Author's Note: Doth your eyes deceive you? Have I updated twice in a week?
Why yes. I think I have!
This is essentially part two of the previous chapter, and I couldn't stop myself from writing this.
Please let me know what you think of this one. It's kind of a major chapter, and it's been in my head since the start.
I really, really hope you like it.
She stood there in the darkness before him, the golden glitter striking through her dress in the dim low light. Something about the way the colour caught cast a hazy glow to her figure, and Tommy couldn't help his gaze from tracing the way the lines curled over curves and dips, revealing something seductively sinful wrapped in hues of heavenly virtue.
Her pinned silken curls were tucked under into a stylish, shorter cut he was sure he'd never seen her wear, highlighting the slope of her cheekbones and fullness of her lips. Lips painted in a shade of red that made Tommy think of blood: not the bright, scarlet blood of a shallow slice from a letter opener, but rather the kind of blood that came from the very centre of a person, dark and hallowed and life-giving.
It made him think of danger and death, and the colour he was bruising to see pouring from the face of the blond that had bared down over her like a lecher as Tommy sliced away his skin into ugly, wet ribbons.
He'd known she would be popular. He'd known that Ada would thrust her under a spotlight, and like insects the champagne socialists and intellectual communists would descend upon her in a plague of self-riotous stupor. If he was to be honest with himself it was the sole reason Tommy was even in Ada's drawing room. To keep the locusts at bay. To wither the plague.
To drag her back to the darkness with him, and wrap the shadows around her. A masterpiece only he had the pleasure to know.
"Better?" He'd asked her, but really he knew. He knew in the way she had been half-contorted away from the blond, leaning back so far he thought she might fall out of the chair; he knew in the way she had looked at him with relief and near-reverence when Tommy had arrived and interrupted; he knew in the way she took his hand, trusting him with hers – so soft and delicate – and let him lead her into the obscure without hesitance.
Still, her mouth was half open in ponder, and he enjoyed the way her eyes chased over his face, searching for an answer he would not give her. "Yes. And no."
Tommy smirked, eyebrows raised, "No?" His voice was low and quiet, but so clear to her still in the din of the room, "If you want to join them again, then by all means."
Mercy laughed humorlessly and shook her head, turning to inspect the crowd of men she'd just escaped. Tommy saw that two of them couldn't seem to stop their attention from searching for her, and their gazes hunted her out in the shelter of the alcove.
There were women too who peered over their drinks at him, painted faces piercing into the shadow to appraise and invite him. It was nothing to him, and he poured a glass of water and of whisky as Mercy seemed to inch closer to him.
"I think not. Better the devil you know, as they say."
Tommy turned to her, glasses in hand and an unholy smile of irreligious intent across his face. "A devil, am I?" He handed her the water, and the smile she sent him of surprised gratitude heated something dead and cold inside of him.
"Yes, but a preferable one at least." Her whisky-amber eyes glittered at him, and her teasing nerve invited him to step closer, flaming irises drawing him deeper and nearer to their warmth.
"Not many people would agree with that." He was so close to her now, only a foot away, that her hand almost grazed over him as she lifted her drink to sip, leaving an impression of dark red along the rim. Water had never looked so inviting to him.
"Perhaps not. But they're not in my position." Mercy's voice hung low, dancing on the edge of a rasped whisper, and it shot through him, rattling along the edges of his sanity, forcing Tommy to temper the urgency that rose inside of him and stamp the fire into low-scolding embers.
He stepped closer still, and his breath fluttered over her ear as she turned bodily to face the party, the rise of her chest catching and stuttering at his whisper, "Beneath me?"
Gulping her drink, she bought herself time, causing Tommy to smirk in satisfaction at the effect he had on her, watching the rise and fall of her throat, the flush kissing at her skin. "Employed by you."
Tommy hummed low in his throat, taking the empty glass from her hand and placing it, and his, on the counter, moving to stand behind her in the process, her back to his front. His nose near the slope of her neck allowed him a taste of her perfume, sweet and floral, and he stopped himself from grabbing her by the curve of her hips and forcing her back into him, burying his face into her hair, biting at her tender skin and running his hands over every inch of her. Instead Tommy hovered there, an inch away, and still an inch too far.
"Oppressed by me."
Her eyes moved too quickly over the drawing room to truly see anything, and Tommy could sense the coursing adrenaline that quickened her breath and slowed her thoughts. "There you go enjoying my discomfort again."
An icy storm passed through his irises, and a dark smile of enjoyment pulled at his lips. He did enjoy her discomfort; more poignantly he knew she enjoyed, in some way, letting him discomfort her. Hadn't she been uncomfortable today, and hadn't she bodily repelled the blond suitor that hadn't been able to stop flicking his gaze her way since?
And wasn't she now, instead, almost leaning into him, a small tremor in her muscles, heart beating a little quicker as he pressed at her boundaries? As he taunted and corrupted her?
"There I go enjoying myself," Tommy paused, leaning in so his lips met the shell of her ear, letting her gasp thrill him and the lift of her breasts harden him, "Are you enjoying yourself, Mercy?"
She licked at her lips, wetting the dark lipstick into a shine, "It isn't as I expected."
"Is that right?" Low and slow, those words crept over her, stirring at a desire that had begun to form in the pit of her stomach. She felt every syllable tickle at the hair of her arms and the back of her neck, dangling her on the edge of a cliff that could very well be the death of her. "And what had you expected?"
"I didn't expect you to be here." Had she always sounded so breathless? So taken?
She felt his amusement rumble over her, the heat of his body standing so close to her working a flush across her, and she wondered how she'd come to be there, and if she even wanted to maneuver away. "Lording over you?"
Mercy laughed at Ada's regurgitated words, wishing she had something in her hands to grip, her mind flashing to the strength of the body almost against hers. "Hiding me away from unsolicited attention."
She noticed that Blond was searching for her still, and had she had the room – had it not meant throwing all the caution she had left (though it seemed so little) into the wind and eliminating the breath of space between herself and Mr. Shelby – she would have stepped back further, into the very depths of the alcove, a ghost unseen and intangible.
"It's in my interest to keep you hidden." His words made her think of Ada, laughing about marrying her off and the hassle it would have caused her employer.
Her employer. She needed to hold onto that. Though it was so easy to forget when he was so handsome and so close and so unyieldingly consuming.
She cleared her tight throat, though her voice still seemed compressed and rougher than usual, "Then our interests seem to have aligned for a moment, Mr. Shelby."
Mr. Shelby. The head of the Shelby family. A criminal. A war hero. Rich as sin. Her employer. Things she needed to keep at the very front of her drifting mind, which seemed to only care about the way her body ached to lean back, and into the strong form and determination of Thomas Shelby.
He gestured without moving, seeming to guide her with the direction of his gaze to the group of socialite philosophers she had escaped, "And their interest?"
Their interest? It certainly had nothing to do with her: she'd barely spoken a word, and they seemed to prefer it that way. She was there for amusement, and to be spoken at. "What of it?"
"Any one of them would have worked tonight to take you home." It would have been matter of fact, except that there was something deep and intentional and black in the way the words twisted out of him. Mercy's breathing all but stilled, and like in the car it seemed the rest of the room silenced and slowed, and she entered a sweet fog that blinded her, robbed her of sensing anything or anyone that wasn't Thomas Shelby. "They'd have talked to you, and put drinks in your hand that would make you forget your name. They'd have danced with you, and put their hands on any part of you they could reach.
"And all the while you wouldn't notice that they'd led you to a bedroom, because they won't have let you get a word in, and you'd be half-dead with boredom over Russia and Marx and the king and country.
"And whichever one of them got you alone would lift up your dress, this lovely, new dress, lay you down and spend three minutes fucking himself into ecstasy, and you'd be almost alright with it, because it would be the only three minutes of silence you'd had all night and you'd forgotten what it felt like to hear yourself think.
"Then he'd roll away from you, light himself a cigarette, and ask if you knew anything about Lenin's policy on the Russian railway trade."
He sounded almost bored for her, so composed as he narrated the way he saw the evening playing out; the way he despised that it would in a slow and even tone. Mercy would have hyperventilated if only she could draw in a breath to ease the ache in her dying lungs. She thought she had known discomfort with Mr. Shelby, but to hear him speak of another man fucking her tightened every muscle she didn't know she had.
This was the man whose son she had sworn to raise, the man she dodged like a coward in his corridors, who slept only three rooms away.
She should be terrified and humiliated and scorned and outraged.
But if she was, it was thrummed down and beaten away by lightning strikes of excitement and chills, and rumbling thunder of that stirring desire.
She was a perfect storm of every emotion she knew she shouldn't feel.
"What a party it would have been had you not intervened."
This time he didn't smirk, there was too much darkness in him, black in his veins and poison in his thoughts, "Why else would I be here?"
She shook her head, dizzy and hot, and her tongue was thick as she forced out her response, "So you're the protector of my virtue? You think me so gullible and easily swayed that I'd let a man that loves nothing but the sound of his own voice into my bed?"
It was supposed to be indignant, but her words hardly conveyed the strength of offence that she so wished they did. But coherent thought left her entirely as his hand – those warm, rough hands that she would be ashamed to admit she dreamt about at all hours – as it slid over her waist and down to her pelvis, before he forced her back to meet his hard front, stealing any notion from her head.
The warmth was almost too much to bear, but Mercy couldn't move for love nor money. She was completely still, and he all but owned her then in a way an employer never should. "Then what man would you let into your bed? What man would you let lift up your pretty new dress and fuck you? Because your bed is in my house, a bed I paid for. And I don't like the idea of any man in that bed."
His lips practically kissed at her skin as he mouthed the words into the tender spot just beneath her ear, and though she swallowed there was no moisture left in her mouth to be rid of. A noise, a sharp inhale too close to a gasp for her dignity to recognise slipped through lips that had become suddenly chapped, and Mercy's mind reeled with thoughts of the only man she'd ever really dreamed about having in her bed.
"You don't?"
"I don't." The depth of his voice scraped through his throat, and the vibrations in his chest reached a place inside of her that she didn't know existed, "If there is going to be a man fucking you in that bed, in my house, then it will be me.
"And I won't just lift your dress up and pull down your knickers to fuck you politely. I will tear this little dress off your body and strip away anything that covers any perfect fucking part of you. And it won't be three minutes of you on your back, closing your eyes and thinking of England. I will fuck you until you can't take it anymore; until you've forgotten your own name, and you can't stand on your own two legs. I will fuck you until you can't breathe, and you'll remember what it feels like to have me between your legs for the rest of your life.
"And then you can tell the maids how I don't mind whether you're beneath me or on top of me, with firsthand experience."
Both of his hands were on her now. One wrapped around her waist, the other holding her at the base of the her throat, keeping her pressed against him from her heels to the top of her head, coiled around her like a snake. It didn't stopper her oxygen, his words were enough to do that, but it encouraged her to sink against him as his words made her legs shake, and she surrendered against any will she previously had.
She was sure she had never been so red in her life, or was she pale, a sickly pale, in her shock and dismay and thrilling desire? When he ran his nose from the curve of her neck to the place behind her ear she trembled and exhaled.
What was he doing to her? What feeling was he enticing from her?
How could she let him do this, when she saw firsthand what an affair like this had cost her family?
Cost her mother?
Her lashes fluttered open, and only then did she realise she'd closed them, shutting out the drawing room that had abandoned all memory of either of them, left them to be ghosts in the shadows.
"Mr. Shelby –" It was half a whisper, one he responded to by muttering her own name back to her intimately, his lips a seductive imprint on her very soul.
"Miss Hale."
Before she could continue – to form a rejection, a plea, an invitation – a call across the room, a shout about the street below, and finally a gunshot ringing pierced the tension between them with a violent shudder.
