheeks. It would be a cute sight under any other circumstances. "Fucking listen to me, would you? We can't waste this. You wouldn't waste this. You're just not thinking straight. I'm not dying. Okay? It's just a bullet wound." I gulp down my pain, and hope he can't see the sheen of sweat covering my face from the exertion.

But he stops walking. I can see it in his face — I'm right. Ordinarily, he'd have no problem sacrificing someone to a little extra pain to get a job done. So why is he being so obstinate?

He sets his jaw, having decided. "Change of plan," he says. "We'll drive to the drop-off point. Arthur will take you to a hospital. I'll meet you there when we're done."

He walks to the door of the truck and lowers me into the seat. I can hear the horses whinnying and nickering behind us. Tommy takes off his coat, then his suit jacket, forming a tourniquet with a stick from the ground and then wrapping it tightly around my thigh. It almost hurts more now than it did before.

"How will you distract them?" I ask, as he gets in the driver's seat.

"Same plan as before," he says. "I'll shoot their tires."