mozzafiato ➝ peaky blinders

otto

Yesterday had been the closest her father had ever come to hitting her.

All night, she had been awake, thinking. Finalising her plan. One fuelled by years of built-up anger. One that had been at the forefront of her mind for years, but seemed to have no feasible method of execution.

But, she believed an opportunity had arisen in this new city.

And, as of last night, she would stop at nothing to make it work.

But first, she had to follow her father's orders.

Her face partly covered with a scarf, Gianna stalked through the streets of Birmingham, secretly seething. 

A map drawn in pencil was grasped in her hand, one she had acquired from a policeman. She had wheedled it out of him with her best "helpless little girl" voice, saying she knew someone at the factory.

All the while, she had been making sure to hide the gun in her holster from view.

Her eyes were constantly dancing about the streets as she walked. She had an irrational fear that someone would recognise her. Her grandmother and her father and uncles had all lived in the city she walked through at that moment; it wasn't entirely impossible that someone could clock her inherited features, get her talking, confirm where she was from and try something on her. 

Her lips twitched up in a brief smile at her expense. She was being silly.

But, still, she began to walk a little faster, her fist tightening around the map.

Alone with her thoughts, she began to wonder about something she had overheard her uncle and father talking about that morning. 

Something had happened, yesterday, on Christmas Day. And all Gianna knew for sure was that someone had died.

Someone close to the Peaky Blinders, the rulers of Birmingham (And soon to be the whole fuckin' world, her father had grumbled.)

And once again, Gianna was in the dark about the whole thing. 

Sighing. she brought herself back to the present.

For a while, she managed to move around the city unaided, the map an image in her mind. She crept down darkened alleyways, hurried along exposed mainstreets, keeping her head bowed all the while, only glancing up to make sure she was going the right way. 

When she eventually needed to check the map, she found herself muttering her father's instructions, quiet enough for only herself to hear, as she ground to a stop and uncrumpled the paper in her hand. 

Scope out the Shelby's factory. Find out how to get father into his office. 

Looking up from the map after turning it sideways a few times, Gianna's eyes suddenly snagged on a soot-black building in the near distance, towering over the rows of houses around it as smoke poured out of it's chimneys.

Her chest swelling with accomplishment, Gia began to walk once more.  

-

It was Boxing Day. The morning before, John Michael Shelby had been killed. And Michael Gray may as well have been.

The Shelby clan was back in Small Heath, and needless to say, none of them wanted to be. After Tommy had sold them all out, and after Polly, Arthur, Michael and John had escaped the noose, the family had fractured. John and Arthur took their wives to live in the country. Polly spent her days in her house drinking herself into oblivion and throwing prescription pills down her throat. Ada had departed for America - and Tommy Shelby seemed to have disappeared entirely.