Page 3 of Corrupt

Trentham selected one of the tiny bites and popped it into his mouth. “My investors are opening two more venues in Shoreditch this year. We’re expanding, diversifying the clientele, keeping things…” He paused, searching for the right word. A polite one. “…reliable.”

He looked at me as if I should applaud his excellent business venture. As if I didn’t know he’d been born with a safety net and a silver card. Men like him didn’t build empires; they inherited the scaffolding and paid others to climb it. And what he was really saying there was We’re attracting the sort of people who party hard and pay well, without inviting the riffraff who bleed on the furniture.

“Reliable,” I echoed, letting it hang. “Nice way of saying you don’t want dead bodies near your VIP tables.”

He laughed. “Let’s call it brand protection.” He ran a finger along the rim of his glass, checking for imperfections. “My clientele pay for an experience. They expect exclusivity, safety, consistency. They don’t want some backstreet concoction cooked up by… enthusiastic amateurs.” He smiled, apologetic. Not sorry. “I’m talking reputation, not revenue. If I’m to associate with your organisation, I need to know the product’s pure, the movement discreet, the logistics watertight. I’m not interested in messy headlines or bodies in car parks.” He watched me, testing how much insult I’d swallow for the promise of his money. “Twenty percent of the profits from the takings on the door for peace of mind seems fair, doesn’t it?”

I watched his mouth move, letting the words crawl over my head rather than into it. The bottle of whisky between us caught the light, gold turned violent along its edge. For a second, I pictured smashing it into his pretty teeth, watching that composure slip on its own blood. The thought sat in the middle of my chest, hot and steady.

Not tonight. Not in this shirt. Not with Doyle watching.

“Fair?” I leant forward, choosing my poncy snack. “That’s a funny word to use when you give me that number.” I popped whatever it was into my mouth and wished I hadn’t. Salt and fish eggs and money on a bite. Disgusted, I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

Overhead at the bar, Doyle shifted. Enough for me to feel it. Don’t fuck it up. Don’t fold either. He glanced my way, too. He didn’t speak, but I felt his silence like a lead weight on my back. Remember who’s listening. Who owns your oxygen.

I’d learnt to breathe around the leash.

Yeah, I was at least fifteen years younger than them. A twenty-seven-year-old street thug like me shouldn’t be sitting in a place like this, eating fish eggs on a sliver of pancake. Not with men who counted profits by quarters, not coins in a jar. Truth was, I belonged in Wormwood or six feet under. That was my yellow brick road. This seat wasn’t for the faint-hearted. I could ruin Trentham with one clean punch, make his Turkish pearly whites fly across the room and have them in someone else’s gob by the time the steaks came. But if I did that, his deal dies, his clubs stay whole, and our product drops back to street level.

Choices, I’d learnt, were a different violence.

I leant back, holding Trentham’s gaze, wiping my hands down my jeans. A reminder. I wasn’t born in his world; I’d climbed here through the rot, and I wasn’t about to pretend otherwise.

“You think you’re buying powder? You’re not.” I didn’t sell chaos. That was the difference. Chaos stayed underground, buried beneath layers of civility. No ambulances, no police, no headlines. This was quiet clients who paid to forget what they were doing. “Powder’s cheap. Any idiot with a Telegram handle and no conscience’ll flog you something that glows in the dark.” I let my eyes rest on his. “What you’re paying for is my control. Over your floor.”

One of his eyebrows ticked up. “Enlighten me.”

“Supply, security, silence.” I sniffed, ran a hand over my close shave. “That’s the order. My people don’t cut with shit that kills, they don’t push to kids, they don’t sell to anyone who can’t handle themselves. Nobody’s cooking in a bathtub. Product comes in lab-bagged or not at all. If something’s off, it never makes my floors. You know why?”

“Because your ‘brand integrity’ matters?”

I almost smiled. “Because my boss don’t like headlines either. And I don’t like funerals unless they’re useful. You want in on that, you’re not buying drugs. You’re buying the feeling that nothing touches your people while they’re in my city.”

“And your cut of the illusion?”

“Thirty-two percent.” I folded my arms. “Net. Off your gross.”

His laughter came out sharper that time. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it?”

I let him look at me and see what he wanted to see. A lowlife high-rises thug with street stories and a clever mouth. Underneath, I ran the sums. Cost of import, cost of storage, cost of the boys on the doors, the watchers on the street, greasing the right palms, cleaning up the wrong mess. Cost of peace. And I don’t mean I did maths. I mean, I worked out what I was worth.

And it was more than what he thought I was.

Always had been.

“You came here,” I said. “You asked for my routes. My discretion. My people. You don’t want to build from scratch, and you don’t want the risk. You want your Shoreditch darlings high and happy without a single wrong pill in their veins.” I nodded towards the restaurant, visible through the smoked-glass partition. “See any ambulances outside?”

Trentham’s head turned instinctively, glancing at the street beyond the tall windows. The pavement below was clean. Valet cars, no sirens. He’d noticed on the way in that no one stumbled past the maître d’, that the laughter here stayed tidy, and the servers didn’t flinch at the clientele. Even the bouncers at the door smiled. Polite, unbothered, lethal.

He just hadn’t named it yet.

“This is a restaurant.” I leant forward. “But everything underneath it—the lounge, the club, the whole glittering rot you want a piece of—runs because I keep it that way. No chaos, no police, no corpses where your customers can see them. You think that happens by chance?”

I let the question hang there, let him feel the distance between the candlelight on our table and the heartbeat thumping beneath the floorboards. The city’s filth didn’t vanish here. It had learnt to wear a suit.

“My customers leave on their feet,” I said. “They come back with friends. You get that. You get product that don’t embarrass you. You get my word that if one of your boys fucks about, I handle it before you even know his name. That’s thirty-two.”