Chapter 1: Epilogue
Notes:
listen to the official "smoke & silk" soundtrack playlist : https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3apZhfCcsYF2JSJXjlMPQU?si=MtLRAvxwRzynJcmFbqsDzg&pi=fACwKjKNQ5itT
hi guys, thank you for choosing to read my work! this is my first time posting something that i wrote, so sorry if something isn't exactly well written or correct. thank you so much for your support, and i hope you enjoy the story! every kudos and comment is really appreciated <3
Chapter Text
The fabric was too heavy, and the veil too light. The family's ivory pearls hung around her swan-like neck, almost as if squeezing her like an overly eager dog. It was as if she were a prisoner in her own body, the fabric enclosing and suffocating her until she wanted to tear it off. Her skin itched and she could feel the bones inside her, a message of her actual presence in that reality, annoying her with every light step she took.
All little girls dream of her wedding, don't they? It would have been too strange if it hadn't been for her, too. Spring rose petals tickling under her shoes, guests gazing at her in ecstasy as she walked toward the altar like an angel searching for her wings, her smiles and blushes hidden beneath the white veil. But reality, without her realizing it, was mingling with her childish fantasies.
She blinked, snapping out of her momentary trance. The world around her seemed to slow down, to fade to gray. The petals beneath her shoes smelled of decay, as if to foreshadow her future, and the only thing hidden by her intricate lace veil were tears. Salty, raw tears. No one seemed to care how she was feeling. No one seemed to care about the actual wedding. The polished wooden pews held old men half asleep, women with too much powder on their faces, and young men with cigarette butts burning between their lips. Everyone present seemed far from anxious about the ceremony. Because they knew perfectly well that even the newlyweds themselves didn't want to be there.
The church is silent. Smoke still hangs faintly in the air, though no one smokes except the groom. The only sound now is the faint rustle of the bride's dress as it drags across the marble floor.
She stops before him, motionless, veiled.
The veil covers her tear-soaked face, but she doesn't budge. She stands firm in her pride, her head held high like a lamb ready for sacrifice. A proud lamb, but soon without freedom.
"Dearly beloved..." the priest began, his eyes fixed on nothing so as not to meet the gaze of the new groom. "We are gathered here today in the presence of God and these witnesses to unite this man and this woman in holy matrimony," he proclaimed solemnly, his hands raised almost parallel with the arms of the crucifix hanging on the wall behind him.
"It is not a vow to be taken lightly, nor a contract made in haste." The groom dropped the cigarette he had now been holding unlit on his lips under his shoe, his cold, expressionless gaze waiting for the damned old man to continue. "Marriage is a pact. A bond of trust, of loyalty, of sacrifice. It is based on mutual respect and the willingness to endure, together, whatever may happen."
The priest's voice lowered, almost to a chirp, after clearing his throat to try to break the awkward silence. "If anyone here knows of any reason why these two should not be joined in marriage, speak now, or forever hold your peace."
Silence.
Oh, how she hoped there hadn't been that aberrant pause. How she hoped someone, among the foaming old men or the sleepy-faced young men, would stand up and shout their denial of it all.
But deep down, she knew.
She knew it wouldn't happen, not as long as the man who would become her husband remained there.
"Thomas Michael Shelby, do you wish to take this woman, Adelaide Araminta Moncada, to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as you both shall live?"
The groom remained in the same position as before, his gaze straight and focused on the priest. He held his hands clenched in front of him, the smoke from the cigarette stubbed out beneath his shoe barely escaping like the breath of a furnace.
“I do." he replied calmly, the quick hiss of the monosyllable not breaking his stony expression.
“And you, Adelaide, do you want to take this man as your husband, to have her and keep her, to stand by him with loyalty and love, as long as you both live?”
Chapter 2: Chapter I
Notes:
listen to the official "smoke & silk" soundtrack playlist : https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3apZhfCcsYF2JSJXjlMPQU?si=MtLRAvxwRzynJcmFbqsDzg&pi=fACwKjKNQ5itT
Chapter Text
Six Weeks Earlier
Outside, the storm had softened its rage to a whispering drizzle, a fine mist that tapped gently against the office windows, blurring the glass into trembling veins of rain. The world beyond was a grey wash, light filtering through swollen clouds like a reluctant sigh, thickening the shadows that pooled stubbornly in the corners of the room. Inside, the hearth breathed softly, the fire crackling with a quiet unrest, casting flickering veins of orange and gold that crept like living things across the faded green walls, which bore the stains of years and memories long settled.
Thomas Shelby sat behind the desk like a statue carved from cold marble, still and unreadable. His legs were crossed with a practiced ease, one hand loosely cradling a glass of whiskey untouched, while the other held a cigarette burning low, its glowing ember a tiny battlefield of fire and ash.
He did not look up when Vittorio Moncada entered, though his senses cataloged everything: the hesitant footfalls that measured the floor with cautious precision; the stiff collar of a coat worn well beyond its prime; the weight of years settling unevenly on shoulders still carrying the remnants of dignity. Rings adorned every finger, some sliding loosely over fingers that had thinned, as if time itself had tried to strip the man bare.
Moncada paused just inside the doorway with his hat held respectfully in one hand and his eyes flicking around the room, taking in the worn bookshelves, the scattered papers and the faint curl of smoke twisting toward the ceiling.
“Mr. Shelby,” he said, the voice laced with old-world formality and a faint tremor, “it’s... good to see you again.”
Tommy’s lips remained sealed for a moment longer. He took a long drag of his cigarette, the smoke swirling upward like a slow serpent, then finally lifted his eyes. Sharp and icy blue, cold as winter’s breath.
“Vittorio.”
The single word hung between them, heavy and loaded.
“You’ve aged.”
Moncada exhaled a breath that might have been a laugh if there had been any warmth left to carry it.
“Life has... moved differently since I last called on you.”
Tommy gestured lazily toward the chair opposite him.
“It tends to do that. Sit.”
The Sicilian lowered himself with deliberate care, the motion stiff and measured, as if guarding a fragile pride that trembled just beneath the surface. His shoulders stayed square, jaw clenched; still a man wielding a sword of glass, brilliant but perilously fragile.
Silence stretched thin between them. The fire spat once, sharp and sudden, a single ember skittering across the grate.
“How’s your daughter?” Tommy’s voice was flat, unadorned, his eyes tracing the lazy spiral of smoke rising from his cigarette. “Still singing?”
Moncada’s lips parted, caught off guard by the question’s immediacy.
“Yes,” he said slowly, each word deliberate. “Adelaide still performs. She’s... very gifted. She has a voice that—”
“She smokes imported Turkish cigarettes. Drinks champagne she doesn’t pay for. Sleeps in a penthouse funded by favors, not fortune.”
The words landed like a slap. Moncada flinched, just barely.
“You’ve... been watching her.”
Tommy’s gaze did not waver.
“That surprises you?”
Moncada exhaled sharply through his nose, then glanced away, only to meet Tommy’s eyes again moments later. An unspoken struggle flashed there between the urge to lie and the weight of truth.
“I’ve come to settle a debt.”
Tommy shifted slightly, the air thickening between them, the mask of civility slipping just an inch to reveal something colder, harder.
“No.” he said slowly, each word cutting through the quiet like a blade, “You’ve come because you’ve run out of options.” continued while he stubbed his cigarette out with deliberate finality in a crystal ashtray.
“You owe me twenty-five thousand pounds. And that’s not including the interest.”
Moncada licked his lips, fingers tightening around the brim of his hat, as if drawing strength from the worn fabric.
“That figure is... negotiable.”
“Not to me.”
The Sicilian straightened, his dignity still intact despite the shift beneath it, playing the nobleman’s part to the end.
“I have land. In Palermo. Titles that can be transferred—”
“I don’t need land.” Tommy’s voice was flat, sharp as a razor. “And titles don’t mean anything in this country.”
A silence bloomed between them, thick and claustrophobic, like smoke trapped beneath a glass dome.
“You have one thing left,” Tommy said at last, his voice low and smooth, velvet over steel.
He let the words hang like a challenge.
“Your daughter.”
Moncada’s spine stiffened imperceptibly. His face remained calm, but behind his eyes, a storm flickered—an unspoken warning.
“She’s not... property.”
Tommy met the gaze without blinking.
“She is now.”
“You want her as payment?” Moncada’s voice was low, edged with incredulity.
Tommy shrugged one shoulder, indifferent.
“A wife,” he said simply. “A name that gives me access to certain Sicilian ports. A woman with the right bloodline for when I stand in a room full of old men in Parliament who still worship the idea of nobility.”
He rose slowly, moving to the sideboard and pouring himself a drink, offering none to his guest.
“Your name still means something. Not here, perhaps. But there. And I’ll need those connections.”
“You would marry her for that?” Moncada’s voice cut sharply. “To use her?”
Tommy’s jaw clenched. He raised the glass to his lips, the amber liquid catching the firelight.
“I don’t marry for love, Vittorio.”
He turned back toward the desk, voice dropping an octave as though speaking to a ghost.
“I did that once. She’s buried in Small Heath.”
Moncada said nothing, but his eyes flickered with something: regret, fear, or resignation.
Tommy leaned forward slightly, just enough to cast a shadow over the table, letting the threat settle in the air like smoke curling and thickening between them.
“This isn’t a negotiation. You offered her. I accepted.”
The Sicilian rose, slow and deliberate, every limb stiff with the effort of maintaining dignity in the face of defeat.
“She will hate you.”
Tommy did not flinch.
“Good.”
The fire crackled on, the heat it emitted doing nothing to thaw the icy tension that now filled the room.
His voice softened, but there was no kindness beneath it.
“Better to marry someone who already knows how to hate you than waste time breaking her first.”
Moncada now lingered near the door, his hat clutched tightly in weathered hands. His posture shifted: his shoulders less proud and his head lowered just a fraction, as though a piece of his soul had been left behind on that Persian rug.
He looked at Tommy’s back, a statue carved from marble, cold and unyielding, and with his lips parted, words trembled at the edge of escape.
“You think you’ve won something tonight, Mr. Shelby.”
Tommy did not turn. The flare of his match illuminated his face briefly as he lit a fresh cigarette, the smoke drifting between them like a veil.
“I’ve secured what I need,” he said simply. “Nothing more.”
Moncada exhaled, the breath trembling despite his effort to keep it steady.
“You don’t know her. You know of her. That’s different.”
Tommy’s silhouette remained framed by the firelight: sharp, untouchable, and cold.
“I know enough.”
Moncada took a single step forward, his voice dropping to a murmur, almost a prayer or a curse.
“She is not gentle. She is not quiet. She was born with a sword in her mouth and fire in her lungs. You will not bend her. She will not yield.”
Tommy’s eyes flicked sideways once, just once.
“Then she’ll break.”
Moncada studied him for a long, heavy moment, then shook his head faintly and turned away.
At the door, he paused, casting one last look at the man who had just bartered for his daughter.
“Be careful, Mr. Shelby. You may have secured the port, but you’ve declared war on the storm that guards it.”
And then he was gone.
The door clicked softly shut behind him, leaving Tommy alone with the dim, smoky silence. Rain whispered its endless lullaby against the windows, and the fire crackled softly, the warmth failing to reach the chill that had settled deep inside the room.
He exhaled smoke slowly, watching it curl and fade.
“Let it come.”
Chapter 3: Chapter II
Notes:
listen to the official "smoke & silk" soundtrack playlist : https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3apZhfCcsYF2JSJXjlMPQU?si=MtLRAvxwRzynJcmFbqsDzg&pi=fACwKjKNQ5itT
Chapter Text
The night hung heavy and thick with fog, an oppressive curtain clinging to the ancient brick walls of Birmingham like a stubborn mold that no sunlight could dissolve. The city breathed slowly beneath this suffocating shroud, its usually bustling streets rendered slick and silent, save for the occasional distant rumble of an engine, swallowed and muted by the damp haze.
Here and there, gas lamps flickered weakly, their frail flames trembling in the damp air, casting fractured pools of golden light that shimmered uneasily in the puddles dotting the uneven cobblestones. The world smelled of smoke and cold iron, a biting chill that seeped insidiously beneath clothing and beneath skin, chilling bone and marrow alike.
Tommy stepped from the car, lighting a cigarette with the practiced flick of a match. The faint hiss of flame was swallowed almost immediately by the dense fog that curled around the street. The club stood discreetly before him with no sign marking its presence. Only two brass sconces guarding a black door, their flames sputtering in defiance of the mist that sought to swallow them whole.
He exhaled slowly, eyes narrowing beneath the brim of his cap as he surveyed the street with his usual measured, calculating gaze. This wasn’t a visit made for business. The Shelby Company had no dealings here, at least not yet. This was something else entirely. A restless curiosity that dragged him out into the damp night. Something unspoken pulling at him from the shadows.
With a final crush of the match beneath his heel, he flicked his gaze down the fog-enshrouded street and crossed the threshold into the dark interior.
The first thing he noticed was the heat: not a welcome warmth, but a raw, almost tangible heat, like stepping inside the breath of someone alive and watching. It was suffocating and intimate all at once.
The ceilings were low, swallowed by heavy velvet drapes that clung to the walls like a shroud. Cigarette smoke hung thickly in the air, suspended in amber pools cast by dim, flickering lights. The crowd inside made no effort to break the silence with laughter or cheer. There were only murmurs floating from table to table, the clink of glasses and the languid spill of music, slow and syrupy, melting from the stage like thick honey poured over a wound.
Tommy passed by tables without once glancing at the faces gathered there. They didn’t matter to him, not tonight. Powdered and painted masks stared emptily into the haze, eyes glazed or drifting but never truly seeing. Drunken smiles and tired hopes blurred and faded in the gloom. None of these souls held his attention.
He slid quietly into a booth tucked in the shadows, pressing his back against the wall, his presence as unobtrusive as a ghost’s. A glass was placed before him almost immediately, filled without a word.
He took a single, deliberate sip, then settled into stillness, waiting.
From the stage came the mournful cry of a trumpet, its notes bending and twisting through the smoke. The piano whispered soft chords beneath it, slow and hypnotic, pulling time itself out of joint. In places like this, moments folded in on themselves. Names, hours, and worries were forgotten; dissolved into the music. And that, of course, was why they all came.
Then, the music stopped.
Not abruptly, not with a jarring crash, but as if the room itself had inhaled sharply in anticipation, holding its breath before a kiss you might regret.
A quiet voice whispered through the dimness: “She’s on.”
No spotlight shifted, no announcement was made. She simply appeared, as if conjured from the very mist that clung to the windows.
Tommy hadn’t noticed the exact moment she stepped onto the stage. One second she was not there, the next, she stood bathed in the amber wash of lamplight, the room held captive by her stillness.
She did not resemble the polished beauties from the magazines, draped in diamonds and painted smiles designed to seduce the masses.
No, she wore dark silk that seemed to swallow her form, a black, backless gown that melted into the shadows themselves. Her bare shoulders gleamed pale and fragile like old porcelain, so delicate it seemed the slightest touch might crack her. Her hair was pinned loosely, soft curls escaping in tendrils like whispered secrets. Around her neck hung nothing but the empty air.
Her gaze did not sweep over the audience, did not rest on any one soul. Instead, it passed over them like smoke drifting across water: indifferent, elusive, untouchable.
For a brief, sharp moment, Tommy saw the weight she carried. Not in her gown, not in her posture, but in the heavy silence she wore like a second skin.
It was the hush before glass shatters.
She was a stranger here, a woman who seemed to have fled a softer world and never quite learned to land.
A swan surrounded by crows.
A thief gloved in velvet.
A storm masquerading in quiet.
She stepped to the microphone with the slow, measured steps of a woman arriving at her own funeral. Not afraid, not trembling, not weeping. Just tired. So profoundly tired it was a quiet defiance in itself.
Her voice came low, not a crafted showpiece or a siren’s seductive wail, but heavy and viscous; like sugar left too long in the jar, thickened with pain and time.
The room leaned in, glasses paused midair, breath caught on invisible threads.
Tommy remained still, untouched by the usual stirrings.
The words themselves barely mattered. It was not the lyrics, but the ache beneath them, the fracture within her voice, stretched thin like a silk thread about to snap.
She did not sing for applause. She sang because it was the only thing anchoring her to the surface, the last thing keeping her from drowning.
And yet, even then, she was not vulnerable.
She was contained, a fragile structure held together by sheer force of will, like a stained glass window trembling in a rising wind but never breaking.
Tommy studied her carefully, as one studies a map full of unknown dangers. He had built empires on instincts like this.
She had something.
Not fame, not power, not utility. Not yet.
But something.
Something invisible and magnetic.
Something that drew people in even when they couldn’t explain why.
He sipped the whiskey, the smoke from his cigarette rising lazily between them.
His face betrayed nothing.
But deep inside, a gear clicked into place.
Not a flutter of romance, nor a spark of desire.
Interest.
Tommy leaned back into the booth, silent, listening.
Because something whispered to him, clear as a bell in the dark: this was no mere performance.
This was a warning.
And he could not yet tell for whom.
· · ─────── ·𖥸· ─────── · ·
Far from the pulsing crowd, the club’s back halls lay wrapped in a softer quiet, the muffled lull of jazz lingering like a faded dream. Velvet curtains deadened the noise, while the golden sconces cast their warm glow on the worn wooden floorboards, painting gentle shadows that seemed to dance with a life of their own. The room felt sacred, like a confessional that no priest ever dared enter.
Adelaide sat before the makeup table in her dressing room, fingers slow and practiced as they slipped pins from her tangled curls. The vanity lights hummed faintly overhead, catching the glint of a small compact mirror cradled between her slender, ring-adorned fingers.
Her skin still held the warmth from the stage, buzzing softly beneath the surface, alive with the echo of her own voice.
Leaning against the doorframe behind her, cigarette half-smoked and heels kicked off, stood Lina, a fellow singer whose laugh could crack ribs and whose tongue was sharp enough to cut glass.
“That one..." Lina muttered, nodding toward the curtain as if she could still see the unseen audience beyond it, “watched you like a wolf eyeing a lamb on Easter Sunday.”
Adelaide arched a single perfectly drawn brow, her lips curling into a crooked smirk. “One of those again?”
“No, cara mia. Not just one of those.”
Lina leaned forward, lowering her voice. “This one didn’t blink. Didn’t drink. Didn’t even glance at the tits of the French girl with feathers. He just sat there in the shadows, watching you. Like he was deciding whether to swallow you whole.”
Adelaide snorted softly, brushing a trace of loose powder from beneath her eyes. “Maybe he liked the song.”
“Bullshit. That wasn’t appreciation. That was a man carrying secrets.”
A strange pause settled between them.
Adelaide rolled her shoulders, loosening her silk robe so it slipped further down one arm. She tilted her head back, eyes half-lidded in thought.
“He didn’t clap.”
“Exactly,” Lina whispered, “even the bastards who want to screw you clap.”
They both laughed, a sharp, cracked sound. It was the kind of laughter women make when they’ve outlived their illusions.
Adelaide lit a cigarette and let it hang between her lips as she leaned toward the vanity, smudging the last of her lipstick onto a napkin.
“He handsome?” she asked quietly after a beat.
Lina shrugged. “Didn’t see his face. Cap pulled low. Could’ve been a prince. Or a killer.”
Adelaide didn’t answer. Instead, she tapped ash into a crystal tray and stared into her reflection, as if waiting for the woman in the mirror to become someone else.
Her eyes no longer belonged to this world. Not anymore.
They were old eyes. Eyes that knew how to lie without flinching.
She exhaled a slow stream of smoke toward the ceiling, watching it coil like a ribbon before fading into the gold haze above. The dressing room smelled of rose water, powder, and sweat. It was the perfume of backstage survival.
A single white lily drooped from a chipped vase beside her mirror, its petals bruised and curling inward, fragile as a secret.
Lina had wandered off, muttering something about gin and cheap men, leaving Adelaide alone with the heavy silence that suddenly felt too loud.
The door clicked softly behind her.
Her robe slipped further down her shoulder, revealing the fragile curve of her collarbone. She made no effort to pull it back.
Her skin itched beneath the residue of makeup and performance. The mask she wore, the fantasy she sold.
“Belladonna." she whispered to the empty room.
That was the name some drunken French merchant had once given her: deadly beauty. A joke at the time, but now, the word bloomed with uneasy truth in her mind. Something poisonous lurking beneath the surface, waiting.
She reached for the small record player tucked in the corner, flipping through worn sleeves until she found the one she sought. A slow, scratchy instrumental from Italy, her Italy. The old one, before the war, before the lies. Her mother used to hum it softly while brushing her hair at night.
She let the melody play low, almost drowned beneath the jazz still bleeding through the curtains.
The mirror flickered with her reflection: not the siren of the stage, but a woman in shadows, slipping out of the skin of someone she once was.
She slid off her earrings. Kicked off her shoes. Curled her bare feet beneath the chair like a girl who had not yet made the choices that had led her here.
A sudden knock came. Not at the door, but in her chest. Like something waking, an echo of footsteps that had not yet arrived.
She turned quickly, expecting to see him there. The man from the shadows, the one who hadn’t clapped.
But the hallway beyond was empty.
Still, her heart beat faster. Just a little.
She crushed her cigarette in the tray and rubbed at the back of her neck, skin prickling with unease.
“Just another bastard with a silver watch and cold eyes." she murmured.
“Forget him." she told herself.
But she could not. Not quite.
Then the old rotary phone rang. A shrill, sharp sound piercing the quiet. It never rang unless someone from the front called, or someone had been searching for her.
Adelaide stared at it. The sound was out of place here, almost unreal.
On the third ring, she answered.
“Velvet Room.”
Silence, then a breath, and a voice: familiar, slick with guilt.
“Adelaide.”
Her mouth froze. Her spine stiffened.
“Papà?”
“Come home.”
She could hear the clinking of glass, the distant crackle of a fire burning too close, like he’d thrown half a bottle of grappa on it, out of habit or despair.
“Why?”
“Because we need to talk.”
“We never talk.”
“Then tonight will be the first.”
There was a moment of silence, as if neither of them wanted to hear those words.
“Please, figlia mia. It’s important.”
Her hand tightened around the receiver.
“If it’s about money, save your breath.”
“It’s not just about money.”
There was fear in his voice. And that made her stomach twist.
He was never afraid. Not really.
“Fine." she said after a long breath. “I’ll come.”
She hung up without a goodbye, the silence filling the room again.
Her robe slipped down to her elbows, revealing the delicate slope of her shoulders.
She met her reflection once more. The eyes were no longer old. They were resigned.
Just before she left, she reached into a silk pouch beside the vanity and pulled out a small silver pistol. Wrapping it carefully in a shawl, she tucked it inside her coat.
A girl can never be too careful, she thought.
Especially when the dead come calling with open hands.
Chapter 4: Chapter III
Notes:
listen to the official "smoke & silk" soundtrack playlist : https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3apZhfCcsYF2JSJXjlMPQU?si=MtLRAvxwRzynJcmFbqsDzg&pi=fACwKjKNQ5itT
Chapter Text
It was raining by the time she arrived.
Not heavily, but the kind that seeps into your coat and bones, soft and soaking; the kind that made the old stones of Birmingham glisten like oil under the streetlamps.
Feather Lane was nearly empty. A narrow, twisted road tucked behind what used to be a Catholic school, now boarded up like a corpse that had already begun to rot.
At the far end stood the Moncada house.
Once grand. Once proud.
Now… a thing in mourning.
Its red bricks were stained by time and the soot of too many winters. The wrought-iron gate groaned as she pushed it open, ivy coiled around its bars like nature had already begun reclaiming what no longer belonged to man.
The garden was overgrown, with pale yellow roses strangled by weeds. A statue of Saint Rosalia stood cracked in the courtyard, her stone hands missing, as if in prayer she had finally broken apart.
The lights inside were warm but faint. There was a single glow from the sitting room, like a candle swinging by the wind in a dark room. The curtains, worn by time like everything in that house, were half-drawn, revealing just enough to make her wonder why the house suddenly felt like it was watching her back.
Adelaide stood for a moment on the front step, the wet hem of her coat dragging behind her like a cloak of ink. She smoothed a gloved hand over her headscarf and rang the bell.
It chimed, long and broken. As if it were an omen.
She heard footsteps, slow and heavy, as if the person who was walking down them had a weight on his shoulders. Then the slow creak of the door.
"Adelaide."
His voice was tired. Brittle.
She hadn’t heard it in nearly a year.
Her father stood in the hallway like a shadow of the man he’d once been. Still tall, but shrunken somehow. His once black hair now more gray than salt, eyes glassy with fatigue and something heavier, something like shame.
He was wearing a velvet smoking jacket she remembered from her childhood in Sicily, frayed at the elbows, a silk cravat tied too tightly at the throat. It used to smell like tobacco and oranges. Now it reeked of defeat.
"You look..." he began, then stopped himself.
She raised a brow.
“Older?” she offered.
“Beautiful.” he said instead. “But tired.”
She stepped past him without answering, shrugging off her coat and leaving it on the chair by the door.
The house creaked around them as if remembering her, like the memory of a distant lullaby.
The wallpaper in the corridor was peeling at the corners. The chandelier above them had only four bulbs left, flickering like candles before they drowned. Her heels tapped on the wood floor, echoing louder than they should have.
“Sit. Please.”
The sitting room was warmer than she expected. Fire crackling in the hearth. A bottle of brandy half-finished on the table. Books stacked in messy towers, letters yellowing on the sideboard.
There were no servants. Not anymore.
She sat on the edge of the armchair, legs crossed, chin tilted. She lit a cigarette, not out of want, but to fill the silence.
“So?” she said, smoke slipping past her lips. “Why now?”
He sat across from her, hands folded. Fingers twitching.
“You always did go straight for the heart of it,” he said with a weak smile.
“I had to,” she replied. “You kept hiding everything else.”
A silence passed between them like fog creeping through a field.
“You still hate me, then.” he murmured.
She looked at him for a long moment. Not blinking. “Hate is effort. I ran out of that years ago.”
He closed his eyes for a second. Maybe to collect himself. Maybe to mourn what couldn’t be fixed.
“We lost everything.” he said finally. “The last shares, the land, the letters of credit… all gone.”
“I figured.” she replied coldly. “You only ever call me when you’re broke.”
“Don’t—” he began, but her expression silenced him.
He leaned forward, rubbing at his forehead. There was no suitable way to say what he had to say to her.
“There was one offer. One way to stop everything from going to the grave.”
“Let me guess,” she muttered. “Your daughter. The last heirloom you hadn’t pawned.”
He flinched. She smiled. Not kindly.
“That's why you called me, right? Who is he?” she asked.
Vittorio met her eyes now, fully. His voice lowered, as if simply mentioning that name was something evil.
“Thomas Shelby.”
Silence.
Something in the air thickened, slow and sour.
“The gangster?” she asked finally, laughter bitter in her throat.
“The businessman." he corrected softly.
No, the gangster. That's what it was. She heard his name whispered every night at the club, like some kind of ghost hovering over Birmingham.
She'd heard things about him that made her silver skin shiver the first time she heard them. Stories that convinced her that this man wasn't a man at all, but the devil hiding behind a coat and a hat.
They called it "Peaky," and if you looked closely, you'd notice a small glow just above the visor that shielded their faces in the darkness. It was the reflection of the sun's rays in the cold steel of the blade, hidden in the fabric to bestow the kiss of death on anyone who stood in their way.
She rose from her chair and walked toward the fire. She moved like a feline on a roof. Careful, meticulous. She watched the flames turn red, blue, then green, then red again. Then she turned back, her eyes like cut glass.
“You gave me away.” she said. “Like cattle.”
“I secured you a future.”
“You sold me into it.”
Her voice was rising, but only slightly. She was still controlled.
“Do you know what they say about him?” she continued. “What he’s done?”
“Yes." he responded. “And I still preferred him to the men who came knocking to collect what I couldn’t pay.”
She clenched her fists. Obviously, the usual miser.
“Why didn’t you ask me?” she said. “Why didn’t you say a single word?”
“Would it have changed anything?”
“Yes.” she snapped.
Everything would have changed. They would seek a solution, rather than come to this. They were still Moncadas, their blood blue and proud as a wild animal.
Vittorio Moncada stood up in turn, his face as pale as a linen sheet. He was no longer the man he once was, and they had both understood this for a long time.
“Adelaide, I had no choice.”
“There’s always a choice,” she hissed. “You just never had the balls to make the right one.”
“Don’t speak to me like that—!”
“Why not?” Her voice cracked, but didn’t break. She wouldn't give him this satisfaction, the satisfaction of seeing her broken like a porcelain doll before his eyes. She had to prove to be the Moncada he had failed to be.
“You didn’t think I deserved a conversation before becoming someone’s wife—?”
“You think you’re better than this?” he shouted back suddenly. “You think a woman with a name like yours, a past like ours, still has the privilege to choose?”
There was a pause, as long as the birth of the universe. It was as if both knew the risk of the conversation, but neither had the courage to dare change things until the fuse reached the bomb.
“You really are your mother’s daughter.”
He regretted it the second it left his mouth.
But it was too late.
Adelaide's face froze. She turned to ice, as if she suddenly lost all heat from her body...and her humanity.
“Don’t,” she said, voice low and dangerous. “Don’t speak of her. Don't you dare to speak of her."
“She would have done the same thing. She married me when we had nothing.”
“She died because of you.”
“She died because she believed in this family.”
“She died trying to escape it.”
They stood across from each other now. Two ghosts of the same ruin. The fire crackled quietly between them.
He looked away first.
“I made mistakes.” he said, quieter. “Too many. I know. But this… this could give you something real. Stability. Power. A name. He’ll protect you.”
“He doesn’t know me.” she hissed, the words coming out almost broken.
“He’s seen you.”
She narrowed her eyes. “What does that mean?”
But her father said nothing.
He only poured himself another glass of brandy, the thin and skeletal hands adorned with old rings trembling.
· · ─────── ·𖥸· ─────── · ·
The fog hung low over Arrow House, thick and pale as if the earth itself sought to forget the sky ever existed. Beyond the tall, grimy windows, the gardens appeared only as ghostly silhouettes, hedges and iron statues emerging dimly like long-lost shipwrecks half-swallowed by the mist. Not a single bird dared to break the silence; the world seemed to hold its breath beneath that oppressive veil.
Inside, the stillness was almost unbearable.
The fire in the study burned low, not out of necessity for warmth, but more as a faint gesture toward life: tiny, flickering tongues of flame casting hesitant reflections on the polished rims of crystal tumblers and the gleaming surfaces of heavy mahogany. The silence had its own texture, thick and almost tangible, interrupted only by the steady, deliberate tick of the grandfather clock and the occasional, mournful groan of old wood settling beneath the weight of ghosts no one wanted to name.
Thomas sat behind his desk like a monarch presiding over a ruined court: still, unreadable, and distant. One hand rested on a sealed envelope, its paper crisp and unread, while the other lay loosely curled beside a cigarette that remained untouched. He was clad in a black three-piece suit, the faint glint of a watch chain catching the faintest light, as though prepared simultaneously for battle and burial. Perhaps, in some ways, he was.
He did not look up when Polly entered, but he recognized her presence instantly, knowing it by the confident certainty in her footsteps that refused hesitation.
“The fog’s rolling in thick tonight.” she observed, closing the door softly behind her without sparing him a glance. “The kind that gets into your bones and stays there.”
His gaze remained fixed on the window, on the murky grey nothingness beyond the glass. “Maybe that’s why it’s so quiet." he murmured, his voice low and distant.
Polly arched an eyebrow, her tone sharp with disbelief. “Since when do you care about quiet?”
“I don’t." he admitted. “But I do notice it.”
She moved slowly across the room, her eyes taking in the scene like a puzzle she was growing weary of solving: a whiskey bottle missing just a single pour, a neat stack of untouched ledgers, the absence of music in a house that once thrummed with it.
Something about the whole tableau felt incomplete, a moment paused on the verge of collapse.
“You sent the letter then." she said, nodding toward the envelope.
Thomas’s jaw tightened imperceptibly. “It’s not her I’m writing to.”
“Oh?”
He finally raised his eyes, sharp and steady. “It’s her father. She’ll hear it from him.”
Polly’s mouth twisted into a blend of disappointment and pity. “You’re hiding behind an old man who gambled away his daughter’s future?”
“No.” Thomas replied quietly, “I’m giving him the dignity to tell her himself. He owes her that.”
“And what do you owe her, Tommy?”
The silence that followed was heavy and dangerous, the kind that always settled before a decision was made or a line crossed.
“She’ll be safer,” he said at last, his voice barely above a whisper. “With me.”
Polly blinked slowly, then sank into a chair opposite him, as if she had done a hundred times before, always taking the side of the truth nobody dared voice.
“You’ve seen her.” she said finally. “In that club. Singing.”
Thomas reached for the cigarette at last, lighting it without ceremony. The flame briefly flickered, mirrored by the dark glass of the window behind her.
“I need her. I need her name, and her stupid blue blood," he retorted, the cigarette smoke advancing like a snake hidden in the grass. "But I won't deny that she'll be better off without that shameless man she finds herself with as a father."
Polly’s breath escaped sharply through her nose, a sound halfway between a sigh and a scoff. “You think marrying her is protecting her.”
He said nothing.
“She’s not Grace, Tommy.”
He didn’t flinch, but he avoided her eyes.
“She’s nothing like Grace,” he finally said.
“Grace belonged here, even if she didn’t think she did. This one…Adelaide…” He paused, tasting the name on his tongue. It was like a candy I had never tasted before. “She doesn’t belong anywhere.”
Polly tilted her head, eyes narrowing thoughtfully. “You think that makes you the same?”
His expression remained unreadable, but the cigarette burned lower, untouched for over a minute.
Polly leaned forward, studying him like he was a boy again: full of sharp edges and secrets too dangerous to share.
“You know, some men keep dogs. Others keep wives. I’d like to believe you don’t mix the two.”
A faint smile flickered across Thomas’s lips; it was not warm, but it was there.
“She’s not a pet, Pol.”
“Then don’t treat her like one.”
They sat together in the deepening quiet, watching as the fog pressed itself against the windows, staining them with its slow, grey breath.
Finally, Polly rose. She moved toward the door, but paused with her hand resting on the knob.
“When she finds out,” she said softly, “I hope she doesn’t scream. I hope she looks at you like you’re something she stepped around on the street.”
Thomas didn’t turn toward her, only nodded.
“She won’t cry.” he murmured.
The door closed quietly behind her. The grandfather clock ticked relentlessly. The fire cracked softly, casting shadows that danced and dissolved like fleeting memories.
Thomas leaned back in his chair, drawing a slow, deliberate drag from his cigarette as the fog outside crawled steadily down the hill, swallowing the world whole.
Chapter 5: Chapter IV
Notes:
listen to the official "smoke & silk" soundtrack playlist : https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3apZhfCcsYF2JSJXjlMPQU?si=MtLRAvxwRzynJcmFbqsDzg&pi=fACwKjKNQ5itT
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The flames in the hearth had burned low, but the letter still crackled faintly, curling into itself as if reluctant to disappear. The last corner blackened slowly, embers winking out like dying stars, the thick paper giving one final gasp before it crumbled to ash among the coals.
It had been thrown there with sudden violence, her fingers trembling not from rage, but from something deeper, more hollow, yet the destruction had not been immediate.
Adelaide had read it too many times. Far too many. Until its ink had bled into the fragile scaffolding of her bones, until she could close her eyes and see it written not on parchment, but along the inside of her ribcage. And even then, even after every syllable had rooted itself in her, she had consigned it to fire.
Now, she sat motionless, draped in a velvet armchair by the tall window. She looked like a doll left behind in a child’s nursery, the fine details of her form softened by grief. Her legs were tucked beneath her with careless grace, hands resting limp at her sides, her face tilted toward the hearth though her gaze did not follow it.
Her eyes were glassed over and unfocused, like two dim stars in a night that had no moon. Twin trails of tears clung to her cheeks, glimmering faintly like dew on a tombstone. They traced no sob, offered no release.
The silence in the room was immense. Even the clock on the mantel had stopped, or perhaps she had ceased to notice its rhythm.
Somewhere outside, the wind brushed against the house, pulling faint cries from the edges of the old stone, but none of it reached her.
"This fucking…” Her voice cracked, sharp and sudden in the hush. She bit off the rest, crossing her arms tight across her chest as though she could hold herself together through sheer force of will. “God, I can’t even think of a name for him."
The words were coming out like venom even though her lips were sweet as cherry blossoms. Only pain could turn something sugary into pure bitterness.
She could still hear the words. Every line of the letter rang with the hollow clarity of something spoken too gently to be kind.
Miss Moncada,
As you are aware, your father and I have reached an agreement that concerns you directly. It is my understanding that he has informed you of the nature of this arrangement. You are not required to respond in writing.
I will expect you at Arrow House, Thursday, the 18th, at 7 o’clock in the evening. You will be received at the front gate. Dinner will be served. Our discussion will be private and brief.
You are not under obligation to attend.
However, should you choose not to, the agreement will remain intact, and decisions will proceed without your input. Your presence offers the opportunity to set terms of your own, should you wish to exercise that privilege.
You will not be required to stay longer than one hour. No press, no announcements, and no further demands until both parties are agreed. This is a courtesy.
— T. Shelby
The paper had been thick, his name pressed into the envelope in bold, black ink. Formal. Heavy. The kind of letter that carried a kind of war inside it.
"God, forgive me...but I can't help but hate him." she whispered as if in prayer, the sparks in the hearth flickered in her eyes: eyes that were wet and wild, like rainwater reflecting the first hint of a storm.
She didn’t recall rising from the chair. Didn’t remember walking to the fire or hurling the letter into it. Nor the moment she fell back down, limbs boneless and her breath shaking with silent rage.
All she know was that she read it.
Again. And again. And again. Until she had memorized not just the words, but the spaces between them: the cold, deliberate detachment of a man who did not seduce, or flatter, or plead.
He invited.
He summoned.
He assumed she would come.
Her hands were limp in her lap now, but her nails had left tiny crescents in her palms. The firelight flickered over her face, carving shadows into the delicate features that had once filled clubs with silence and awe. Now she sat motionless, as though afraid that if she moved, she might shatter entirely.
But beneath that eerie stillness, a tempest had begun to rise.
It wasn’t loud, not yet. It was a twisting in the gut, a coil of fury knotted with betrayal and longing and something dangerously close to defiance. Her breath came shallow, sharp.
Her body was frozen, but her mind was a battlefield, thoughts scraping against each other like blades.
He had given her a choice. That was the cruelty. That was the genius. The illusion of freedom wrapped in velvet language. The offer was never truly an offer, but the shadow of control pretending to be kindness.
"He knows I'll come." she whispered, her weak voice broken by tears cutting through the silence that had fallen in that house. "He knows."
That knowledge, that certainty, made her want to scream, to tear at the walls until the house itself bled. But she didn’t. She remained there, stone still, as the last ashes collapsed like the ruins of a city razed in silence.
Her jaw clenched hard enough to ache.
She wanted to forget the words. She wanted to forget him. But they had lodged inside her, rooted deep, like shrapnel too close to the heart to remove without bleeding out.
In the quiet ruin of the room, she finally exhaled, and it was not a sigh, but a tremor.
“He wants me to go to this damn meeting, huh?” she said aloud, not to the room, but to the air, to the fire, to him. Her voice was no longer soft. “You’ll see me there, Mr. Shelby.” she declared, like a commander urging his troops to attack the enemy.
She would go.
Not because he had asked.
But because she refused to be the one left behind.
She would walk into that room, look him in the eyes, and set fire to everything he thought he understood about her. If he wanted a beginning, she would give him one.
But it would burn.
Notes:
hi guys, thank you so much for all the support! don't forget to leave kudos and a few comments! i'm really curious to know what you think of the story <3
Chapter 6: Chapter V
Notes:
listen to the official "smoke & silk" soundtrack playlist : https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3apZhfCcsYF2JSJXjlMPQU?si=MtLRAvxwRzynJcmFbqsDzg&pi=fACwKjKNQ5itT
Chapter Text
"So, this is his house..." she murmured as she stepped out of the carriage, each step taken lightly despite the heavy atmosphere that was waiting her.
Arrow House loomed at the end of the long, narrowing path. Its architecture was severe, stoic, just like the owner. Red brick and soot-black stone were knitted together into a facade that seemed more fortress than home.
The central entryway, grand and arched, gaped open like the mouth of something old and watchful, framed by a symmetry so perfect it felt almost accusatory. There were no flowers. No smoke curling from the chimneys. No movement at the windows.
Only stillness.
The lawn stretched outward in all directions, vast and empty, the grass left to grow just enough to feel wild but never careless, as though nature itself had been warned to behave.
Every corner, every ledge, every shadow seemed shaped by the same hand: cold, deliberate, unyielding. Even the architecture, it seemed, had been trained to follow orders.
"I will expect you at Arrow House, Thursday, the 18th, at 7 o’clock in the evening." So said the letter she had received, and so Adelaide had done.
She hurried towards the entrance, hugging her fur coat as the English wind began to settle into the darkness. She could feel the pebbles crunching into the grass beneath her cleats, as the dust rose and mingled with the spring air at every step.
She rapped on the doorknob to announce her arrival, the sound piercing the quiet of the evening like a drum before battle. It was all so...quiet. Almost too quiet, like the calm before the storm brewing inside her. It was unsettling, almost a harbinger of something equally terrible to come.
The door opened after a few seconds of waiting, just enough time for the cool air to turn her cheeks pink. Behind it, a woman welcomed her into the house.
"Good afternoon, Miss Moncada. We were waiting for you." she welcomes, standing with a quiet, composed dignity, her expression calm but not without edge. She wore a high-collared black dress, modest and plain, but impeccably clean.
She was the housekeeper, she supposed. Or something close to it.
Adelaide handed her the fur coat after entering the house, the dull sound of the front door closing behind her. The house, inside, was as she had expected.
It was not opulent in the traditional sense, it was something far more deliberate than that. Even inside, the symmetry that Adelaide had observed on the outside was respected, with walls paneled in dark oak, interrupted only by aged portraits in heavy frames and antique mirrors that reflected more shadow than light.
Lamps glowed behind stained glass, casting amber and wine-colored hues across the velvet drapery of the armchairs. For a moment, she felt like she was in her own club, but stripped of its music, its smoke, its soul.
Everything was kept immaculate, but the kind of immaculate that came from discipline. The furniture was tailored and stern, high-backed with dark leather.
Servants moved through the space like shadows, careful not to disturb the balance.
Even if in that house, and in that world, even the balance seemed like chaos.
The woman who had greeted her at the entrance led her into a room other than the study where she had expected to be taken: it was a dining room. Effectively, he had mentioned in the letter that dinner would be served.
In the center of the large room stood a long, polished wooden table, which seemed to have withstood the harsh violence of time thanks to the wax so diligently applied by the servants. Three silver candelabras filled the empty spaces, one at each end and one in the center, with their candles moving like fireflies caught in the night. Of all the available space on the table, only one place was set, placed directly at the head.
A silver cloche was placed over the plate to keep the food warm, the glass already filled. It looked like wine, given the color of the liquid, although she couldn't see very well from that distance, and the dim lighting certainly didn't make it easy.
"The host doesn't intend to keep me company?" she asked ironically, continuing to examine the table setting as if someone were already seated there.
The housekeeper shook her head no, her short, softly waved auburn curls shook delicately to the movement, like feathers slowly falling in the air. "Mr. Shelby prefers to meet in his office. After dinner.”
“I’m not hungry.” she announced almost in an annoyed tone, trying to compose herself only out of pity for that poor woman. He hadn't even seen her for the first time, and already he was intent on commanding on her person.
The housekeeper's smile was so faint it barely qualified as one. “He said you might say that. He also said to inform you that the meeting will not take place until you’ve eaten." she replied in the same calm tone, her hand wrinkled with age gently inviting her to sit at the place that had been prepared for her. "Properly."
Properly.
It was that addition that made her eyebrows rise, more in doubt than in offense. She couldn't tell whether the "properly" came from the housekeeper's courtesy or, worse, from Thomas Shelby himself.
Without a word, Adelaide crossed the room and took her seat. There would have been no point in replying. The sooner she endured this charade, the sooner it would end.
She sat stiffly with her spine straight, her arms resting like marble on either side of the plate. The housekeeper hurried in raising the cloche that protected the food as soon as she sat down, the steam from the hot dish tenderly hitting her face as it rose through the air like a dragon.
The silver spoon felt heavy in her hand, like a broken sword. When she brought it to her lips, the broth was rich, delicate, flavored with thyme and other herbs. She tasted none of it.
Each swallow felt like a concession, each sip another clause in a contract she hadn’t signed in ink. She ate slowly, mechanically, while the flicker of candlelight danced against the walls.
Only when the plate had been cleared and her glass drained to the precise line, she was allowed to get up from her chair. There was something almost ceremonial in the way the lady bowed her head slightly before speaking.
“Mr. Shelby will see you now.”
Adelaide felt the atmosphere slowly change as she was led into his study, the air becoming tighter and heavier. It wasn't fear, but the seething sea that was boiling inside her ready to drown him as soon as she laid her eyes of glass on him.
The housekeeper knocked on the half-open door, the glow of the lamps lit inside the room barely peeking through the crack. Inside, the silence was even more deafening than in the rest of the house. Only a faint crackling could be heard from what must have been a burning fireplace.
"Come in, Mary." replied a voice from inside, revealing the name of the lady who had guided her until now. Mary simply opened the door, invited the guest in, and closed it again after a brief nod to her employer. She left her there, between the shark's teeth. Too bad that, no matter how large an animal is, it is always weak to poison. And Adelaide, like a viper lurking in the grass, was ready to release it as soon as she was bitten.
The walls in the room were lined with books, their spines worn like old soldiers. The fireplace was wide and black-mouthed, its flames low and deliberate, always contained.
The desk was vast and clean, a dark wood monolith near the center of the room. No clutter.
The flames of the fireplace illuminated the half-empty glass placed on top of the desk, next to some letters stacked in precise piles. Behind the desk, a tall window looked out over the estate, the open curtains allowed the last rays of the day's sunshine to filter through faintly.
Sitting there, in the velvet chair behind the desk, sat he. Thomas Shelby.
He did not stand to greet her. Did not gesture or offer a seat. He simply looked up, eyes unreadable and his face composed in the way a blade is composed: elegant, efficient, without warmth.
“Miss Moncada.”
He kept one leg crossed over the other, the edge of his trouser sharp enough to suggest someone else had ironed it for him. His three-piece suit, charcoal with a subtle herringbone weave, fit like it had been stitched onto his bones.
"Mr.Shelby."
Adelaide advanced toward one of the chairs facing the desk, moving like a cat toward its prey. Her cleats clicked against the polished floor, echoing in the silence of the room. She sat down even though she was not invited to do so, smoothing her skirt beneath her like it was part of the choreography. Her spine remained straight, her falsely innocent eyes looked at him, waiting for him to speak.
She seemed more like a diplomat than a guest, although she had no intention of leaving in peace.
“I trust dinner was acceptable?” he asked, though it sounded more like a statement than a question. His icy eyes never left hers, as if he feared she might make a misstep at any moment.
"Dining alone is always a pleasure for me." she retorted, the scornful irony starting to escape his pink lips.
"Were you expecting to eat with me, by any chance?" he continued, the cigarette he held tightly between his index and middle finger shedding ash like the first snow of the year.
Adelaide didn't answer, knowing that whatever came out of her mouth as an answer would have landed her in a dead-end trap.
For a few seconds, they both remained silent, the only sound audible being the crackling of the fireplace and the wind lapping against the window, as if he too wanted to be part of that encounter.
Thomas slowly rose, crushing his now-burned cigarette in the glass ashtray that sat on the desk like a paperweight. He took a few steps against the wall, where a small brass trolley held on its surface several glass bottles with as many glasses.
"Did your father explain to you how you got into this… situation?” he asked as he lifted the cap from one of the bottles, the dark liquid pouring into one of the glasses.
"Honestly, no." she replied curtly, watching the liquid sway like a small tidal wave as he picked up the glass. He still had one to go on his desk, so why take another one?
Thomas chuckled, the short and raspy laugh coming out like a mockery. He expected it from Vittorio.
He sat back down in the chair, the three-piece suit blending into the velvet. He placed the glass he had filled on the desk, pushing it slightly towards Adelaide, as if to offer it to her.
Adelaide eyed the glass reluctantly, her eyebrows rising slightly as she watched it being pushed toward her as an offering. They both knew she'd need it soon, but for now she left it there.
Thomas sighed when she didn't accept the glass, leaning back in his chair. He clasped his hands against his chest, his feet planted on the floor.
"Well, it seems to me the reasons are pretty obvious." he began, his icy eyes darkening even more as the night outside continued to creep in. His voice came out hoarse, a scratch ready to strike at Adelaide's pride. "Whether you like it or not, your family name still means something, even on foreign soil."
Adelaide remained silent, her harmonious features hardening slightly, as if she had been struck by a tiny shock. The family name. That damned title that haunted her like a mark on her skin. Wherever she went, wherever she hid, the ancient glory of her ancestors seemed to haunt her like a ghost with its murderer.
"Like it or not, I need that damned last name. Or rather, I need what it brings with it." he declared, the tone of his voice flattening as if he were at a simple business meeting. "Access to ports and political seats, as well as respectability among those who still care about blood lineage. Your last name, my dear, opens shining doors I didn't even know existed."
Adelaide listened to his beautiful explanation, her angelic face growing ever more tense. She needed a drink.
Thomas watched her take the glass he'd offered earlier and down it in one gulp, a faint smirk creeping across his face as he watched thet scene. It was tiny, without emotion, but it was there.
"It's a coat of arms that you need to marry then, not me." she retorted acidly, placing the now empty glass back on the desk. Sarcasm was the only sharp weapon a woman possessed besides, of course, what Nature had given her. And Adelaide used both with a quietly disarming fury.
"It's a shame that a marriage with an object can't be done." he retorted with equal coldness, countering her tempered one. His expression remained statuesque, but his eyes now shone differently. Or maybe it was simply the reflection of the fireplace in his pupils.
Adelaide snorted, crossing her arms against her chest. This man was making her break out in hives from nervousness. "It seems you're getting a lot out of this. Is there something in it for me too, or am I just forced to be a pawn in your chess game for power?"
Thomas didn’t answer right away. He remained seated behind the desk, his elbows resting lightly on the arms of the chair. "You will have a decent place to live, my name, which in certain circles, is worth more than money itself and, of course...protection."
"Protection? Who should I be protected from?" she blurted out, her eyebrows rising, as did the fire inside her.
Thomas let out a silent laugh, the corners of his lips turning up purposefully to mock her. "We both know that the darkness of the club doesn't mean sanctuary."
"What difference does it make from the protection you claim to offer me? It's nothing more than sanctuary with shackles." she hissed, her doe eyes suddenly darkening like when the Moon covers the Sun.
Thomas inclined his head slightly. “Everything has a price.”
Adelaide tried to remain calm, clenching her fists so tightly that her nails left marks on her palms. “Who assures you that the plan you’ve built will work?” she teased, tilting her head to demonstrate the challenging tone in her words.
"I don't make investments without doing my research." he replied in a serious tone, his fingers resting relaxed on both arms of the chair. From the look in his eyes, it was as if he were referring to her.
Adelaide suddenly remembered her father's words when she went to talk to him in Feather Lane: "He's seen you."
Whatever those words meant, it wasn't the time to delve into them right now.
Thomas, seeing her gaze lost in thoughts for a second, took the opportunity to continue, trying to put an end to her temperament that was too boastful for his tastes.
"Listen carefully, Miss Moncada. We can make this a peaceful and even prosperous arrangement if you stop being such a spoiled child." he announced almost curtly, his hands steepled on top of the desk, his posture unmoving, like a judge pronouncing sentence. "We both know that complaining will only make the knots more tangled and, in your case in particular, it will mean losing the few privileges I'm willing to grant. I won't pity ypu just because we're bound by an agreement, I warn you."
Adelaide couldn't believe what she was being forced to hear. She, a spoiled child? Just because she rebelled against the idea of marrying a complete stranger, with a bad reputation too? Oh yes, surely she was the irrational one here. Of course.
But what could she do, really? As much as she hated to admit it, he was right. She wasn't in a position to start a war...well, at that moment.
But she'd had enough for today. Her head throbbed with a slow, pulsing ache, and her fingers itched with the impulse to hurl the crystal glass across the room, just to see if that damn composure of his could crack. But no.
Not now.
Not yet.
It was time to leave, before she further complicated an already complicated situation.
"All right, Mr. Shelby. For now, I'll behave. But I can't promise you anything." she murmured as she rose, her movement slow and calculated, like a nymph awakening from her slumber. "But remember that you can't bend a storm, no matter how hard you try."
She moved toward the door, each step a deliberate performance of restraint. Her hand reached the handle, but just before she pulled it open, she turned. Just slightly. Just enough.
"Oh, one last thing..." she said, her voice tipped with defiance and sugared with sarcasm. "The next time you plan to invite me over for dinner, at least have the decency to serve me more than a broth and a glass of wine. Or, better yet, I give you the permission to take me out to eat."
With that, she stepped through the doorway and shut the door gently behind her. The heels of her shoes clicked rhythmically against the polished floor, until they slowly disappeared.
A small, amused smile appeared on Tommy's unyielding face for the first time since the meeting began. It was small, almost imperceptible, but it was there.
“Storms may not be bent,” he murmured, retrieving a cigarette from the inner lining of his jacket and striking a match with a single practiced flick, “but they can damn well be directed.”
Chapter 7: Chapter VI
Notes:
listen to the official "smoke & silk" soundtrack playlist !! : https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3apZhfCcsYF2JSJXjlMPQU?si=MtLRAvxwRzynJcmFbqsDzg&pi=fACwKjKNQ5itT
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“Mary told me she was at Arrow House yesterday.” Polly announced, her voice low and rough as though it had been scraped across gravel. Shadows clung beneath her eyes like bruises, testimony to a night spent chasing thoughts and ghosts across sleepless hours. A cigarette rested between her fingers, the embers eating their way inward like time devouring resolve.
“She…?” Arthur echoed, confusion knitting his brows together. He held the neck of the whiskey bottle in one hand, his fingers curled around it like it was the only thing steadying him, ready to pour more fire into the half-empty glass before him.
“Vittorio’s daughter, you idiot." John drawled, the toothpick bobbing at the corner of his mouth with each syllable. It pointed down like a clock’s hand nearing the six, as if it too had grown tired of the conversation. “The one Tommy decided to marry.”
Polly rolled her eyes with the weary elegance of someone who had done it a thousand times. Her disapproval didn’t need words. She knew that the arrangement was born of strategy, stitched together with old names and desperate debts. But even for the Shelbys, it was madness.
“Tommy invited her." she went on, her words falling one by one like bricks building a wall: measured, necessary but exhausting. As if by speaking, she could unburden herself from the weight that had kept her pacing through the dark.
In the corner, Finn stirred from his immobility; the young one, ever the observer, always half a second behind and trying not to show it.
"Tommy invited the lass?" Arthur repeated, the disbelief laced through his voice like rust through metal, his words voicing what Finn thought but didn't have the courage to say. "Am I wrong or didn't he tell you that he was leaving it up to Vittorio to inform her... well, about the agreement?"
“Well, he had to meet her sooner or later, right?" John interjected, this time choosing to side with his brother. “Though, to be fair, our little Tommy had already laid eyes on her long before last night.”
Polly crushed the last of her cigarette into the ashtray, the sound faint but final, like a period placed firmly at the end of an unwanted sentence. Around them, the faint hum of voices filtered through the wood-paneled walls. The Garrison was opening, waking from its own kind of sleep.
"That's why the fact that he invited her makes me even more suspicious." she muttered leaning back into the worn velvet of the sofa, her gaze cast toward the ceiling.
"Where the hell did he first see her?" exclaimed Arthur slamming his glass on the table after emptying it. He didn't like being the one unaware of the facts.
"At the club." Polly replied, crossing her arms against her chest. "She's a jazz singer at the Velvet Room."
"Miss Moncada abandoned her father a few years ago, when the only reason he called was money." John added, downing a drink for him too.
Arthur let out a long whistle, leaning back in his chair as well. "So our Thomas went to the club to see her, hmm?"
Polly said nothing. She didn’t need to.
She’d seen the files: the photographs, the scribbled notes tucked into the drawers of Tommy’s desk, the way he circled her name. Adelaide Moncada hadn’t stumbled into Thomas Shelby’s world. She had been summoned.
“So? The meeting?” asked Finn, unable to stop himself. There was a hunger in his tone, not for gossip, but understanding. He wanted to try to read the moves on the board before the game began.
"Hold your tongue, boy." Arthur said, his tone coming out reproachfully. "You’ve no business knowing half of what we do.”
“But for once, Finn's right." John murmured, that mischievous smile playing on his lips again, tugging at the edges of his sharp face. “Don’t leave us dangling, Pol. We’re all ears.”
Polly gave a long, thoughtful sigh, as if considering whether to let the conversation keep unfolding or shut it down with a cold glance and a final word.
She lit another cigarette, the flame flickering briefly as she brought it to the edge of the tobacco. Her eyes were slightly red, not from tears, but from a night spent turning thoughts over like cards in a gambler’s hand, none of them good.
"Tommy invited her to discuss the deal." she finally said, exhaling a plume of smoke that curled toward the low ceiling. "He made her eat alone, and then sent to his office to talk."
"Talk?" John echoed, his usual amused smile shining in the gloom of the room like a diamond in the rough. "Is that what we’re calling it now?”
"Mary served her dinner as ordered and then took her to his office. She stayed for a little under an hour, and then stormed out." she said simply, the smoke from her freshly lit cigarette enveloping her like a blanket.
"An hour in that office and she didn’t slap him?" Arthur mused aloud, his voice dry with surprise and one brow arched as though the very idea defied natural order. "I’m impressed already."
Polly's eyes lifted from the ashtray, cold and sharp as cut glass. Her gaze sliced through the haze of smoke that was curling around her. “She didn’t need to slap him, Arthur." she said, her voice low and seasoned with disdain. “Some women learn that words, well chosen and precisely delivered, leave far deeper wounds.”
“As far as I know, Vittorio Moncada is in debt up to his neck. Why Tommy decided to toss her a lifeline?” John scoffed, dropping his boots on the table with a heavy thud. “Since when do we offer charity?”
“It’s not charity.” Polly muttered, her voice brittle and dark, dusted with something like regret long buried and often ignored.
“It’s business. You think Tommy would bring a woman into the house if there weren’t something in it for him?”
John leaned forward, his grin curling slow and lopsided. The toothpick bobbed with the rhythm of his breath, the smirk not quite reaching his eyes. “So what’s he playing at?”
“Legitimacy.” Polly said simply, as if the word itself was weight enough. “A name like Moncada... it turns handles on doors we still haven’t learned how to knock on. Old-world doors. The kind with family crests and bloodlines older than this city.”
John rolled his eyes, half amused, half skeptical. “And he thinks marrying into that lot will keep the wolves at bay?”
“No." said Polly. “He thinks it’ll elevate us.”
Arthur groaned, running a rough hand down his face. His words followed on a tired exhale. “Jesus Christ, Pol. We’re not aristocrats. We’re gangsters. Businessmen. What’s next? Tea and biscuits with the bloody Pope?"
"What she has is legacy." Polly retorts, her tone sharpening like a silver blade in the darkness. "Connections. Old doors that might still open. And Thomas…he doesn’t care if the hinges are rusted. He just wants to know what’s behind them.”
Finn shifted in his seat, his discomfort obvious, but his curiosity louder. The air was thick, and no one seemed able to cut through it. “What about her?” he asked almost quietly, but the question landed like a stone on still water.
That silenced the table for a moment. Even Arthur stopped fiddling with his bottle, looking toward Polly as if he, too, hoped for some insight, some piece of Tommy’s chessboard she might have seen while the rest of them were fumbling in the dark.
“She wants to sing.” Polly said after a pause, her voice quieter now. "And she walked into Arrow House thinking maybe, just maybe, that she still had a choice.”
John huffed. “She doesn’t.”
“No,” Polly agreed. “Not anymore.”
Arthur looked up again with his brow furrowed. “And Tommy? What was his angle, really? You’re saying he’s been watching her. That this didn’t just drop into his lap?”
Polly nodded slowly. “I’ve seen the files. He’s been tracking her for months, long before Vittorio came begging. Like he was preparing for something.”
Arthur blinked. “Christ, so this was his idea? Not the old man’s?”
“The Moncadas didn’t have a pot to piss in." Polly replied. “Tommy approached him, not the other way around.”
John’s smirk faded into something more pensive, his expression unreadable in the suffused light. “So Tommy picked her." he murmured. “This wasn’t just about business.”
Polly exhaled, the smoke spiraling into the stale air above them. Her gaze drifted to the tabletop, where rings from old drinks bled into the wood like blood on a cloth. “It began as business. But nothing ever ends that way with Tommy, does it?”
Arthur’s mouth twisted into something between a grimace and a laugh. “Bloody hell. He’s falling for her already?”
“No,” Polly said. “Not falling. Watching. Like a man watches fire: he's fascinated, but wary of the burn. He stays just close enough to feel the heat, but he never lets it touch him.”
John scratched his chin, thoughtful now. “So she storms out after their little meeting. What then? She sings her songs and pretends none of it happened?”
Polly shook her head. “No. Not her. She’s not afraid. That girl stood in front of him and told him what she thought, and she didn’t look back. That’s not someone who disappears. That’s someone who waits until she decides her next move.”
Arthur tapped his fingers against the table, the rhythm slow and uncertain. “So we wait?
Polly gave a half-smile, sharp and knowing. “We’re Shelbys. We never just wait. We prepare.”
John stretched in his chair, his bones cracking audibly as he rolled his shoulders. “Still… if she looks anything like the papers suggest, I can’t exactly blame him for getting tangled up.”
The clinking of glassware and muted murmurs from the front of the Garrison reminded them that the outside world hadn’t stopped spinning just because they were caught in one of Tommy’s spirals. But inside the private back room, things felt stil; stretched, like the moment before a coin drops.
“So she left." Finn said, his still young face frowning. “That’s it?”
Polly glanced at him. “That’s today. But this isn’t over. Girls like Adelaide Moncada don’t just vanish. They haunt you.”
John rubbed at his jaw, the beginnings of concern forming beneath his usual bravado. “What do you reckon Tommy’s thinking right now?”
Polly sighed, her gaze towards faraway, as though staring down a hallway none of them could yet see. “He’s doing what he always does: running numbers in his head. Trying to figure out whether the gamble is worth it or not."
“And is she?” Arthur asked, eyeing Polly.
She met his gaze with unwavering calm. “Oh, she’s worth a hell of a lot more than money. That’s the danger.”
The room lapsed into silence again, but this time, it wasn’t tension that filled the air. It was something heavier. Anticipation.
All of them, in their own way, understood what was coming. Something was shifting in the family. A new player had stepped onto the board, but none of them knew what side she’d play for when the real game began.
Arthur picked up the whiskey bottle and poured without speaking, refilling each glass in turn. “To Tommy’s next mistake." he muttered dryly, lifting his own in a loose salute.
John chuckled under his breath, taking the toothpick out of his teeth and throwing it on the ground. “God help the woman.”
But Polly didn’t lift her glass. She remained seated, still as stone, her eyes fixed on the shadows gathering along the wall. She could already see what they could not: the battlefield unfolding beneath layers of charm and calculation. A war not fought with bullets, but with words. With glances. With silences that screamed louder than any gun.
It was smoke against silk.
· · ─────── ·𖥸· ─────── · ·
Around Arrow House, the sun had begun its slow retreat, vanishing behind colossal banks of slate-colored cloud. The sky had turned the color of soot, like the smoke that curled from the chimneys on cold Birmingham morning: thick and ashen.
Inside, the embers in the hearth had surrendered to the cold, leaving only the brittle skeleton of a fire long dead. The room, once warmed by its glow, now seemed to breathe glacial through the walls. Light spilled from the lamps, but it was a sickly sort of illumination, a pale yellow that lit the space without offering any comfort.
He didn't look up when the door opened.
Tommy had known it was them. He’d heard the cadence of their footsteps long before they reached the study, each step echoing through the vast, echo-chambered corridor like ghosts moving through a mausoleum. The house, old and watchful, seemed to whisper their approach.
“I suppose you’ve all come to give me a piece of your minds." he said with a flat and unimpressed tone, his gaze still fixed on the open ledger before him when they entered. But the numbers on the page had long since blurred into irrelevance. His cigarette, half-consumed, rested between two fingers with its ash growing indifferent.
Arthur didn’t wait for an invitation. He sank into the chair opposite Tommy’s desk, his posture that of a man bracing himself for something unpleasant. He glanced quickly at the desk, taking in the clutter: the ledgers marked with fresh ink, an opened letter left to curl at the corners and the half-empty glass of whisky staining a ring into the grain of the wood.
It was messier than usual. And Tommy’s messes were never accidents.
"Since when can't we come visit you for no apparent reason, eh?" he said with a light ironic tone, but there was strain beneath the words. He wore a tentative smile, the kind one wore when stepping into unknown territory.
"Stop it, you idiot, even you don't believe in what you're saying." John scoffed as he crossed the room, placing both hands on his brother’s shoulders before lowering himself into the armchair beside him. “Tommy’s not stupid. He knew the moment the front door opened this wasn’t a social call.”
Finn lingered behind them, unsure whether to speak or stay invisible. He leaned against the old bookcase by the fireplace, its wood polished to a sheen that caught the lamplight in patches of gold. Despite the fact that no one had read those books in decades, not a speck of dust dared settle on them, like the house itself refused to show signs of aging in Tommy’s presence.
"Pol told us about the girl." John said finally, the teasing edge of his voice giving way to something more serious.
He didn’t say her name.
He didn’t need to.
The air in the room shifted immediately with the mention of Adelaide, like someone had opened a door in the distance and let in a different kind of cold.
Thomas looked up, his eye color perfectly matching the room's atmosphere. Ice.
"And what exactly did Polly tell you?" he asked, the words coming out low and controlled like the chambering of a bullet.
"That it was you who directly asked Vittorio Moncada for his daughter." Arthur answered, his tone slightly lower as if he were seeking confirmation from Tommy's face as he spoke.
John paced slowly, as if the weight of the truth sat heavy in his spine. “So? Is it true? You’ve been watching her? Planning this?”
Tommy didn't flinch, the face continues to remain impassive, like a statue despite the rain." I keep track of assets,” he replied. “Potential allies. Threats. Risks.”
“And which is she?” Finn asked quietly from
the shadows.
“She’s all three.” Tommy said.
The brothers exchanged uneasy glances, the shape of their understanding shifting beneath them. With each word, Tommy was reordering what little they thought they knew about Adelaide Moncada.
Arthur let out a low breath, rubbing the back of his neck. “You should’ve told us, Tom.”
Tommy didn’t respond. Not directly.
Instead, he rose without urgency and wandered to the window, his cigarette burning down to a forgotten nub between his fingers. Outside, Arrow House lay cloaked in a fine mist, its trees standing like sentinels in mourning.
“She left.” he murmured, more to himself than to them. “But she didn’t slam the door behind her.”
Arthur stood as well, something unsettled flickering behind his eyes. It was as if he were watching with his own eyes as his brother slowly fell deeper into the vortex of madness. “What’s your next move then?”
Tommy didn't turn around, his hands in his pockets as he continued to stare out. His hot breath hitting the window produced a sort of blur on the glass that lingered for a few seconds, like small temporary clouds. "I'll talk to her."
"Talk to her?” John echoed. “Where, in another bloddy boardroom with papers and empty glasses?"
Tommy finally turned. The corner of his mouth twitched, a gesture that might’ve been a smile if it weren’t so heavy with intent.
“No,” he said. “Something… simpler.”
The brothers exchanged another glance, each more perplexed than the last. But Tommy was already sitting again, sinking back into his velvet chair as though the conversation had ended without them. He lit another cigarette, his icy eyes distant, already retreating into some private corridor of thought.
He looked up again only when he heard the door close behind his brothers, their confused mutterings carrying through the labyrinthine corridors of the house.
The echo of their departure lingered, long after the door clicked shut and their footsteps dissolved into the hush of Arrow House’s ancient bones. It was a silence Tommy knew well: one born not of peace, but of calculation, like the pause between moves in a game no one fully understands.
He remained still for a long moment, the smoke from his cigarette curling above him like a spirit, aimless and slow. Outside, the evening storm gathered pace. Raindrops began their ritual against the glass, first timid, then certain, until the windows quivered beneath the weight of it.
The ledgers told him everything he needed to know: how much she was worth, who she knew, what secrets her father had buried under Italian soil...but none of it explained her.
It wasn't just a challenge, it was pure rebellion in a woman's body. And that was precisely what bothered him the most: the fact that she refused to fall into place like a proper piece on his board.
Trying to control her would only worsen the storm. And Thomas Shelby knew better than to fuel a fire already burning wild. But that didn’t mean he would kneel before it, either.
He reached for the phone on the edge of his desk, his fingers hovering above the receiver for a beat. Then, slowly but deliberately, he picked it up and dialed.
Outside, the rain continued its descent, steady and relentless, while the wind coiled through the eaves of Arrow House like a warning. Or a promise.
“Have the car ready tomorrow night." he murmured with a low tone, as if he were handing a secret to the darkness. And then he hung up.
Notes:
hi guys !! i'm sorry if even this chapter was a bit long, but i hope you enjoy a long chapter as much as i do ;)
also, thank you guys for your comments!! they not only encourage me but, of course, they fill my heart with joy too! so thank you so much again, and i hope you continue to enjoy the story.
muah 💋
Chapter 8: Chapter VII
Notes:
listen to the official "smoke & silk" soundtrack playlist !! : https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3apZhfCcsYF2JSJXjlMPQU?si=MtLRAvxwRzynJcmFbqsDzg&pi=fACwKjKNQ5itT
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The velvet curtains had just fallen on the final note, leaving the air thick with the residue of trumpet wails and perfume. The room, previously in a deathly and almost reverential silence, slowly woke up; the murmurs and clangs of glasses being clinked in toasts echoing like ripples on dark water. Smoke spiraled in slow ribbons through the chandeliers, and laughter returned in fragments, broken by the occasional hiccup of applause that arrived too late to matter.
In the dressing room behind the stage, Adelaide Moncada sat slouched on the edge of a narrow chaise, one heel still hanging loosely from her foot and the other discarded and lying on its side like the body of a fallen soldier. The toes of her stockinged feet touched the cool wooden boards as if she were testing the edge of a cliff.
Beside her, the crystal ashtray shimmered under the gaslight, its shallow basin crowded with the crooked spines of cigarettes burned to their ends. One still billowed smoke: a thin, ghostly column twisting up like the final breath of a small dying dragon.
She stared at the ceiling.
The cracked plaster looked almost beautiful in the low light, like spiderwebs stitched into pale stone or an old cathedral collapsed in on itself. Her gaze was fixed and distant, as if she believed the cracks might rearrange into some kind of answer.
“You were brutal tonight, cara mia." said Lina, perched at the vanity like a courtesan in a French oil painting. She dabbed at her nose with a swan-feather puff, her motions delicate, practiced. It was the kind of grace that once powdered over bruises instead of blush. “Half the crowd left wondering whether you’d marry them or murder them.”
Adelaide closed her eyes. “I’d do both." she murmured, her voice hoarse from the last song. “In the same breath.”
She didn’t smile when she said that. There was no cheeky lilt in her voice. The mood in the room was too taut for humor, stretched thin like the hem of her gown, which she had half-unzipped to breathe again like a living woman. Sweat clung to the nape of her neck, dampening the long brown curls that had once been pinned with precision but now hung wild. Her corset was loosened but not undone, as if she might have to pull herself together at any moment, rise, and return to the stage like a warrior summoned mid-prayer.
Lina turned slowly, her powder puff pausing mid-air as she studied her friend. Her expression softened. She had learned the hard way that Adelaide's exhaustion was never just physical. When Adelaide grew quiet like this, when her posture collapsed in on itself and her stare became too still, Lina knew it wasn't the performance that drained her, but her thoughts. Those raven-black thoughts that circled her mind like carrion birds.
“You’re still thinking about that Shelby.” Lina said gently, not as an accusation but as a confirmation of what had already settled like ash in the room.
“How could I not think of him, Lina?” she muttered, rubbing the heel of her palm against her temple as if she could scrub him out of her mind with enough pressure. Her tone held the sharp edge of a sneer, though it was not directed at Lina, not truly. “You know how maddening this all is. How frustrating.”
"And what, you’re giving up?” Lina’s tone sharpened. She turned fully now, resting her elbows on the vanity cluttered with jars of creams and pigments, the tools of their nightly illusions.
"There's no way I'm abandoning the game," she replied in an almost prophetic tone, her doe eyes slowly darkening to pine with the fire that was building inside her. "Especially when the chessboard belongs to him."
Lina watched her friend carefully, her arms folded across her bodice. “You sound like you want to kill him.”
Adelaide gave a slow blink, then tilted her head as though considering the idea. “No." she said at last. “Killing him would too... merciful.”
“What then?”
“I want to outplay him.”
Silence fell again, thick and velvety. In the distance, the last rumbles of applause faded, replaced by the low buzz of the club reawakening beyond the walls. Lina set down her compact with a soft click. In the mirror, the two girls stared back: Adelaide like a Roman goddess undone by war, and Lina like her priestess, trying to read the entrails of her fate.
“He’s dangerous, honey." Lina whispered. “He has power. Real power."
“And that’s exactly the problem.” Adelaide leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees as if he were confessing her crimes, or worse, her sins. “He looks at me like I’m a calculation. An equation he intends to solve. But he’s wrong.”
Lina gave a small shrug. “Maybe he sees you as... leverage.”
Adelaide let out a laugh, cold and humorless. “Maybe he sees me as a lit match he can hold by the base.”
“But even lit matches burn fingers.”
There was a pause, where neither of them spoke, and in that space, the old chandelier above them creaked, ever so slightly.
Adelaide stood, suddenly too restless for stillness, and crossed the dressing room barefoot; the hem of her silken robe was dragging faintly behind her like the train of a jaded empress. She stopped in front of the narrow window and cracked it open. The Birmingham night greeted her with damp air and the distant pulse of traffic, a world that moved too quickly, too loudly, while her mind remained trapped somewhere else. Back at Arrow House, maybe. Or even further than that.
"He'll take my life away from me, Lina. The life I built with my own bloody hands." she muttered, her voice choked with anger, not with tears. She would never shed a tear for a man like that. "Apparently, forced marriages are part of my destiny, noble or otherwise."
"Don't talk bullshit, Adelaide. We both know you were born to be free." Lina retorted, trying hard to bring her friend back to her senses.
Born to be free.
Maybe she was, but it was her own blood that betrayed her. Her family name would always hold her down, like a lead ball tied to her ankle. And it was that same name that had handed her over on a silver platter to a Shelby, even though she had decided she no longer had anything to do with her family's nature.
“I don’t want to be one of his games, Lina. I won’t be.”
“And what if he doesn’t care what you want?”
Adelaide met her reflection’s eyes and smiled. It one of those rare, dangerous smiles, with no warmth. It was pure defiance, as the blade of a knife sharpened too often.
“Thomas Shelby wants a Moncada. Well, he'll get what he wants." she announced, her voice sweet as sugar despite the venom waiting to come out at the right moment. "But he will find out what we are made of in Sicily."
Just then, the knock came.
The stranger knocked three times, then silence. As though the hand behind it didn’t beg entry, but demanded it be opened.
Lina frowned, looking in surprise at the time on the clock that sat on the dresser at the entrance. Adelaide didn’t move, her eyes fixed on the door now.
After a moment, the knob creaked and turned.
It was Theo, the club’s exhausted stage manager. He stood with his cap in his hands, his expression apologetic.
“Miss Moncada..." he began, clearing his throat. “There’s a man outside. Says he needs to see you.”
Adelaide didn’t blink. “I don’t take visitors.”
“I told him that." Theo said, adjusting his cap nervously. “But he insisted. Said you’d want to make an exception.”
Lina narrowed her eyes. “What’s his name?”
Theo swallowed. “He didn’t say. Just told me to tell you that...he’s already waiting in the car.”
Adelaide’s body remained still, but something in her changed. Her blood knew before her mouth could name it.
“Shelby.” she hissed, the name spilling out like a curse spat in the dark. Like something not worth saying.
Adelaide looked at Lina, who had raised both brows, clearly amused. “Well...” Lina said, “he’s nothing if not persistent.”
Adelaide walked across the room, stepping into her heels and tying her robe around her waist tighter. She didn’t paint her lips again. Didn’t fix the faint smudge of kohl under her eyes. Let him see her raw, tired, angry.
“What are you going to do?" Lina asked, observing the fact that she was still wearing her robe.
Adelaide paused at the door, glancing back once. “Maks him understand that, on his chessboard, I am not a pawn...but the queen."
· · ─────── ·𖥸· ─────── · ·
The alley behind the club glistened with the residue of last night’s rain, a slick sheen cloaking the cobblestones. Puddles formed in uneven patches across the ground, turning the street into a mirror of distorted amber as the overhead gaslamp cast its lonely glow. Jazz murmured behind the brick walls of the building; it was faint and muffled, the sound of someone else's life continuing. But out here, the silence reigned. The silence before something changed.
Adelaide pushed open the heavy back door with her shoulder, its rusted hinges creaking like an old warning. One of her hand was tugging her silk robe tighter across her body, the fabric fluttering against her bare legs in the wind. The scent of stage perfume still clung to her, as if it, too, refused to leave.
And then, when she stepped out, she saw him.
Thomas Shelby.
He stood like a sculpture, leaning against the side of his black Bentley as though the alley had been staged for him, as though he had choreographed the scene and merely stepped into it at the appropriate moment. One foot rested lightly against the wheel, the other planted in a puddle that didn’t dare splash.
His long coat hung open just enough to reveal the immaculate lines of his dark suit: the charcoal waistcoat, hi starched shirt and a tie knotted with clinical precision. His shoes gleamed despite the grime underfoot, and from beneath the brim of his peaked cap, his eyes watched her in that infuriatingly and inscrutable way.
At his feet, the remains of a cigarette smoldered on the cobblestone, its end still glowing faintly like a dying ember. The smoke rose in a gentle ribbon, reporting the fact that he had been there long enough to finish it. Long enough to wait for her.
Her heels clicked once against the stone before she stopped, her ams folded beneath her chest and the chin raised. He didn’t move. Only that faint smirk flickered at the corner of his mouth, the kind that wasn't so much a smile as it was a provocation. His eyes dragged over her robe, a gleam of amusement not bothering to hide itself.
“You’ve got a lot of nerve." she started, her voice smooth and sharp, like satin caught on glass. The robe’s collar fluttered in the wind again, but she stood still. Her tone was calm, but the kind of hush before a cataclysm.
Tommy straightened his back, looking at her with the same calculating gaze as always. “You said I could take you to dinner.”
Her brows arched in disbelief and her arms remained crossed, but something in her jaw ticked, like the tremor of the storm beneath. “I don’t recall saying 'now' ". she replied coolly. “And I definitely don’t recall inviting you to loiter outside my dressing room like some back alley stalker.”
“You stormed out of Arrow House.” he countered evenly, his hands now hidden inside the pockets of his pants. “But not before you gave me permission.”
He said it without irony. Like it was a contract she’d signed in blood. And perhaps that was what made her angriest: the way he made every word feel binding, inescapable. The bastard had been waiting for the right moment to play that card, and here he was, dealing it like a winning hand.
"Oh, for God’s sake.”
She hissed the words through her teeth, each syllable clipped and bitter with disdain. “Do you really think I’m going to climb into your bloody funeral car just because you remembered what I said before I stormed out?"
“Yes.” he said. Simply and flatly. As if that were enough. As if he were used to the world folding neatly around monosyllables issued in that voice.
“No.” Her voice landed like iron wrapped in silk, a quiet elegance hiding something sharp beneath.
“No,” she said again, slower this time like a decision being made out loud. It rang through the alleyway like the unsheathing of a blade. “I’m not coming with you. And I don’t care if you stand there until your shoes rot into the pavement.”
Tommy didn’t speak. Not yet.
But something in him adjusted: it was subtly, like a shadow folding into place. Then he stepped forward. One measured pace, no more. Just enough for the low-hanging lamplight to draw him out of the darkness completely, catching the sharp cut of his jaw, the hollows beneath his cheekbones, the steel in his gaze. In the half-shadow, he looked carved rather than born.
“You misunderstand." he said with his voice unhurried. There was no anger in it, no urgency. Only that smooth, steady cadence he wore like armor. “This isn’t a request.”
He didn’t have to move closer. He didn’t have to raise his voice. But the warning was there: woven beneath the civility, like a stiletto slipped into the lining of a coat.
That unmistakable Shelby thing. The reminder that behind the civility and bespoke tailoring was a man who made people vanish when he needed to.
"Is that a threat?” she asked with her gaze narrowing. The question was low, incredulous. Not because she didn’t expect it, but because he delivered it so easily.
“No.” he said again, his tone as unchanging as stone. “It’s a statement.”
There was a coldness in the way he said it. But it wasn't cruelty; he wasn’t cruel, not in the vulgar, careless way. But there was something colder in him, honed like the edge of surgical steel. He wasn't the kind of man who didn’t inflict pain for pleasure, but the one who administered it with precision. Purpose. And when he was finished, he cleaned his hands.
“You always say you're not afraid of me.” he added, his winter-colored eyes never leaving hers. “Prove it."
The silence that followed was heavy as snowfall, but ten times more dangerous.
Adelaide didn’t flinch. She stood with her shoulders squared and her chin lifted, lashes lowered just enough to shadow her expression.
She wanted to spit at him. To turn and walk away, to let the door slam and leave nothing behind but her scent in the wind. But she knew what that would mean. What it would cost.
“Do you really think I’ll accept?” she muttered, still determined not to give up yet.
“I think..." Tommy retorted slowly, as if he was trying to make her understand the concept he was going to explain at that moment. “...that you’re not as reckless as you pretend to be."
She narrowed her eyes, undecided about whether to slap him or not. “Don’t you dare presume to know anything about me.”
“I don’t presume.” he replied, his tone soft but firm. “I plan. I observe. And above all I listen. You should try that sometimes."
Her mouth opened to retaliate, but he raised a hand before she could speak any word. He hadn't finished yet.
“But tonight..." he continued, “I’m listening to you. Over dinner. Like you said I could.”
The alley held its breath again. The lamp overhead buzzed faintly, casting a golden hue across his cheekbones, but there was nothing warm in the way they looked at each other.
“Is this supposed to be a date?” she asked with a chilled thread of disdain. “Because if it is, you’ve come to the wrong bloody woman.”
“No.” he said simply. “It’s business. Just business. I figured you’d prefer a dinner table over a boardroom. Since last time you didn’t seem to enjoy yourself very much at mine.”
The words came out dry, with the faintest suggestion of humor, but he didn’t smile. He stood calmly, confident with arms now at his sides. Controlled, as always.
She stared at him for a long moment, her lips parted slightly as though testing the weight of her next insult. But then something in her shifted, something behind the eyes. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of exploding. Not yet. That would be too easy.
Instead, she turned on her heel. He had thrown out the challenge, and she had deliberately taken the bait. She wasn't afraid, and she fully intended to prove it to him.
“Give me ten minutes.” she muttered, her voice sharp like a violin string. “And if you’re not gone when I come back, then I’ll assume you enjoy getting slapped in public.”
He didn’t respond. He just watched as she swept back toward the club entrance, the door slamming shut behind her with a final, furious click.
As he lit another cigarette, Thomas Shelby allowed himself a single exhale.
Smoke curled from his lips.
And with it, the smallest, private grin.
Notes:
hi guys !! i'm sorry if i closed the chapter in this way but, by also including the dinner scene, the chapter would have become a bit too long.
I preferred to break up the scenes in order to make the reading a bit more enjoyable and, ofc, increase the suspense hehe
had really a lot of fun writing this chapter, love making Adelaide and Tommy bicker 💋
Chapter 9: Chapter VIII
Notes:
listen to the official "smoke & silk" soundtrack playlist !! : https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3apZhfCcsYF2JSJXjlMPQU?si=MtLRAvxwRzynJcmFbqsDzg&pi=fACwKjKNQ5itT
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The entire car ride was silent.
It was not the brittle silence of anger, nor the sharp-edged hush of words unspoken and strategies forming in the dark. No. It stretched between them like a long, cold shadow at dusk, the kind that settles between two people like fog over water: still, shapeless, and utterly impassable. It seeped into the seams of the leather seats, lingered in the hollow hum of the engine, and made even the faint creak of motion seem too loud.
Neither of them spoke.
Adelaide sat with her ankles crossed neatly and her spine unyielding, poised with an elegance that teetered on the edge of tension, like a porcelain doll someone had set too close to the ledge. Her hands were folded in her lap with such exacting grace and her doe eyes, though fixed upon the passing world beyond the glass, were not watching.
It was not observation, but resistance. A refusal to be drawn into the gravity of the man beside her.
She didn’t look at him. She didn’t need to.
His presence filled the car like a pressure system. The air grew dense with it.
Oxygen itself seemed to thin in his wake, as though it needed permission to exist where he sat. It curled into the upholstery, wove itself into the cold space between them, and wrapped around her pulse; not with heat, but with the unnerving stillness of something tightly wound and waiting. The kind of quiet that exists just before the sky splits open.
Thomas drove like he was ferrying a ghost to its grave.
One hand lay idle on the wheel, the other resting on the gearshift, though neither made any real claim of control. His movements were practiced, precise but devoid of life, like a watchmaker turning the same cog for the thousandth time, merely because that was what the hour required. He stared ahead, unblinking, his jaw set beneath the brim of his hat as if carved there.
Streetlamps passed over their faces in brief, golden flashes: there, then gone again, like memories that refused to linger. Adelaide watched the city slip past the window, not as a tourist might, but as a prisoner studies the bars of her cell. Laughter from women in furs spilled into the night, men with lust-heavy eyes leaned in doorways, and the aching notes of violins or saxophones floated from open pub doors as they moved through Birmingham like phantoms.
When they finally slowed in front of the restaurant, he pulled the car to a smooth stop. For a moment, neither of them moved. The silence sat between them like a third passenger, daring one of them to break it.
Adelaide was the first to break the silence, opening the door as if the very thought were a gesture of defiance. The door opened with the sound of breaking glass, revealing her passenger to the outside world. One heel emerged first, then the other, and then she rose from the car like something exiled from it, her coat catching the wind like a leaf reluctantly let go.
The Birmingham night air met her like a lover long lost. Wind tugged gently at her coat, her hair, urging her forward.
The restaurant stood tall and solemn, its windows bevelled like fine crystal, spilling lamplight and piano notes into the street with the gentleness of whispered secrets. The kind of place that didn’t raise its voice, but it simply expected the world to listen.
Thomas stepped out of the car as calmly as a king from his throne, slamming the door shut with a loud click. He might’ve vanished into the shadows entirely if it weren’t for the blaze of something unnatural in his gaze: fire, incongruously born in eyes the color of snowfall.
The doorman spotted him instantly, offering a silent nod laced with recognition and something close to reverence. Adelaide noticed the man’s gaze shift to her, linger a beat too long. She couldn't tell whether it was curiosity, judgment, or suspicion. Perhaps all three. She offered him nothing in return. Not even her eyes.
She didn’t wait for Thomas to offer his arm.
Her heels struck the marble foyer like the tick of an expensive clock, crisp and poised. The doorman swept open the heavy brass door with a bow so fluid it bordered on performance, but Adelaide barely registered him. His eyes followed her still, as though trying to decide whether the woman beside Thomas Shelby was to be feared...or pitied. She let him decide without her input.
Thomas caught up to her, his steps deliberate and unhurried. They walked in together like two monarchs long past love, united only by the kingdom they ruled and the eyes watching from the shadows.
He would never let her walk ahead. Not even now.
The interior of the restaurant exhaled elegance like a final breath held far too long. It was quiet; not with the hush of emptiness, but with the cultivated silence of old money and older secrets. Crystal chandeliers hung like constellations above damask-draped tables, their glow casting halos upon the polished floor below, gleaming like the surface of a still lake disturbed only by the wind. The air was thick with the scent of truffle and aged tobacco, underscored by the delicate rot of something hidden, something expensive.
They were noticed the moment they crossed the threshold: not merely seen, but registered. A waiter emerged from the shadows, his step brisk and his deference sharpened by recognition. He knew who Thomas Shelby was. Everyone in that place did.
Not from any formal introduction, but by the way he moved, the way the air seemed to bend around him...and by the glint of the blade hidden in the folds of his peaky.
Their table waited in a back corner, a vantage point disguised as discretion. From there, one could observe everything: every whispered proposal, every veiled glance between lovers or liars. The lighting played tricks with shadows on the wallpaper, casting them in a half-world where privacy and surveillance danced hand in hand.
The waiter drew back Adelaide’s chair with the ceremony of a man laying down an offering. She lowered herself with the grace of a woman about to be executed, regal even in resignation. A small, inscrutable smile touched her lips; a gesture as dangerous as it was beautiful. It was the kind of smile that belonged to stained glass saints or femme fatales. The kind that made men forget how to breathe.
Her coat slid from her shoulders like dusk falling over a battlefield, revealing a dress as black and sleek as a dagger. There were no embellishments: no pearls, no lace, no glittering distractions. Just silk molded to form, sleeveless and unyielding. A sheath more than a gown. Her neck was bare, her fingers unadorned save for one slim golden ring.
Tommy took the seat across from her, his back leaning against the chair and his legs slightly spread, his posture relaxed but controlled as if he owned the entire place. Which was quite likely.
Without a word, a second waiter arrived with the house wine and a basket of bread arranged with the delicacy of relics placed upon an altar. Adelaide didn’t move. She didn’t touch the glass, nor reach for the bread.The menus were delivered shortly thereafter, placed on the table like a lover secretly delivering a letter to her beloved.
Tommy took one of the two menus and began to leaf through it, his eyes reading its contents as if it were one of his ledgers, even though he had the look of someone who already knew what to get.
Adelaide didn't take it.
Her hands remained resting delicately on the napkin she had placed on her legs, as though any small act, any sign of appetite or participation, might be misinterpreted as surrender.
"Aren’t you choosing?” Tommy murmured breaking the silence, the question coming out more like a sentence. His icy eyes were still fixed down on the menu.
"I'm not hungry." she replied, her voice dry and distant. Her jaded eyes did not meet his. They aimed just past his shoulder, as if the very sight of him might ignite something she couldn’t put out.
He flicked the menu closed with a single and decisive movement, placing it back on top of the menu that hadn't been opened. "You said the same thing at Arrow House. You should change your line."
Adelaide didn’t flinch. She rarely did.
Her expression remained impassive, but there was a shift in her posture, almost imperceptible: her shoulders straightening just slightly, as though adjusting the weight of a crown no one could see.
“I wasn’t aware I was meant to be entertaining." she replied evenly. “Or predictable.”
The waiter returned, soft-footed and reverent, like a priest returning to the pulpit. Even if he had come a few minutes later, Tommy still wouldn't have answered to her.
He ordered for both of them. No consultation, no glance in her direction. He said her dish like a verdict, like a decision made long before she’d even stepped into the car.
Adelaide turned her head slightly, just enough to watch the waiter retreat again into the hush of the restaurant, her expression unreadable. Then she looked back at Tommy, meeting his gaze for the first time since they'd stepped inside.
"You order for me now?" she asked. Her voice wasn’t sharp, but dangerously smooth.
He didn’t blink. “You weren’t going to.”
“No." she said. “I wasn’t.”
A new silence fell between them, this time heavier than the one they'd been in the car. It had weight now. Texture. It buzzed in her bones, in the blood behind her eyes.
“Why did you bring me here?” Her words came low and clear, like a blade laid carefully on a table between them.
Tommy didn't respond at that moment, simply moving slightly closer to the table. He took the bottle of wine that had been brought as soon as they sat down and poured it into both of their glasses. It was like that evening during their first meeting, as if he knew she would need it.
"I already told you. Business." he simply replied, leaning back into his seat. His expression was perpetually bronze, not a single thought gracing his expressions. He was like a locked book, which secrets within it were too grave and weighty that the paper itself was afraid to hold them upon it.
Adelaide rolled her eyes, clutching the napkin in her ebony hands in an attempt not to explode right then and there. "Do you have something you need to tell me about our...deal?" she asked again, miraculously trying to cooperate to avoid triggering the storm that was raging inside her.
Tommy watched her carefully, one hand resting on the table while what looked like a slight smile played across his lips. "There is" he replied, almost carelessly. "But I don't want to ruin your appetite."
"I don't think we'll find anything else to talk about until the food arrives." she retorted, the words falling from her lips, colored like wilted roses, in a defiant tone.
Tommy took a slow sip of his wine, then set the glass down with the soft finality of someone dropping a gavel. His gaze didn’t leave hers, even as silence slipped back into the folds of their table like a persistent tide. Around them, the gentle murmur of cutlery and low conversation carried on, as if they were in a world apart. And perhaps they were.
"The wedding date has been chosen." he announced. "It will be held on the second Saturday of next month."
Adelaide didn’t move, though the room seemed to tilt. Her eyes dropped to the silver in front of her, half-expecting to find a knife embedded in her chest.
His words crashed over her like waves on rocks, her mind darkening for a few seconds as if she were falling into the darkest, deepest vortex.
That small hope, that tiny flame of light she'd kept locked away in her heart, had suddenly gone out. And the breath responsible for that was Thomas Shelby. As always, for the past month.
She reached for her wineglass, gulping down the dark liquid in one shot like whiskey, and then setting it down again as if he had never lifted it. The burn of the alcohol down her throat was welcome. It was something sharp, real. Something that didn’t lie.
Adelaide straightened her back and lifted her chin. She looked at Tommy again, and this time, there was no distance in her gaze. She saw him. Fully. Clearly. And she let him see her, too.
“You really are going to go through with it." she said, softly. Not a question. A recognition.
Tommy didn’t answer right away. He lit a cigarette instead, the flare of the match casting a fleeting glow over his features: harsh, beautiful, unreadable. Smoke curled between them like the veil between war and diplomacy.
"You knew this would happen. Don't be so surprised." he replied with a pragmatic tone, the cigarette ash glimmering between his fingers like a star in a cloudy night sky. Blurred, but present nonetheless.
Precisely because she knew it, she didn't want to accept it. All of this had seemed like a stupid nightmare destined to go away, even though deep down she knew her fate had already been sealed by a devil in a suit and tie.
Meanwhile, the dishes were brought to the table, both served on porcelain plates as if they were offerings. Tommy crushed his now-burned cigarette in the ashtray nearby, its remains billowing out like the wreckage of a small fire.
Adelaide didn't grab her fork, not even trying to pretend to eat. Instead, she poured herself another glass of wine, the liquid surging in the glass like the tidal wave boiling inside her.
"So?" she asked bitterly, the word coming out more like a hiss than a question.
Tommy placed the silverware he had picked up when the dish was served to the sides of his plate, his gaze fixed on her as if she were a painting to be understood or a sail to be furled.
"So, get ready." he replied simply, what was meant to be encouragement coming out as an emotionless command.
"Sounds easy for you..." she muttered angrily, picking up the fork. In her hands, it looked more like a broken relic than a piece of cutlery.
Tommy watched her pick up her silverware and fiddle with her food lazily, instead of eating it. The corners of his lips quirked slightly in a smile.
"It is easy. All you have to do is put on the dress, walk down the aisle, and say a damn yes." he replied coolly, that tiny smile that seemed to appear in his marble face disappeared immediately like a passing cloud.
Adelaide lifted the fork, turned it once in the food like a shining spear, then set it down again with the soft finality of someone closing a door they would never open again.
Her voice came low, flat. “You think it’s just a yes.”
Tommy didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. He only sat back in his chair, watching her with that measured silence of his: the one that spoke more than most men’s shouting.
"You're holding on to something I abandoned long ago. My name." she scoffed, a warmless smile playing across her falsely innocent features.
"You can shed the name, but not the blood." he replied simply, his icy eyes quelling the silent fire within her.
"What about me?" she asked suddenly, her tone strangely desperate. It was as if she were seeking safety in a house of cards.
He was mildly surprised to see her facade crack slightly, like a scratched porcelain doll. "You will be safe." he replied in turn, the words coming out for the first time with a hint of warmth in them. Something that didn't escape Adelaide's notice.
Another long silence fell over them, but this time it brought with it something different. It was as if that wall of ice had begun to slowly drip.
"I want to go home." she muttered as she placed the napkin on the table after removing it from her lap, like a warrior removing his own armor after battle.
She expected a firm refusal, but to her surprise, Thomas seemed to agree. He gave a vague nod and, although there were still more courses to be served, he rose from his chair like a tired knight.
He threw two bills on the table after taking them out of his coat pocket and started walking toward the exit, moving through the tables like a silken shadow.
Adelaide quickly rose to join him, her expression confused, as if trying to comprehend what had just happened at that damned dinner. The waiters also had very questioning looks, but they remained in their places, not saying a word.
It was past midnight, and the night air had grown increasingly cold, now managing to seep between the bones. The wind blew Thomas's coat with every step, accompanying him toward the car as if it, too, agreed with their premature exit from the restaurant.
Adelaide opened the car door, closing it behind her as if to erase everything that had happened in the last few hours. Tommy sat in the driver's seat, his coat still on as he started the car. "We're going to my house."
She knew there was something going on. It seemed too easy to be true.
“What do you mean we’re going to your house?” echoed Adelaide, the flame that seemed to have gone out flaring up again like a firework. "I wanted to go to my house, not yours."
"Soon it will be yours too. It's time you started getting used to it." he replied simply, as if his reasoning were completely normal.
Adelaide looked at him as if he were crazy. She hoped it was the alcohol talking, even though he'd barely had two glasses of wine. "You realize you sound fucking crazy, right? Where do I sleep then, even if I wanted to?"
"My sister Ada's room is free." he replied as he drove calmly, his hands on the road as he slipped the steering wheel between his hands.
Adelaide leaned back in the seat, one hand over her forehead as she cursed him in Italian in her mind. "Why?" she asked simply, knowing there was no point in arguing.
"My family would like to meet you." he retorted as he began to slow down, a sign that they were reaching their destination.
"And so, instead of inviting me normally, you decided to kidnap me directly." she concluded bitterly, the black of her dress becoming one with the upholstery of the seat in the night light.
"I'm not kidnapping you." he said flatly, the streetlights illuminating his jaw like dark candles. "And then, we both know you wouldn't have shown up."
It was true, she wouldn't show up. But it didn't seem right to force her to stay at his house like a hostage either.
When the car stopped, Adelaide recognized the austere structure and its almost sacred symmetry. Arrow House seemed to be scrutinizing her in all its grandeur, as if judging her own presence there again.
She could see that the lights were still on, given the glow filtering through the windows. Someone was waiting.
Notes:
hi guys, here I am with the new update! so sorry if i keep you waiting, but i hope you enjoy this new chapter too <3
xoxo 💋
Chapter 10: Chapter IX
Notes:
listen to the official "smoke & silk" soundtrack playlist !! : https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3apZhfCcsYF2JSJXjlMPQU?si=MtLRAvxwRzynJcmFbqsDzg&pi=fACwKjKNQ5itT
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Arrow House received Adelaide as it had before: without warmth, without welcome, a creature of stone and shadow that tolerated intrusion only because it could afford to. Its façade was silent, but it seemed to breathe beneath the night sky, a slow, patient inhalation that did not care whether those crossing its grounds left again.
The gravel path was damp beneath her heels, the stones slick with dew so fine it shone like powdered glass in the moonlight. The air moved low against her ankles, a cool, saltless tide, heavy with the scent of turned earth and distant rain. Each blade of grass bowed beneath its jeweled burden, and when she moved, the sound of her heels cut cleanly through the stillness; it was sharp, deliberate, like the clockwork toll of a distant bell marking the hour of arrival.
Ahead, Tommy moved at an unhurried, unyielding pace. He did not glance over his shoulder, did not slow his stride. He had no need to confirm she followed.
That was, she thought with the bitterness of recognition, the most infuriating thing of all. He knew she would. He always knew.
The path lay before her like memory rendered in stone: hedges arching overhead in perfect symmetry, the ivy clinging like an old scandal to the weathered façade. At its end, the brass door rose beneath a lantern’s pale glow, the metal’s warm gleam at odds with its funereal weight. It did not feel like the entrance to a home. It felt like the gate to something that kept its dead close.
Before either of them reached for it, the door eased open.
Light spilled into the night, a warm, honeyed blade slicing across Tommy’s dark coat, cutting the shadows clean in two. Mary stood there, her figure still and impeccable, as if she had been born in that very spot, waiting. Her uniform was pressed to the last thread, every line as disciplined as a soldier’s stance. And yet, there was no lifelessness to her stillnes, only the tempered calm of someone who had learned to survive among wolves without ever raising a fang herself.
“Good evening, sir." she said to Tommy, her nod crisp, her voice carrying that quiet respect built from long acquaintance. “The others are waiting for you.”
But her gaze flicked to Adelaide. Just for a moment. Long enough to mark her. Long enough to compare the living woman before her to the image no doubt passed in whispered speculation below stairs.
Recognition flashed in her eyes, followed by something softer. Not sympathy exactly, nor approval, but the faintest slackening of reserve as though some part of her, against her better judgment, was pleased to see Adelaide still standing.
“Miss…” she said with careful formality, though the edges of her mouth curved in a subdued, genuine smile. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.”
Adelaide’s answer came in kind, slow but assured, the faint spark of amusement in her eyes making her words ring like glass touched by a fingernail. “The pleasure is mine.”
Mary stepped aside, the movement graceful and silent. Tommy passed through without pause, but Adelaide lingered for the barest breath, her fingers grazing the cool brass of the doorframe. The house loomed before her like an adversary, and she crossed its threshold not as a guest, but as someone entering enemy territory: eyes open and steps measured.
Inside, the air was rich with the scent of beeswax polish, wood smoke, and the faint undercurrent of tobacco that no amount of scrubbing could banish. A fire murmured in some far-off room, its glow spilling faintly down the long, paneled corridor. The Persian carpets underfoot drank the sound of Tommy’s steps, but hers, slower, more deliberate, left the faintest echo.
She let her hand trail across the hall table as she walked, her fingertips skating over the smooth grain of the wood. The house spoke in its own language: velvet curtains heavy enough to smother light, portraits that stared too intently from gilt frames, silver sconces gleaming like sharpened teeth. Beneath all that grandeur, something older lingered. The walls felt saturated with memory: betrayals folded into their grain, whispered threats curled into their corners, the ghosts of bloodstains lingering just beneath the polish.
Tommy vanished around a corner, the warm light at the hall’s end swallowing his figure whole. Adelaide followed, her heels tapping once, twice, before she stepped into the amber-lit drawing room.
And there they were.
Waiting, as if she had been expected for hours.
They were all there, every last one of them.
Not scattered about the house in casual disarray, not lounging in private corners as though her arrival were of little consequence. No, they were assembled. Arranged with a precision that felt deliberate, as if the room itself had been staged for her entrance.
From somewhere in the background, a gramophone murmured faint notes, the needle dragging its soft lament through a melody no one was truly listening to. The record had been left spinning, its music threading through the air like smoke, not sweetening it, only thickening it. The fire in the grate was lit, flames bowing and snapping over the logs, casting an amber wash across the room. Yet the warmth did not touch the atmosphere; the air was cool, measured and faintly expectant.
Arthur and John sprawled in their armchairs like a pair of watchful hounds: they were broad, restless creatures in suits that had given up the fight against their owners’ impatience. Their bots claimed the coffee table with the entitlement of long habit; a bottle of Irish hung slack in Arthur’s hand, its neck caught between his fingers, tilting dangerously but never spilling. Their waistcoats sagged open, ties tugged loose, collars soft with wear. Men who had been waiting too long, but with enough discipline to keep their knives sheathed.
At the dining table, haloed by the muted glow of a single lamp, Polly sat in black silk and pearls, the embodiment of a matriarch who could both bless and bury you without moving from her chair. Her hands were folded in her lap with the composure of someone seated at mass; except that here, she was the priest and the confessional in one. Beside her, Michael kept a posture so precise it seemed less natural than rehearsed, his head tilted just enough to suggest that he expected the performance to begin any moment.
Ada, in her usual armor of disinterest, didn’t lift more than her eyes toward the hallway. Yet even that fleeting glance had the weight of judgment in it, as if she could already read the ending to the scene that had barely begun.
And then there was Finn, the youngest, awkwardly balanced on the edge of a sofa cushion like a boy who’d stolen his way into the grown-up’s game, unsure whether he’d be allowed to stay.
The silence in that room was not empty. It was the kind of silence that had heard dying breaths and sworn oaths without so much as a twitch.
Only moments before she’d appeared, Arthur and John had been exchanging low, liquor-softened words, their conversation punctuated by the clink of glass. But the sound had cut off the moment she filled the doorway: still, shadowed, and unmistakably present.
She stood as if carved there, staying still for one breath and then another.
Suddenly, she was painfully aware of herself: not in vanity, but in the startling sharpness of physical reality. The coat on her shoulders felt heavier than fabric should, pressing along the blades of her back. She could feel each measured rise and fall of her chest, the length of her spine taut beneath the wool. The light polish of her heels barely grazed the wood floor yet she felt rooted, held still by the invisible weight of their collective gaze.
They were all looking at her.
Not rudely, at least not yet.
But certainly not without intent.
She met their stares without blinking, without so much as a twitch. She let the silence dress her, not in shame but in something harder, sharper. She wore it the way a painting wears candlelight: absorbing it, reflecting it, refusing to diminish under its glow.
Tommy’s voice broke through, low and casual, as though they had stumbled into a conversation already underway.
“You can hang your coat if you want.”
That was all. No softening, no explanation. Just the dry toss of a coin into the still water.
He moved past her then, unhurried. As though nothing in this room had shifted. As though her arrival hadn’t recalibrated the gravity in it. He headed for the sitting room with the quiet inevitability of someone walking into his own shadow.
She didn’t move. Didn’t reach for the coat rack.
Instead, she let the moment stretch, thin and taut, their attention cinched around her like the thread of a tightening snare.
If they expected her to falter beneath it, they had misjudged. She straightened. Lifted her chin just enough. The set of her jaw took on a glinting edge, and her gaze moved slowly, deliberately, from one face to another. It was less the pass of a guest than the assessment of a hunter.
Then, with the unhurried grace of someone stepping into a ring, she walked forward.
The hem of her black dress whispered against the polished wood, trailing in her wake like a shadow unwilling to be left behind. Her coat slid down her arms in a slow, deliberate surrender, pooling at the crook of her elbow where her fingers curled around it.
The room seemed to shrink with her entry, too many bodies in too little space, the air thickening until even civility felt like a dwindling resource. She moved with the poise of a woman who had been summoned to her own execution but arrived knowing she might yet take the heads of her judges.
By the fireplace, Tommy remained standing. One hand buried in the pocket of his trousers, the other lifting the glass of amber that had been poured for him, waiting as if this had been arranged to the second. The firelight caught in the liquid, turning it to molten gold or to blood caught in a chalice, depending on how one chose to look.
He drank.
And then, as if introducing the evening’s entertainment, he said, “Everyone, meet Adelaide Moncada.”
There it was the balance of power, subtly set.
Not 'Adelaide, meet everyone' . No, they were being presented to her, though under the guise of the reverse. He had laid her before them like a card on the green baize. As a queen, as a warning...or both.
Adelaide understood it instantly. And she played her part.
Her eyes swept the room again, this time not merely searching but tasting the moment, the way one savors the first mouthful of a dangerous drink. She didn’t smile, but there was the suggestion of one, low and private, tucked just behind her stillness. It was indulgent, almost. As if she were deciding which part of the animal to cut first.
Arthur and John remained slouched in their armchairs, but when she entered, some instinct older than manners pulled their spines a fraction straighter. Arthur’s eyes, glazed faintly by drink, still carried the quick spark of an animal that could rouse in an instant. John’s mouth twitched but not quite in a grin, not quite in a sneer, as though he were deciding which would serve him better.
Finn, propped against the arm of the sofa, watched her with the unguarded curiosity of youth; curiosity that came from not knowing enough, from having heard too many stories without endings.
Michael, seated beside Polly, was harder to read. His stillness was deliberate, his eyes cool and evaluating, as though he were sliding her into one of his mental compartments, testing where she fit and whether she belonged there at all.
Ada’s glance was quieter, heavier and carried
a strange recognition. She looked at Adelaide as one storm recognizes another. She was not fearing the damage, but wondering what will be left standing afterward.
And then there was Polly Gray.
The room already had a fire, but it was Polly who radiated the true heat. She sat back in her chair like a monarch on a private throne, her stillness speaking louder than any gesture could. In one hand, her cigarette burned with a steady glow, smoke curling around her fingers. Her eyes fixed on Adelaide with the precision of a scalpel, not tearing, not cutting but capable of either.
Adelaide did not look away.
The judgment in Polly’s gaze was sharp, almost metallic, but it was not the whole of it. Beneath the steel was something else: a test of weight and endurance, a wordless calculation of strength. The kind of appraisal one woman gives another when she knows only one will remain standing at the end.
Adelaide didn’t flinch.
Her coat slid from her arm in a slow, fluid motion, landing over the back of a nearby chair as though it had always been meant to rest there. Her hands folded loosely before her; not a barrier, but a statement of composure. She wasn’t smiling, but there was no retreat in her stance.
Her presence was a performance, but not a lie.
Polly’s glass lifted, the amber inside catching the light. “Well..." she said at last, “I was expecting you to be taller.”
Adelaide blinked once, letting the pause hang between them before the faintest curve touched her lips. “Everyone says that.”
The ripple that moved through the room was subtle but tangible. Laughter for some, unease for others, as though the line could be read in more than one way.
Polly’s smirk was small but edged. “We’ll see what else they’re right about.”
Tommy’s exhale was soft, almost a laugh, but threaded with calculation. “You’ll get your chance.”
Only then did he move. He let the silence breathe before crossing from the fireplace, his glass still in hand. The firelight turned the liquid inside into molten sunlight, but his voice was the thing that commanded attention: low, deliberate, with that Shelby weight that left little room for interruption.
“This..." he began, tilting his glass slightly. “is Arthur. My older brother.”
Arthur did not rise. Instead, he leaned
forward, elbows on his knees, and let his gaze travel over her slowly, without apology, the way a man might confirm that the legend matched the telling.
“Well now…” His voice was gravel dipped in whiskey. “Tommy didn’t mention you were—” He let the sentence hang with his eyes glinting, and made a vague motion with his hand that seemed to encompass all of her.
“Arthur.” Tommy didn’t raise his voice, but it landed like a quiet tap of a hammer to glass; measured, but enough to make someone reconsider throwing the next stone.
Arthur grinned, wide and knowing, and leaned back again, entirely unchastened.
Tommy’s gaze slid to the man opposite. “John.”
John didn’t bother to sit up. He stayed draped in his chair, his boots still on the coffee table as though introductions were a tiresome formality. His smirk appeared instantly, honed and sharp. “So this is the famous Adelaide.” he drawled. “Thought you’d be taller.”
Adelaide’s mouth curved at one corner, slow and deliberate. “You’re the second person to say that to me tonight.”
Arthur laughed outright at that, a bark of amusement that bounced off the high ceiling. John’s smirk deepened into something more appreciative, but Tommy’s fingers shifted minutely around the base of his glass, the faintest sign of a man cataloguing every look, every word.
"This is Finn." Tommy said, inclining his head toward the boy balanced on the sofa arm.
Finn straightened at once, his “Nice to meet you” quick and earnest. His gaze lingered half a beat too long, the faint flush at his neck betraying what he thought he was hiding.
Tommy’s look toward him wasn’t cold, but it was enough to make Finn clear his throat and shift his stance.
“Michael Gray, my cousin.” Tommy’s tone flattened slightly, as if noting a fact rather than offering an introduction.
Michael didn’t lean back like Arthur or John. He leaned forward, elbows on the polished wood, and studied her with a careful, cool detachment. “Miss Moncada." he said smoothly, the syllables precise. A flicker of something, whether amusement or interest, ghosted across his expression before vanishing again.
Then came the first woman. “Ada." Tommy said, and there was something softer, almost imperceptibly so, in the way he said her name.
Ada’s smile was a curious thing: it was warm enough to pass for welcome, but with an edge that could draw blood if you pressed too hard. “So you’re the one Polly told us about." she said, her voice like silk pulled taut. “Can’t say I’m disappointed.”
Adelaide’s own smile sharpened slightly. “Neither can I.”
Arthur chuckled low, as if enjoying the exchange too much. Tommy didn’t so much as glance his way, but the air between him and his brothers seemed to thrum with an unspoken warning.
Finally, his gaze shifted to the woman at the head of the table. “Polly Gray." he announced. “She’s the one who keeps us alive.”
Polly’s cigarette flared as she drew on it, exhaling smoke through her nose in a slow, deliberate ribbon. “Keeps most of us alive." she corrected with her voice rich and unyielding, her eyes fixed on Adelaide as if weighing her in a set of invisible scales.
Adelaide stepped forward then, her black dress whispering against the polished floor.
“And who keeps you alive, Miss Gray?”
Polly’s lips twitched. It was not a smile, but something close. “I do.”
The answer hung in the air like the final note of a piano piece, vibrating in the silence that followed.
The brothers were watching her now; not just with curiosity, but with the faint, satisfied recognition of men seeing a rumour confirmed. The air held that low, charged hum of a first bout in the ring, the spectators leaning forward to see who would throw the next punch.
Tommy didn’t move at once. He let the exchange breathe, his gaze flicking from Polly to Adelaide and back again, as if measuring something neither of them had voiced. Then, with the deliberate precision of a man who knew the value of a pause, he crossed the short distance to an armchair by the fire. Lowering himself into it, he settled with unhurried grace, the glass still poised in his hand and the flames etching amber light into the sharp lines of his face.
Adelaide, in turn, claimed a chair opposite Polly. Her coat slipped from her shoulders with the fluid inevitability of a shadow peeling away from its source. She was conscious of the brothers’ eyes on her, their collective appraisal threading through the air like the pull of an unseen tide. Still, she kept her gaze trained on Tommy, and he met it without a flicker of retreat.
Beneath the pale and crystalline surface of his stare, something darker stirred: a shadowed glint, quiet but unyielding. Possession, perhaps. But the kind that lived under skin, subtle enough to deny, sharp enough to warn.
Arthur broke the silence first. Leaning forward in his chair and his elbows braced on his knees, he wore the faintly predatory restlessness of a man who had been biting down on his tongue too long.
“So…” His voice came low and rough, laced with that unrepentant mischief that lived in his bones. “Our Tommy’s gone and fetched himself a Sicilian princess.”
The words were bait tossed into still waters, and they earned an answering spark of amusement from John. He tipped his glass toward her as though to toast.
“Not just any princess." John said, his grin crooked and unhurried. “Vittorio Moncada’s daughter. Heard plenty about your old man.”
Adelaide arched a single brow, her face an exquisite mask of control. “I hope you don’t believe everything you hear.” she said, her voice a cool pour over ice, smooth enough to slip between them without friction.
Arthur chuckled, trading a look with John. “In my experience, love, the truth’s usually worse.”
Tommy didn’t cut in. He reclined in his chair, ankle draped over a knee and the whiskey in his hand catching firelight in slow, liquid gold. His expression was carved from something unreadable, but his eyes stayed fixed on her, like stillness stretched thin over a coil of tension.
John leaned forward now, his elbows hooked on his knees and the curiosity sharp as a blade. “Word is, the Moncadas owned half the coast once. Vineyards, shipping, a palace perched high enough to look down on the rest of the island. But now…” His grin grew sharper. “Now you’re here in Birmingham. Can’t imagine you traded all that for the
weather.”
Adelaide didn’t blink. “You’d be surprised what one trades when choice is an illusion.”
Some secrets were better left that way.
Michael, quiet until then, eased back in his seat with the slow confidence of someone who preferred to listen before cutting to the bone. “So the rumours were true.” he murmured, each word deliberate. “Your father lost the land. The titles. And you… were part of the bargain to fix it.”
There wasn't malice in his voice, just that Shelby efficiency of stating a truth without cushioning the blade.
Arthur whistled low, shaking his head. “Christ, Tommy. Didn’t think you’d go for something arranged. Thought you liked the hunt.”
Tommy’s gaze slid to Arthur then, cool and steady. It wasn’t sharp enough to be called a glare, but it had the same silencing effect.
Arthur cleared his throat and reached for the bottle, muttering something under his breath.
Polly, who had been watching in silence, took a slow drag of her cigarette before speaking. “If she’s Moncada’s daughter, she knows exactly how this sort of table works.” She exhaled smoke in a thin, deliberate stream. “Men talking over the women they want to measure.”
Ada smirked at that, but John only grinned wider. “Not measuring, Pol. Just curious. It’s not every night our brother brings home someone who looks like she stepped out of a bloody painting.”
Adelaide’s lips curved in a small, knowing smile. “Careful. Paintings are often hung too high to touch.”
The brothers laughed at that, Arthur loudest of all, but Tommy didn’t join in. He only watched her, the glass halfway to his lips and the firelight catching on the faint narrowing of his eyes: subtle, almost imperceptible, but there.
The room quieted again, the fire’s soft crackle filling the space between breaths. Adelaide let the silence work in her favour, sweeping each Shelby face with a measured gaze before returning to Tommy.
He stayed silent. The set of his jaw and the calm balance of the glass in his hand, told its own story: she was in his world now, and though the others might circle, only he held the leash.
It was Finn, leaning against the back of the sofa with his hands shoved in his pockets, who finally broke the lull.
It was Finn who broke the quiet. Perched against the back of the sofa and hands in pockets, his voice was untouched by the barbs his brothers preferred. “What’s Sicily like, then?”
Something shifted in Adelaide’s face at the question; it softened, as though the name of her home had reached inside her chest and stirred loose the scent of the sea.
“Heaven on earth." she replied with her tone threaded with nostalgia, each syllable delicate and precise.
“The air smells different there. At dawn, you can stand in the orchard and taste the sun before it crests the hills. The sea carries its salt far inland, mingling with the sharp sweetness of lemons and oranges. The salt clings to your skin after the water, as if the island itself wants to keep you."
Her gaze had drifted past the room now, her mind turned toward another coastline entirely. “In the summer, the wheat fields sway like a living thing, and the sound of them moving is… like breathing. My favourite place was the cliffs above the bay. Being a noble, I was not allowed to tan because only those who worked exposed their skin to the harsh rays of the sun, and a noble does not work...but I used to sneak down to the shore and swim when no one was watching. The water was so clear you could see the sand ripple beneath your feet.”
Ada smiled delightedly, as if his words were transporting her to one of those books she had read in the library. Adelaide kept speaking, her tone somewhere between confession and reverie. “I learned to dance there. When I was forced to go to some ball organized by some other baron, I would escape to the city with my friends. We would dress like vagabonds and go dancing with the people in the squares."
Her voice caught, just barely, before she added: “And my mother…” She stopped for a moment, and the firelight caught the faintest tremor in her lashes. “She always wore jasmine in her hair. I could find her in any crowd just by following the scent.”
The room had gone still again, though this time the silence was of a different kind. Even John had the decency not to smirk.
Tommy’s eyes didn’t leave her, but there was something harder in his stare now, something unreadable to the others but not entirely to her. He swirled the whiskey in his glass once before taking a slow drink, as if the sound of her nostalgia was both a story and a challenge.
For a heartbeat, no one spoke. The fire cracked softly in the grate, the only sound in a room that felt as if it had been gently tipped toward her words. The smoke from Polly's cigarette drifted upward in lazy spirals, curling in front of her face.
“Sounds like paradise.” Finn murmured almost to himself, as though reluctant to break the spell she’d cast.
“Paradise with rules, eh?” John’s grin broke through, crooked and knowing. “No tanning, no swimming… unless you’re sneakin’ about. Can’t say I’d have liked that.” His eyes lingered on her a beat too long, the ghost of a smirk tugging at his mouth.
Arthur chuckled low, a rumble in his chest. “Doesn’t sound like the rules stopped her.”
Adelaide’s lips curved; not into a smile exactly, but into something sharper, slyer. “The rules never stopped anyone worth remembering.”
The words hung between them like the smoke, delicate but edged, and she knew from the flicker of amusement in Arthur’s gaze that he’d caught it.
Across the room, Tommy sat back in his chair, ankle resting on his knee and the glass balanced loosely between his fingers. He hadn’t interrupted, hadn’t so much as shifted, but his stillness was the sort that pressed in on the senses. He watched her the way a man might watch a knife laid on a table: admiring its craftsmanship, aware of its use, and quietly weighing whether it might be turned against him.
Polly, seated at the far end of the table, broke her silence at last. “And yet you left it." she said, not unkindly, but with the flat weight of someone who had lived long enough to know that leaving beauty came at a cost.
Adelaide’s gaze flicked to her, steady. “Some paradises..." she said, “you leave before they turn into prisons.”
It was Arthur who laughed then, too loudly, as if to shake the sudden heaviness. “She’s got teeth, Tom." he said, lifting his glass. “You didn’t tell us that part.”
“I didn’t tell you a lot of parts." Tommy replied, his voice mild, but his winter eyes never once leaving her.
Arthur’s laugh still clung to the air when Michael leaned forward in his chair, elbows resting on his knees and his curiosity sharpening like the edge of a coin between his fingers.
“So… Adelaide…” Michael began, letting her name unfurl slowly from his tongue, as though he were weighing each syllable for taste and consequence. “If Sicily’s all sea air and citrus groves… tell me. What is Birmingham to you?”
The question slipped into the room like a blade sheathed in velvet. Mild on the surface, but Adelaide knew better. The Shelbys did not deal in idle curiosity. They asked to measure, to test, to see which answers would hold under heat and which would break.
She let her eyes drift toward the fire, the flames catching in her gaze until it seemed as if embers had settled in her pupils. When she spoke, her voice was slow and deliberate, like someone threading a needle in the dark.
“In Birmingham…” she began, “the air tastes of iron instead of salt. The wind doesn’t sing, it growls. And the people…” Her eyes swept the room, glancing from one face to the next without resting on any, “…the people here treat life like a beast to be pinned and broken. And they will fight it until it learns to kneel.”
A grin curled at John’s mouth, half pride and half challenge. “You make it sound like we’re wolves.”
“Are you not?” she countered, and there was a faint shimmer of amusement in her tone, so faint one could almost mistake it for sweetness.
Arthur barked a laugh, quick and rough; John snorted in amusement, while Ada allowed herself a quiet smile. The sound rippled through the air, warm for a heartbeat.
But Tommy didn’t join them. He remained exactly as he had all evening: motionless, controlled, yet with the faintest tightening at the hinge of his jaw. His glass turned once, twice in his fingers, the whiskey catching firelight in molten threads before he drank.
She felt his gaze, and it was different from the others’. Theirs lingered with curiosity, appetite, perhaps even admiration; his was something else entirely. It mapped her like territory to be claimed or defended, as though memorising every fault line. And beneath that scrutiny flickered a darker thing: not tenderness, not protection, but a quiet and possessive disapproval of how his brothers looked at her.
It was Polly who saved the moment from teetering into something more dangerous. She tapped her cigarette against the ashtray, her voice a drawl laced with that peculiar mixture of approval and warning she seemed to reserve for only the most interesting women. “Well...” she said, “whether you’re from the salt air or the smoke, you’ve found your way here. And that, my dear, is no small thing.”
Adelaide met her gaze and, for the first time that evening, smiled in earnest. “No.” she agreed softly. “No small thing at all.”
Notes:
wow guys, this chapter was pretty long...at least for my chapter writing standard lol
hope you enjoyed it, and can't wait to read your thoughts in the comments on the early dynamics between Adelaide and the Shelbys !! 💋
Chapter 11: Chapter X
Notes:
listen to the official "smoke & silk" soundtrack playlist !! : https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3apZhfCcsYF2JSJXjlMPQU?si=MtLRAvxwRzynJcmFbqsDzg&pi=fACwKjKNQ5itT
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Adelaide woke to the delicate chorus of birds beyond the window, their song threading through the pale, reluctant light of an English morning. The sunlight did not pour in with the boldness of her native coasts; here it was filtered, hesitant, touching her face like a hand that feared to wake her.
She stirred languidly, rubbing the sleep from her eyes with the slow grace of a cat unfurling from a long dream. Her limbs curled deeper into the sheets, unwilling at first to surrender to the day. When she finally coaxed herself upright, her gaze drifted to the ceiling: it was unfamiliar, high, and faintly cracked. The plaster wore the gloom of a place that light avoided, as though it had secrets it preferred to keep in shadow.
The heaviness in her skull reminded her of the night before, a slow and dull weight pressing behind her eyes. Too many glasses, one after another, poured to steady the nerves frayed by that infernal gathering. The Shelbys had sat her among them like a jewel in the lion’s den, and she had drunk because it was the only armor at hand. Yet no liquor had dulled the memory of the way Tommy had looked at her: not with open threat, nor with the softness of admiration, but with the detached watchfulness of a man waiting to see how much of her would survive the evening.
The sheets beneath her were smooth, smelling faintly of starch and something clean. But the pillowcase carried a trace of smoke, the scent curling through the linen as if the fire downstairs had whispered its warmth into the fabric. The robe that clung to her shoulders was not her own: the silk was too rich, the embroidery too intricate, the color far bolder than the careful elegance of her own wardrobe. It slid from her shoulder when she shifted, falling with the lazy grace of a swan’s wing.
Across the room, the dress she had worn yesterday hung in defeat over the back of a chair, crumpled and marked by the night’s excess. Beneath it, her heels rested neatly together, placed there with care by someone else’s hand.
It took a beat longer than it should have for her to realize she was still at Arrow House.
She remembered fragments: the way the brothers’ eyes had measured her, the strange blend of curiosity and calculation in the room, Polly’s unflinching gaze. But it was Tommy’s she could not shake: cold steel against a backdrop of firelight, as though he were weighing her worth against some unspoken risk.
A quick knock on the door interrupted her from her thoughts.
She pulled the sheets tighter around her like a priestess with her peplos, as if the clothes she was wearing weren't enough to cover her.
“Who is it?” she asked in a suspicious voice, although the sweet embrace of sleep still lingered in his tone.
The door opened just enough to admit Mary, carrying a folded bundle of fabric over one arm. The housekeeper’s composure was as immaculate as it had been the night before: hair pinned back without a single stray, apron crisp and clean and her expression polite but with that glint of quiet understanding she wore like a second uniform.
“Breakfast is ready, Miss." she announced with her voice calm but firm, as though breakfast were not an invitation but an inevitable fact. She crossed the room and laid the folded garments on the bed. “These are from Miss Ada. She thought you might prefer something fresh for the day.”
Adelaide’s eyes fell to the clothes. It was a simple skirt and blouse, tailored enough to be flattering but practical, the sort of thing a woman wore when she intended to be taken seriously. She reached out, brushing her fingers against the fabric, aware that she owned nothing so plain and nothing so deliberately useful.
"Thank her for me." she murmured, the sincerity in her voice unfeigned. Whether it was pity or something closer to alliance, she would take it.
Mary allowed herself the faintest of smiles, that quiet flicker of warmth she seemed to reserve for moments when the house’s chill could not go entirely unchecked. “The dining room’s just off the main hall. Mr. Shelby and his brothers are already there.”
And with that, she slipped out, the floor creaking almost imperceptibly with every step, as if the house itself were waking up with every step they took on it.
Adelaide rose from bed with a calm and lightness that seemed almost real, like a rose rising proudly after a whole night of being bent by the wind. As she shed her robe to put on clean clothes, her eyes met her reflection in the mirror above the dresser. Her eyes were still slightly blurry from the fumes of the alcohol she'd consumed the night before; her long, curly hair tousled into soft disarray, like a nymph who'd spent too many hours resting among the branches of a tree.
But despite everything, she could still see the storm inside her. Because she had no intention of letting things stay that way. She had no intention of accepting a life she did not deserve.
· · ─────── ·𖥸· ─────── · ·
Arrow House in the morning breathed a different kind of quiet than it did at night. No murmured conspiracies seeping from the drawing room, no soft clink of crystal cradling whiskey and no restless echo of boots pacing the boards above. This was a heavier stillness, deliberate and watchful. It was the sort of silence that reminds you you’ve woken inside someone else’s dominion, and that it tolerates you only because it chooses to.
Adelaide descended the staircase with the composure of a monarch walking toward her own trial, her fingers grazing the polished banister as though steadying herself for whatever verdict awaited below. The paintings along the walls, generations of Shelbys with their hard eyes and stubborn mouths, seemed to measure her with the slow appraisal of proprietors assessing an uninvited guest. In truth, that was exactly what she was.
The faint, rhythmic clink of cutlery and the low murmur of male voices drifted up through the house, threading between the wainscoting and along the narrow corridors like invisible guides, pointing her toward the heart of the morning.
She found the dining room.
Arthur and John were already seated at the long table with mugs of tea in hand, their chairs tipped back at easy, indolent angles. They sat like men who had long ago conquered the room and saw no need to defend it. At the head of the table, Tommy’s cigarette smoldered lazily between two fingers, its smoke curling upward in silver ribbons that dissolved into the soft gloom.
Three pairs of eyes turned towards her as soon as they heard her enter.
The room felt emptier than it had on her first visit, when she’d sat alone at that same table. The absence of certain presences seemed to press in on the space, hollowing it.
“Where are the others?” she asked with her voice light enough to sound casual, though her mind was already taking quiet stock of who was not here.
John answered first, a faint grin curling at the corner of his mouth as he tipped his mug. “Michael and Polly are at the betting office. Ada’s buried in the library.”
A single nod from Adelaide acknowledged the report. She crossed the floor in measured strides and sank into the chair Mary pulled out for her. The scrape of its legs over the polished wood seemed louder than it should have been, a small disruption in the stillness.
Mary moved silently at her side, setting a plate before her: thick, warm slices of bread; pale, creamy butter; eggs steaming gently and a glass dish of preserves that caught the weak morning light like amber trapped in crystal. The scent of fresh coffee rose to meet her before the cup even touched the table.
She hadn’t realized how hollow her stomach was until that moment.
Tommy didn’t speak right away. He drew in a slow breath through the cigarette, the ember flaring briefly before he let the smoke slip past his lips in an even stream. His eyes held hers across the table, steady and unreadable; he was not searching for anything, not even challenging her. Just watching, in the way a man might study the surface of a river to judge its depth before stepping in.
“How’d you sleep?” he asked finally, his voice even, low, carrying across the length of the table without effort.
Adelaide picked up her fork, letting the tines sink into the soft heat of the eggs before answering. “Well...enough." she said, her tone measured, polite without warmth. A perfect diplomatic response from an ambassador without a country. She took her first bite before she added: “Thank you.”
The words were habit, not concession. But she was aware, painfully aware, that she was eating at his table, wearing clothes borrowed from his sister and staying under a roof he owned. And no matter how much she told herself otherwise, the small satisfaction she took from the food’s warmth, from the steadiness of the coffee in her hands, was his to grant… or to take away.
She wished she hadn’t given him that.
Tommy ashed his cigarette into the tray at his side, still watching her with that unreadable calm. Arthur and John exchanged a brief glance, one of those silent communications between brothers that could mean anything from 'leave it' to 'this might get interesting'.
The weight in the room shifted, subtly, as though the day itself were waiting to see what would be said next.
The coffee was strong, bitter enough to catch at the back of her tongue. She took another slow sip, letting the heat settle low in her
chest before setting the cup down.
John was the one to break the quiet. “Ada’s clothes suit you." he remarked, the smirk on his lips heavier with mischief than any real compliment. “Bit different from the princess dresses I heard about.”
Arthur chuckled into his tea. “Give her a week, John. She’ll have this place lookin’ like one of them marble palaces by the coast.”
Adelaide didn’t rise to either remark. “It’s not the walls that make a palace.” she said lightly, buttering her bread. “It’s the people who walk through them.”
Arthur grinned at that, leaning back with the kind of satisfaction men have when they think they’ve found a worthy sparring partner.
Tommy, though, remained still. His cigarette burned low between his fingers, forgotten for the moment. “And what would you say about the people in these walls?”
Her knife paused over the bread. She didn’t look at him right away; instead, she reached for the preserves, letting the silence stretch until she was certain she could meet his gaze without showing too much. “They seem...” she said at last, “like people who know exactly what they want. And who don’t much like hearing ‘no.’”
She had other answers to add in her mind, but she didn't want to have bile so early in the morning.
Arthur’s laugh was quick and loud. John’s grin deepened. Tommy’s face did not move, though his eyes narrowed just enough for her to notice. The cigarette’s smoke spiraled upward between them, wavering in the morning light before dissolving into the still air.
Mary reappeared briefly to refill the coffee pot, her presence breaking whatever had been hanging in the air. Adelaide thanked her quietly, and when she glanced back at Tommy, he was no longer watching her.
Or rather, he was, but in that oblique way of his, as though seeing her without looking.
Arthur turned the talk toward some fight the night before in the Garrison, John chiming in with details that grew more outrageous by the minute. Adelaide listened but didn’t contribute, her mind half on the conversation and half elsewhere. Every word, every glance in this house was weighed before it was spent. And she had no intention of wasting hers.
“…so this lad swings at me, right?” John was in the middle of his tale about the Garrison brawl, his voice bright with mischief and his hands carving wide arcs in the air. "Problem is, he’s so blind drunk he misses me by a yard and plants himself face-first in someone’s soup.”
Arthur nearly lost his mouthful of tea, his laughter bursting from him in a hoarse, delighted bark. “Christ alive...whole bloody place stank of mutton and ale after that. Poor sod must’ve carried the smell for a week.”
John’s grin widened as his eyes slid toward Adelaide. “What about your place then? You get scraps like that in your fancy club?”
She arched a brow, the faintest spark of amusement playing at her mouth. “Not quite like that. In my club, men didn’t throw punches. They threw insults… and money.”
Arthur smirked, leaning back in his chair. “Ah. Posh brawls. Quieter, but twice as dangerous.”
A ghost of a smile passed across her lips. “You’d be surprised how sharp a word can cut, when it’s spoken to the right person… in the right room.”
John rested his elbows on the table, the better to study her. “So you’ve seen your share of trouble, then.”
“I’ve seen men ruin themselves without lifting a hand.” Her tone was light and conversational, yet each word landed with the precision of a blade. “Sometimes all it takes is one careless sentence, and the wrong ears.”
Arthur chuckled, shaking his head. “Christ, you must’ve been forced to hear all sorts in there. Bet every bastard thought you went deaf the moment you started singin’.”
The remark was tossed out like a pebble into a pond: meant for a ripple, nothing more. But for her, it struck deep.
Forced to hear.
The phrase lodged itself in her mind, a single pure note resonating long after it was struck. Her gaze fell briefly to the coffee cup in her hands, masking the flicker of thought in her eyes.
Because he was right.
They had spoken freely around her: the businessmen with their cigars, the politicians with their brandy, the gangsters from the docks with their rum. All so certain that the woman on the stage existed only to be admired, not to listen. Their words had been gifts they didn’t know they were giving. And some of those gifts… could ruin men.
Arthur’s grin was still tugging at his mouth when she set the cup down, the porcelain meeting the saucer with a deliberate, ringing click.
“You’re right." Adelaide murmured.
Not lightly, not in the casual rhythm of breakfast banter. Her tone carried weight; the kind that makes hands still over cutlery, that makes even breath feel too loud.
The silence that followed was quick and clean, as though someone had whisked the tablecloth from beneath the plates without disturbing a single one.
Her eyes swept across the three men before her. Dark, steady. “I heard everything.”
The words hung there, thicker than the curl of steam from her coffee.
She leaned back in her chair, as if the memories were a comfort she might settle into. “They whispered things they thought the music would swallow whole. Business schemes meant to stay locked in drawing rooms. Promises they had no right to make. Threats they would never dare to voice above a breath. But the notes of a song don’t make a woman deaf, gentlemen. If anything…” She let the pause stretch until the air itself seemed to lean toward her. “…they make her hear more.”
Her voice was smooth, but beneath it an ember was burning, licking higher with every word.
“I heard as I moved between the tables; a drink to one man, a smile to another. I heard while my eyes swept the room, catching the twitch of a politician’s jaw when a certain name was spoken, the way a smuggler’s hands tightened on his glass when customs were mentioned. I saw the way they looked at each other when they thought no one was watching.”
A faint, dangerous smile touched her mouth. “I knew things they never imagined I could know.”
Arthur had gone still, his toast forgotten halfway to his mouth. John watched her with that sideways glint: part amusement, part intrigue, part calculation.
And Tommy… Tommy only smoked. The ember flared once, then dulled as he tapped ash into the tray. Behind the pale, still mask of his face, something shifted.
“What are you getting at?”
It wasn’t barked. It wasn’t drawled. It was quiet, deliberate, and so precise it cut the air clean in two. It wasn’t a question so much as a recognition, that he’d seen the outline of something in the shadows of her falsely innocent mind.
Something that wanted out. Something that wanted a fight.
Her lips curved slowly, deliberately, like a woman savouring a private joke. She set her fork down with finality, the small clink on porcelain carrying like a shot in the stillness. Her hands folded loosely on the table.
“I’m saying.." she began, her voice soft enough to draw them forward “...that the world has a strange habit of speaking freely in front of those it does not fear.”
Her gaze moved from Arthur to John, then anchored itself in Tommy’s. “And I have spent years listening. Long before I stepped into this house, my head was full of things men would rather die than see written down.”
The corner of her mouth lifted again, but the smile never reached her eyes. “If I am allowed to live as I please, I will give you what I know.” She leaned forward, letting the light catch her expression. “And what I will know.”
Arthur shifted slightly, the faintest crease of surprise in his brow. John’s grin returned, but it was tempered now with the glint of respect.
Tommy didn’t move, didn’t blink. He simply studied her, as though weighing the metal of the offer, the danger of the woman making it.
“Information.” she finished, each syllable deliberate. “For freedom.”
The quiet that followed was so thick it felt almost solid: the kind of silence that could break into laughter, violence, or a deal, depending entirely on which way Thomas Shelby decided to tip it.
Tommy didn’t answer her at once.
He sat back in his chair with the unhurried grace of a man who had never in his life been made to rush for anyone, the cigarette balanced loosely between his fingers as though it weighed nothing at all. Smoke unfurled from its tip in languid ribbons, curling upward into the warm stillness of the dining room until it dissolved into the air like a thought too dangerous to hold.
The quiet that settled between them was not the absence of sound but the deliberate pause between moves on a board. It belonged to two players who knew that patience could be as sharp a weapon as any knife, and that the first to break the silence might as well declare their position.
At last, he spoke.
“You know…” His voice was low, almost lazy, every syllable placed with the precision of a man who measured the worth of words before spending them. “It sounds like a trap.”
His gaze never left hers. Pale, glacial, unblinking. But there was a shift there now: almost like a faint narrowing, a glint that was not suspicion so much as something colder, sharper. Anticipation.
If what she was saying was true, then she was starting to be worth more than some port in Sicily.
Arthur’s brow furrowed, as though trying to follow a conversation written in a language he only half understood. John, by contrast, leaned back with the ghost of a smirk, the expression of a man who enjoyed a good hand of cards but enjoyed more the moment when someone else realised they were already losing.
Tommy leaned forward at last, his elbows resting on the table and the cigarette angled in his hand like a weapon held in plain sight.
“So...” he asked, his voice as even as a level horizon, “How do you intend to prove it?”
The question was not a request. It was a gauntlet dropped in the dust between them.
Adelaide’s lips parted. And then, to the mild surprise of the men at the table, and perhaps to her own, she laughed.
It was not the brittle, nervous laugh of someone cornered. It was low and warm, spilling into the space between them like slow brandy, and it carried a heat that made the air seem to draw closer around them. It was the laugh of a woman who had just spotted the opening move in a game she intended to win.
Because this wasn’t only about proving her worth. It wasn’t even only about clawing back the right to live without chains.
This… was something far more intoxicating.
It was the chance to slip her hands, quiet and deft, into the unseen foundations of his empire. To trace the fault lines hidden deep beneath it and pry, bit by bit, until the great edifice shuddered.
She could taste the possibility, ans it was sharp, metallic and electric on her tongue.
Her eyes never left his. Her smile curved, slow and deliberate, until it was no longer polite but edged and gleaming, a line of stiletto steel sheathed in velvet.
“Do you have a map?”
· · ─────── ·𖥸· ─────── · ·
A map of Birmingham lay unfurled across Tommy’s office desk like an ancient manuscript, its curled edges tamed under the bite of rusted paper clips. The parchment was yellowed, worn soft by years of fingertips and cigarette ash, the ink faded in places where time had rubbed at it. It smelled faintly of dust and smoke, as though it had absorbed every whispered plan ever breathed over it.
Adelaide leaned over it, her shadow spilling across the streets and canals inked there, her fingers drifting like a diviner’s rod over the sprawl of the city. The room had gone still; still enough to hear the slow tick of the clock on the far wall, still enough to feel the weight of three pairs of eyes fixed on her. The Shelby brothers watched as if she were some witch at her altar, on the brink of conjuring something best left unspoken.
Tommy stood on the other side of the desk, the broad cut of his shoulders catching the morning light so that it haloed him in sharp edges. His pale eyes followed the deliberate wander of her hand, unblinking. His jaw was set with the quiet restraint of a man who disliked waiting and disliked being led even more.
“Here it is.”
The words slipped from her lips in a murmur, almost as if she were speaking to herself. The faint curve of a smile ghosted her mouth as her the nail pf his ndex finger, filed and sharpened as if it were a claw, came to rest on a specific patch of the map.
Arthur and John, who had been lounging against the bookcase with their arms crossed, leaned forward to peer at the spot she indicated. Tommy didn’t move. He only kept watching her, as though the real answer would come from her eyes, not the map.
Arthur frowned first, lifting his head to glance at her. “I think we know that one well enough.”
Adelaide’s laugh was soft, almost girlish, and all the more cutting for it. “I know it’s the port.” she said, tilting her head as though humoring a slow pupil. “And that’s where you’ll find my gift.”
Arthur’s brows rose higher. John shot his brother a sidelong look. That word, gift, rolling between them in silent curiosity. But Tommy’s stare didn’t shift. If anything, it sharpened.
His eyes slid from the point of her finger back up to her face, reading her as one might study a ledger for hidden debts. “Explain yourself.”
His voice was a low command, not a request.
His calloused hands were now buried in his trouser pockets, his stillness deliberate: it was the stillness of a man who knew movement could be mistaken for a tell.
Adelaide’s smirk deepened. For a heartbeat, the two of them were locked in the taut space between predator and prey, though it was no longer clear which was which.
They were like ice and fire, circling each other in the slow, dangerous rhythm of a waltz.
“You asked me to prove I knew things, you didn’t?" she reminded him, her tone laced with amused defiance. “Well… there you go.” She drew her finger back from the map as though severing a thread, her eyes never leaving his. “There’s a container full of weapons down there. Just waiting to be taken.”
The words hung in the air like the acrid scent of cordite after a single, perfect shot: sharp, dangerous and utterly impossible to ignore.
Adelaide could see it in their eyes, all three of them: that glint of surprise. Even in Tommy’s, though his face, as ever, betrayed nothing but the faintest flicker, like light catching on frost.
Arthur’s head tipped slightly, caught between disbelief and the first stirrings of interest.
“Weapons?” he repeated, tasting the word as if it might shift meaning if rolled over the tongue long enough.
John, by contrast, was already grinning. That slow, lazy curl at the corner of his mouth widening like a man settling in for a story he intended to enjoy.
“Now you’re speaking our language." he drawled, stepping closer to the desk. One hand came to rest on the map’s edge, his eyes darting from the spidery ink of the docks to the woman who had just claimed to hide treasure there.
Tommy did not move. His stillness was its own sort of weight, as if the air bent around it. Yet behind those pale, unblinking eyes, something shifted. She had caught him unprepared.
If she was telling the truth, if that container truly held what she claimed… then the board had changed. The pawn was no longer crawling forward. It was halfway to becoming a queen.
“How do you know that?” he asked, suddenly. His voice was quiet, but the steel was there: honed and cold. He studied her with the kind of attention that could dismantle a person, piece by piece.
It wasn’t merely suspicion. It was the measured testing of a blade against his thumb, weighing whether it belonged in his pocket… or buried in an enemy’s chest.
Adelaide’s smile came slow, deliberate, blooming at the corner of her mouth like the curl of smoke from a match. Her fingertip wandered idly along the printed river on the map, a casual movement that somehow drew all three of their gazes.
“Those weapons..." she began with her voice wrapped in sugar "were meant to arm a garrison of His Majesty’s army during the war. But the war ended before they could be used.” She paused, letting the memory of those years settle in the room like the weight of coal dust. “You remember the chaos in the city when it was all over. So they left them there. Abandoned. Forgotten.”
Her gaze flicked to Tommy then, just in time to catch the faint tightening of his jaw at the mention of the war. She pressed on.
“At least, that’s what I heard an officer say one night at the club.” she continued, her tone still deceptively light. “He didn’t know why they hadn’t been reclaimed afterward. But… we don’t care about that, do we?”
Arthur swore under his breath. “Bloody hell…”
John leaned in, his elbow on the desk ans hiz eyes bright with a mix of calculation and curiosity. “And you’re just givin’ this to us? Out of the kindness of your heart?”
Her laugh came soft and low, velvet poured into the space between them.“No. Think of it... as a warning of what I’m capable of.”
The silence that followed was thick enough to slow time. Even the clock’s ticking seemed to fade, muffled beneath the taut, invisible wire stretched between her and Tommy Shelby.
His cigarette burned down to the last inch. Without once breaking their locked gaze, he reached forward and ground the ember into the ashtray, each movement deliberate, final.
That woman, he thought, was becoming more and more of a danger.
“All right." he replied in a low voice, turning his back to look out the window, as if searching for the answer to a puzzle that was too complicated. “Let’s find out if you’re telling the truth.”
Arthur’s eyes lit in quiet hunger, with the look of a man who never minded a fight or a job done in the shadows. John pushed himself upright from the desk, his grin sharpening into something leaner, meaner.
Adelaide? She only seated in the velvet chair, perfectly still, perfectly composed. As if the first move in this game had already gone to her.
Notes:
hi loves, hope you enjoyed this chapter too!
as you have read, Adelaide has just started advancing on the board, and she has no intention of losing the game 💋
i'm looking forward to read what you think about in the comments <3
P.S. : i also wanted to thank you for surpassing 1000 hits! i know it's little, but I never thought I'd get to this level. thank you so much from the bottom of my heart 💗
Chapter 12: Chapter XI
Notes:
listen to the official "smoke & silk" soundtrack playlist !! : https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3apZhfCcsYF2JSJXjlMPQU?si=MtLRAvxwRzynJcmFbqsDzg&pi=fACwKjKNQ5itT
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“In the end…” Arthur muttered, his voice rough as gravel, carried on the damp breath of morning. The mist clung to his coat, curling into his hair and beard as though even the weather conspired to weigh him down. “The lass was bloody right.”
The words slipped from his mouth like a secret he would rather have swallowed, half disbelief, half reluctant respect. His eyes, wide and shadowed, fixed upon the hulking shape before them: a container, squatting at the far edge of the docks like some slumbering beast. Its sides were streaked with rust, its steel ribs corroded by years of salt and rain, while faded white stencils clung to the surface like scars from an old war.
The port around them was waking slowly, grudgingly. Fog rolled thick and heavy off the canal, wrapping cranes and rust-bitten bollards in its gray shroud, softening the clang of distant chains and the harsh bark of a foreman driving his men. A rat darted between forgotten crates, vanishing as quickly as a sin whispered in confession.
Tommy stood a few paces ahead, his back to his brothers and the collar of his long overcoat turned up against the damp. A thin ember glowed at his fingertips, the cigarette’s light weak but insistent against the smothering gray. His eyes, pale and unyielding, were not on the container itself, but on the darkness it cast across the slick planks beneath it. He did not speak. Tommy Shelby wasted no words where silence carved deeper.
Behind him, John let out a low whistle, his grin breaking through the fog as though he had been waiting all morning to wear it. “Well, I’ll be damned..." he drawled, letting his hand slide across the rusted metal as though it might sing beneath his touch. “Woman might’ve just saved us the trouble of smuggling half o’ Europe.”
Arthur spat into the water with a grunt, suspicion etched deep into every line of his face. “Or she’s bloody playin’ us.” he growled. “Could be empty. Could be a coffin she’s put us in, eh?”
The younger men they’d brought along lingered at the edge of the dock, shadows within shadows and boots scuffing against damp wood. Their breaths rose in faint clouds, their silence heavy. They were waiting, as they always did, for their leader to move the first piece.
At last Tommy drew deep from his cigarette, letting the smoke curl from his lips like something conjured, then flicked the stub into the dark waters with the precision of a man discarding a thought. His gaze lingered on the container, a predator’s stillness cloaking him.
“Open it." he command.
Arthur barked a short, bitter laugh before jerking his chin at two of the lads. They obeyed without hesitation, crowbars in hand, their eyes taut with that dangerous mingling of dread and hunger that comes before revelation.
The shriek of metal tore through the fog: a raw, grinding cry, like an animal forced from its lair. Hinges groaned and steel protested. Then, at last, the doors yawned wide.
Darkness gave way to order. Inside, stacked with the grim precision of the dead in their graves, lay rows of wooden crates, their flanks stenciled with the faded insignia of the British Army. The wood was dark with age, the corners softened by time, but the markings spoke plain enough. One of the boys stepped forward, prying loose a lid, and the dull gleam of oiled steel caught the meager light.
A breath, collective and low, seemed to ripple through the group.
Arthur let out a whistle of his own, long and reverent. “Jesus Christ.”
John laughed, his voice rising sharp against the damp morning. “Well, lads, looks like the lady wasn’t lyin’ after all.” He crouched, pried a rifle free with the ease of a man who knew its weight. The stock was smooth beneath his hands, the metal still catching what little light the fog allowed. He turned it, almost tenderly, his lips curling into a wolfish smile. “What’d I tell ya? Girl’s not just a singer, she’s bloody Father Christmas.”
The younger men laughed, thin and nervous. Their chuckles dissolved into mist before they could find ground.
Tommy didn’t move.
He stood as he had since they arrived, silent, carved from fog and shadow, the sharp planes of his face made harsher by the gray. His eyes were not on the rifles, nor his brothers, nor the gleam of steel. They were elsewhere, already calculating, already moving pieces across a board no one else could see.
Adelaide had been right.
And that, more than the rifles, more than the fortune of war left to rot in a dockyard, was the true danger.
Arthur dragged a rough hand across one of the crates, touching it as a man might touch a relic he had no business laying hands on. “Bloody hell..." he muttered again, his voice low, ragged with awe and unease. “Enough here to arm half o’ Small Heath.”
John’s grin held, but thinner now, his eyes flicking toward Tommy for any sign of approval. He received none.
“Close it." he said finally, his voice low but carrying.
Arthur blinked, turning from the weapons as if he hadn’t heard right. “Close it? Tommy—”
“Close it." Tommy repeated, his tone flat and final.
John hesitated with the rifle in hand, the steel catching a pallid gleam of the dockside light. “What the fuck for?” he shot back, disbelief thick in his voice. “Look at it, Tom. Enough iron here to tip the scales in our favour for years. We could—”
“We could draw every bastard from here to London if word gets out.” Tommy cut in, his gaze slicing toward John with a sharpness that made his brother’s grin die in his throat. “Guns like these don’t sit quiet. They talk. Loud. And every ear in this city listens when they do.”
The rifle seemed to gain weight in John’s grip, as though the warning alone had turned steel into lead. He slid it back into the crate with a clatter, hia lips pressing tight around the words he didn’t dare speak.
Arthur shifted closer, his boots crunching against the gravel. His jaw worked, the lines of his face hardening. “So what then?” he asked, a low growl beneath the question. “We just leave it? Walk away like it means nothin’?”
The metallic click of Tommy’s cigarette case broke the moment, sharp as a gunshot in the hush of the morning fog. He struck a match, the sudden flare of light painting the hollows of his face in fleeting gold. For a heartbeat he looked like a figure cast in fire, only to return at once to shadow when the flame died, leaving nothing but the steady ember glowing at the tip of his smoke.
“No." he said at last, the word curling out with a thin ribbon of smoke. “We don’t walk away. But we don’t rush in blind either.”
He turned back toward the yawning mouth of the container. The crates sat stacked in shadow, row upon row, each filled with the kind of promise that could topple empires.
Tommy’s eyes lingered on the darkness within, unreadable, as though he were staring not at wood and steel but into some abyss where only he could glimpse what came next.
“This isn’t about the guns.” he murmured. His voice was quieter now, almost lost to the sea-wind. “It’s about her.”
Arthur’s brows knit, his shoulders tensing as he followed the invisible thread of his brother’s thought. “Adelaide?”
The silence that followed was answer enough.
John’s laugh came sharp, too quick, and thinner than he intended. “Well...” he said, forcing nonchalance into his tone “she’s got a knack, I’ll give her that. Handin’ us an army on a silver platter.”
But Tommy’s lips curved faintly, and the shape it took was not a smile.
“She’s not handing us anything.” he replied, his icy eyes still locked on the dark container. “She’s showing us she can.”
The words settled heavier than the guns themselves, and for a moment none of them spoke. A gust of wind swept through the dock, rattling the loose chains against the posts, carrying with it the brine-stink of the water and the ghostly clang of distant metal. Coats flared in the breeze, boots shuffled on the planks, and still the silence hung thick, pressing in around them.
Arthur’s voice came at last, low and almost reverent, as if admitting a truth too dangerous to speak aloud. “Christ, Tom. What the fuck have we let into our house?”
Tommy didn’t answer. He only took another drag, smoke curling upward in a pale ghost between him and the fog. His gaze never moved from the crates, nor from the space beyond them where futures seemed to stretch, uncertain, inevitable.
Because he knew.
Adelaide had placed her first piece on the board, and the game had only just begun.
· · ─────── ·𖥸· ─────── · ·
The fire in the library’s hearth breathed its warmth into the room, its flames dancing against the dark-paneled walls until even the austere bones of Arrow House seemed, for a fleeting moment, softened by its glow. Yet comfort in that house was always an illusion: fragile, fleeting, gone as soon as one remembered who it belonged to.
Adelaide sat in a high-backed chair, a book sprawled open across her lap like some neglected confidant. The pages had not been turned in hours; her eyes, though fixed upon the lines of text, had wandered far beyond them. For two days she had tested the boundaries of her gilded prison, slipping past watchful eyes only to be dragged back, again and again, into the architectural skeleton of Arrow House. The men guarding her were as tired of the chase as she was. Today had marked her third attempt, and the third time she had been returned, the cage door closing softly but firmly behind her.
She was just beginning to stir, to gather her will toward the book again, when the quiet tread of footsteps broke through the hush of the corridor beyond. Not the heavy, careless stride of Arthur, nor John’s restless pacing...and not even Tommy's heavy, slow footsteps. These steps were measured, deliberate, carrying with them a feminine grace.
And sure enough, Adelaide’s instinct proved right. Polly Grey appeared in the doorway, as though the house itself had conjured her out of shadow and silence.
Her figure was sharp against the firelight: jacket cinched neatly at the waist, velvet gloves dangling from her right hand like relics pulled from a forgotten altar. Her hair, dark and wavy, was tamed beneath a scarf tied at her head in the style of a veil. She looked, Adelaide thought, like a woman who belonged both to the present and to something older, something immovable.
“Polly.” Adelaide murmured, her voice slipping into the still air like a bullet fired into the clear sky. The name was not quite a greeting, more an acknowledgment of her sudden presence. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”
The older woman stepped further into the room, her heels clicking against the polished wood, each beat echoing like the second hand of a clock.
“I know. It’s been busy days.” she replied with a faint sigh, the sound almost theatrical in its weariness, though Adelaide did not doubt its truth. Polly had the look of someone who carried both her own burdens and those of others. “How are you holding up?”
Adelaide closed the book in her lap with a decisive clap, dust rising from its untouched pages like ghosts of words never read. Her gaze flicked upward, sharp beneath her long lashes. “I can’t say I’m growing accustomed to life as a prisoner.”
Something like sympathy flickered across Polly’s lips, curving them into a faint, knowing smile. “Well...” she said, her tone carrying both warmth and steel, “that’s what I’m here for. Would you like to accompany me to church?”
For a heartbeat, Adelaide only stared. The invitation struck her like a stone cast into still water. Of all the things she might have expected, this was not it. Her eyes widened, dark and luminous, betraying her surprise.
“To church?” she echoed, the suspicion in her tone undercutting the softness of the question. She hadn’t set foot in a church in years: not since Sicily, not since leaving behind the walls that had both sheltered and suffocated her. “No.” she responded quietly “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
But Polly only arched her brows, the weight of her gaze suddenly sharp, commanding. “All right, then.” she concluded. “Let’s put it this way: accompany me to church.” The words, though spoken softly, struck like an order.
Adelaide searched the woman’s eyes, desperate for a crack in the façade, some flicker of jest. But Polly’s gaze was iron, steady and unflinching, softened only by the gravity of purpose. There was no mockery there, no kindness either. Only certainty.
And perhaps, Adelaide thought, perhaps this was her chance. To slip beyond the walls, if only briefly, to breathe air untainted by Arrow House. To step into a space where the walls did not belong to Thomas Shelby.
“All right then." she sighed at last, the words falling with the weight of reluctant surrender. “I’ll come.”
Polly’s smile deepened just enough to betray satisfaction. She looked like a woman who had expected this outcome all along. Slipping her gloves over her fingers one by one, she moved toward the door, her voice following her out into the corridor like a silken thread.
“I’ll wait for you at the entrance.”
And then she was gone, leaving only the faint echo of her heels and the lingering scent of cigarette smoke and lavender, as though the house itself had exhaled her.
· · ─────── ·𖥸· ─────── · ·
The church rose at the end of the street like a sentinel of stone, its spire vanishing into the morning haze, as though it pierced not the sky but some hidden realm beyond. The doors, swollen with age and memory, opened on a groan that carried centuries of prayers caught in their hinges, the sound lingering like an old hymn fading into silence.
Inside, the air was cool, tinged with the mingled perfume of candle wax, old incense, and damp stone: it was solemn, austere and unchanging. Sunlight fractured through stained glass, bleeding its colors across the nave in shards of crimson, sapphire, and gold, as though heaven itself had splintered and rained down upon the worn wood of the pews. Dust motes swirled lazily in the beams, suspended in the hush until even silence seemed made visible, a substance heavy enough to press upon the chest.
Adelaide lingered at the threshold. Her boots struck the stone floor with too sharp a sound, each step echoing back at her like a reprimand. She felt like a trespasser in a place that belonged to whispers and devotion, not to women who lived in smoke-filled clubs and survived on secrets. She could not remember the last time she had stood beneath a vaulted roof like this, years before the stage, before the velvet drapes of cabarets and the bars where liquor poured more freely than grace. Once, faith had been soft and familiar to her, like a lullaby of candles and murmured prayers. But somewhere along the road it had slipped away, like water through cupped hands, leaving behind nothing but the thirst of absence.
Now, surrounded by painted saints whose eyes seemed to follow her every step, she felt stripped bare, intruding upon something she had long since abandoned.
Polly moved with none of her hesitation. She advanced with the assurance of ritual, dipping her fingers in the font, the gesture clean and practiced, before tracing the sign of the cross across her chest. Her walk down the aisle was steady, unhurried, as though time itself bent a little for her within these walls. Sliding into a pew near the front, she drew from her pocket a black veil and settled it over her head with the solemn elegance of habit. In the beam of light that cut across her shoulder, the lace glowed silver for a heartbeat, then sank back into shadow.
Adelaide remained standing a moment longer, her gaze lifted toward the ceiling where the arches soared heavenward like vast wings caught mid-flight. She tilted her head back as if the weight of the roof might collapse under the burden of faith it held.
Polly noticed.
“You’ve not been in a church for a while.” she murmured, her voice pitched low, respectful of the hush, but carrying its own gravity. Her fingers smoothed the lace at her temple, yet her eyes rested fully on Adelaide, studying her with the same scrutiny one might give a passage of scripture, searching for hidden meaning.
Adelaide’s lips curved, the faintest shadow of a smile, as though she might dismiss the observation with a clever retort. Yet when she spoke, her voice betrayed her: a softness, almost fragile, slipping through the cracks.
“No." she whispered. “Not for a long time.”
The words did not echo. They fell into the stone and seemed to vanish there, as though the church itself absorbed confessions whether they were freely offered or unwillingly torn loose.
Polly shifted slightly, the veil catching the edge of a sunbeam, turning its black lace briefly into silver filigree. She reached across the wooden pew and patted the space beside her, her hand steady, her command cloaked in gentleness but no less resolute.
“Come sit here." she said quietly. It sounded like an invitation, but it bore the unyielding weight of instruction. “If you won’t kneel, then don’t. But don’t stand there like a ghost, either.”
Adelaide lingered, her gloved fingers curling around the carved edge of the pew before her, as though she needed to hold on to something solid, something real, before she allowed herself to cross the small distance.
For an instant, she considered keeping her distance, letting the shadows at the back of the church swallow her whole. There was safety there: in anonymity, in silence, in the quiet promise of being unseen. Yet Polly’s gaze pinned her where she stood. It was not a look of reproach, nor pity, nor even patience. It was something sharper, older. A look that did not accuse, but unwrapped. A look that could strip flesh from secrets without ever lifting its voice.
Drawn by that unspoken pull, Adelaide moved forward. The bench creaked beneath her as she sat, the wood cool against her palms, polished by years of restless hands and restless prayers. Along its edge, initials carved by parishioners long gone whispered of the living who had once tried to leave proof of themselves behind before the earth claimed them. She traced one such mark absently, wondering what face belonged to it, what burdens it had once carried.
Polly did not turn to her at once. She adjusted her veil with deliberate fingers, smoothed the fall of her skirt, and allowed the silence to stretch until it grew purposeful. Only then did she shift, her eyes lifting at last. Beneath the net of black lace, her gaze was keen, unwavering, heavy with the weight of questions left too long unasked.
And when she finally spoke, her words fell into the space between them like fog.
“I know what keeps you from places like this.” The murmur was low, yet its authority was unmistakable, the kind of tone born from a lifetime of listening to silences rather than words. “It’s not God you turned away from. It’s home.”
The sentence struck with the clarity of flint. Something deep in Adelaide recoiled at the spark, at the sudden illumination of places she had worked so carefully to darken. For years she had smothered it all beneath song and laughter, beneath rouge and stage light; but Polly’s voice tugged those ghosts loose like threads from a fraying hem.
Polly leaned closer, as though the saints themselves might strain to overhear. Her tone softened, became conspiratorial, a voice meant for secrets shared under the eye of heaven.
“Tell me, Adelaide… why did your family come to Birmingham? Why leave Sicily behind?”
The question lingered in the air, curling like incense smoke: impossible to brush away, impossible to answer without summoning the shades of memory. It was not curiosity. It was excavation.
Adelaide’s fingers trembled faintly as they traced an invisible pattern into the varnished wood of the pew. She lowered her gaze, unwilling to meet the sharpness of Polly’s, and instead let her eyes drift across the church toward the altar. Candles burned there in uneven rows, flames wavering in the drafts that haunted the stone. Their light bent and danced as if reaching toward something unseen, some truth just out of grasp.
And then the glow blurred into something else.
A wall, whitewashed and salt-stained, rising from the cliff’s edge where the sea battered itself against jagged rock. The thick scent of oranges ripening, then rotting, under a merciless sun. Voices, always men’s voices, hissing and hurried; conversations never meant for a child’s ears, but never hidden well enough to keep her from listening. The slam of a door, so hard it shook plaster from the walls. And her mother’s rosary, beads snapping like bones beneath desperate fingers.
The memory clutched her throat. For a heartbeat, she could almost taste the brine of the Mediterranean on her tongue, hear the iron in her father’s silence, feel the oppressive shadow of men who thought themselves kings.
Then, like sea foam sucked back into the tide, it was gone.
Adelaide blinked, steadying herself, gathering the fragments before they could betray her. She shaped her face into composure, lifting her chin, smoothing her mouth into a smile that was neither warm nor yielding but deft and elusive, a veil as carefully worn as Polly’s lace.
“Some things…” she whispered, her voice barely louder than the low drone of a hymn that drifted faintly from some hidden corner of the church, “…belong to the sea and the soil that bore them. They don’t follow you here. Not unless you invite them.”
Polly’s eyes narrowed, the lace of her veil casting faint shadows across her cheekbones, but she did not press. She had lived long enough to recognize a door bolted from within, and she knew that rattling the handle only made the hinges groan louder. Silence, wielded well, could be sharper than any blade.
Adelaide let her gaze fall to the stone floor, lashes fanning like dark feathers to veil the flicker of unrest in her eyes. Her voice, when it came, was quiet, almost reverent in the hush of the church.
“This isn’t the place, Polly. Not today.”
The older woman regarded her for a lingering moment, letting the words, and all the unsaid things they carried, settle between them like dust motes drifting in fractured light. Then, with a small adjustment of her veil, she leaned back against the pew. Her tone was low, steady, threaded with a calm that was more warning than comfort.
“One day, though…” A breath, soft as a feather. “One day you’ll have to tell me what ghosts you’ve dragged into this city. And when that day comes, girl, you’d better pray they’re the kind that can be bargained with.”
A shadow of a smile played across Adelaide’s lips, delicate as a crack in porcelain. Yet her hands, folded tight in her lap, betrayed her: the knuckles were pale, her fingers bound in tension. She said nothing, but within her chest she could feel the stir of those very ghosts Polly spoke of.
For a time, there was only silence. The kind of silence that belonged not to absence but to presence, a silence thickened by wax tears dripping from tall candles, their flames whispering secrets into the vaulted air.
Adelaide tilted her head, her green eyes sliding toward Polly with a sudden, sharpened curiosity. Her question left her lips scarcely above a whisper, a thread of sound that seemed almost afraid to break the solemn hush.
“Why did you bring me here, Polly? The real reason.”
The hush of the church devoured the words, lifting them upward into the soaring arches, into the beams of fractured light that slanted through stained glass, where saints stood immortal in red and gold. Somewhere near the altar, a candle guttered, its flame bowing against an unseen draft, as though even the walls themselves were pausing, waiting for the answer.
Polly, as ever, did not rush. She was a woman who understood the worth of silence, who knew that patience could be wielded like a blade or a balm. Slowly, she adjusted her veil again, each movement deliberate, measured, as though aligning not just lace but thought itself. When she finally turned, a smile curved her mouth: it was not sly, not mocking, but satisfied. The smile of a woman who had been understood without needing to explain, and who took quiet pride in being seen through.
“You already know." she replied sweetly. Her voice was low, unshaken, the cadence of a truth she had long carried like a stone in her pocket.
Adelaide’s brows arched, just enough to betray her disbelief. Yet Polly’s gaze held, unwavering. It was the gaze of a woman who had watched empires rise and crumble in her own lifetime, who had outlasted men, wars, and the grinding wheel of time.
“I brought you here..." Polly continued, her words unfurling in the echo of the church, “so you wouldn’t feel like a prisoner.” The arches caught her voice, softened it, and sent it back again like a muted prayer. “Tommy may be… whatever he is: soldier, leader, a man carved from smoke and iron… but he will not lock you in a cage. Not unless you give him reason.”
The certainty in her tone sank into Adelaide like a stone dropped into deep water, vanishing into the dark where it could not be touched but could still be felt. She looked away, her gaze climbing to the painted face of a saint above the altar. The gold leaf shimmered in the fractured light, solemn and unblinking. Saints never flinched. They never looked away. They only watched, silent witnesses to the bargains of the living.
Adelaide’s lips parted, then closed again, the unspoken questions curling back down her throat. She was not sure she believed Polly; not entirely. But there was no mistaking the conviction in the older woman’s voice. It was not the softness of loyalty nor the blindness of hope; it was the steel conviction of someone who had known Thomas Shelby long before the world had learned to fear his name.
Polly placed her hand upon the worn oak of the pew, her rings catching the candlelight, glimmering like small constellations scattered in the half-dark. She leaned closer, closing the air between them, and Adelaide caught the scent of polished wood, beeswax, and the faint metallic tang of dust.
“He doesn’t mean you harm, Adelaide.” Polly whispered, softer now, but no less certain. “But he will test you. Again and again. And you…” Her eyes swept over Adelaide, sharp and appraising: the delicate lines of her frame, the armor of her composure, the quicksilver intelligence smoldering in her dark gaze. “…You’d best be ready to pass.”
Adelaide turned her head, her angelic profile cut in pale relief against the candlelit gloom. A faint smile, fine and dangerous, touched her lips; something too honed to be mistaken for sweetness. “And if I fail?”
Polly’s expression did not shift. The veil framed her features in stillness, her mouth serene. But her eyes… her eyes deepened, sinking into a fathomless dark, a well with no end. There was warning in them, more terrible than words could carry.
“Then, girl…” Her voice was low, measured, final like the sound of a door closing. “May God help you."
Notes:
hi guys, here I am with a new chapter! i wanted to apologize for not updating in the last few days, I'll try to be a little more consistent <3
xoxo 💋
Chapter 13: Chapter XII
Notes:
listen to the official "smoke & silk" soundtrack playlist !! : https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3apZhfCcsYF2JSJXjlMPQU?si=MtLRAvxwRzynJcmFbqsDzg&pi=fACwKjKNQ5itT
Chapter Text
Adelaide had been called. Summoned, as though she were some trespasser dragged before a lord in his hall, guilty of pilfering fruit from a pantry that was never hers to touch.
The message had reached her in the garden, though to call it that was an act of charity, if not outright deception. Autumn had already laid its hand upon the earth, and the place bore the weary scars of neglect. The hedges, yellowed and uneven, wound themselves into crooked corridors that aspired to be a labyrinth but succeeded only in being an obstacle, a parody of Daedalus’s clever cruelty.
Among these shriveled green walls, flowers still clung stubbornly to life, though their efforts felt almost pitiful. The peonies and marigolds had not lost their color, yet somehow seemed dimmed, as though dulled by the heavy air. The roses were worse: prouting in fractured clumps along the narrow paths, their petals mottled and bruised. They resembled not blossoms but wounds, tender flesh left to fester in the open air.
And yet, for all this decay, the fragrance of the place was not unpleasant. The mingling perfumes of the flowers lent the air a sweetness that clung stubbornly, desperate to mask what lingered beneath. Adelaide, however, could not ignore the discordant note hidden in that perfume, faint but undeniable: the smell of endings. The smell of something beautiful left to rot. It was as though the air itself had absorbed death and now exhaled it in whispers, like essential oils I let evaporate on a corpse forgotten by all.
It struck her then: this was a garden for the blind. A place where one might be welcomed, even charmed, provided the eyes remained closed.
She remembered what Ada had told her once in this days, when she had found the woman seated with a newspaper in hand, frowning faintly at the state of the grounds. “Tommy only bothers with this place when he expects famous company.” Ada had said, her tone a mixture of exasperation and resignation. “Otherwise, he lets it go. He likes the wild to creep in. Thinks it’s balance.” Then, with a small sigh, the corner of her mouth quirking while she read with resignation the accounts of the events that had occurred that week in the news headlines: “Tommy’s not exactly the flower type.”
Adelaide had not needed Ada’s words to know it.
The garden itself bore his signature: not of care, but of deliberate abandon. Like everything else in his kingdom, it reflected his curious blend of control and chaos: cultivated in patches, but left to unravel just enough to remind anyone stepping inside that beauty, here, was never free of menace.
And now, summoned from this half-tended wilderness into the depths of his house, Adelaide could not shake the thought that she herself was being plucked from the garden like one of those fading roses: still fragrant, still alive, but already weighed down with the promise of decay.
It was not Mary who came to her with the news. Nor was it one of the Arrow House maids, those quiet little ghosts in aprons who slipped down corridors and vanished into doorways whenever Adelaide dared to wander the house in her restless boredom.
No, the summons came from one of his men.
The figure that approached her was all edges and shadows, a long face carved by sun and weather, marked by demons Adelaide dared not name. His gait was steady yet reluctant, each step pressing mud into the fading grass as though he resented every inch of ground that brought him nearer to her.
There was something hesitant in his expression, a pause caught between duty and distaste. His mouth opened once, closed again, as though unsure how to address her...or perhaps unwilling to speak to her at all. Messenger work was not the task of men who followed Thomas Shelby into fire and blood, and Adelaide knew well enough that the errand sat ill with him.
“Miss Adelaide…” The words were clipped, reluctant while his deep frame was casting its shadow over her, blotting out the thin rays of sunlight that strained against the blanket of grey sky. His voice carried the faint weight of rehearsal, as though he had forced himself through the line in his head before delivering it aloud. “Mr. Shelby is waiting for you. In his study. Yes… in his study.”
Adelaide inclined her head with a faint, diplomatic curve of her lips, the kind of acknowledgment that freed him of the duty as quickly as possible. He had no desire to linger, and she had no wish to keep him. A few heartbeats later, his boots had turned back toward the house, and she remained where she was, her heels pressing against the brittle remnants of what had once been a lawn lush and green.
For a moment she stood very still, her breath gathering in her chest. She had hoped, though hope was dangerous in this place, that her gift would be enough to sway him; to draw at least a flicker of concession from the man who held her fate in hands as steady as they were merciless. Perhaps he might even have been persuaded to see her proposal not as a challenge but as an offering.
Yet as she began her slow walk toward the house, toward the wolf’s den, as the thought burned bitterly in her mind, the certainty grew in her like a knot. Thomas Shelby would not be moved so easily.
The house loomed before her in its brooding stillness, its windows catching what little light the day offered like watchful eyes. She thought of the last time she had seen him: it was two nights ago, leaving his study with his brothers in tow, their faces carved in the grim mask of men who had heard too much and spoken too little. She had given them the location of the container, her voice steady, her posture calm, though inside her chest her heart had thudded like a prisoner’s fists against iron bars.
Since then, nothing.
For two days the brothers had vanished, leaving Arrow House to its silence. The staff had not fretted; they were accustomed to such disappearances, to weeks passing without their master’s presence. But Adelaide was not accustomed. Not yet. And she knew in the marrow of her bones that such absence was not mere neglect of duty or indulgence of secrecy. It meant something.
And whether that meaning was fortune or ruin, she would learn soon enough.
Adelaide advanced with her customary elegance, each step a measured gesture of composure. She knew the path well by now; every corridor, every turn, every shadowed corner that led to his study. Her heels struck the polished floor in a rhythm that seemed to echo through the hall like a metronome, each click merging with the solemn ticking of the clocks scattered throughout Arrow House.
The sound was relentless, ancient, as though time itself had conspired with the walls to remind her of its dominion.
The door to his study loomed before her like a sentry, tall and mute, its dark wood exuding the gravitas of secrets it had long kept sealed. He used the room as an office when Small Heath did not claim him, but here it seemed heavier, colder, as if the very grain of the wood remembered all that had passed inside. Adelaide noticed the silence at once: no fire in the hearth, no crackle of flame to soften the chill. The absence felt deliberate, an omen written in smoke that had never been lit.
She did not knock. She did not announce herself. Instead, with a slow and deliberate hand, she pressed against the door until it yielded, opening with the quiet sigh of hinges long accustomed to her intrusion. The room unfolded before her: dim, still, faintly scented with ink and stale smoke.
Thomas Shelby sat at his desk, hunched forward with the intentness of a man carving commandments into stone. His pen moved swiftly, tirelessly, dragging rivers of black ink across the pale expanse of paper. Each stroke seemed less like writing and more like the ploughing of earth: words sown like seeds, order forced into chaos with the sheer weight of will.
He wore round spectacles, an incongruity on his hard features, the glass slightly shrinking his pale eyes but doing nothing to diminish the sharp, glacial fire within them. The lenses might have softened other men, made them scholarly, approachable. On him, they only served as another mask, a new layer of armor disguising the predator beneath.
Adelaide slipped forward, her body carried not by eagerness but by something heavier, something inevitable. She lowered herself into the armchair that had, in the strange choreography of their encounters, become hers. Its worn leather seemed to sigh under her weight, as though welcoming back a familiar occupant. It held her as it always did, its fabric infused with the subtle ghost of her perfume, claiming her presence as though she were its rightful heir.
Tommy did not look up. Not when the door gave way to her hand, nor when the chair accepted her body. He remained bent over his work, the scratching of pen against paper steady and merciless. His hands were stained with ink, but he paid the blemish no mind; he simply continued, pouring words onto the page with the discipline of a man who knew that what he wrote was no mere correspondence, but the architecture of futures.
Adelaide lasted only a few minutes before the silence began to gnaw at her. The relentless ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece struck her ears like hammer blows, each second stretching taut until it quivered in the still air.
The ashes in the hearth, brittle remnants of a fire that had died days before, seemed to whisper a silence heavier than words. It was not the silence of peace, but the silence of something suffocated, strangled out of existence.
Her composure cracked.
“Did you like my gift?” she asked at last, her voice cutting through the hush like a blade unsheathed in a cathedral. The words dripped with irony, sharp and poisonous, meant less as a question than as a provocation.
Tommy froze, the pen in his hand pausing mid-stroke while the ink was swelling at its tip before falling in a dark blot on the page.
His eyes lifted to her: icy, unyielding, stalactites honed over centuries of dripping patience. Without hurry, he set the pen aside, as carefully as a philosopher closing a manuscript. Then, with the same deliberate calm, he removed his spectacles and laid them before him, their glassy lenses catching the light as though they too bore witness to this meeting.
When he spoke, his voice was flat, detached, carrying none of the weight his words ought to have. “The wedding date has been brought forward.” It was said as if he were reporting on the weather, or the tally of a hunt. Something that mattered to no one but the record.
The words struck Adelaide like a stone hurled into the sea of her chest. For a moment, she was no longer in that cold, airless room; she was back by the waters of her homeland, the waves of Sicily rising around her, dragging at her ankles, eager to claim her as they did the shipwrecks that littered their depths. She could almost feel the salt tightening against her skin, pulling her under, pulling her away. Yet she remained here, bound not by rope but by walls, a prisoner dressed in fine clothes.
“Why?” The question burst from her throat, ragged, venomous. Her hands clutched at the chair’s arms, her ivory knuckles pressing against the padded leather as though she might crush the very seat beneath her. “Why?”
His reply came like a guillotine. “It’s none of your business.” His gaze did not falter; it was calm, impenetrable, unbearable in its steadiness. He might as well have been carved from the very oak that made the desk between them.
But Adelaide knew. Oh, she knew.
He was afraid.
Afraid she would slip away from him, vanish like smoke into the streets of Birmingham, or worse, take with her the kind of secrets that could raze empires. She had been reckless, letting him see that she possessed such power. And now, like a sovereign desperate to secure his bloodline, he would bind her, chain her to him with a ring forged not of love, but of strategy and possession.
“We had an agreement." she spat, her voice quivering not with weakness, but with the effort of containing her fury. Every syllable was barked, defiant, echoing in the stillness of the room. “Information in exchange for liberty.”
“I never confirmed an agreement.” His words cracked the air like a whip. For the briefest of moments, his eyes flared: light flashing through the storm, quick as a falling star and just as ominous. “The wedding will take place. That is not up for discussion.”
His calloused hands came to rest against his chest, his fingers brushing the fabric of a simpler garment that had replaced his habitual three-piece suit. Even in this pared-down attire, stripped of waistcoat and chain, Thomas Shelby still carried himself with that inescapable aura of authority; an elegance sharpened by austerity. His voice, quiet yet certain, fell into the room like a pronouncement:
“You’ll be able to sing again.”
For a moment, Adelaide’s eyes, the eyes of a doe startled by moonlight, narrowed; her anger was congealing into something colder. The flare of rage that had risen in her settled abruptly, frozen in place, like a river turned to glass under winter’s command. Her heart lurched, unsteady, as though it too wished to believe him. For the smallest fraction of time, she allowed herself the indulgence of hope. It glittered faintly, fragile and foolish, like starlight shivering across the surface of a puddle.
Perhaps, despite all else, he might allow her this. Perhaps, bound as she was, he would at least leave her that fragment of herself.
But Thomas Shelby, who had learned to read hope the way gamblers read a table, saw it at once. The faint light that stole across her face, the tremor that betrayed belief. And for one fleeting second, something stirred in him.
Not warmth, not quite, but a shadow of it.
Pity, or its cruel cousin.
He crushed it at once, burying it beneath the same iron vault where he had buried far greater things.
“You’ll sing." he went on, his voice steady as a man stating the rules of a game he’d already won. “But you’ll sing for me. You’ll find out what I need to know.”
There it was. The trick. The catch. The poisoned hook beneath the silver lure. Of course. Thomas Shelby never offered gifts without extracting payment. Every liberty came shackled to its price.
Adelaide’s lips parted, but no sound emerged. Her throat had tightened around the words, strangling them before they could be loosed. Rage surged within her, climbing, clawing; yet her mind, sharp and tireless, clung desperately to clarity. She forced herself to breathe, to think, even as fury threatened to shatter her composure.
“You wouldn’t dare.” she hissed at last, her voice low, venomous, the hiss of a snake disturbed in its coil. Her fingers dug into the armrest, her nails carving crescent moons into the burgundy leather, the marks of her resistance etched there like scars.
“Oh, I dare.” Tommy replied, his calmness more violent than any shout could have been. He leaned back slightly, as though to let the weight of his words settle into her bones. “I dare as much as I dare report you for misprision of felony, concerning your… container. If you decide not to meet my conditions.”
Her body went still. The blood in her veins seemed to turn to ice. He was threatening her openly now, stripping the mask of civility away to reveal the steel beneath.
“Believe me, dear…” The endearment slipped from his mouth like an insult draped in velvet. “Prison doesn’t suit you.”
What Thomas Shelby threatened her with was, in the eyes of the law, a trifling offense: mere failure to disclose to the proper authorities the existence of a container filled with weapons left to languish in the port. But the law in Birmingham was no impartial deity.
Adelaide did not need reminding that half the constabulary carried his coin in their pockets and bent their heads when his name was spoken.
Justice was a set of scales, yes...but in this city those scales were his to tip, his to weigh, his to shatter if it pleased him. Whether she raged against it or not, the balance hung in his hands alone. And though it burned her pride to admit it even in thought, he was right. Prison was not for her. No iron bars would suit her skin.
Her voice, when it emerged, was sharp enough to cut through the thick air of the room. “Can I at least know the new wedding date?” The words were clipped, measured, spoken with a swallow of the anger that threatened to tear her apart. She did not give him an answer to his new terms, not aloud. But she didn’t need to. He knew, he always knew.
A curve touched his mouth then; not warmth, but triumph. The smile of a man who has already claimed the victory long before the battle has ended. “Next week.”
Adelaide’s body stiffened, her chair creaking under the sudden jolt of her shock. “Next week?!” The words escaped her like a cry of disbelief, the question falling between them like a weapon she had not meant to hurl.
“I believe I pronounced the words correctly the first time.” he replied, his tone carrying the sharp impatience of a schoolmaster forced to repeat himself to a slow pupil. “Yes. Next week. So you may begin preparing. As for your new role…” he adjusted the round spectacles once more upon his face, their lenses catching the pale light as he bent again to his desk. “We’ll discuss it after the ceremony.”
That dismissal, calm and deliberate, was the final spark to the powder keg inside her.
Adelaide rose with all the violence of a storm breaking free from the horizon, her movements so abrupt the air itself seemed to recoil. The door slammed behind her, reverberating through the house with the echo of a gunshot.
He did not look up. He did not see the angry tilt of her heels biting into the polished floor, nor the half-moons she had left impressed into the leather of the chair, furious scars carved by her nails. Thomas Shelby’s world rarely bent to such details.
He simply lowered his head, his pen returning to its slow, steady march across the paper. The ink bled into words, words into names, the dance of letters on the page momentarily blurring in his vision.
The wedding guest list had grown too long.
Perhaps he had to shorten it.
Chapter 14: Chapter XIII
Notes:
listen to the official "smoke & silk" soundtrack playlist !! : https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3apZhfCcsYF2JSJXjlMPQU?si=MtLRAvxwRzynJcmFbqsDzg&pi=fACwKjKNQ5itT
Chapter Text
“To Tommy!”
The roar shook the very bones of the Garrison, a thunderous tide that rattled its stained glass windows and sent froth cascading over the rims of brimming pint glasses. The clash of glass upon glass cracked like musket fire, echoing beneath the smoke-stained rafters. Amber rivers of beer ran down rough knuckles, spilling across the scarred wood of the tables, seeping into timber already heavy with the memory of a thousand such nights; timber that had drunk more liquor than most men and perhaps just as much blood.
Arthur’s voice had led the charge, raw and bellowing, the sound of a throat long scarred by shouting orders in trenches and curses in taverns. He stood like a conductor commanding chaos, thr pint raised high above his head as if summoning some ancient war god from the froth. John’s laughter split through the noise, high and wild, sharp as a wolf’s cry echoing across the wasteland of the night.
Michael, seated a little apart, did not howl nor pound the table. His glass lifted in time with the others, his lips curled into the faintest of smirks, but his eyes never ceased to measure. Always measuring. While Arthur devoured the revelry and John wore it like a crown, Michael dissected it, weighing every word, every glance, every stumble of a man too far gone in his cups.
The Garrison itself seemed to bow beneath their dominion. Tonight it was no public house. Tonight it was theirs: claimed, occupied, conquered. The air hung heavy with sweat and smoke, thick enough to choke, the tang of spilled gin clawing at the perfume of cheap cologne. Women moved through the haze like moths drawn to a flame, laughter trailing behind them in fractured ribbons and perfume catching on the sleeves of dark coats.
Songs rose and broke like waves against the walls: ragged chants of battles half-forgotten and verses spat out by throats drunk on memory and whiskey. Every note was jagged, every word splintered, yet together they struck like a hammer, pride seeping through the cracks. Cards slapped onto sticky wood, some coins clinked and spun, while boots drummed on the floor until the whole place shivered as though trying to keep pace with the pounding of so many restless hearts.
And at the center of it all, amidst the madness he himself had set into motion, Thomas Shelby sat.
Not at the head of the table, but set slightly apart, where lamplight thinned and shadows braided themselves into the smoke. He had chosen the penumbra as though it were a cloak, a half-light that concealed as much as it revealed. Before him, untouched, stood a glass of whiskey: its liquid holding the color of molten amber, the kind one might find preserved forever in a jeweler’s case, beautiful and unreachable. The cigarette in his hand smoldered faithfully, its ember pulsing like a heartbeat, keeping time with the rhythm of thoughts that never ceased their march.
Tomorrow, he was going to get married.
Arthur’s arm crashed around his shoulders with the weight of brotherhood and ale, dragging him forward into the revelry. His laughter was a rasp, already frayed at the edges, but full of a soldier’s insistence that celebration was owed even to doom. “Come on, eh? Tomorrow you’re a married man. Drink to it, brother! Drink like it’s your last night free!” His words were half-command, half-blessing, soaked in beer and affection.
John, already half-drowned in drink, slammed his pint against the table, spilling foaming ale across his boots without a care. “Aye, Tommy!” he barked, his grin sharp as a blade. “No bride of yours’ll keep you tame. Not you. Not ever!” His voice cracked into laughter, echoed and magnified by the roar of men around them, the Garrison swelling like a beast fed by smoke and liquor.
The crowd cheered, voices folding together into a chorus that shook the rafters and the sound of men drowning silence with noise. Yet Thomas only allowed himself a smile that wasn’t quite a smile: it was a ghost, a curl of lips that lived and died in the same instant, leaving no trace behind.
His mind had already slipped the noose of the pub. While Arthur thundered and John howled, while cards slapped wood and coins rolled like dice of fate, Tommy’s thoughts wandered away, beyond the smoke, past the laughter. Away from the stench of beer-soaked tables and into the echoing, chill corridors of Arrow House.
That damned woman.
His newest venture. His most dangerous wager.
His other investments had always been precise, clinical things: money that grew like vines across contracts, deeds that fattened into land, numbers that obeyed the strict law of balance sheets. He was a man who gambled only when the odds were already stacked in his favor. But this was not a ledger or a signed agreement. This was a creature of flesh and will, a woman whose beauty was not porcelain but steel disguised in porcelain’s sheen. A woman who had already bared her teeth at him, reminding him that even trophies could bite.
For the briefest breath of a second, he allowed himself to wonder whether the risk was too great. Not to the empire: it would stand regardless, its foundations mortared with iron, smoke, and blood; but to his control. To that fragile architecture of order he had carved out of the ruins of war and chaos.
No. The thought withered as he drew smoke into his lungs, then exhaled, letting the doubt vanish in the thin gray cloud curling toward the ceiling. She was only a woman. Clever, yes. Vexing, certainly. But lions had been caged before. He had made beasts kneel. He could make her kneel too.
Still, while Arthur roared out another toast and John’s laughter rattled the floorboards, Thomas Shelby did not join the frenzy. His eyes remained fixed on the glass before him, untouched, as though the drink itself held the answer to a question only he dared ask. It was not whiskey he saw, but a reflection of the war he alone was fighting, a battle not marked on maps nor measured in territory, but in silence, in glances, in the shifting weight of trust and betrayal.
At last, he reached for the chipped glass with the same inevitability with which a condemned man takes hold of his sentence. He lifted it as though it bore a mark of shame, a scarlet letter only he could see, and drank it down in a single swallow. The liquid seared his throat, flame racing through him like fire devouring dry grassland, settling in his chest with a burn that almost felt like triumph.
Tomorrow, he was going to get married.
· · ─────── ·𖥸· ─────── · ·
“To Adelaide!”
The toast rose like a spell cast into the air, and the answering chime of crystal followed, delicate and sharp, like coins dropped into the dark belly of a wishing well. Champagne foamed at the lips of the glasses, bubbles bursting like tiny bells as the sound rang through the living room. The fire answered with its own voice, crackling merrily in the hearth, sending out waves of warmth that kissed bare ankles and silk hems. From the gramophone, music spun lazily into the air, the notes curling like smoke, gilding the scene with a shimmer of gaiety that felt almost real.
The table had been pulled forward to clear the center of the room, leaving space for laughter, for dancing, for anything that might masquerade as joy. The clock above the mantel had struck nearly eleven, though its chimes were drowned by the noise of women’s voices, their chatter mingling with the restless stir of the dying ashes.
Arrow House, that sprawling mausoleum of wealth and silence, stood changed for one night. Its usual lords and soldiers were gone; in their place, queens reigned. Queens with cigarettes in their hands and shadows in their eyes.
Tomorrow, Adelaide was going to get married.
It was Ada’s idea: to dress the occasion in ribbons and laughter, to pretend the night before a wedding could be a celebration, and not a funeral of freedom. She had arranged it all, a small gathering to blur the sharpness of inevitability. Polly presided as she always did, her smile half smoke, half prophecy, a queen mother on her throne of shadows. Lizzy watched Adelaide with the calculating eye of a merchant inspecting fine silk before purchase, weighing its worth and fragility alike. Esme, untamed as the wind, regarded her with something closer to pity, her wild stare saying what her lips did not: she knew the curse of being bound to a Shelby, and it was no gift.
And there was Lina. Sweet, faithful Lina, who had flown to Arrow House the moment the letter had reached her hands, her excitement carrying her over threshold and into the lion’s den. She had come armed with laughter, with chatter, with the bright force of old friendship. But even she, with her eager warmth, could not lift the veil that hung over Adelaide’s shoulders.
The bride-to-be sat apart, wrapped in the glow of the fire, her face quiet as a painting and her glass trembling ever so slightly in her pale hand. The light kissed her skin in molten tones, turning her into both angel and prisoner, a figure caught between heaven and cage.
Adelaide sat curled in the armchair nearest the fire, her figure carved in gold and shadow by the restless flames. Each crackle painted her skin anew, the light stroking her bare legs like a lover before slipping away into darkness, leaving only the echo of warmth behind. Her eyes, however, remained cold.
They followed the whirl of Ada’s skirts as she danced clumsily with Mary in the center of the room, their laughter tangled with the scratch of the gramophone and the tipsy peals that spilled from Lina’s lips. A scene of joy. A painting of life. Yet for Adelaide, it was all dulled, as though viewed through a sheet of frosted glass.
Polly occupied the chair beside her, that familiar sentinel presence. She, too, was smiling, her lips painted by the pleasure of watching others revel, though her sharp eyes never ceased to probe. They caught the stiffness in Adelaide’s shoulders, the pallor behind the rouge. She drew deeply on her cigarette, the ember glowing like the last jewel in a dying crown, before letting her voice fall heavy into the silence between them.
“You’re not having fun, are you?” It was not a question but a verdict, slipped into the air with the smoke.
Adelaide swirled the champagne in her glass, the pale liquid rising in miniature waves that broke against the crystal walls. “You know it isn’t the party that troubles me. On the contrary…” Her voice was low, distant, like someone confessing through a veil.
Polly studied her a moment longer, then flicked her cigarette to the fire. The flames leapt greedily, devouring the stub and drawing it into the blackened company of ash. Her mouth curved in that familiar, almost cruel way. “I think I’ve already spoken to you about this.”
Adelaide’s grip tightened on the glass until her knuckles whitened. The crystal strained against her fingers, her fury caged but quivering. “He wants me to work for him.” she hissed, venom buried beneath her whisper. “He will let me out of the cage, but he’ll still keep me tethered. A leash disguised as freedom.”
Polly leaned back, bracelets clinking like distant bells...or like chains, delicate but unbreakable. Her face was caught in the dim glow, the hollows and lines of her age lending her the aura of something more than human, half oracle, half executioner. “So then it’s not the marriage you fear?” she asked, the lilt of sarcasm sharpening the edge of her words.
Adelaide’s gaze lowered to the floor, lashes casting shadows on her cheeks. “It is one of many.” she breathed, the words scarcely louder than the sigh of the fire, as though uttered within a confessional box.
Polly exhaled heavily, not in exasperation but in weary understanding. The sound was slow, thoughtful, curling from her lips with the scent of smoke and knowledge. She crossed her arms, her bangles chiming faintly as they shifted, the sound a delicate echo of the unseen chains Adelaide had named. “He told me about his plan.”
Adelaide ’s head turned just enough to catch her in profile, her features carved in light and fatigue. “And what did he tell you?” Her tone was flat, without hope, her face resting against her hand as her gaze drifted back to
Ada’s carefree twirling, a dance to music Adelaide could not hear.
“No more than he told you." Polly admitted at last. Her eyes fell to the intricate Persian carpet beneath them, to the neat arc of her black ankle boots planted firmly in the weave. And for once, ger voice carried something rare: a hint of defeat.
Adelaide’s lips curved into a bitter half-smile, one born not of joy but of irony, sharp and cutting as glass. “Enough..." she murmured, her voice carrying the weight of unspoken scorn, "...to understand it is not a plan destined to shine.”
“I don’t think so.”
Polly’s reply came quick, clipped, and yet accompanied by the faint lift of her chin, as though daring Adelaide to argue further. A low chuckle followed, one that drew the younger woman’s eyes to her in a flash, narrowed and burning with suspicion.
Adelaide had not expected that answer. She froze, her silence less a surrender than a test, waiting for the elder to unspool her thoughts.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that." Polly scolded with dry amusement, though her smile lingered at the edges like smoke. The rings on her fingers caught the lamplight and flared in little bursts of brilliance, jewels submerged in the murky waters of the room. “You and I both know that if you refuse him, if you tear down his plans, you’ll have nothing left to hold onto. And you—” she leaned forward, her calm voice dropping, “you are not a housewife. You never were. You never will be.”
Adelaide’s grip slackened on the glass she held, the tremor of her tension loosening. The champagne within still glimmered, half-forgotten, its surface quivering with every beat of her heart. She had not wanted to think of it: of after. After the ceremony. After the ring was sealed around her finger like a shackle. Surely, he would silence her singing; that was inevitable. But what then? What would remain of her once the music was gone?
Polly’s gaze softened, though her tone remained edged with that unyielding clarity she wielded like a weapon. “Your life may not be what it once was. That’s true. But at leas...at least you will still have a piece of it.”
The words fell into the room like a verdict, as conclusive as the snapping shut of a judge’s ledger. Polly’s eyes drifted back to the hearth, to the flames that writhed and cracked as though in answer to her attention. They bent and stretched higher, glowing with a fierce, almost human hunger, as if each fiery tongue longed to win her favor.
A piece of it.
Adelaide’s mind seized upon the phrase like a drowning woman grasping for driftwood. A piece. That was what she was condemned to fight for: fragments of herself, shards of freedom, scraps of the life she had once known. She saw herself like a queen robbed of her throne, walking among the ruins of her kingdom. To regain what had been usurped by her vassals, by her enemies, by her husband-to-be, she would need to wage a war of her own. One battle at a time, one piece at a time.
Adelaide sat transfixed, her gaze locked upon the fire as though its restless tongues of flame might part like scripture and reveal some hidden prophecy. She looked like a zealot awaiting the final sign of the world’s undoing, her thoughts sharpened into hard facets and her diamond mind glinting beneath the weight of indecision. Life stretched before her like a chessboard, each square a choice, each piece a consequence.
And she, cornered yet calculating, played the match as though her very soul were at stake.
It was as if heaven itself mocked her brooding, for Ada appeared at her side with the suddenness of a mischievous sprite, her voice buoyant and laughter spilling from her like uncorked wine.
“Come on!” she insisted, her cheeks flushed crimson with drink and her eyes glittering as though intoxication had stripped away the dull skin of sobriety and polished her into a more radiant version of herself. She seemed to blossom under the influence, freed from the drudgery that so often dulled her brilliance.
Her hands, warm and insistent, clasped Adelaide’s arm with the eager persistence of a girl who already knew she would win.
Around them the atmosphere had grown thick and sweet, the kind of intoxication no bottle alone could provide: the music, the perfume, the laughter of women creating a heady perfume of its own. Esme clapped her hands in time, egging Ada on, while Polly leaned back in her chair, observing with the faint curl of a smile at her lips. Even Lizzy allowed herself a ghost of amusement to soften her sharp edges.
At first, Adelaide resisted, stiff as a stubborn child pressed into Sunday Mass against her will. But then, with a sudden flare of defiance, she tipped her glass and drained it to the last drop, the crystal ringing faintly as it emptied.
The gesture was met with delighted cheers, Esme’s laughter rising bright and wild, and Mary’s softer smile; a tender glance that fell on Adelaide like a mother watching her child step hesitantly into joy.
And so, with her head light and her blood warmed, Adelaide allowed herself to be swept away. The gramophone’s melodies swelled, warped by the laughter and voices that spun like ribbons through the room. She twirled, once with Lina, then with Esme, skirts brushing against stockings and their hair flying free. The world bent beneath her feet, shifting, spinning, reshaping itself with every note of music. For a moment, it was as though life had tilted in her favor, the weight of tomorrow dissolved into the dance of tonight.
But only for a moment.
Tomorrow...
Tomorrow, she was going to get married.
Chapter 15: Chapter XIV
Notes:
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Chapter Text
“And you, Adelaide, do you want to take this man as your husband, to have her and keep her, to stand by him with loyalty and love, as long as you both live?”
The words drifted through the church like smoke: they were heavy, suffocating and impossible to ignore.
Adelaide did not answer. She stood motionless like a figure carved from ice, fragile and glittering, yet doomed to dissolve the moment she parted her lips. Her silence clung to the air with such weight that even the rustle of fabrics from the congregation’s shifting bodies seemed deafening. The frescoed saints, painted into eternity along the side aisles, peered down at her with unyielding eyes. Some seemed to urge her forward with divine insistence; others, she swore, were condemning her with their eternal gaze. And behind them all, she felt the human judgment of every pair of eyes in that suffocating space.
Two words. Only two. And with them she would inscribe her name in blood upon a covenant more binding than iron, sealing her fate in a book she would never again be allowed to open.
Her gown shimmered beneath the vaulted arches like liquid moonlight poured into human form. The ivory satin, cut on the bias with precise severity, clung to her shape in reverent silence before spilling into a train that pooled at her feet like a captive tide. The fabric caught the fractured sunlight filtering through the stained glass, flickering between purity and flame, as though mocking her with its duality.
The bodice was sculpted with cruel elegance: it was modest in design, the neckline rising high as if to cage her, softened only by lace so fine it seemed like frost spun upon glass. The sleeves traced the line of her arms in unforgiving embrace, narrowing into points that touched her hands like shackles adorned with beauty. Each pearl button fastened at her wrists glimmered faintly, fragile as tears, yet unyielding as chains.
At her waist the gown curved with quiet discipline, a whisper of grace tightly contained, before loosening into the waterfall of silk that trailed behind her. It was a dress meant to celebrate, yet it bound her with every stitch, every fold.
Adelaide’s fingers rose almost unconsciously to her throat, brushing against the cool surface of her mother’s pearls. They were the only treasure she had managed to smuggle away from the ruins of her home, rescued from the greedy jaws of creditors who had devoured the relics of her ancestors piece by piece, as carrion birds strip a carcass. The strand clung to her skin like a fragile tether, a secret link to a world that had once been hers.
For a fleeting instant she thought she heard her mother’s voice. Faint, delicate, barely more than a sigh. It came to her like a breeze through mulberry trees, mingling with the murmurs of the congregation seated stiffly in their pews. That familiar tone, soft as a lullaby, seemed to fold around her like arms once had, luring her mind away from the suffocating weight of the church and into the memory of someplace safe. Someplace that felt like home.
But illusions are fragile things. The brief sanctuary shattered at the scrape of the priest’s throat, sharp and deliberate, dragging her back into the present. His expression was puzzled, though not without a flicker of unease; he was waiting. Waiting for her to speak, to obey, to end this trembling pause that had stretched too long. He dared not provoke the groom. The air itself seemed to mutter that God alone could guess what consequences might follow if Thomas Shelby’s patience was tested at the altar.
Adelaide lifted her face. The tears had carved pale rivulets down her cheeks, catching the light until her skin gleamed almost as if sculpted from wax, kin to the Madonna of Sorrows who wept beside the altar. Her wide eyes, round and luminous with fear, were not the eyes of a bride but of a lost child searching for her mother among strangers.
Her tear-brimmed gaze lingered on the figure of Christ, wandering slowly across the carved wounds that marred his body. The painted rivulets of blood slid from his pierced hands and open side, frozen in eternal descent, an image of agony made permanent. And yet, despite the torment etched into his limbs, his face bore not the hollow mask of despair, but the calm radiance of a soul at peace. It was not resignation; no, something far greater. It was acceptance. A serenity carved out of suffering, unshaken even by the silent lament of the Virgin weeping just below him. Her sorrow was carved in stone, but his expression defied it, unmovable as the heavens themselves.
And there, in that dimly lit chapel, the sight of that impossible tranquility slid into Adelaide’s heart like a blade. It was absurd, perhaps, but it steadied her trembling soul. That statue, frozen above the priest’s bowed head, became a message written in silence: a message she had not thought she could hear again.
Memories surged back unbidden: echoes of catechism murmured in the musty air of Sunday school, verses once recited with a child’s unquestioning voice. She had long buried those fragments beneath years of bitterness, but now, as though summoned from the grave, they whispered to her again.
For the briefest instant, just the span of a heartbeat, she believed. She believed as she once had, when faith had not yet been strangled by reality.
And that heartbeat was enough.
“I do.”
The words slipped from her lips like shards of glass, sharp and fragile, yet held together by sheer will. Her diaphragm strained to steady them, forcing her voice into a brittle calm that threatened to crack with every breath. She blinked furiously against the tears that threatened rebellion, the faint redness they left behind only rendering her more ethereal, as though sorrow itself had carved her into an angel.
The vow did not emerge as speech so much as a confession, a whisper torn from her chest that seemed unfit for mortal ears. It floated upward into the vaulted arches, caught and multiplied by the stone, until it returned to the congregation as something larger than she had meant it to be.
It traveled through the church like a messenger bird, its wings dark and foreboding as it brushed the ears of the elders, who nodded with grim satisfaction at the sealing of this contract. Yet to the younger faces unscarred by the world, it transformed in flight, descending instead as a white dove, a promise of something they still dared to call love.
Thomas Shelby remained fixed in place, as unbending as a sentinel carved in stone to guard the threshold of some forgotten temple. If the words had reached him, he gave no sign; they slipped past him as though they were smoke curling upward, vanishing before it could leave a trace. Perhaps he had believed in them once, long ago, in another life where vows still bore weight. But not now. Not here.
What unfolded before his pale eyes was not a sacrament but the execution of a design: his design. He observed it the way a chess master might watch a final move bring about checkmate, not with joy, not even with relief, but with the cold satisfaction of inevitability.
Her voice, trembling though it was, had been to him nothing more than a seal pressed in wax, another entry marked in the vast ledger of his dominion. Ink and blood were the currencies with which he wrote his history, and now her soul had been tallied among them, as neatly as a figure added to a column of debts already collected.
The priest exhaled with the weight of a man spared from tension, his sigh thin yet unmistakably relieved. At last, the bride had spoken, and the ritual, with its heavy silences and unspoken threats, could proceed. He lowered his head in solemn approval, though the faint tremor in his hands betrayed a desire to be finished quickly, to escape the charged air that thickened beneath the vaulted arches.
“May the Lord bless these rings." he intoned, his voice rising with a fervor almost theatrical, far too bright against the shadowed stone of the church. “That you give to each other as a sign of love and fidelity.” His shrill words scattered through the aisles like startled birds, echoing against the saints’ painted faces.
Below the altar, a small cushion lay as if abandoned by angels, a square of velvet absorbing the weight of destiny itself. Resting upon it, two rings glimmered with a deceptive innocence, waiting like silent conspirators to bind flesh to fate.
Tommy’s hand moved first. Calm, deliberate, inexorable. He reached for the ring meant for her: a band of silver with a little diamond in the center. It was modest in its simplicity, yet in that moment it burned brighter than any crown. The light that filtered through the stained windows caught upon it, fractured and softened by dust, until the jewel seemed not metal but starlight itself, as though the heavens had stooped to reflect in a gutter’s rainwater.
Adelaide extended her hand, though her body betrayed her resolve more cruelly than words ever could. It was not the tremor of maidenly shyness, nor the flutter of some imagined girlish romance: it was the raw shiver of a creature balanced at the rim of an abyss, aware that a single step forward meant plunging into darkness. Her fingers, pale and fine as porcelain, quivered like leaves seized in the throat of a summer storm, too delicate to withstand its force.
Tommy paused, yet in that silence entire worlds seemed to hang suspended. His gaze, cold and unblinking, anchored her to the spot. At the corners of his lips a shadow of a smile unfurled, though it bore none of the warmth such gestures were meant to carry. It was the curve of triumph, the cruel amusement of a man who saw weakness where others might see fragility. He read her fear as though it were scripture and found in it confirmation of his dominion. Her pride, once sharp and untouchable, had faltered, and he took a quiet, ruthless satisfaction in watching it scatter like sand driven by a bitter wind.
When his hand finally moved, it was with the measured certainty of one who never doubted the outcome. His fingers, calloused and etched with the scars of labor and war, closed around hers. The contact stilled her trembling, though not with comfort; rather with the inevitability of iron pressing against silk. The contrast was almost violent: his grasp coarse, unyielding, the hand of a man forged in fire and grit; hers smooth, fragile, pale as carved ivory, and just as likely to crack beneath the weight of time.
The contrast of the rough enclosure of his hand against hers and the cold kiss of the band sliding over her skin sent a shiver rippling through Adelaide, sharp as the crack of frost on glass. It was as though the ice in his eyes had slipped from his gaze into her very veins, creeping slowly, mercilessly, like winter’s tide seeping beneath a door. The ring itself was beautiful in its austerity, a simple circle of silver, unadorned yet irrevocable, carrying a weight far greater than metal could measure.
A simple white stone glittered upon it, yet its gravity was undeniable: an eternal clasp disguised as ornament, a shackle disguised as a vow.
The world seemed to collapse inward until there was nothing but that circle binding her finger, closing around her like a snare set in silence. The air thickened, the murmurs of the church fell away, and for a moment she could not tell if she still breathed.
And yet, she did not recoil. Pride was her armor, and though dented, it still held. Even as her body betrayed her with tremors, she forced her chin upward, carved her terror into stone, and let him complete the ritual. Her defiance gleamed faintly, a shard of light trapped beneath glass.
She was a bride.
She was a captive.
She was both, at once, and the echo of that truth seemed to toll through her chest like a muffled bell.
The second ring awaited in its velvet bed, darker than the one now weighing on her hand, as if the craftsman who had shaped it had known instinctively that it was destined for a man who bore gravity like a crown. Adelaide’s fingers, steady now though her pulse hammered in her throat, lifted it from its resting place. Her touch was deliberate, slow, as if she were moving against unseen currents thick as tar, each gesture deliberate and each breath measured.
Tommy’s hand waited in the narrow space between them, steady and unyielding, suspended in the air like the outstretched limb of some marble effigy. It was a hand that bore the map of his life upon its skin: scars carved deep as rivers, calluses hardened into stone and lines etched like fault-lines across a continent scarred by war and conquest. Each mark spoke of graves filled, deals struck, enemies ruined. His palm was broad, his fingers long and resolute: less a man’s hand than a weapon softened by flesh.
Adelaide’s breath faltered in her throat as she reached for him. The act felt unnatural, almost profane, as though she were daring to touch a relic steeped in violence, a sacred thing turned dangerous by the history it carried. His skin was warm, yet the warmth did not invite her in. It was the heat of a guarded hearth, warning of fire that could consume rather than comfort.
Her fingers curled around his with the delicacy of someone handling a blade, every movement deliberate and every breath trembling. She lifted his hand as though presenting an offering at an altar, a sacrifice performed in silence before an audience of saints and sinners alike.
Slowly, carefully, he slid the ring onto his finger. The metal met his flesh with the inevitability of fate. The band tightened around him as though it had been waiting, as though it recognized its master, not an ornament but a seal of dominion. It looked less like a new possession than the return of something that had always been his, merely delayed until she was the one to crown him with it.
Tommy’s eyes never strayed from her.
Unblinking, unyielding, they fixed on Adelaide as though she were an equation he meant to solve, a cipher whose every hesitation, every tremor, revealed more than words ever could. When the ring settled against the base of his finger, he flexed his hand with the barest movement like a man testing the weight of a chain he had clasped upon himself, not in weakness but in choice.
For Adelaide, the gesture did not echo the moment when he had bound her with his own hand. No cold dread clawed at her ribs this time. Instead, irony rose sharp in her throat, acrid and cutting, a poison-tipped laugh she could not allow to escape. She, the prisoner, was crowning the jailer. She, whose wings had been clipped, was fastening the clasp around the one who had built the cage. There was a dark kind of triumph in the act, a flicker of rebellion hidden within submission, though she alone could taste it.
The church hushed, the air dense with candle smoke and the breath of dozens held captive by the moment. And then, like a gavel falling in some higher court, the priest’s voice rang out: solemn, resounding and unyielding.
“You may now kiss the bride.”
The congregation stirred, a single body leaning forward in breathless anticipation, as though they were about to witness the sealing of a covenant older than law and holier than scripture. A murmur swelled and fell like the tide against the stone walls, restless, expectant.
Adelaide stood fixed in place, a sculpture in human form like marble clothed in satin, too lifelike to be stone yet too still to be flesh. Her lashes sank slowly, veiling the world, shutting out the blurred riot of colors from the stained glass, the thousand eyes pinned upon her, even the presence of the man who bound her fate. Darkness gathered behind her eyelids, merciful and complete. She clung to it the way a condemned soul might cling to prayer as the blade was lifted above their neck. Let it be quick, she pleaded silently, let it pass before I feel it.
Then she felt him. Not the kiss, not yet, but the shifting of air as he leaned closer, his shadow stretching to cover hers, his nearness pressing against her like the weight of inevitability. His breath grazed her ear before his lips ever threatened hers, and with it came words, low enough to be mistaken for a thought, meant for her and her alone.
“I’ll avoid making this day even more tragic for you. I'll have my satisfaction later.”
His voice was a blade sheathed in velvet, its edge concealed beneath a note of quiet amusement, dangerous and delicate, like silk stretched so thin it threatened to tear.
Her heart clenched as if gripped by an unseen fist from the cruel lucidity of his words; the dagger’s twist that proved he not only understood her loathing, but chose to brandish it against her. He had read her as he read every man in a room, stripped her thoughts bare, and used them as his weapon.
And then, he kissed her.
Not the kiss prescribed by the priest, nor the binding seal the crowd so hungered to see. His lips brushed only the corner of hers, the faintest graze, fleeting as a shadow at dusk. But enough to leave its mark on her skin.
It was not affection, not even ownership, but the careful staging of a scene, precise enough to trick the eye of the beholder. To the church, it appeared complete: the ritual satisfied, the devotion proven, the marriage sealed.
But to Adelaide, it was something else entirely: a mercy wrapped in mockery, a reprieve that tasted of humiliation.
Applause erupted like a storm breaking against the stones of the church, thunder rolling through the vaulted ceilings, ricocheting from saint to saint in painted silence. The illusion had taken root. To the congregation, it was not a ghost of a kiss but a pledge: an anointing of love, of unity, of strength tempered by tenderness. They saw what they longed to see, and no more.
Near the front, Polly did not rise with the tide. Her rings, sharp as talons catching stray shafts of light, glimmered as her hands remained still in her lap. Her gaze was fixed upon the couple, unflinching, as if weighing scales only she could read. In her expression lay something between approval and omen: a quiet recognition of the game being played, and a warning that no mask ever stayed on forever. Only after a measured pause did she bring her palms together, each clap slow, deliberate, carrying the gravity of a verdict passed down in silence.
Ada, by contrast, leapt eagerly into the wave of celebration, her hands striking together with bright ferocity and her smile stretched wide enough to convince even herself. Yet her eyes told another story: a small fracture at the edges, a flicker of unease, as though she alone could feel the invisible weight pressing down on Adelaide’s shoulders like a veil heavier than lace, heavier even than the vows just spoken.
Arthur’s laughter erupted like cannon fire, shaking the air and rolling through the pews with the ferocity of a man who had seen too much war and yet found triumph in the smallest of battles. His palms crashed together, the sound more like blows than applause, as though the kiss were not a ceremony but a victory claimed in a blood-soaked ring. “That’s it, brother!” he thundered half-rising from his seat, his chest swelling with pride and drink and his voice booming above the chorus of claps.
John, by contrast, leaned back with the languid ease of a man watching a play unfold from the shadows of the stalls. A crooked smirk tugged at his mouth as he nudged Esme with his elbow, his tone teasing yet edged with something keener. “See that? Cold as stone, our Tommy, even at the altar.” The words were a jest, but his gaze lingered where jest ended: sliding between groom and bride, reading the pale stillness etched into Adelaide’s face, the tension stitched in silence. It was not laughter he sought in her, but meaning; as though her expression carried a riddle none of them had yet solved.
Finn, seated further down, clapped too, though not with the boisterous fervor of his older brothers. His palms met with a hesitant rhythm, as though he were unsure whether to celebrate or to pray. His boyish face, still caught somewhere between youth and manhood, flushed pink beneath the church’s filtered light. His eyes found Adelaide more often than they should have, lingering a fraction too long on the curve of her profile, on the sheen of her gown that seemed spun from starlight. There was admiration there, dangerous in its innocence. He cheered for her, yes, but his applause held something softer than triumph.
Michael, instead, kept his silence. He did not waste his voice in cheer or jest, but let his eyes do the speaking. Sharp as fractured glass, they lingered on Adelaide: on the unnatural stillness of her frame, on the faint tremor that rippled through her fingers long after the ring had bound them. To others, it was ritual complete, romance sealed. To him, it was the echo of iron bars sliding shut, the final clink of a lock turning. And Michael, more than any of them, knew how to recognize the sound of captivity disguised as ceremony.
Behind him the pews thundered with applause, a tide of clapping hands and ringing voices. Family, acquaintances, hangers-on, the curious who had come to watch Birmingham’s power wed beauty; they roared as if watching a coronation. In their eyes it was union, alliance, even love. But Adelaide heard their joy as one hears the laughter of vultures, circling, feasting upon spectacle. None grasped the truth, save for a rare few who carried eyes sharp enough to pierce the veil.
And in the center of it all, Thomas Shelby. His hand clasped hers with unyielding steadiness, an anchor disguised as comfort. His face betrayed nothing, calm as if the act had cost him no effort, no thought at all. He remained the sculptor admiring his work, the master of the illusion: untouched, untouched entirely by the spell he had cast.
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