Thomas Shelby stood in the doorway, only a silhouette, his gun still raised, and the body of a huge, blonde German man crumpled on top of Leonard Reilly, bleeding from his neck and from a shot to the head. Tessa turned, stunned, so shocked she couldn't think of what to say, of what to do, of anything. All that came out of her mouth, the only thought in her blank white mind, like a sheet of paper before the artist dips into the watercolor, was to stare at Tommy, and say,
"You came."
"Yeah," was all he replied with, wiping a spray of blood from his face.
"Tommy," Tessa said, frantically, "they had Ada, they fucking had Ada, here, and she tried to get out but I don't know if she did-,"
"I know, I already found her, running down the street in her fucking underwear. It's alright, she's with Johnny Dogs now," And a military grade tommy gun and enough dynamite to blow up your father's house and all his stables, he thought, but didn't say, because he didn't want to think about it, couldn't think about it, about finding her, safe, only to leave her again and have her not still be safe when he returned. "And now we need to go. Cover your ears." He walked up to her father, pointed his gun again, shot it right at the spot where the chains were adhered to the stone wall. The BANG was deafening, coupled with the echo and the crumbling of stone. He worried about going deaf again. It was a miracle it hadn't happened yet, the only miracle he was likely to see in this life. The manacles fell with a clatter, still attached to her father's wrists, but free of the wall. "Thomas Shelby," he said, offering Leonard Reilly his pistol-free hand and wrenching him to his unsteady feet. Her father was covered in blood and brains, his glasses missing, his hair in disarray. "You probably remember me."
Her father did not spare Tommy a second glance. He was staring at his daughter, who was staring at the body on the floor. Her hands were dripping red. Tommy did not have time to decipher his expression, but if he had to guess, he would probably have gone with horror. His little girl, holding a knife, staring at the man whose throat she had just slit. Tessa's face was completely empty. Tommy understood.
"I…," she said, then stopped, like she couldn't get any farther, couldn't form any more thoughts or words. "He…," she tried to continue, then shook her head, just barely. Her mouth moved again, but no sounds came out. Tommy took a step closer to her, tentatively, then realized with a belated kind of shock that her chest was heaving, her breathing hyperventilating, the blood on her fingers splattering the ground because of the force with which her hands were shaking.
"Hey," Tommy said, sharply, more sharply than he had intended to, because of the fear, more afraid for her than he was of the armed German military upstairs. "Hey," he said again, softer, trying to reach her, took another slow step nearer to her. She looked up at him, away from the body, finally, and if he had a heart, the look in her eyes would have shattered it. A tear slipped out, glittering like a diamond in the low light, just one, and she looked down at her hands like she didn't know who they belonged to.
"Listen to me," Tommy said. "You didn't kill him. Okay? I did." He cocked his pistol again, shot the body in the chest without really looking, for good measure. Reilly jumped. Tessa didn't move, didn't flinch. "You didn't kill him. It's okay. It's alright." She nodded a tiny bit, but went back to looking at the body, like she wasn't even aware Tommy or her father were in the room. Tommy took her hand with his free one, to snap her out of her stupor, and she yelped.
"Sorry," she said, and he wanted to laugh, "my thumb is broken."
"They broke your fucking thumb?" The first one wasn't enough, the blonde brute at his feet. Tommy wanted to kill all of them for so much as touching her.
"No," she said, sounding far away, like she found the whole situation mildly curious. "I did." She was still staring at the corpse, the remnants of bone, the place where the back of a skull had been. Her hair looked like individual strands of gold in the crooked light of the gas lamp on the floor, her eyes shadowed like a skeleton. Tommy didn't know what to say, or think, and he didn't have time to figure it out, so he kept his face neutral and tried to reach her.
"Tess," he said, but he realized within an instant that her eyes were rolling back and her body going slack, and he got to her just before she crumpled on the ground. Her father watched him catch her, like he had watched everything since the first gunshot, and Thomas wanted to scream at him, would have, if he thought it could have done any good. Your daughter broke her own thumb and killed a man within a span of two hours, and you're just going to fucking stand there? He wanted to ask, but he scooped Tessa up, tried to be rational, because if she was conscious and not completely fucking terrified, that's what she would have wanted him to do. She was dead weight in his arms, and he hoped she would wake up soon, because they needed to move, and fast.
"Come on," he said, to her father, the man who had caused all of this shit. Tommy knew that, logically, it was hardly Reilly's fault, but for the moment, he needed someone to blame that wasn't himself. He would deal with his own regret later. He nodded at Reilly, who was still crouched on the floor in the corner of the dark cell, then at the body of the blonde German, staring at Tommy.
"You called her Tess," he said, and Tommy heard a plethora of nuances in his voice, none of which Tommy had the fucking time to deal with at the moment. The old man might be in some state of shock, but his priorities were questionable, despite the situation or because of it. "That's what her mother called her," the other man continued, his voice soft.
Tommy wanted to say "Are you fucking serious right now?" aloud, but he didn't, letting his expression relay it for him.
"Take his gun." He told him instead, and Reilly looked like he would rather have flung himself off a building, but he took the gun from the German's slack hand, his own trembling. Tommy turned and started up the stairs, before coming to the fairly obvious realization that he couldn't carry Tessa and hold a gun at the same time. He glanced back at Reilly, who had made no move to follow, which made Tommy want to hit him.
"Can you shoot?" Tommy asked him.
"No," the old man whispered, his face ashen.
"Fucking hell," Tommy said, and moved Tessa as gently as he could to hand her to her father, holding her head up when it lolled to the side as he held her out to him. "Take her. Give me the gun. She'll wake soon, she's just overwhelmed. The body shuts itself down sometimes. Happened all the fucking time in France." Tommy realized once he said this that Reilly, as the CMO, was undoubtedly already aware of the phenomenon. He traded Tessa's slack form for the German's Ceska Zbrojovka vz. 22, a semi-auto, which he kept in his left hand because it would have less recoil than his revolver, which was now down three bullets.
"And you're so sure about that? What if she's injured?" Tommy gave Reilly a few points back for his concern over Tessa's welfare, but then immediately retracted them because of the ungratefulness of his tone. Tommy had just saved both of their lives, after all.
"Oh, she's definitely injured," he said, approaching the staircase again, checking the pistol's mag, releasing the slide. Fully loaded. Good.
Reilly spluttered. "To say that with such nonchalance! She is my only daughter-,"
No one had ever claimed that Tommy was a patient man.
"Oi! You won't have even an only daughter if you don't shut up. Now let's fucking go," he said, and this time, he decided if the old man didn't follow him, he would take Tessa himself, guns be damned, do his best to get them both out, and leave the old fucker here. Serve the wrinkly bastard right.
"You should allow me to take a moment to inspect her for physical symptoms-," Reilly continued, but Tommy turned and started walking away.
"We don't have fucking time for you to do a fucking physical on her. Its the mental symptoms that will be worse, anyway," he snapped, the old wood of the stairs creaking under his weight as he climbed, and he heard with a mingling relief and continued annoyance that Reilly had finally decided that getting out of the hellhole fit into his busy schedule. Tommy kept both guns aloft. The distraction, provided by Johnny Dogs, had undoubtedly served to remove some of the German guards, but it had also undoubtedly not removed all of them. Tommy appreciated that it was a large house. It allowed for more stealth, but the flip side of the coin of luck was that the soldiers stationed there were all acclimated to the house's blueprint, and Tommy was not. And he had an unconscious woman and an old man in tow. So the odds were not in his favor, but when were they? He thought about France, waiting with his brothers to die in the snow.
He gestured for Reilly to wait once he reached the top of the stairs, peeking around the corner, revolver at the ready, pistol held tense by his side. Tessa stirred in her father's arms, her eyes blinking open, beautiful even with her split lip, even looking like she had crawled through the gates of hell. Tommy's heart was pounding, thumping against his ribcage like a rabbit whose leg was caught in a trap.
"What the fuck?" Tessa mumbled quietly, looking completely lost, like she couldn't remember where she was or how she had gotten there. She probably couldn't. Tommy wondered if, at some point during the night, she could have gotten a concussion. He did not like how likely it was.
"Good morning, sweetheart," he said, and even to his ears, it sounded too flat, feigning too hard for nonchalance, but Tessa met his eyes, and hers had the ghost of a smile in them, even as her father frowned. She slipped down from Reilly's arms, trying to gather her bearings, shaking her head a bit to clear it. He couldn't give her the time to get herself together, even if he may have wished to.
"Wait for my signal," he told them, and then he moved out from behind the staircase wall, his guns held in front of him like they were swords and he was Achilles, going into battle.