When Tommy's footsteps echoed on the stairway, she lay down in his bed, turned and faced away from him. The sheets smelled of dust and the lingering traces of opium smoke, but not like him, which she was grateful for. But soon he was near her, standing over her, so she could smell him anyway and it made no difference. This sent an irrational flash of anger through her. He was everywhere, in her lungs, in her mind, and she could not escape. He sat at the edge of the bed, not touching her. He ran his hand down his face.

"Tessa. I know you're not asleep," he said. He always managed to impress her and make her want to slap him, simultaneously. She thought most everyone who met him probably felt that way. She wasn't special. "Solomons has a man on the inside. He's going to offer his support. With our… plan."

Tessa held back a scoff. Our plan. But she had agreed, after all. She supposed she had as good as come up with it, at this point. At least Tommy hadn't been meeting someone about drugs or whiskey or races or whatever else he was caught up in. That tempered her, a little bit. She needed his help. She couldn't see him, but she could feel his back just barely pressed against hers while she stubbornly faced away from him. Every bit of him was hard, like steel. There was no softness in his eyes or his body or his heart. She thought of the car he had gotten her. Just to repay a debt. The lightness in his face as he played chess with his family. Overshadowed by the darkness of war. And she thought about how, even if she survived the Germans, she was completely fucked. He sighed, and went to stand. She turned and caught his hand. He looked back at her, dead eyes questioning.

"Stay," she said, because she was just like everyone else, she wasn't special, and she was a stupid, begging mess for Tommy Shelby. He cleared his throat, scratched the back of his head. She waited for him to make an excuse, and didn't care. Playing with a knife would hurt eventually no matter what, did it really matter when it cut her?

He sat back down. She wanted to raise her eyebrows, but kept her face neutral.

"It's a small bed," he said.

"I suppose you'll just have to endure being close to me," she told him, and he blinked and shook his head, which was his version of a smile. He took off his expensive, shiny shoes, shrugged off his vest. He lay down beside her and she shifted so that she could rest her head on his chest. His heart beat comfortingly, slow. He put his arm up behind his head and she tried not to fixate on how it made his muscles flex and play under his shirt. She breathed him in through her nose, closed her eyes. To her surprise, he moved his other arm down around her, hand on her shoulder. She kept her eyes closed as if opening them would ruin the fantasy, that he was a good man, and she was a good woman, and everything was simple and easy and they weren't forced together trying to bring down a German gang who had taken her father hostage. She focused on breathing, on his smell, on his heartbeat under her ear.

She felt small in his arms, his hand wrapping around her shoulder like her bones were hollow, like she was bird that could fly away. But her fist was gripping his shirt tightly, even as she slept, and the soft curves of her body and the fine lines of her face had fire in them, even as her eyes were closed, even as she clung to him. She looked like she came from fine breeding, like she had the Arabian sun inside her, she looked like the one horse no one could break. Her hair was draped across his arm and sifted through his fingers, dense and expensive-feeling, like hotel sheets. He watched her breathe, her mouth barely open, sometimes forming words he couldn't seem to catch no matter how he listened. He felt the familiar darkness creeping up on him, all the faces, the permanent images of violence, of every atrocious act he had ever committed and ever seen played like a film at the pictures, but instead of closing his eyes and drowning in them, he kept them open, kept looking at her, like she was a lifeline. He tried not to blink. The faces swam at him even in the brief milliseconds of darkness behind his eyelids. She muttered something, moved one of her legs over his. He stared up at the ceiling, anywhere but the walls, imagining he could see through it, then through the smoke, up to the stars. To the hunter.

"Tommy," she said, her eyes moving under her lids. He wondered what it was that was making her say his name in her sleep. He wished she wouldn't. He wished she knew he was poison, but maybe she did. Maybe that would just make her take more of him. He reached up and brushed a wayward strand of red off of her face, her creamy cheek with it's smattering of freckles, like the stars, like Orion.

"I've never met anyone like you," he said to her, quietly, only because he knew she could not hear him.

The morning cracked bright and loud through the window. The machines never stopped, all through the night they boomed and cracked, sending their dust and smoke through the air. But Tessa heard none of it, or had already become accustomed to the noise, because the sound that woke her was the sound of the door creaking open. No one in this house ever knocked, it seemed. Arthur stood in the doorway, and was about to speak before he took in the scene in front of him, Tommy's face soft and unlined in sleep, half of Tessa's body on top of his, her face lifting from it's spot nestled in his shoulder. Arthur's expression turned so gentle it shocked her. Of all the family, he seemed the most brutal, and he seemed the most kind.

"Is everything okay?" Tessa asked, her rusty voice cracking on the last word.

"'S fine. Polly was just wondering where Tommy was, is all. He's usually up before all of us, stomping 'round, making sure nobody gets any rest."

"He never sleeps, does he?" Tessa asked, looking down at his face, so close to hers. He looked beautiful, and harmless, the slope of his nose and lines of his cheeks evoking so much affection in her that she pulled back from him a little, reflexively.

Arthur shrugged from the doorway. "Looks like he's sleeping now," he said, and then turned and walked away without a goodbye. His receding footsteps woke Tommy, and the change was startling. One minute he wasn't alert, wasn't aware, and then he was completely. She could feel that he wanted to move, so she scooted away from him, as much as the tiny bed allowed. When he sat up, he made a noise that she felt between her legs, and she wanted to push him back down onto the bed and finish what they had started the night before. Instead she watched the line of his back as he stretched the sleep from his limbs, climbing out of the bed. She wondered if he always slept in his clothes. He was pulling out a cigarette from his case, and he turned to look at her. She wished he wouldn't, at least until she had brushed her hair.

"Ask Polly or Ada if you can borrow some clothes. We're going out today."

"We are? Where to?"

He was buttoning his vest, spoke through the smoke floating out of his mouth. "We are, yes."

She raised an eyebrow at him, a prompt, a demand. She didn't like surprises. He gave in.

"How would you like to visit your horse?"

She smiled, but it was like smiling with glass in her cheeks. "Seeing as it could be my last day alive, and all?"

"You get used to it." He reached his hand out to help her out of bed. "Come on. I'll give you the grand tour of the Shelby stables."