As the youngest Shelby child and twin to Finn Shelby, Kezia has spent the last 4 of her 10 years locked away for her mental defectiveness.
She returns to Small Heath under the legal guardianship of her brother, Thomas Shelby. Despite knowing she's s...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
We don't need to talk about how I haven't felt like updating in like a month.
CHAPTER NINETY-NINE
Angela dreamed that night that she had a brother.
Hair pale as fresh wheat. With a baby face and blue eyes.
Maybe the dream was a memory. Or a wish. A hope that someone, at least for a time, loved her unconditionally.
She was younger in the dream, maybe nine or ten. They walked down an unfamiliar street. Everything had a gray cast, not unlike her brother. He oozed a steely sharpness, like gunmetal.
She looked down at her hand and found their linked fingers. His skin was calloused. Did he do manual labor? She wanted to ask. To say anything to him. But her words were caught in her throat like a jammed handgun.
His smile down at her was cheery, filled with youth. But his blue eyes held a different story. His pupils were blown out. Bloodshot and hazy. The man was high, off of something good. Angela understood, now that she was older, that her brother was on drugs. She also knew, somehow, that this fact was kept from her.
Another set of blue eyes, sharper than her brother's, casted over her in the dream like a shadow. No face. Just those piercing, judging eyes. Filled with an obsession for her that made her skin prickle. She felt no fear. Only a safety she never felt in her life.
Jealousy threatened to swarm her soul at this realization.
To be loved so ardently was a gift. One that God did not feel Angela deserved.
The overwhelming emotion awoke Angela early in the morning. And the feeling stayed with her long into the afternoon and the evening.
"We just got called for a meeting," Alice said, coming into Angela and her shared room. "Said don't worry about looking pretty. We're not on the clock."
Angela looked down at her lap. No. She was on her bed, not a clock. She did not understand that phrase, or what it meant. "What are we going to talk about?"
Alice shrugged. "Don't know. Sounded real serious, though. C'mon. I'll bring a vial so we can use on the way there."
•ᴖ•
All the girls were packed into the dressing room. Alice and Angela arrived early, so they got to sit on the sofa beside each other. Angela was grateful; her high was slipping like a rockslide in her mind.
A bad trip.
She blamed her dream. Her fake brother and the other man with bright blue eyes. She'd seen those eyes before. Flashes like lightning in the corner of her eyes.
Every color in the room, real and imagined, were magnified. Swirls of reds and oranges and the colors that came off people sometimes. Angela tried to ignore the color that came off people. She once brought it up to the Madame, when a man came in whose colors bled black like sticky tar. Angela was slapped for her comment, and told to never utter such retarded shit again.
The man ended up choosing Angela, and she still tried to not think about the things he did to her.
She breathed in but instead of calming her racing heart, it made colors rush quicker.
"Our Italian friend," the Madame told them," who has so graciously run us for years, is no more."
Murmurs from the girls erupted. The sound irritated Angela's skin. She scratched her arm hard until flakes of skin floated down onto her lap like snowflakes.
"Mr. DiPasquale was murdered. A business deal gone bad. But fear not!" She raised her hand to shut up the room. "The men who killed him have taken over... The only problem is that they're in Europe." She smiled, all lips and toxic. "Get packed for London, ladies. And pack for the cold and rain. I hear London is very gray this time of year."
