Chapter Text
“There are too many of these fucking people in this fucking town,” Gellert mumbled into his forearms, and across the table from him, Cosmo softly laughed, shaking out his hair.
Like his father, he wore it long, but it was thicker than Pike’s, and it sat in a cloud of volume on his shoulders, blond streaked with lilac. Cosmo had a delicacy to him that neither Pike nor Damien carried with them – he was limp-wristed and moved with a natural sashay, and spoke with a lisp he often tried and failed to repress.
“We could take a few more of them out for you, Mr Osgodby,” he said – damn near simpered - and Gellert raised his face from the tabletop and rested his chin on the backs of his hands.
Cosmo smiled at him, one of his feet reaching out to brush against Gellert’s under the table, and Gellert looked at him very flatly before Cosmo sighed in a put-upon manner and drew his foot back. Leaning back in his seat, he tipped his head back against Damien’s hand, which was rested on the back of his chair.
Damien was standing up straight, his expression blank, his lips pressed loosely together. Where Cosmo’s hair had volume to it, Damien’s had almost none – his eyebrows were a darker purple than Cosmo’s, and he let stubble grow messily across his cheeks rather than keeping himself clean-shaven as Cosmo did. His hair, lank and thin, had enough length to come down around his ears, but it was for lack of care rather than, Gellert supposed, a particular intention to grow it out.
Gellert looked up and down the table, at the various members of the family gathered in place – Raquel, who wasn’t even pretending to pay attention, and was catching up on the chapters of the book other guards had read with Gellert’s mother as Raquel took a few days off from being her guard; Vixen Sett, who was scrolling on their phone, but was paying more attention than they seemed to be; Eddie Sinclair, Gellert’s personal bodyguard, who was looking at Gellert.
He rarely looked at anybody other than Gellert.
“What do you think, Edward?” Gellert asked, and Sinclair looked at him, looked to the twins.
“Well,” he suggested helpfully, “I could take out a few of ‘em too.”
“Anybody else?”
A few hands went up around the table, and as Gellert put his head in his hands they all started laughing.
“For God’s sake, people,” Gellert said, “stop winding me up. Please.”
Acacia Fleming took up a different whiteboard pen and stood in front of the board, her hands on her hips.
The names listed there were numerous and split loosely into columns, and they’d separated the columns out into three loose rows, roughly separated by generation. The Renns were in the lefthand column, the Sorrels in the right, and there were a great many lines drawn between each side, tracking business relationships, personal relationships, any connection they had a record of.
Toward the top of the board, where the eldest family members were listed, the connections were rather few and far between – as the names got lower, more and more strands connected names on the left and right side of the board, and the more connections they made, the sicker Gellert felt.
“From the top,” Gellert said, rubbing at his temple as though it were going to do anything to soothe the migraine threatening him. “Take us through it.”
“The Sorrels came to Lashton in the early 20th century,” Acacia said. “They settled here – they’d previously been involved in smuggling operations here and there, especially between here and Ireland, but that became a lot harder for them after the Rising, and even more so with the second world war. They ended up sticking around and establishing themselves more solidly here – they had their own contacts for selling highs and medicines, they smuggled a little.
“At first, they struggled to get a foothold here, ‘cause they couldn’t shake our hold on the city, and they didn’t have a hope of competing with the Kings or the Laithes, because a lot of their biggest work was legitimate stuff, you know, real estate, farm management, shipping companies. Bit by bit, though, they built it up – they did a lot of complex and layered magical highs, got involved in blood farming.”
“We never got involved in blood farming?” Raquel asked.
“Daddy got too involved,” said Cosmo. “And there’s laws about farming from pregnant people.”
“The Renns came into the city a lot later,” Acacia went on. “They came in during the 70s from Ukraine, established themselves here. They got into engineering and gadgetry, a little weapons design and trafficking, a lot of innovative smuggling. They took up territory fast, and they made money fast.”
“I remember,” muttered Raquel, looking back to her book. “That pissed Daddy off.”
“Both families grew quite a lot of wealth quite quickly,” Acacia said. “New money, not so much like the Kings and Laithes – they couldn’t establish themselves in the same way precisely, could never present themselves and their businesses as legitimate. In recent years, though, that’s changed a little – with the youngest generation having such a big online presence, such big social media followings, they have a lot of broad appeal.
“They’ve done a lot of collaborations with one another, a lot of online brand deals, and there’s something rather appealing in them as figures – the Renns and Sorrels respectively have a sort of salacious appeal to them. They’re doing numbers on their socials, and it’s exciting, ‘cause are they mobsters, aren’t they…?”
“And it started out as brand deals,” Gellert said, “but it became… personal.”
“The Renns and Sorrels were pushed close together by the rest of us,” Acacia said bluntly, shrugging her shoulders. “You know yourself, Mr Osgodby – when you worked with the Kings, you were friendly enough with the Laithes, and while we’re not exactly friendly with those guys like they are with each other, we have agreements with them here and there, over territory, over people, shit like that. We haven’t got anything fucking like that with the Renns or the Sorrels – Lucien always hated them and wouldn’t give them an inch.”
“A lot of us go to the same schools,” Cosmo added, tapping his fingertips against the table. “But Ace is right – a lot of us go to school together, and then we either go into the business or we don’t. Lines are drawn, boundaries, expectations. We’re told there’s stuff we can and can’t do with other members of Lashton families, and they don’t get that as much.”
“The older generations, they’re pissed about it,” Raquel said. “Felix Renn, he was fucking red in the face over this shit, screamed himself so hoarse our guys didn’t need a man inside to really spy on what he was saying.”
“But the younger ones are holding fast,” Acacia said. “They’ve spent time together all this time, gone to school together, grown their businesses together, and now, two of them want to get married… Why should they split apart now? Why shouldn’t the two families converge from the bottom up? Blend?”
“It’s been a month since the announcement,” said Sinclair, “and some of them are already softening. Margaretta Renn’s mother and father, they were obviously against it before, but it does seem like that’s changed a little – they weren’t seeing one another in person, but after the engagement party, they’ve been meeting up a few times, even went out for a public dinner. Not just Margaretta, but her and Bran, with the parents and the siblings.”
“You’ve been invited to some of their parties, the two of you,” Gellert said, and Damien and Cosmo looked across at him with twin expressions of faint surprise at being called on. “Younger Kings than you – Laithes and Kings, what about them?”
“Some of the Kings,” Cosmo said. “Righteous, Grandiose, Gorgeous.”
“Virtuous,” rasped Damien.
“The youngest of the active Laithes is Dai, and until recently, he hasn’t been…” Acacia trailed off.
“Until recently, yes,” Gellert murmured, thinking of the Dai Laithe he’d seen at the engagement party, no longer shaking like a chihuahua, but drugged to his gills and learning to exude some of his father’s confidence and sex appeal. “My point being, is this a concern for all of our juniors? Are we to witness a melting pot of the five families, all of them together?”
“Not for us,” said Cosmo. “Daddy would kill us.”
He said it without any hesitation at all, as though it were something completely obvious, and Gellert looked around the table, at the ashen faces of the little committee he’d assembled – Damien and Cosmo were each very grave, and Raquel looked a bit green.
“He’d do worse than that,” she muttered, and Cosmo bowed his head, hiding his face with the curtain of his thick hair.
“Mr Pike seems to think that we needn’t involve ourselves, needn’t intervene,” Gellert said quietly. “He’s of the opinion that neither Oidhche Laithe or Noble King will intervene – I don’t know that I should like to wait on those odds. I should rather interrupt this little union sooner rather than later.”
“You want to kill them,” said Damien.
“Killing them isn’t enough,” Gellert replied quietly. “Killing them will just make them grow closer together – if we start picking them off, they’ll ally themselves to start fighting back. No, Mr Pike, if we’ve any chance of preventing consolidation on their parts, we would be best suited to have them cannibalise one another.”
“How the fuck are we supposed to do that?” asked Sinclair, and Gellert smiled.
“Oh, we’ll figure something out,” he said softly. “It’s simply how business is done.”
* * *
The point of keeping Eddie Sinclair was to prevent Gellert from being kidnapped by one party or other.
It went rather against the point of things when someone chose to kidnap them both.
“Hullo, Mr Osgodby,” said Oidhche Laithe’s bodyguard, crouching down in front of him. When he’d grabbed Gellert from the back as three other men had gotten hold of Sinclair, he’d very carefully kept his fingers out of reach of Gellert’s mouth, and had managed to force the knife out of his hand before Gellert had been able to cut him.
He hadn’t been prepared for the enchanted spurs Gellert had extended from the heel of his boots, and his suit trousers were torn open on the lefthand side, blood staining down his leg and spattering over his ridiculously large shoe.
He’d taken Gellert’s glasses off and put a blindfold on him for the journey, and he’d put them back on him now – he hadn’t gagged him, but he’d tied his wrists and ankles very well, and Gellert hadn’t managed to get himself free, although he’d cursed the whole time from the back of the car.
“Can I get you anything to drink?”
Gellert stared at him stonily, and the bodyguard faltered and stumbled back, moving across the room. They were in an office of some sort, and after Laithe’s man had opened up the door, he came and cut free Gellert’s wrists and ankles.
“Mr Sinclair as well, if you would, he poses no danger to you,” Gellert said sharply, and the bodyguard looked nervously at Gellert, then across as Oidhche, who sidled into the room with his hands in his pockets, his suit jacket resting on his shoulders.
“Are you alright, Mr Osgodby?” asked Sinclair as soon as the guard had pulled the gag free from his mouth.
“I’m fine, Edward,” Gellert muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose under his glasses before settling them back.
Bridie, Huw, Ariana, and then Dai came in, and Gellert sat in silence, massaging his grazed wrists to encourage blood back into them, watching as Ariana sat down at the office desk and opened up a laptop, presumably to take notes; Bridie, Huw, and their father took seats across from Gellert and Sinclair.
Dai stayed standing with his hands in his pockets – like his father, he was dressed in a dark blue linen suit, although unlike his father, he didn’t wear his suit jacket, only the trousers and shirt. His eyes once again had that medicated quality they’d had at Bran and Margaretta’s, a sort of glaze painted over them even though he seemed active and engaged. His shoulders were back against the wall on one side of the door, and the bodyguard mirrored his position on the other side of it, his arms crossed over his chest.
Ariana was dressed in a blouse and pencil skirt, though Bridie and Huw were dressed a little more casually, both of them in jeans.
“Could you not get through to us, Mr Laithe, by telephone?” Gellert asked quietly. “Misplaced my email address, perhaps?”
“We, uh, we thought it was best to avoid your Daddy’s involvement to start with,” said Oidhche smoothly, shrugging his jacket off his shoulders. Dai came forward and took it off him, hanging it off the back of his chair as Oidhche leaned forward, his elbows on the arms of the chair, one long leg crossing over the other.
Gellert looked down at his ankle, which was very tanned – Bridie and Dai shared their father’s olive colouring, although where Dai had thick, dark hair and dark eyes, Bridie’s hair was a shining, burnished red. Huw had flinty eyes and pale blond hair, and Ariana’s colouring was lighter as well, but the father’s resemblance was still present between the five of them, even with two different mothers at play.
Oidhche liked tanning salons, liked to sunbathe, liked to swim under the sunshine.
“And not your secretary’s involvement either?” Gellert asked, and although he addressed the question to Oidhche, he looked across to Ariana, who looked up over the laptop screen at him and smiled politely.
“Oh, Cerys is off this week, Mr Osgodby, she’s with her girlfriend in Blackpool. I said I’d do the minutes instead, save you doing it.”
“That’s nice,” Gellert said dryly. “I suppose with so many of you, it’s no easy feat to neatly schedule a kidnapping.”
“Now, Mr Osgodby, not a kidnapping,” purred Oidhche. “Just, uh… An impromptu meeting of minds, huh?”
“Huh,” repeated Gellert coolly.
“You mind if I smoke?”
“By all means, Mr Laithe.”
Dai pulled the cigar case out of his jacket and held it out to his father to take – at the same time Gellert leaned forward with the lighter from his own pocket, Laithe’s guard leaned forward ready with a match, and Oidhche chuckled.
“Don’t you boys know how to make a girl feel pretty.”
“Christ’s sake,” muttered Huw, rolling his eyes, and Gellert saw that Bridie also had a cool expression on her face – Dai, at least, seemed to find it somewhat funny, and Gellert lit Oidhche’s cigar as his guard leaned back again.
“Get some drinks for us, would you, Friday?”
“Yes, sir,” said the guard, and walked across the room to the set table to one side of the little office, beginning to pour out glasses of water.
“You know why we have you here?” Huw asked, and Gellert exhaled.
“I can only assume you’ve been having the same meetings we have,” Gellert said quietly, “as to our response to the Renn-Sorrel business. The same meetings I would expect the Kings are having themselves.”
“Dad said you guys didn’t see it coming either,” said Bridie, and Gellert met her gaze, looking at her seriously.
It felt rather surreal, being in this room, across from Oidhche Laithe and four of his children, two of them his most senior lieutenants – in all his time with the Kings, he’d made contact with many high-ups in the Laithes, the Pikes, to a lesser extent the Renns and Sorrels, but it had never been like this. He’d always been a facilitator in his managerial roles, primarily working with other like-minded facilitators, guards, grunts.
Lucien Pike did not really keep serious lieutenants, didn’t have the same robust hierarchy that the Kings and Laithes did, nor the somewhat wider-spread, although no-less neatly organised, ones of the Renns and Sorrels.
Or he hadn’t, until recently.
Gellert hadn’t been kidnapped as Pike’s secretary, the man closest to his ear – he’d been brought here because he was, for all intents and purposes, Pike’s second-in-command.
“Cosmo and Damien were blindsided, even, I don’t know about Dai here, but I would guess than Siân and Dag were likewise taken aback. I don’t know that your family experienced quite the same thing that the Kings and Pikes do, but I am given to understand that it’s rather usual for the five families’ children to work and live alongside one another. There are only so many schools in this city, after all – gang affiliations are not taken seriously until later on, for the most part, and for those of you who are not active in the business – less relevant, I know, in your family than in ours or the Kings’ – certain cordial relationships can be maintained.”
“Not relationships like this, though,” Huw said quietly. “Not a marriage.”
“Your father’s slept with Verdance Pike,” said Gellert.
“Hey, hey, hey,” said Oidhche, exhaling smoke as Huw pulled a face and Dai’s blankly medicated expression faintly crumpled. “Verdance Pike slept with me, Osgodby. I was a real catch at that age.”
“My apologies, Mr Laithe,” Gellert demurred sardonically. “Verdance Pike slept with your father, Mr Laithe. And your brother Cassian has had relations with various of the Kings, I’m sure – of the Kings that I might think of, Courageous had flings at school with various of the young Pikes. I wouldn’t claim to have my finger to the pulse of heterosexual youth in Lashton Town, but I’m sure there are various cross-gender partnerships of similar lilts.”
“The fuck is that supposed to mean? Cross-gender? You mean straight?” Huw demanded as Oidhche laughed and behind him, Dai’s lips twitched – Ariana hid her mouth behind one hand, typing with the other only for a few moments, and Bridie was pressing her lips together to keep from laughing.
“Mr Osgodby is gay, Mr Laithe,” said Sinclair helpfully, and Oidhche made a softly wheezing sound around his cigar as he tried not to laugh too hard, because Huw’s pale cheeks had turned a darker colour.
“You don’t fucking say,” he said darkly.
“I’m sure you’re used to the experience of being outnumbered, Mr Laithe,” said Gellert, faux-pleasant, before asking, “What input from myself and Mr Sinclair were you hoping for?”
“We don’t give a fuck about what he thinks,” said Huw, waving a dismissive hand in Sinclair’s direction, which made him frown and look down at his knees. “Osgodby, what are the Pikes planning?”
“Planning, Mr Laithe?”
“You gonna kill them?”
“Me?” Gellert asked, raising his eyebrows and looking at Huw seriously. “Mr Laithe, I’ve never hurt anybody in my life.”
Huw didn’t find that funny – Oidhche and his daughters did, though, and Dai smirked, the expression pulling very slowly across his heavily-medicated features.
“Why, are you planning to kill them?”
“We can’t do it.”
“Can’t you?”
“Not without consequences.”
“Oh, I see, and we’re immune from consequences, are we? Is that your hope, Mr Laithe, that the Pikes will step in to eliminate the youths of the Renn and Sorrel families, and bear the violence in retort?”
“We’d offer support,” said Huw.
“I might be a good deal younger than you, Mr Laithe,” said Gellert, “but I wasn’t quite born yesterday.”
Huw stared at him coldly.
“Do you think I can try now, Huw, if you’re done smashing your head into the wall?” Bridie asked, looking across at her older brother with a rather snide look on her features.
Gellert made eye contact with Oidhche, who sat between his son and daughter looked more than somewhat amused by the situation. Meeting Gellert’s gaze, he exhaled smoke and spread his hands in a powerless motion.
“You’re not going to kill them directly,” Bridie says, “and we know that. We assume you guys have some sort of scheme in mind.”
“Scheme?” Gellert repeated. “You think Mr Pike has a scheme?”
“You’re the schemer, Mr Osgodby,” said Dai in a faint and hazy voice from his place next to the door. “We all know that. All kinds of things have started changing in Lashton since you joined Mr Pike.”
“I can’t take credit for all of them, Mr Laithe,” said Gellert quietly, and Dai’s eyes seemed to darken as he concentrated on Gellert’s face. Gellert wondered how much concentration it took, the amount of meds he was taking these days, far more than he had before, Gellert was certain.
“Can’t you?” Dai asked.
“We could work together,” said Bridie. “Our family and yours. In our round table discussions, we initially talked about doing a Godfather-style elimination, you know. We all spread through the city, kill off all the Renns and Sorrels at once.”
“Was that your idea, Miss Laithe?”
“It was mine,” said Ariana.
“The youngest of the Renns is Anastasia – she’s two. The youngest of the Sorrels is Hugh-Patrick, he’s four, I believe. Which of these babes in arms would you slit the throat of, Miss Laithe?”
Ariana stared at him over her open laptop, her expression greying somewhat. “We wouldn’t— Not the kids, Mr Osgodby.”
“Not Natasha Renn, then – she’s seven.”
“No.”
“Evan, he’s nine.”
“No.”
“Vincent and Lukah, they’re twelve: the twins.”
“Mr Osgodby—”
“Ada Sorrel is fifteen, and rather a capable butcher.”
Ariana wrinkled her nose, leaning back slightly. “What? Mr Osgodby—”
“Miri Sorrel is eighteen. Her?”
“I—”
“Sweetheart, he’s asking you what the cut-off is,” Oidhche said softly, tapping cigar ash into the tray that his guard held right next to him. “When do they stop being kids and start being targets?”
Ariana exhaled, and looked pointedly back to her computer screen, her fingers making noise on the keys as she typed. “We decided against it anyway,” she muttered. “It’s too messy apart from being cruel.”
“So we pit them against each other,” Bridie said. “The Renns and the Sorrels – we break up the engagement, break up the whole thing.”
“Their parents aren’t happy about it, either set,” Huw said. “Bran’s the harder target, given their enchantments and their prowess, but if Margaretta’s killed and we frame a specific Sorrel, Bran will want to take revenge. Let it snowball.”
“Bran would never suspect such a thing, of course,” said Gellert mildly. “It’s not as though they’ve grown up in Lashton the whole of their life.”
Huw’s lip pulled back into half a snarl, and then he said, “We’ve done frame-up jobs before. What, you think we’re fucking amateurs?”
“You think Bran Sorrel is?”
“I don’t care if Pike is gonna try to fuckng kill us all, let’s just talk to him direct,” said Huw, and Oidhche laughed. “Would you stop being so fucking smug?”
“Dad—”
“You said you wanted to grab Osgodby and talk to him, we grabbed him, you’re talking to him. I told you kids, you want me to let you do things on your own, I’m gonna letcha.”
“As a personal favour to me, Mr Laithe,” said Gellert, “you don’t think you could—?”
“Nuh uh,” said Oidhche, tapping off his cigar. “But this personal favour thing, Osgodby, I could get behind that.”
“Kill a bunch of them at once was our original idea,” said Dai. “The kids spend time together, drink together, get high. We dose them with something – not to kill them. Something that induces rage, anger. Has them kill each other. That’s not the kind of thing a, uh…” He laughs, swaying slightly on his feet. “A family doesn’t get over something like that. Bad enough for a bunch of kids to die – but for everybody to be arguing about whose fault it is?”
That made Oidhche and the other three go quiet and pensive, and Gellert looked between the four of them, at Bridie and Ariana’s discomforted faces, at the distaste on Huw’s own face. Oidhche’s expression had a distance in it, and once again, he met Gellert’s gaze.
“They’re not comfortable talking about it,” Dai said. “Thinking about it. Who would be?”
“Who indeed,” said Gellert. “Is that why you’re so intent on slaughtering any two family’s children, Mr Laithe? You want whoever survives to feel the pain that you do?”
Bridie stood to her feet, her hands clenched at her sides as though she was going to reach out and punch him, and Gellert looked up at her expectantly as he eased himself to his feet, still a head shorter than her.
“You don’t fucking talk to him like that,” she said harshly, her hair a set of flames around her head. “You don’t fucking—”
“Bridie,” said Dai softly.
His hand nudged her shoulder and pushed her to sit again, and Dai stood right in front of him.
“You wear your father’s cologne,” Gellert said.
“You like it?” Dai asked, raising his eyebrows, and he reached out and curled his fingers around Gellert’s glasses chain, his thumb sliding over the tiny links. “Do you like me, Mr Osgodby?”
“A bit thin for my tastes,” said Gellert, and he looked up and into Dai’s handsome face – in this position, up close, he could see the scars on the underside of his neck, a few of them visible under the open shirt of his suit. “You’re not your father yet, Mr Laithe.”
They’d had to take him apart and put him back together again, at the hospital, but at least he’d been one of the survivors. The car crash was rather infamous in Lashton – he remembered regular presentations at school talking about road safety, always bringing it up.
“You’re gonna take it back to him, aren’t you?” Dai asked. “Tell Pike you’ll work with us.”
“I don’t tell Mr Pike anything, Mr Laithe.”
“Sure you do,” he said, and patted the side of Gellert’s face – it was as though he weren’t prepared for the feel of Gellert’s skin under his fingers, because after two blows, two quiet slaps in the quiet room, he drew his hand right back and held it up beside his own head, the fingers on it twitching. “Sure you do,” he said again faintly, turning his head away, and Gellert watched him go as he half-stumbled away, resting his hand on Sinclair’s chair to keep from falling.
When he dropped his pill packet getting out of the inside of his blazer, Sinclair rushed to grab it for him, and when he saw that Dai’s hands were trembling badly, he popped one out for him, then glanced up at his face, then popped out a second, and emptied them into Dai’s hand.
“I will speak with Mr Pike,” Gellert said. “But I make no promises.”
Dai took the glass of water Sinclair pushed into his hand, swallowing down water to help with his pills.
“Call a car for us, would you, Mr Sinclair?” Gellert asked.
“I don’t know where we are, Mr Osgodby,” said Sinclair. “They blindfolded us.”
“We’re on the corner of Cobb Avenue and Seam Street,” Gellert said.
“How the fuck do you know that?” demanded Huw.
“Oh, he just does that, Mr Laithe, he counts all the turns and stuff in the car,” said Sinclair as he pulled his phone out of his pocket. “It drives the boss spare. Can’t surprise him for his birthday.”
“Shut up, Mr Sinclair.”
“Yes, Mr Osgodby, sorry. I’ll text Yves.”
