Details. Sometimes they mattered, sometimes they didn’t.
Sid’s reply buzzed through. Another pin, this time for an outdoor café, and then a message.
Sid:twenty mins?
Dante sent back a thumbs-up emoji and turned in the direction Google Maps was telling him, wishing he had Luis’s sense of direction instead of his own. Dante’s inability to read a map had brought them grief more times than he could count.
Don’t forget that.
As if he ever could.
Dante wove his way along the city streets until he came to his personal idea of hell: the shopping district. And it was market day. Dante took a breath, absorbing the familiar noise and smell, and it hit him like a truck. Manchester faded away, swallowed up by the London streets that had raised Dante up and shot him down. The world seemed to grow smaller. Darker. His chest tightened, his breath shortened, and his pulse throbbed like an expanding balloon set to pop.
Pressure built in his temples. He spun around, searching for a bolt hole, but he was surrounded by pubs and bars, and the kinds of shops he knew would make the chaos in his brain a thousand times worse.
Go to the bus stop. Go home.
But he couldn’t. BecauseSid. Because—
“Couple of GBG boys just rinsed the stash on Kings Road, fucked us over on a couple of mopeds. You want us to go after them?”
Dante eyed the runner who’d charged up twenty flights of stairs to deliver the news to Dante’s doorstep. He was eager to please, desperate for clout and rep, and like every other kid in the Moss Farm blocks, he idolised not Dante, but Luis, his favourite henchman.
Smirking, Dante turned to his brother now and tilted his head. “What do you think?”
Luis was holding a joint but not smoking it. He didn’t need the relief the way Dante did. The sweet buzz. The oblivion. “GBG are just kids, man. Babies on bikes stealing hash bags. We ain’t got time for that shit.”
“You don’t think it looks weak to get taken like that in our own ends?”
Luis flicked the lighter in his hand. “I think it looks weak to be sending muscle after school kids. You want to go out there and fight a twelve-year-old?”
“Fighting is your job, brother.”
“Yeah, well, I ain’t doing it. Not this time.”
Defiance burnt hard in Luis’s glare, daring Dante to challenge him, but Dante didn’t fight like that. Toe to toe with Luis he’d always lose, so he made sure it never happened.
He turned back to the messenger. “You have a brother, don’t you? At the middle school?”
The messenger nodded. “Year eight.”
Dante smiled and gestured for Asa to pass him a roll of notes. He held them out to the messenger. “Pull him out and take him with you. Luis’s right: muscle shouldn’t fight kids, so tell your little brother it’s time to earn some extra pocket money.”
The messenger left. Asa glanced between Dante and Luis and disappeared too. For the first time in weeks, they were alone in the grotty flat they’d grown up in, and Dante let out a breath. Luis hated him as much as the next guy on the street, but his malevolence was familiar.
Safe.
Luis would never hurt Dante. He just spent his entire life wishing he could.
“You fucking cunt,” Luis growled the second the reinforced door slammed shut. “You can’t send kids after kids. It’s fucking sick.”
Dante shrugged, lighting another joint to numb the disquiet that matched the raging storm Luis was about to fling in his face. “If you don’t want that to happen, you need to tool up and go put down whoever paid for those mopeds. Otherwise, we stick to your theory and let kids be kids. You decide, brother. What’s it gonna—
“Hey.”
Dante jumped, spinning as a warm arm slid around his waist.
The jerky movement brought him face to face and chest to chest with Sid, but somehow, he didn’t seem real. Another shaky breath rattled Dante’s lungs, and sweat trickled down the nape of his neck.