The beemer had just gone past at top speed and the chorus of: "the girls are here" had started echoing through Blue Zone. The boys from Houses 4 and 16 had been gathered together in House 4s sitting room. Spike and Mickey had finally come up with an initiation task for Rhys. They'd spent weeks announcing one idiotic idea after another; things that weren't difficult, things that were impossible, things that defied science. So it was Joel who'd suggested the task and the other boys had just agreed and acted like they'd had something to do with it too.

'It was all of our idea innit,' was how they'd introduced it Rhys, a bit like two children who'd decided they wanted to be in charge of the playground game. 'You sneak onto the busses with the girls tonight. Once you get to Dublin, you can nick the money you need to come back.'

So now Rhys was chewing his nails nervously as they all made their way to Central Square to meet the girls.

'Be honest Ste,' Rhys said, coming up alongside him. 'What are my chances of getting away with it?'

Ste wasn't sure when he'd become the go-to guy in Blue Zone, but it was happening more and more. Everyone in the zone seemed to think that he had some kind of inside knowledge because of all the "jobs" Brendan had him doing. And he'd heard the phrase "he's got the ear of the boss" more times than he cared to remember.

'You won't get away with it,' Ste answered honestly. 'He'll know about it.' He truly believed that Brendan knew everything that went on in The Estate. 'But do it well and he'll pretend not to see. He may even be impressed, send you on a proper job.'

Unsurprisingly, that didn't seem to make Rhys any less nervous, but Ste didn't really care. Rhys didn't have much of a personality. He didn't add anything to their little gang except sulky glares and the odd whinge. Even his crime, the thing that had made him run away from home and led him to The Estate was just as disturbing and had taken a huge amount of alcohol for Rhys to admit to and even then details had been foggy; something about being in a relationship with his half-sister he hadn't known he was related to.

She didn't really care. He'd recently become King, or more like Prince of his own twisted romance story. Rhys didn't interest him in the slightest.

'Ste!' He heard his name being called and Rae was darting her way through the crowd.

'Hiya,' he grinned, as she practically jumped into his arms. He held her tight. She felt small in his arms, fragile and weak and he felt an urge to protect her. She smelt different too. Her hair smelt fruity and she was wearing some kind of coconut body spray and he breathed in the normality of it all. But his attention was quickly stolen by Brendan's fag hag Mitzeee, who looked smug as she waggled her eyebrows in his direction like there was some big secret that only she knew, which in a way, he supposed, there was.

Rae cuddled closer into his side and he could feel her smile as she pressed her lips to his chest.

'Mitzeee thinks I'm foolish for always going with you,' she said and the words felt like a dagger of betrayal straight from Brendan's bitch's hand into his back.

'Wh-what makes you say that?' he asked.

'You probably didn't notice, but when we were walking together, she kept looking over with this look on her face.'

Ste was almost certain that Mitzeee's smirk had been for him, but he was a guilty kind of glad that Rae had got her own wrong idea from it.

'I wouldn't worry about that, you know,' he answered. He didn't even sound a little untrustworthy when he spoke, but this affair with Brendan had been going on a while now. He'd had plenty of practice at lying with ease and without remorse. 'You know how weird them lot from the top of the hill can be.'

'You'd know, I guess,' she murmured.

'What?' Ste was sure she must have been able to hear his heart beating faster.

'Well, you went to Spain with Brendan didn't you? You must have been with him a lot then.

'Not really,' Ste felt himself relaxing a little. She was still clueless. 'I just went around the city on my own, didn't I? He was the one off doing all that dodgy stuff.'

She sighed, her fingers gently walking across his chest.

'You don't have to lie to me, Ste.'

'I'm not lying!' he cried, a little too loud and a few octaves too high to sound like anything other than a lie, but she didn't seem to notice. She was about as good at reading people as he was.

'I know you've got a past and you've been to juvie and that living on The Estate means you have to do any job Brendan asks you to do. And I'm okay with that.'

'You are?'

For a second, he imagined some kind of perfect Bonnie & Clyde future with Rae, where they disappeared into the shadows together leaving nothing but an endless stream of minor thefts and petty crime in their wake. But the fantasy was over before it began as she continued:

'You're just doing what you have to do to survive in this place.'

'Oh, right.'

But Ste didn't see life on The Estate as "survival". This was life, his life, and he didn't hate it, not by a long shot.

'We're all just surviving here.' She was quiet after that. He could feel her fingers still drawing nonsensical patterns on his chest. Then she whispered:

'Tell me about Barcelona.'

He'd already told her a hundred times about the streets, about the posh glass-fronted shops, about the Barcelonian locals who'd seemed so exotic and beautiful. He'd told her how the people seemed to float instead of walk, and how they all sounded so interesting and Rae had lapped it all up. He'd even promised to take her there one day, but what was one more lie piled on top of his lies about Barcelona. Lies he'd never have to face but gave his girl an escapism she craved. He didn't need escapism, he had Brendan. Every second spent alone with that man felt like a twisted fantasy.

Tonight didn't feel like a night for more words and more lies.

'Stay here,' he whispered, kissing her on the forehead and climbing out of the bed, the cold air attacking him from every angle. He pulled on his boxers and ran downstairs careful to avoid stray scraps of metal and glass which were likely to be on the floor. He hunted all around the sitting room for Bart's can of spray-paint. It had to be in here, Bart was always using it to add extra little moments to his pictures on the walls. There it was.

He passed Bart on the way back up to his room, who just eyed the can and said:

'Your bird must be into some kinky stuff.'

It wasn't a question and his pupils were drug-affected pinpricks so Ste felt no desire to respond to him and just carried on up the stairs.

'What are you doing?' Rae frowned, when he came back into the room and started shaking the can.

'Cover your mouth,' was his only response as he picked up his discarded t-shirt from earlier and held in front of his face. She pulled the sheets around hers, but he could still see the uncertain smile in her eyes when he looked at her.

'Now you gotta bear with me,' he said over the rattle of the shaking can. 'Cause I ain't much of an artist.'

Then he pushed his finger down and began to spray onto the wall. Line down, one diagonal, a squiggle here. There was the big building on the left too. He rushed across the room to paint that, and closed his eyes trying to picture the scene. There'd been trees along the avenue and that weird statue structure in the distance. He painted them all and then took a step back to admire his handiwork. It wasn't too bad, for a can of spray paint on a dirty wall, but it was nothing compared to the real thing. But Rae had never seen the real thing, so her reaction was:

'Wow!'

'Stand up,' he grinned, jumping onto the bed and taking her hand to pull her to her feet next to him. 'Imagine it's sunny, but not really hot. And that,' he stood behind her, resting his chin on her shoulder and used her arm to help point to group of squiggly lines, 'is a water feature and you can smell coffee and….'

He trailed off then, because she wasn't looking at his drawing at all, she'd twisted right around his arms so she was gazing up at him with a goofy expression on her face and watery tears in her eyes.

'Oh.' He hadn't meant to upset her. 'The drawing is a bit crap, isn't it? Doesn't really look anything like a water feature-'

She cut him off with a sweet kiss and whispered. 'It's perfect,' as she rested her head on his shoulder, gazing at the wall as though it really was Barcelona and they really were in a penthouse room in a fancy hotel and there was no Estate, and no Blue Zone and no Brendan.

And, then she said something that changed everything:

'I love you Ste.'

It had been a bad day. The heist on the jewellery shop in Paris hadn't gone to plan. The drug's Brendan had snuck out of Steven's bag for the deal in County Derry had only been half as lucrative as he'd been hoping and barely worth the risk of getting himself or the lad caught. And worst of all, Brendan still didn't have a present for Cheryl's birthday, despite looking all over the internet almost twenty-four hours a day.

It only got worse as his phone began to ring with some idiotically annoying tune about "growing up and being famous", which Anne had set as her ringtone. He didn't know how to get rid of it.

'What?' he snapped. She and the girls had only been gone twenty minutes. What could possibly have gone wrong in that time?

'Oh.' He heard her tone turn bitter. 'Maybe this isn't the best time.'

'What do you want, Anne?' he sighed. She wouldn't have called if it wasn't important – or at least she better not have called if it wasn't important.

'I think one of your boys is on my bus.'

'You think one of my boys is on your bus?' he repeated incredulously.

'Well, no,' she chuckled a little, 'I can see him…. He's not doing a great job of hiding.'

Brendan leaned back in his chair and pinched the bridge of his nose, just trying work which one of the men from The Estate would have pulled a pointless stunt like this, and why. And then it clicked, the clue was in the word "boy".

'It'll be the new lad from Blue Zone,' he said, opening up Walker's folder on his computer and scrolling through the documents until he found the spreadsheet marked "Estate Profiles". He clicked around idly until the screen was displaying the Blue Zone boys in order of the most recent arrival. He read the name at the top:

'Rhys Ashworth.' And: 'They've got this stupid initiation thing in Blue Zone,' he explained half-heartedly as his eyes fell to the next name on the list, the second newest arrival in Blue Zone: Ste Hay. 'They tasks get more and more ridiculous.'

'So do I stick him in a taxi?' Anne asked.

'No. Leave him,' Brendan frowned. 'I'll be interested to see how he gets back and how long it takes.'

'Fine.' He could almost hear her stropping. 'But just so you know; he's wearing a blonde wig that looks like it came from Dealz.'

Brendan wished he could place Rhys' face so he could picture that more clearly, but instead he just said:

'Was there anything else, Anne? I'm busy.'

'Well, actually, I had another brilliant idea for Cheryl's birthday….'

'Night, Anne,' he interrupted, hanging up. She'd get over it and Brendan had had enough of Cheryl's birthday for one day.

He hovered his mouse over Steven's name, highlighting it and then clicking away from it over and over again. It had been a bad day, a nice dose of Steven could only relax him.

He walked out into Red Zone and got the person he saw to go to Blue Zone and get Steven.

Predictably, within ten minutes, there was a frantic knocking at his office door. The lad must have sprinted from Blue Zone to get to the office that quickly. It just confirmed to Brendan that Steven was constantly at his beck and call. But things were different, they'd changed somehow, it was obvious the second he opened the door.

* Dealz (as far as I know) is the Irish equivalent of Poundland, 99c store, 2 dollar shop etc.

Thanks for reading! (Sorry it was short). xx