Page 77 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

Even the jail part might be alright, eventually. I’ve survived worse things than jails and I’d do it knowing the list was done, knowing the debt was paid, knowing that Callum and Jordan and Tyler and Oliver and Bilal have names on the chests of the men who took them, that they were not forgotten, that someone said their names loudly enough that the whole city had to hear.

That’s enough.

That should be enough.

I close my eyes.

The floor is cold and the light is flickering and somewhere outside the window London is being London, getting on with it, all that orange and scatter, and I am very tired in a way that goes past the physical into something quieter, something that feels almost like permission. You’ve done it. You can rest now. You don’t have to keep moving.

The cold of the tiles is becoming something I’m not noticing as sharply as I was. The fever warmth is spreading, and I know, somewhere in the part of me that’s still thinking clearly, that warmth spreading is not what warmth spreading from a wound is supposed to mean, but it’s becoming harder to hold onto that knowledge and do something with it. The thoughts are getting further apart. The spaces between them are getting longer.

I think about a key.

Small and silver and warm from his pocket, placed in my palm with everything he couldn’t say in words, and I curled my fingers around it and felt it all the way through me, and I kept it in my jacket pocket all through that dinner in Richmond and all through the drive back and I fell asleep with it in my hand and now it’s on a counter in a flat I walked out of and it’s cold by now, it’s definitely cold by now, the warmth is all out of it.

I should get up.

I know I should get up. I know this. I keep knowing it and not doing it and the gap between knowing and doing is getting wider and the floor is cold but I’ve stopped minding the cold the way I did, and the light is still flickering, and I’m quite tired, I’m so very tired, and it would be so much easier to just lie here for a while, to let the warmth do what the warmth is doing, to close my eyes and let the weight of all of it settle.

I’ve done what I set out to do.

Haven’t I.

The list is finished. Almost. Callum and Jordan and Tyler and Oliver and Bilal have names on the chests of the men who took them, and I did that, and the last man is dead, and I didn’t get to carve the boy’s name because there were guns and lights and running and I didn’t get to finish the last one the way I finished the others. There’s a boy out there whose name didn’t get said. That matters. That’s going to matter to me for a long time, the one I didn’t get to.

But I never expected everything to go cleanly. I never planned to get away with it all. The end of the list was always going to be the end of me. Jail, not death, but right now I’m not sure of the difference, and I thought I’d be at peace with it.

Except.

Except I didn’t account for a flat in Brixton with a man who acts as if packed lunches with notes in them are magnificent gifts, and says everyone matters, and I didn’t account for caring whether I got up off the floor, and those two facts are sitting next to each other on the cold tiles with me and they feel important in a way I can’t quite hold onto.

The warmth of the fever is spreading.

I know what that means. Some clear part of me that’s still working properly knows what that means and is trying to make itself heard over the rest of me that has gone very quiet and still and tired.

Lennox would let me in.

I know he would. Even now. Even with everything. I know it with the last of whatever certainty I have left, which isn’t much, which is getting less, but it’s there, it’s still there, the one solid thing.

I should get up and I should go to the only safe place I have ever known.

I should.

I should really.

I should.

Chapter thirty-six

Lennox

I’ve been home for three hours and I have not stopped moving.

Not going anywhere. Just moving, the specific agitated circuit of a man who can’t sit still and has nowhere useful to be. Kitchen to sitting room to hallway to kitchen. I’ve made tea I haven’t drunk. I’ve turned the television on and off twice without registering what was on it. I’ve checked my phone eleven times for any update on the blood under the rafter, anything from forensics, anything from the hospital about a walk-in with a gunshot wound, anything at all, and the phone keeps telling me nothing.

Three drops of blood.

He’s out there somewhere with three drops of blood’s worth of injury and no way for me to find him, and I don’t know if that’s a graze or something deeper, and I don’t know if he got somewhere safe, and I keep running through the options for where he might be and coming up empty because I don’t know if he has found a hotel and I don’t know the name he’d have checked in under.