The Darkness Within (Peaky Blinders) Thomas Shelby

9. Scars

Take my mind

And take my pain

Like an empty bottle takes the rain

And heal, heal, heal, heal

And tell me some things last

- Heal, by Tom Odell

It was hard to find time to be alone together. Somehow there always seemed to be something going on, or someone interrupting and they had to play it off like they were just chatting.

Kiara had lost count of the amount of times Riley had almost caught them and all she could seem to say to him was "I was just asking Tommy where you were," Before coming up with some excuse to need her brother's help as a cover.

And then finally they were alone; no one was interrupting. Kiara had waited for Riley to think she was asleep and she waited for him to go to bed before sneaking out the front door where Tommy was waiting. He grabbed her hand and they ran down the street to where he had parked the car, away from the front of the house so Riley didn't see it. They drove back to the Shelby house and snuck upstairs.

Tommy was hardly a virgin at 22. He was a Shelby and a Peaky Blinder for crying out loud, but Kiara was. She had done other things with Donovan Keating, but they never went the whole way. They almost did once, but then he saw her scars from her father's beatings and asked about them. He never should have asked. Tommy had only seen one, the one just above her right eye, under her eyebrow, a small indent it was from a small shard of glass that had bounced off the wall when Cacey Donoghue had pelted his whisky glass at it in a fit of rage. The others he saw that night. Scattered across her back were various lines of scar tissue. One that started just under her left shoulder blade and ran down three inches, another slightly smaller that ran in the opposite direction just underneath the first and then a third one on her lower back that wrapped slightly around the right side of her waist. There were five other much smaller ones scattered between the larger ones as well, but all of them were easily concealed, all of them below her shoulder blades.

Tommy had been standing behind her, one hand on her shoulder and the other on her waist, placing a kiss on her neck before helping her remove her dress. His hands had lightly traced over the marks, but he didn't say a word, only placed another kiss on her shoulder before turning her back around to face him.