Page 50 of Corrupt

I nodded. I couldn’t trust my mouth to open without everything breaking loose.

Joe took the bag and disappeared into the back. It didn’t matter how he did it, the envelopes, the fake receipts, the bulk orders that never existed. As long as the money came out clean on the other side, Cormac stayed happy. And when Cormac was happy, he forgot about me long enough for me to breathe.

By the time Joe came back, my tea was stone cold and my head felt hollow. He swapped the mug for a fresh one and slid a plate in front of me. Fried bread, eggs leaking gold, sausages looking older than the café. Exactly what I needed.

“How’s the view out the Wick?” Joe pulled up a chair opposite me while I salted the food as if I was trying to cure meat, then dug in. At least he filled the plate.

“Decent.”

“Yeah? Those dizzy heights not getting to you yet?”

I looked up, chewing. “Not so far.”

“Careful, Razor.” Joe leant back, arms folded over his gut. “People think going up in the world means you’re flying. Truth is, sometimes it’s just a taller place to fall from. Ivory towers make you lightheaded.”

“Yeah.” I stabbed at the egg, wiped yolk through beans. “So I hear. But I’m used to being high up. Came from towers, remember?”

He’d know. He’d lived street level, then climbed to whatever rung in the Firm I was now trying not to slide off too. Tristan had called it Organised Criminal Networks. Joe had done ten years for it. Didn’t flip. Didn’t bend. Came out with a prison stare and a café no one asked questions in. Didn’t touch drugs anymore, didn’t swing fists, but still laundered money through a till drawer that stuck when it closed too hard.

He wasn’t innocent. Couldn’t ever be.

And suddenly I wasn’t sure I wanted to be him in twenty years if I ever lived that long. Sitting in a greasy spoon he owned, watching dogs eat better than he did, pretending the world made any sense after having spent ten years inside for someone else’s game.

Joe drummed his nails on the table, eyes shifting to the old woman feeding her spaniel sausages. “Went to Levi’s memorial yesterday.”

Air caught tight in my chest. I stared at my plate. “Yeah? Didn’t see you.”

“Stayed out of the way. Let the family have their moment.”

I nodded.

“You didn’t go back to the house after?”

“No.”

“Where d’you go?”

I paused my fork mid-air. Then lowered it, pushed the plate aside, and looked him dead-on. “Why d’you never settle down, Joe? Never had a bird? Never shared this place with anyone?”

He barked a laugh, then spread his arms as if displaying the café and his own worn-out body. “Who the fuck wants this? Grease, debt, and bullshit. That’s what I bring.” He shook his head, rubbing a hand over his bald scalp. “And when you’ve been inside ten years, you wake up every night thinking someone’s standing over you with a blade. That’s no life to drag a woman into. No life to raise a kid in. No life at all, really.”

Looking at Joe, I shifted. His tired eyes. His callused hands from decades of graft. The café stinking of burnt oil, disinfectant, and quiet fucking regret. He was a man who’d once run with the same boys I did. Who’d survived long enough to be left behind. And it hit me heavy in my gut.

If I didn’t get out soon, properly out, this was waiting for me.

Ten years gone. No one to come home to. No softness. No warmth. No future. Just a prison sentence that never stopped, even once the walls disappeared.

Joe didn’t see me staring.

Or maybe he did.

Either way, his next words snagged somewhere raw in my chest.

“Eat, lad. Before it gets cold. And whatever’s chewing at you? Don’t let it make you stupid.”

So I did.

And after that plate was gone, I went straight into myself. Into the quiet, the routines, the relentless list of things keeping me alive in this world: laundry. Sorting the cash. Not just at Joe’s but at the other places scattered around who took our cash in for us and made it come out clean the other side. And I updated the fake invoices Joe and the others would process later. Then I checked the sellers’ tallies, stock levels, the bouncers’ shifts, the VIP bookings.