“Dude, he got shot because of me, on top of bare time in prison. Unless he became a fucking monk inside, there’s no way he’s moved on from that shit.”
“You don’t know that.”
“And you don’t know Dante Pope.”
“Neither do you.”
Benito exhaled a long breath through his nose. “I can’t do this with him. He doesn’t think like the rest of us, and he’s relentless. If he wants to hurt me, he won’t stop until he has.”
Mickey gripped Benito’s shoulders, forcing him to meet his gaze. “You used to be like that too. We both did. But people change.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Theydo. Or we wouldn’t be here, either of us.”
Benito took Mickey’s hands and squeezed them. “You’re nothing like Dante Pope.”
“How do you know? I’ve been alive twenty-five years and you’ve only known me for eighteen months. You have no idea what I’d be capable of if I was living his life.”
Benito shook his head. He got Mickey’s point, but Dante Pope was a unique creature. Clever. Unpredictable. He had his weak points, though—his ego and chronic inability to be alone.Maybe—
No. Benito shook his head again, more violently this time. “I can’t fight him. Or even think about it. I can’t be that person anymore.”
Mickey nodded. “So what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to ask him to give me what I gave his brother. I’m going to ask him to set me free.”
* * *
Benito wrote Dante Pope a letter. Mickey never read it, but he was there the day the reply landed on the doormat from Manchester Prison, because it was Mickey’s doormat, in Mickey’s house, where Benito had lived since he’d given up his city-centre flat.
Mickey held up the note from Dante Pope and read it aloud.
Martell,
Life moves on. I hope yours is as good as I want mine to be.
Be well,
D
“Is he being sincere or bluffing like a motherfucker?”
“Honestly?” Benito came up behind Mickey and kissed his neck. “With him, it’s hard to tell, but I’ve never heard him say shit like that before, so maybe it’s real.”
“You believe that, don’t you?”
Benito shrugged. “I want to, and I can’t live my life looking over my shoulder. Sometimes you have to see the best in people until they show you otherwise.”
“He never showed you the worst of him?”
“As much as he saw the worst of me, but maybe seeing his brother go straight changed him as much as it did the rest of us.”
Mickey matched Benito’s words to what he knew of the crew he’d run with on the road. Young men fighting for a crown no one seemed to want. It was a fucking mess, and even thinking about it made him twitch. Or, at least, think about twitching. Cravings were easier to manage when Benito was around. Some days, addiction never crossed Mickey’s mind.
The days it did, he went to a meeting in a village hall six miles away. Benito came with him and ate all the biscuits while they listened to other people talk. Every Thursday, he did the same at the anxiety support group he took Rosetta to, and hestillhad no idea he was Mickey’s fucking hero.
Mickey let the note fall to the kitchen counter and spun around, quickly caging Benito in his arms. “You want to go out tonight?”