cross my palm with silver (line our pockets with good fortune)
.
II. Coin Toss
.
.
.
Thomas shuddered awake to the sound of his uncle's voice ringing out from elsewhere in the yard. His hands dragging into fists on his thighs, he sat up with a sudden jerk and felt something soft slide from his shoulders down to his lap.
He forced his eyelids to wrench open.
It was early morning. Tommy was in the stables, sitting on a low stool. He'd fallen asleep in the nook next to the entrance, back against the wall, shoulder leaned sideways against a post.
The sounds of men working in the yard—swearing, grunting, yelling—echoed vaguely into the room. His neck and back were sore as all hell. His legs were numb with the spring evening chill, and from sitting in the same position for hours. The light streaming in from the open doorway next to him was bright, if pale and gray.
A little ways away, the horse stared at him with its wide, round eyes. It was still tied up in its stall. There was salt spread all around it, and around Tommy, in unbroken lines.
He glanced down. Pooled upon his thighs was an unfamiliar shawl, wide enough to cover him from shoulder to hip. It was a young woman's shawl, pastel yellow with fanciful white embroidery and little trembling tassels hanging from the edges.
This was… definitely reality. It was definitely reality, wasn't it? And yet—
He hesitated for a moment, and then swiftly lifted the shawl from his lap. Something small and round flew out and fell to the floor by his feet. He picked it up.
Hanging from his fingers was little white sachet, smelling of perfume and flowers.
Tommy immediately dropped it. It landed noiselessly onto the shawl piled upon his legs.
"Fuck," he rasped, dragging rough hands over his face and then pushing them up into his temples. He blinked blearily down at the shawl and the sachet. "Fuck."
Drawn by the sound of his voice, Charlie entered the stables and stopped short in the doorway with a look of bewilderment. He stared at the horse, stared at the ground, and then stared at Tommy, slumped over against a post. "The hell are you still doing in here, Tommy? What's all this on the floor?"
"Salt," grunted Tommy, blinking furiously to get the sleep out of his eyes. And, hopefully, his brain. He scrounged around in his pocket for his cigarettes and scrabbled with the matches until one lit.
Blessed tobacco. It hit his brain like a shot, ushering away the fog blanketing his mind.
"Salt in circles, cross on the neck of a horse, dried goat dung on the floor," Charlie listed, glancing around slowly. "It looks like a bloody chovhani ritual."
Tommy didn't even look at his uncle, still transfixed by the object sitting innocent in his lap. He had half a mind to throw it into the fire.
Charlie waited for Tommy to reply, but the silence stretched on. Unnerved by the unspoken implications, Charlie gave him a hard look. "Tommy. Tell me there wasn't a witch in here. A wise woman is one thing, but you know you can't mess with witches unless you want to risk bankruptcy or a black curse. The devil knows you'll dig yourself straight into hell without any help."
Tommy sighed and finally lifted his head. "Did you see a woman around the yard, Charlie? Small, dark hair. No stockings."
"Damn it, Tommy," Charlie barked. "I thought you were going to put that horse down, not call awitch. Who knows what infernal hoodoos she could leave in my yard."
Tommy looked steadily at his uncle, cigarette hanging between his lips. "Did you?" he asked, in a low, even voice.
Charlie's mouth thinned in frustration, but eventually he answered, "No. I didn't see any woman around here. Just my men."
Another sigh dragged itself from Tommy's throat, accompanied by a long stream of smoke. The witch herself was missing, but it wasn't a dream. The evidence was all here, laid out in front of his eyes.
It wasn't a dream. He'd made a promise—carelessly, but a promise was a promise—and now he'd have to keep it. He looked at the sachet again, and the urge to throw it into the fire swept over him once more, the impulse even more powerful now. Throw the damned thing away, tell Miss Young she'd won the wager, send her on her way with the bloody horse.
Striking a wager with a gypsy witch, a chovhani, and willingly making himself the target of a love spell—Tommy must have been out of his fucking mind.
Yeah, actually. He had been out of his fucking mind, and he knew it as a right certainty.
A dream? What fucking dream? It must have been the opium lingering in his blood, the heavy, growing tumor that had become of his exhaustion, the overwhelming dread at the thought of shooting the horse. Any one of those things, or all of them. It was one thing to be magically coerced into feeling love for a girl who only existed in a dream, and an entirely different thing for that girl to be real, to be an unknown and potentially dangerous entity.
Tommy couldn't treat this stinking, heaping mess he'd made for himself lightly. Naomie Young was a witch, a real one, and she was powerful. She'd proven that last night.
Or—had she?
"Charlie," Tommy called urgently, carefully using the shawl to gather up the charmed pouch and getting to his feet. He dropped his finished fag to the floor and ground his heel on it. "Call Curly. Tell him to check on the horse. Hurry."
Charlie shook his head but moved nonetheless. He left and returned quickly, Curly in tow.
"H-hi, Tom. That's a—a nice scarf," Curly greeted, in his anxiously cheerful way.
Tommy nodded at him and gestured to the horse. "There's no time to waste, Curly. Check his legs, his heart. Has the horse gotten better?"
Curly saw the horse, still standing proudly in its stall, and his face brightened. "Yes, yes, Tom," he said, immediately bustling over to it and running his hands over its flank. "I'll check, I will. Yes, yes."
Tommy watched intently as Curly began a speedy examination of the horse, surveying its hoof, its leg, its chest, pulling a number of instruments from shelves and hooks to assist him. Uncle and nephew waited in tense silence for the verdict.
"You're okay!" Curly cried at last, kissing the horse's muzzle. "Good boy. You're o-okay, yeah. Yeah."
Tommy's only reaction to this news was a long, slow blink. It seemed Miss Young was as powerful as she'd promised after all.
"You said the curse would reach his heart by today. Where is it now?" he said, still lingering within the salt circle. He needed Curly to assure him the horse was fine so that he could confidently leave it, or else he would have to leave the bullet on the stool. If he ruined the horse's treatment before it was finished, he risked being shackled with a curse for the trouble. And he had no time to deal with gypsy curses right now.
"Gone, Tom," Curly assured him, nodding furiously and running his gentle hands down the horse's neck. "All gone."
Tommy nodded back and left the salt circle with a loping stride. He stuck a hand into his pocket, the shawl slung over his wrist and the sachet cradled within. "The horse is healthy?" he asked, approaching Curly. Tommy's hand absently reached to rub under the horse's jaw.
"Not c-completely, no, no. But he will be!"
"Course he's okay," Charlie snorted from behind him, disgruntled. "Tommy called in a damned chovhani just to fix him."
Curly's eyes went wide and he began to cut the air with his hand as if to cut through any bad magicks that may be near. "A w-witch, Tom? A w-w-witch, here?"
"I didn't call her," Tommy said tiredly, his eyes sliding to his uncle. "She came for the horse. Calls him brother."
"Oh, fucking hell," said Charlie, looking stunned. He made a face as if he couldn't figure out whether to burst into laughter or have an apoplexy from all the stress. "It figures you'd find yourself a witch's horse, and get him cursed at that. Does she blame you?"
"Nah, just the Lees."
"And thank God for that. A witch. A horror to offend, but you share a common enemy; she could be useful as an ally, if you can manage to keep her still long enough," noted Charlie.
"Not a problem, she'll be here for a while yet," Tommy replied, pulling out another cigarette and bringing it to his lips. He lit the end and shook the match to put it out. "We've an arrangement."
Charlie stilled and stared at Tommy, hit by some sudden realization. "Did you plan this?" he asked, gravely.
Tommy just looked at his uncle and took a drag of his cigarette in lieu of answering. The answer being, of course: not in the fucking least.
Normally Tommy deserved any accusation of scheming that might have been thrown at him, but Charlie was greatly overestimating him in this instance. How could Tommy have planned any of this? How could he have known of Naomie Young's existence before she'd appeared before him? On top of that, he had been so convinced that she wasn't real, and then so shaken to realize she was, that the idea hadn't even occurred to him until just now.
It wasn't exactly something Tommy could admit to, though. Better to let Charlie think what he wanted. This whole affair with the witch was completely out of character for Tommy, and he doubted his uncle would believe him even if he said anything.
Charlie took his silence as confirmation and shook his head. "You're playing a dangerous game, Tommy. The Lee tribe and that mad-dog Inspector were bad enough. A witch on top of that? Might as well just throw in the Commies and the Fenians for good measure."
Tommy was reminded, then, of Ada's current situation, and his face darkened. Depending on how Frankie reacted to the pregnancy, the Commies would follow. And the IRA would come sniffing for the guns sooner or later.
"Just a matter of time," Tommy said. He closed his eyes and rolled his cigarette between his lips thoughtfully. Perhaps he was taking on too much at once. But it couldn't be helped; they'd all happened at once.
He'd deal with it. He always dealt with it. This was necessary if he wanted the Shelbys to move up in the world.
"But w-where i-is the witch, Tom?" Curly cut in nervously, craning his head and glancing around as if she would pop up from the shadows at any point. He was still slicing through the air with his hands.
Tommy exhaled a cloud of smoke and opened his eyes. Indeed. Where the bloody hell was Miss Young?
"Hello," a voice called brightly. As if summoned, Naomie stepped through the stable entrance. There was a satchel slung over her shoulder, filled with freshly plucked plants. She was wearing the clothes from last night but with a new shawl of green and blue. Spotting Tommy turning to look at her, her mouth curved into a dimpled smile. "Thomas Shelby, you're awake! How was your sleep?"
"Naomie," Tommy greeted, nodding back. "It was fine." He was surprised to find that he meant it; despite the uncomfortable position, despite the chill of the night, despite being in the presence of a strange intruder, he had slept astoundingly well. Disturbingly well.
"Of course it was; I took the liberty of adding herbs for restful sleep to the mix. It won't interfere, but I thought the sachet might as well do something, since it's useless otherwise," Naomie said, looking very satisfied with herself. The dimples in her cheeks deepened. It was strange; he hadn't realized she had dimples, last night, but now he couldn't stop noticing them. "I usually charge lots for that kind of handiwork, but this time I won't charge you. Didn't I say I'd be kind?"
"You did say," Tommy agreed, gravely. His face was serious, but he could feel a thread of amusement flit through him. "Far too early to assume you'll win, though."
She strode to the horse. "But I will," she said, nodding with an air of great self-assurance. As Naomie passed Tommy, her skirts swished carelessly against his legs and her soft shawl dragged against the rougher material of his coat sleeve. When she stood next to him, he became aware of a sweet, lush smell. If he could identify it at all, he would say it was akin to the smell of flowers, or fresh grass, or the spring breeze. From picking herbs, he supposed.
"Good morning, little brother," Naomie cooed, running a finger over the horse's muzzle. She bent in close, her long, curly hair draping over Tommy's still outstretched arm, and kissed the horse's nose twice. "Are you feeling better? Of course you are, ves'tacha, I spent the whole night making sure of it."
The corners of Tommy's mouth twitched. Naomie seemed to be in the habit of asking questions she already knew the answer to, or perhaps that was just due to her overwhelming confidence in her own abilities. It wasn't unwarranted, but it was certainly amusing.
He stepped away to give her space to fuss over the horse, and found himself by his uncle, who looked perplexed. Brows high on his forehead, Charlie said, "She's… young," as if that was a very startling turn of events.
Indeed she was, but Tommy expected that his uncle was not simply pointing out her age.
Naomie looked nothing like what one would expect of a chovhani. She was not respectably old, nor did she have the dark, dramatic attire or the cabalistic deportment of a typical witch. There was no kohl around her eyes to make her seem more mysterious, no heavy rings on her fingers or chiming bracelets on her wrists to add an impression of ritualistic power. In the light of day, that sense of the esoteric and arcane that had so struck Tommy last night had all but disappeared. Now, Naomie simply appeared to be an ordinary girl of perhaps twenty years of age, with mannerisms that only made her seem younger. It was hard to see her and think, witch.
"Yes I am," Naomie replied, also hearing Charlie's comment. She turned to face them, looking pleasantly surprised. "How did you know? I'm Naomie Young."
She extended her hand and Charlie took it firmly, his face carefully cleaned of all the reservations that Tommy knew he must have had. "Charlie Strong," he said. "I own this yard."
While introductions were made all around, including to a nervous Curly, Tommy plucked the sachet from within the depths of the shawl and slipped it into his pocket. It made him uneasy to think of keeping a love charm so near, but if it would allow him to sleep as well as he had last night, that wasn't something he would turn his nose to. It was at least less harmful than opium, and more effective, too.
"Accommodations, Naomi?" Tommy called, cutting into the conversation. Naomie nodded eagerly, bidding farewell to Charlie and Curly. She extracted her leather bag from the hay, slung it over her shoulder, and hurried to his side.
They set off without further ado. Tommy wanted to get home as soon as possible, to avoid many people witnessing him in his state of disrepair, but seeing Naomie struggling to keep up with his long strides, he slowed a touch. Wordlessly, he reached out and pulled the heavy bag off her shoulder and onto his own—not because he had suddenly decided to become gallant, but rather because it was impeding them.
"Thank you. I'm spent," Naomie whispered, leaning in close as if imparting some great secret. Tommy inclined his head so as to bring his ear nearer to her mouth. "Haven't had a wink of sleep in hours. I could sleep in a barn, right now."
"You won't have to," he said quietly, glancing to her face and realizing that she had washed it at some point. "I already said I'd take care of you."
She dimpled up at him. They may have both been gray, but Small Heath could never hope to be as clear and bright as her eyes. Tommy's eyes traced over that open face, the gentle arc of her brows, the straight slope of her nose, the spread of freckles over her cheeks.
In the faint daylight, without dirt smudging her face or straw in her hair, Naomie looked like just another pretty young woman he might see at the fair, or on a street. While she lacked polish and had none of the posh elegance of the Garrison's barmaid, something about Naomie's sunny, uncomplicated countenance made the eye linger.
He did not want to notice her, but he couldn't help it—she was really quite lovely.
The muscles in Tommy's jaw clenched. As if burned, he immediately removed his hand from his pocket, where it had been closed around the sachet. He looked away from Naomie and sped up his pace again.
They made their way through dim back alleys and dirty side streets to get to his flat in Garrison Lane. Tommy stalked forward with the confidence of knowing that no one would dare to stop him and Naomie followed behind him without hesitation, the thought that he might bring her to some grisly fate not seeming to even occur to her. Their fast clip got them to the front door at no time at all.
"Is this where I'll stay?" asked Naomie, appraising the grungy building curiously. Around them, the sparse number of people passing around in the street gave the two of them a wide berth.
"No, this is me," Tommy told her. "I have some business. You can come in, or wait out here."
He could see the interest leave her face. Her eyes traveled away from the building to the pedestrians down the street, flitting from hunched body to body. "I'll wait out here," Naomie said distractedly, her gaze zeroing in on the red, swollen hands of a woman who was determinedly looking at the ground.
Tommy nodded and went to clean up. It took him barely any time at all, but when he came out, Naomie was no longer in front of his door.
He scanned the nearby street and found her by another building, where the woman with swollen hands soon exited. Tommy stood in place and watched them, taking the time to light another cigarette. There was an exchange of hands: money from the woman for a small tin from Naomie's small herb satchel. Nodding at each other, they both turned to leave.
They spotted him staring straight at them at the same time. The woman jumped and bowed her head, but Naomie hastened to Tommy's side, beaming. He said nothing, only lifted a brow at her in question.
Naomie smiled and put the money—fifteen shillings, which must have been at least a few days worth of wages—into her satchel. She was being uncharacteristically tight-lipped about her transaction with the woman, but Tommy thought he knew what had occurred. After all, you couldn't really call yourself Roma before you sold your first overpriced trinket to some unsuspecting gadze. After that, it was just a matter of finding your next victim.
"You look awfully handsome in those clothes. Very important," Naomie said, boldly looking him up and down.
If an attractive woman was looking at him, Tommy saw no reason why he should not return the favour as it suited him. He didn't say anything in reply, only plucked his fag from his lips and returned the look, his eyes dragging obscenely over her whole body. There was nothing much to see, on account of all her clothing being so loose and draping, but it conveyed his point well enough.
Thomas Shelby was not a gentleman by any definition; if pushed, he would push back, harder and dirtier.
Under his lingering, hooded gaze, Naomie neither blushed nor shied away. Rather she seemed to find it amusing, doing a little twirl for him with a high, floating laugh. Her skirt flared out around her knees and her shawl fluttered open under her arms, tassels flying. He could see the dip of her waist where her blouse tucked into her skirt, the smooth lines of her calves and the delicate shape of her ankles. Her knees were flushed a rosy pink, and he suspected this was not from rouge, but from long hours of kneeling and praying.
"Well?" Naomie asked, as she finished her spin and her clothes settled back down around her. "Am I handsome as well?"
Tommy lowered his lashes and peered at her expectant face thoughtfully. Her almost child-like mannerisms were rather charming, in their own way. There was no doubt that she had known a lot of affection from those around her.
"Very handsome," he finally said. Her cocksure grin almost engendered a smile in him, but he knew he could not spend all day entertaining her. Tommy was, as she had noted last night, a busy man. He gestured down the street with his head and began to walk. "Come."
They headed to the nicer part of Small Heath, although 'nice' was only relative. It was near enough that he'd be able to keep a close eye on her, but far enough from the rabble to be more respectable than most.
Along the way to the boarding house, Naomie chattered on and off about her plans for the horse, supplemented by commentary on the interesting characters they passed by. It appeared she did not have the habit of visiting larger cities often.
He found her enthusiasm rather curious; it made all the more stark the differences between their upbringings. To Tommy, the citizens of Small Heath were just small, filthy cogs in the large, filthier machine that was Birmingham. To Naomie, they were all endlessly fascinating in their own ways, and she did not hesitate to tell him so.
She did not hesitate much to tell him anything, it seemed, and she did not seem to mind that his contributions to the conversation mostly consisted of silence, smoke, and the occasional thoughtful hum. Naomie was perfectly capable of chatting all on her own with barely any input on his part.
This was, of course, a very welcome state of affairs—Tommy's reticence was partly because he was sifting through every grain of information proffered to him. Naomie Young may not have been very mysterious, but she was still a mystery, at least until he looked into her background.
And after he set her up at a respectable lodging house, that was precisely what he planned to do.
Naomie set down her herb satchel and shawl on a chair and looked around the modest room she had been directed to. She already knew she liked it without even having stayed the night. Simply the fact that she would not have to share anything with any of her many older sisters endeared her to her new lodgings. The place had few furnishings—a bed, a tall wardrobe, a vanity table, and a squat little stove—but that was already more than she was used to.
Naomie was looking forward to getting to know the place. She'd never had a wardrobe before; caravans weren't generally very conducive to keeping them.
To provide some cheer to the sparse room, someone had added a vase with some nodding white lilies to the windowsill and a pot of citronella by the door. Citronella, to keep away the gnats. That was quite clever of whoever had done it; probably the landlady, she decided.
The landlady, whom Naomie had met earlier, was a strict looking English woman of distinguished height and waistline. Or at least, she'd been strict-looking when Naomie had first tripped into the establishment. When the woman saw Thomas Shelby enter next, any sternness dissipated like water on a hot pan and was replaced with a great degree of anxiety. She had immediately rushed forward to greet him, and the two had fallen into a hushed conversation where Thomas—or Tom, or Tommy, or whatever people around here called him—informed the woman that Naomie would be borrowing a room for an indefinite period, and the woman could only manage to say, Of course Mr Shelby, of course.
It was altogether a very quick, very short discussion. Perhaps his tone could have suggested that Thomas was coaxing her, but the landlady did not seem to need much coaxing. Whenever he said anything, she agreed right away, without even pausing to consider it.
Upon conclusion of this one-sided discussion, they'd all been ushered to the room Naomie was in now, and Thomas had taken a good look around before he'd wordlessly approved it by dropping her bag on the floor. Afterwards, when he left, the landlady had looked at Naomie as if she was a curse that the devil himself had sent. Without a single word of welcome, she had left a ring of keys on the table and beat a hasty exit.
That was fine. It invited bad luck to live in a home where the host did not welcome you, but Naomie was confident that she could convince the landlady to come around to her eventually, whether by her personal brand of charm or by the generous gift of some tincture or other. Currently, she found herself too busy with setting up her new accommodations to bother. There was much to do.
She prayed, first, for blessings against burglary, fire, and misfortune, and then set up small hand mirrors on the windowsill and opposite the door so as to reflect the negative energy of those who might disrupt the harmony of her abode. Dried violets were added to the vase of lilies, and a little jar of St. John's Wort hung from the window; spearmint was slipped into her pillow, and neat bunches of holy wort, witch hazel twigs and willow bark, tied up with string, were added to all four corners.
This task complete, Naomie stepped back and considered her handiwork. She would have also liked to spread borders of salt around all openings, but she thought it might be rather inconvenient to have salt constantly underfoot—and invite the landlady's ire besides—so she had settled for laying out lines of stones collected from the seashore. When the rest of her luggage was brought over from the stables, as she had been promised, Naomie would put up her cross and all the necessary talismans. For now, this would be enough.
It felt like Naomie had barely closed her eyes when she was awoken by a hunger pang so harsh the pain made her curl into a tight ball.
She scrunched her eyes closed and laid very still, attempting to go back to sleep.
Hunger pierced through her again, sharper than before.
She ignored it, trying to sink back into the nice dream she'd been having about galloping down a field on little brother's back and winning a race—then her stomach rebelled at the idea, clenching so hard it knocked her breathless.
She was hungry.
She wanted to sleep.
She was hungry.
She wanted to sleep.
She was fucking hungry.
SLEEP.
...
She had to pee.
With a long, drawn-out groan of frustration, Naomie finally sat up. "Traitor," she hissed at her belly. It gurgled back vindictively.
Incoherent rage was enough to power her through to the water closet and then to the dining room, where she found… nothing. There was no food there, and she either couldn't find the kitchen or its door had been locked for the night.
Outside, the sky was already black. Naomie had slept the whole day away. Cities at night were dangerous, she'd been told, but she was too hungry to heed the warning, and she'd never been very good at being cautious anyway. She retrieved her shawl and her satchel, locked all doors, and went out into the dark street in search of food.
The entire journey was, she found, appalling and fascinating in equal measure. Although the street immediately around her boarding house was quiet enough, the further she walked, the more she became witness to an increasing level of moral degeneracy. Despite the late hour, there were people yelling, brawling, vomiting, and even fornicating out in the open, without any degree of shame at all. The streets and all the people on them were dirty and uncouth, and they stunk of some strange, indefinable stench.
Still, she watched them with her eyes wide open and her head on a swivel. It was a novel experience for her, who had grown up in various parts of the countryside under a doting father, a fiercely catholic mother, eight protective older siblings, and a powerful grandmother who had decided Naomie was the apple of her eye from birth. No one in the tribe wanted to cross her father, and her grandmother even less.
One would expect that witnessing humanity at its most foul would be enough to kill Naomie's appetite and that she would thus be able to return to her room and to blissful slumber. Not so. Her hunger only grew the longer it took for her to locate her next meal, and eventually she gave up on finding a market or restaurant that was still open. Instead she found herself entering the nearest pub—of which there were many, and all brightly lit.
Choosing one that looked less dismal than the rest, Naomie entered through the large wooden doors with the sense of passing a portal into a new world. She heard, first, the unending roar of drunken male voices, punctuated by clinking glasses and thumping bottles. Then followed the stink of sweat and smoke, then she became aware of the dim lights, the sticky floors, the scuffed furniture, the heaving mass of bodies.
Naomie looked and looked her fill, drank it all in, and found nothing lacking.
Satisfied, she stepped through the crowd, which rushed and jostled all around her but never quite touched her, and came up to the counter where a man was pouring frothing drinks. Her wide-eyed curiosity must have attracted his attention, for he put down the glass in his hand and turned from his waiting customers to study her.
"Can I help you, lass?" the bartender asked, a perturbed frown beginning to break on his face. "Are you lost?"
"Do you sell any food here?" Naomie asked, crossing her arms over the bar and leaning against it. It wasn't very comfortable, as the counter was high and reached all the way up to her chest, but all the stools were taken.
Hesitantly, the man nodded. Then he clarified, as if afraid she might get the wrong idea and decide his was a respectable establishment, "Just some ale snacks; chips, pickled eggs, pig trimmings and the like."
"Then yes," said Naomie, offering him a smile. "You certainly can help me. I'd like two of everything you just mentioned. And a mild," she added as an afterthought, recalling that this was a pub and it would look quite strange not to have a drink at hand. It would be better to fit in wherever possible, she thought.
At this, the bartender looked at Naomie as if she had spouted horns. "This is a pub, where men come to get drunk," he explained, as if she were particularly slow. "It isn't a place for an unaccompanied young miss like you to have your meals, 'specially not at this time of night. Go home, lass, before anything happens." To punctuate his words, his eyes flickered over her head at the rowdy crowd of working-class men hollering over the tables and bumping into each other.
A flash of surprise darted across his face: none of them were looking at her. Naomie knew this even without turning to see. Most likely, none of them had even noticed her. She'd be a poor excuse for a witch if she couldn't even manage such a basic thing, or so Gran would have said.
But then his eyes darted to the side, and a resigned Just-As-I-Expected expression came upon him.
"Shut up and get the woman her food," said a gruff voice from the next seat over. "And you, fuck off. What kinda manners is that, not giving a lady your seat? Go on! Get."
The man in the stool directly next to her scrambled off of his seat, his drink sloshing over the rim of his glass. He rushed unsteadily to a different part of the pub. The bartender also hurried away, with a crisp, "Right away, Mr Shelby."
Naomie gave a long, slow blink as she processed the name. She took the seat that had been so generously cleared for her and turned to the man who had spoken.
Mr Shelby was a man with a narrow, weathered face, a heavy brow ridge, and a thick moustache. A lock of slick hair curled around his right cheek, and a thin, healing scar marked his other. She could not find much resemblance between him and Thomas—except for the colour of his eyes, which were a lovely, dusky blue.
The thumb of the hand that held his glass was in a splint. It seemed he had only recently gotten out of a fight.
"Thank you," Naomie said, smiling at him so that her dimples became extra visible. "I haven't eaten much in the last couple of days and I'm absolutely famished. I don't know what I would have done if he'd chased me out. Collapsed on the street from hunger, maybe."
His alcohol-hazed eyes perused her face at length and then traveled down her body. When he leaned in close, she could smell the booze on his breath. "Good thing I was here, then. It's not safe for a girl like you to be going around alone at night," Mr Shelby said, gesturing vaguely with the empty cup in his hand. Then he added, with an ironic smirk, "City's gone mad. Hooligans and gangsters run everything, and the coppers don't bat an eye."
"I see. Should I be worried?" asked Naomie, not very worried but—indeed—very interested. The bartender brought over her order and beat a swift retreat. Neither of them paid him any mind.
"If you're asking, you must be from outta town. Nothing's gonna happen to you now you're with me," replied Mr Shelby, with a healthy helping of arrogance. He tried to take another sip of his glass, before he realized that nothing was left. "They wouldn't dare."
She was not precisely with him, but Naomie did not argue the point. Rather she looked at his crisp white shirt with its shiny metal sleeve garters, his waistcoat and its modishly attached pocket watch, and his gray peaked cap, which hid in its brim something that glinted in the light. It was the exact same kind of cap that Thomas had carried.
Most men that she had seen so far in Small Heath did not dress half as well. Just the name might have been a coincidence, but the similar manner of attire implied some sort of relationship. Mr Shelby was too young to be Thomas's father, but a brother or cousin, maybe…
Naomie dug around in her satchel and pulled out a labeled tin. "Give me your hand," she demanded, putting her own palm-up on the bar. Mr Shelby gave her a confused look, a little unsteady from all the whiskey he must have drunk until now, but helpfully gave her his hand. She shook her head at it. "No, the other one."
With much more caution, he detached his injured hand from his glass and extended it to her.
"Whoever splinted this did a good job," Naomie began, holding it up and appraising his thumb. It was broken. Without warning, she set his hand down on the bar and started to unwrap the bandages. "But I can do better."
Mr Shelby flinched, tried to draw back his arm. She held on tightly to his wrist. "What are you—"
"Keep still, Mr Shelby," she said, patting the back of his hand. "As my thanks to you, I'll make sure it heals up in a snap."
Warily, but probably not warily enough, he watched Naomie as she opened up the tin and began to apply a charmed green salve to the inflamed, discoloured skin around the injury. She could see the moment he registered the cooling effect of the mint: a telling flicker of his eyelids, followed promptly by a loosening of his shoulders. She wrapped the thumb back up with its splint, mumbling a simple healing charm under her breath.
"There," said Naomie, letting go of the hand and finally allowing him to take it back. "Doesn't it feel better already?"
"Guess it does," Mr Shelby agreed, with no small amount of wonder. He brought his thumb close to his face to inspect it. "What are you, then? Some sort of apothecary? A wise woman?"
"A chovhani," she informed him cheerily, sticking a few chips into her mouth. He became very still, his eyes shooting to her. Naomie nodded at his startled look. If he knew what the word meant, then it meant he wasn't a gadze, an outsider. "So you are Roma. Like Thomas."
Mr Shelby straightened up in his seat, distancing his body from hers. "And how do you know Tommy?" he demanded, appropriately wary now. Keeping her in his sight at all times, he placed both of his hands on top of the counter, putting them palm up so as to be as inoffensive as possible. His rolled up cap pressed up against the tips of his fingers.
Naomie dimpled at him. "Oh, I met him yesterday. He helped me get settled in—Thomas has been quite decent to me, so far."
"Our Tommy? Decent?" Mr Shelby snorted. All of the uneasy tension was knocked right out of him by a sudden burst of humour. He looked at her again, examining her all over, and chortled, "Yeah, I bet he's been real decent."
"And what's that supposed to mean?" Naomie demanded, a little aggrieved. Her brows crinkled, and her mouth puckered with the stirrings of indignation.
"Nothing rude," he assured her. He chuckled again, and slumped forward onto the counter. "Just that the great and mighty Thomas Shelby has finally remembered he's a man like the rest of us. Bloody time."
Naomie glared at the back of his head but settled down anyhow. She suspected that Mr Shelby was deeply misunderstanding her relationship with Thomas, but she did not bother to correct him. After all, she couldn't exactly tell him the truth—she had a strong premonition that Thomas wouldn't like others to know the details of their silly bet. Perhaps he might really shoot her then, even though he was the one who suggested it.
Mr Shelby swiped a nearby beer from the counter and brought it to his mouth. It was actually Naomie's beer, but she said nothing, as she didn't really want it anyway. Mid-chug, he abruptly paused and turned to face her. "I haven't offended you none, have I?" he asked, more cautious than a drunken man had any right to be.
"I'm not going to curse you, if that's what you're asking," Naomie told him through a mouth half-full of fried pig trimmings. "You don't have to be on eggshells all the time. It'll take a lot to get me that angry."
In fact, her nastier curses tended to be reserved for a very particular genre of transgression; she did not cast those so easily otherwise. Even when she was vexed to the point of being red in the face and ready to throw a fist, it was not common for her to go so far as to curse the person who'd caused her pique. She'd been raised to treat her gift as a responsibility rather than a weapon, and it was a lesson that stuck. Mostly because she got smacked with a broom whenever it got unstuck, but regardless.
This was why Naomie was so unused to the way all of these men treated her like a live mine. She hadn't realized witches had such a reputation amongst the Romany people at large; after all, she herself didn't curse people very often. Excepting the fairs, which was populated by enough kin to constitute an army anyway, she'd remained within the confines of her tribe's encampments for most of her life.
And her Young clan did not fear their witches. No living member of her clan even remembered a time when a witch or two wasn't living amongst them, healing and helping. Her grandmother was venerated, her every word received with a respectful sense of gravity, and as for Naomie… well, they could not help but to treat her with the same casual familiarity they showed towards any other Young child. These people had all seen her crawling around in nappies, or running around bare as the day she was born, or rolling around in mud and getting scolded in full public view. They were aware that she was uncommonly powerful, but they were also too used to her easy temperament to feel any fear of her.
Of course, this was partly because the worst curse they had ever known her to cast was one that made one of her sisters jar her elbow every time she passed by a chicken. They'd never seen her make a gadze 'accidentally' bite his own tongue off for saying disgusting things about that same sister, years later. They'd never seen her send ghosts to haunt a young man for weeks on end, tormenting him until his eyes went hollow and his hair turned white as snow. And they'd never have to.
As Naomie scarfed her bar snacks, Mr Shelby sat quietly next to her, downing drink after drink. It was a wonder he hadn't drowned already. If someone told her he was part-fish, she'd believe it.
"You drink like you're trying to escape the demons in your head," Naomie told him, once she'd lost count of how many glasses he'd knocked back. He lifted his head and looked over his slumped shoulder at her. "They won't go away just because of a bit of booze, you know."
"Yeah?" Mr Shelby slurred, dark eyes squinting from under heavy brows. His pupils were not entirely focused. "And I suppose you've got something better than rum in that magic bag of yours?"
"I sure do," said Naomie, brightening up at the prospective of making a sale. She launched into an enthusiastic pitch. "I've got lots of things that'll help, and I've got them right on hand, too. What do you say to a potion that'll cheer you up in an instant whenever you start to feel down? Or a talisman that will keep the most painful memories from taking over your mind? Or even a candle that'll help you sleep like a baby, night after night? How does that sound to you?"
"Sounds too bloody good to be true," grunted Mr Shelby, rubbing a hand over his tired face. He pointed at her with an unsteady finger. "But I'd try anything at this point. Gimme all those."
"They won't be free, though," Naomie warned, already reaching for her bag. "If you want all three, it'll cost you a pretty penny."
Mr Shelby slapped the table. "Hell, you think I'm worried about money? I'm Arthur-fucking-Shelby. Money ain't ever a problem. Gimme your price," he said, shoving a hand into his pocket.
"Alright," Naomie replied, a sunny smile breaking on her face. She rifled through her satchel and rearranged those three items so that they sat at the top of her bag, ready to be taken out. "That'll be—"
Naomie stopped. She could feel, like a physical touch pinning her to her seat, someone's heavy gaze on the side of her face. There was a body at her back, not quite against it but close enough to make her aware of a sudden wash of heat.
A low, amused voice slipped into her ear. "Miss Young," it said. Soft breath bussed the side of her face in a lick of hot smoke. "I trust that you were not about to fleece my brother. Especially after your fierce insistence that you were neither a cheat nor a swindler."
Naomie sniffed and ignored him. "Ten pounds, three shillings," she finished, as if she were never interrupted. She placed her wares onto the counter in a neat line.
Arthur Shelby glanced at her, and then at the man behind her, his hand slowly pulling out of his pocket. He held the money in his fist, but he neither extended it nor put it away. He glanced behind her again.
The heat left her back and lingered by her side until she finally turned towards it with a scowl. There, stood between Naomie and his brother, hand slung casually in his pocket, was none other than Thomas Shelby himself. His face was inscrutable. He watched her from under the brim of his hat, his gaze made all the more intense by the shadows cast over his eyes.
He was just as well-dressed as he had been this morning. Just as handsome too.
Handsome or not, he was very much getting in the way of her making money.
"I am not and will never be a swindler, Mr Shelby," Naomie proclaimed primly, pursing her lips, "Because the things I sell actually work. Exactly as advertised. I've never had a customer who regretted purchasing from me, only those who regretted not doing so sooner."
Thomas did not reply—he often did not, she found—and only stared at her in silence. His eyes were a blue so cold they could freeze a man through, but holding them felt more like trying to carry a burning coal in her bare hands. Still, Naomie stared stubbornly back, resolved not to quail under his gaze no matter how heavy or unwavering. He had called her a swindler, and she would not stand down until he took it back. The air between them became charged with something unknowable.
"Oh, I'm not doubting the efficacy of your enchantments, Miss Young," Thomas finally said, eyes remaining glued to hers. "Only your pricing of them."
"I price them what they are worth," Naomie replied firmly. She wanted to look away—the more she kept his gaze, the more she felt like she was sitting on a hot pan—but she persevered. "There isn't a man I've met who didn't think these things were worth every shilling and more."
Thomas glanced away from her to the objects set out on the counter, and Naomie allowed the tension to run out of her stiff spine. His eyes flitted from the phial labeled 'cheer', to the tall burlap pouch labeled 'sleep', to the talisman, which was a circle of blue glass with a hole punched in the center. Symbols painted in white and gold danced around the rim of the hole, and there was a strap of leather knotted through it.
"I believe you," Thomas said, with a smile that was not really a smile. There was no humour in it, only a bitter knowing.
From behind him, Arthur finally tired of their strange back and forth. "So, is she a real witch or not?" he demanded, thumping the counter.
"She's a real witch. Even a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, I'm told," Thomas said, paying mind to his brother at last. "I won't stop you from buying her charms."
Arthur, who still had the money in hand, looked from Thomas to Naomie, and then to the wares sitting on the bar. He slowly slid the payment over to Naomie, and she took it up and openly counted it, no longer mindful of whether Thomas was watching or not.
"Ten pounds, three shillings," she concluded happily, whisking the money away into her satchel. "Very good, Mr Shelby. Now, there are some instructions on the packages, but I'll tell them to you as well, just to be sure. Whenever you need a shot of cheer, just take a tiny sip of this bottle that I've helpfully labeled—only one sip, mind you, or else you'll spend the rest of your day grinning like a loon. Someone could punch you in the face and you'd just pat their backs. And this incense candle should be lit a few minutes before bed for best effect, but make sure there isn't any cigarette smoke in the air before you sleep. It'll knock you out the same, but your dreams won't be very good."
Naomie handed each item over as she explained it, and Arthur received them with an expression of complete, drunken concentration. She was fairly sure that he'd forget all this by morning. "And this," she said, dangling the talisman, "You just carry it on you. You'll know that all the power has been used up when the glass breaks in half. This could take a month or a year; that depends on you."
Arthur picked up the talisman by its strap and peered closely at the coloured glass. "Depends on me what?"
"The intensity of your bad memories. How frequently they intrude into your mind."
"Right," he replied, nodding emphatically to show he understood. He tucked the talisman away into the pocket of his coat. "Right, okay."
"Is that all?" asked Tommy, once Arthur had cleared away his purchases and it seemed Naomie had nothing left to say about them. Naomie nodded at him. "Then it's time for you to go home, Arthur. This isn't the Garrison. Harry's not here to start watering down your rum when you go too far. Pol's worried that we'll find you dead in a ditch by the morning."
"Fuck off, Tommy," groaned Arthur, nursing an empty glass to his forehead. "I only came here so you bastards wouldn't bother me. Let a man drink in peace."
"You won't find your peace at the bottom of a bottle, Arthur. Go home. Try your new charms. Have a sleep. You'll thank me in the morning."
With an angry grunt, Arthur got off his stool and shoved past Thomas. Thomas sedately gave way, and he and Naomie both watched Arthur shamble to the door of the pub.
"Is he going to be okay?" Naomie asked, wincing when Arthur slammed his shoulder into another man. The man flinched away with an apology and Arthur bared his teeth at him, before continuing to shuffle past. "Shouldn't you go with him?"
Thomas gestured to the bartender, and then slid onto the vacated bar stool. Settling down, he rolled up his cap and brought out his cigarettes. "Nah, he's a grown man. He'll take care of himself. Just needs a reminder, sometimes."
The bartender hurried over with a clean glass, into which Thomas poured out a splash of whiskey from Arthur's bottle. He had a leisurely sip of his whiskey, took a long drag of his cigarette, and then turned to face her. He leaned sideways on the counter, visibly more relaxed than before.
"Tell me, Naomie," Thomas drawled, white smoke trailing from his lips. The way he said her name made her lower belly clench. His eyes shone like shattered glass under his dark lashes. "Is the boarding house I've found for you not to your liking? Is it not… respectable enough?"
"Not at all," Naomie said, surprised that he would ask such a thing. "I like it very much. I don't know how respectable it is, since I've been asleep the whole day, but the sheets are clean and the room is very comfortable."
"That's good," he said lightly. He took a drag of his cigarette and nodded, slow and thoughtful. "That's very good. Now then, if you like your accommodations so much—why is it that I have found you here, late at night, in a pub full of drunken factory workers, selling your wares to an unknown man, and eating," his eyes flickered to the bar counter in front of her, "Beer snacks?"
Naomie studied Thomas's face; those hooded eyelids, those high cheeks, that lush mouth, the blunt brows raised in a sarcastic show of interest. His expression was as obscure as usual, but his eyes seemed to her to glimmer with a vague desire to needle.
"You're implying something," she concluded, after a moment of thought. "And I suspect I know what it is, but you and I both know it's nothing like that. I was just hungry and couldn't get into the kitchen."
"You could have asked the matron."
"I didn't want to wake her up just because I was hungry. She would have hated me even more than she does now."
Thomas considered this, long lashes casting shadows on his cheeks as they rose and fell. Smoke drifted from the hand that hung over the edge of the bar. "Do you want me to talk to her?"
"Because you talking to her will fix the problem," Naomie replied, with a wry laugh. "No, it'll be more helpful if you don't. I can get her to like me before long; I'm very charming, you see."
"Oh?" Thomas asked, a faint smile pulling at his lips. "Are you?"
"Am I not?" she said, dimpling sweetly at him. Naomie leaned in close enough to feel the smoke from his cigarette curling around her cheeks, close enough to smell his aftershave. She batted her lashes in an exaggerated manner, and then had to bite her bottom lip to hold in a giggle.
Thomas tilted his head to the side, as if to consider her. His gaze flickered to her mouth and then back to her eyes, where they stayed fast until she, too, was drawn in. He looked at her—she looked back—and without meaning to, Naomie found herself sinking deeper and deeper into his gravitational pull the longer she held his gaze. For a short, breathless moment, she could not remember where she was, or why she was there, or even that there was anyone in the room other than the two of them.
At last, Thomas said, "I suppose you are."
"What?" replied Naomie, dumbly. She blinked several times as she returned to herself. She'd forgotten the question. Was it an important one?
Thomas smiled and said nothing, only turned back to his whiskey and his cigarette. Naomie slowly turned away too, still dazed and bewildered. Mechanically, she reached to her plate of food and brought whatever her hand came across to her mouth.
That had been like being under an enchantment. It was strange as hell. Was she the witch or was he?
How dangerous. She'd have to be careful from now on, lest she be taken unawares again.
Honestly, it had to be breaking some sort of written law to be that attractive and look at others like that. Naomie was sure that Thomas had been, at the very least, in complete violation of all sense of decency and human virtue just now. She felt a bizarre but not unwarranted fear that her mother might appear out of nowhere and give her a good tongue lashing for so much as speaking to the man.
The two of them sat in silence, Naomie warily eating—keeping half an eye out for her mother—and Thomas calmly drinking and smoking. Once the last chip disappeared into her mouth, he collected his cigarette boxes and abruptly stood.
"Let's go," he said, pulling his cap back on.
Naomie stared blankly at him. "Go where?"
"I'm walking you back. Come, I don't have all day."
"But I haven't paid—"
Tommy tossed a couple of shillings onto the counter and raised a brow as if to say, 'Anything else?'
There really was nothing else, so Naomie obediently gathered up her belongings and walked out of the pub with him.
When she'd been alone, whether on the street or in the bar, no one had noticed her at all. This was of course due to an amulet that she held, which kept others from paying her much mind unless they were looking for her or she did something to attract notice, such as speak. Now that she was with Thomas, however, everyone was noticing her; she caught the way that random people were nodding or doffing their hats or glancing quietly out the corners of their eyes at the both of them. What this meant was that despite not doing anything at all, Thomas's very presence was salient enough to nullify her notice-me-not amulet.
"So what do you do, exactly?" Naomie asked, peering up at the man by her side.
Thomas smiled with a quiet, private amusement. That was enough for her to understand that his subsequent response would not be the entire truth.
"I'm a bookmaker."
Naomie huffed. Like hell a bookmaker could command such attention—and fear—from so many people. And yet, she could tell that he was telling the truth.
"Bookmaker-and-?" she pressed.
"Bookmaker and none of your business," he said, warningly. His smile slipped away, but she wasn't worried; a spark of humour glimmered just there on his face, just out of sight.
Throwing caution to the wind, Naomie tried one last time. "What if I want to make it my business?"
Instead of getting angry, Thomas tilted his head and looked at her, thoughtfully rubbing his lower lip with his thumb. He was quiet for a long moment, and for a second she thought that he might tell her after all.
"Tell me about your magick, Naomie," Thomas said instead, abruptly changing the topic. "How does it work, exactly?"
Naomie—very seriously and also very pettily—considered telling him it was none of his business. Then she reminded herself that this man was picking up her tab for—well, everything—and that little brother really liked him. Besides, she was never reluctant to speak about magic. It was her hobby, livelihood, and passion.
"Alright, well… Roma magick in general works on two different planes: the natural, and the unnatural," she began, lifting her hands palm-up so that they were each cupping an unseen object. "Witchcraft that deals with the unnatural includes such things as fortune-telling, prophetic dreams, exorcising spirits, seeking the divine, and communing with the dead. These are the things that most people attribute to witches. The unnatural is not bound to earthly rules, therefore a witch's power in the unnatural plane is not either."
Naomie flipped over her left hand so that Thomas could see the horizontal cross on the back of her thin, silver rosary ring. It shone with an uncanny brightness in the dim light of the street. An eerie chill passed over Naomie, and even though Thomas only blinked and made no other indication of having felt anything, she knew that he must have experienced it too. Then she put down that hand, dispersing the sudden chill, and lifted her right, which had retrieved a single shilling from her satchel.
"The natural, of course, has to do with the natural world; that is, reality. Witches, however powerful, cannot completely change reality. They can't make something into something it is not, or bring anything into existence that did not previously exist. They can only increase or decrease effects already there, or make things that are improbable, probable. The more powerful you are, the more probability you can command, and to a greater extent.
"You're a bookmaker, so I'll explain with odds. Look at this coin," she prompted, twirling it between her fingers. Thomas leaned over her shoulder and peered at it as she showed him one side and then the other. It was one of the ones she'd gotten from Arthur, just now. "It's a normal coin, with a head and a tail. There exists no chovhani magick that could directly cause this coin to become double-sided, or change the weight of it, or any number of absolutely impossible things. Now, heads or tails?"
"Heads," Thomas replied, without hesitation. Naomie smiled, satisfied with her spectator. His eyes were very focused. Currently, his attention was wholly concentrated on her. There was nothing worse than an indifferent audience.
"Right. A witch of not much talent could tell you that your next flip will land on heads, and make it come true. Those are odds of 1 to 1 that she's manipulating." She flipped the coin into the air, caught it, and then showed Thomas the result. It had landed on heads. "Not very impressive, though, is it? That could very well have been just chance. And that's the point—that's why she's considered untalented.
"Now, say she tells you that your next three coin tosses will be heads." Naomie demonstrated again, thrice throwing the coin into the air and catching it. Each time, the coin landed on heads. "Odds of 1 to 7. Better, but still nothing much. How about ten heads in a row? What are the chances?"
Thomas mused over the question, silently doing the math in his head, and eventually came out with, "One to around a thousand."
She threw again, ten straight flips, and each time, the coin came up heads. "Now we're getting somewhere. More specifically, those are odds of 1 to 1023 that she's manipulating, which means she's erased all the thousand or so possible outcomes in which tails could have come up at least once. No one would deny that she has a little bit of skill. In this vein, a witch who could make your next hundred tosses with this coin come up as only heads would be considered highly capable, as she would be commanding odds of 1 to… well, an incredibly big number. Over a billion of a billion of a billion, or something like that."
As she walked, Naomie continued to throw the coin, catch it, and show Thomas the result. It invariably came up heads, and his expression became more contemplative with each subsequent demonstration.
"A powerful witch could make your next thousand tosses turn up heads. A very powerful witch could—without ceremony, simply by touching it—charm this coin into never turning up tails again, no matter how many times it is thrown. And, according to what I've heard from other witches, there have historically been rare, prodigious witches who manifested their gift to such an inconceivable degree that they could perform a ritual to make every single coin tossed in this city turn up heads until the moment of their death."
As her lodging house came into view, Naomie's explanation finally wound down and they both fell into a pensive silence.
"And you, Naomie?" Thomas asked, sounding out the syllables of her name as if he wanted to weigh its value in his mouth. He glanced down at the shilling sitting in her palm. "How many times will that coin of yours turn up heads?"
"Why don't you see for yourself?" she replied, with a cocky grin. Naomie flicked the coin over to him and he easily plucked it from the air. "Take it home and try it. I want it back when you're done, though; a shilling is good money, you know."
Thomas blinked slowly, then removed his hand from his pocket and reached out to pull her wrist towards him. He pressed another shilling into her palm, long fingers trailing hot against the back of her hand as he pulled away. "I'll be keeping this," he told her, gesturing with the charmed shilling held in his other hand.
Naomie folded her hand over the replacement coin and stuck it in her pocket. "Sure, if you like," she said. It was no skin off her back; money was money. Maybe she should even charge him for the enchantment on it.
She briefly played with this idea, and eventually decided that would be going too far. But if she saw him winning any wagers with it, she'd definitely demand a cut. Father may have done his best, but Mother hadn't raised a fool.
Before Naomie realized it, they had reached the door to her lodgings. She stopped in place and turned to face him.
"Thanks for walking me," she said, gingerly. She bit her lower lip. "It was… well, pleasant."
Thomas didn't reply, just nodded at her. His gaze felt heavy on her skin.
For several moments, they stood together on that doorstep in the dark, staring wordlessly at each other. Naomie didn't know what he was waiting for. She didn't know what she was waiting for.
She cast about for something to say. What could she say? Something about the wager?
Abruptly, Naomie blurted out the first thing to come to mind, which was, "So, are you in love with me yet?"
She almost cringed immediately after. With herculean effort, she barely managed to keep her face placid and unbothered.
A smile flashed across Thomas face, which had just now seemed so severe and distant as to be carved of stone. His brow lifted. "Can't say that I am, no."
It was already out there; might as well go with it. Naomie nodded emphatically. "Of course you aren't. Because it's nonsense. I'm going to win the bet."
"We'll see," Thomas said, his lips tilting just-so and becoming something that was nearly a smile. It softened the sharp lines of his cheekbones, softened the piercing blue of his eyes. Whenever Naomie saw that expression on his face, she thought that Thomas Shelby might even have been said to look gentle.
Then, without so much as a by-your-leave, Thomas finally turned to leave, apparently having gotten what he'd been waiting for. He began to walk away, still idly rolling the coin around in his hand.
Naomie blinked and then scowled.
"Goodnight to you too," she grumbled under her breath, also turning to the front door of her lodgings. The only response she received was a soft huff of amusement from Thomas's departing back.
.
.
.
.
Notes—
chovhani or chov'hani — Romany word for witch. So, a gypsy witch.
gadze — anyone non-Romany. pejorative connotations.
Happy birthday my bun! part 2
