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On the larger of the two sofas, a man looks up, and there goes my finance-bro theory—unless finance bros have started favouring shaved heads, noses that have clearly been broken more than once, and tattoos that climb out of their collars and up the sides of their necks. Which seems unlikely.

A leggy woman is curled into the man’s side, but I barely take her in because once the man’s green eyes land on mine, I find I can’t look away. For the first time, I wonder if entering a stranger’s flat in the early hours of the morning in my pyjamas may have been a bad idea. Because, looking at this man, my exhausted brain offers up one deeply unhelpful word.

Gangster.

I tell myself I’m being daft. Then again, who has a marble coffee table? And who buys two flats?

I’m aware, in the prickling way you become aware of these things, that it’s no longer just the man looking at me. Heads turn. One man elbows another, nods in my direction, and murmurs something that makes the other snigger. Soon all eyes are on the short woman in the stripy flannel with the dog wedged under one arm. Heat floods up my neck and into my face.

The man—Ryan—doesn’t laugh. He just watches me, his gaze travelling the whole length of me and back, taking his sweet time about it, like I’m a mildly diverting thing that’s wandered in off the street. Then he tips his head the barest fraction, waiting, as though I’m the one who owes him an explanation.

“Er, hi,” I say, my voice coming out smaller than I’d like, so I force it louder. “Would it be okay if you turned the music down?”

Beside Ryan, the leggy woman smirks. I shift Penny higher on my hip and fight the urge to shuffle my feet.

Ryan lets the question hang there, unanswered, until I’m fighting not to fill the gap myself. Finally he says, “And you are?”

His voice is Glaswegian, like mine, but where mine has the soft, rounded edges of the leafy, well-to-do West End, his is all grit and gravel.

“Briony Sinclair,” I say. “I live in the flat below.” He says nothing to this, so I add, “I’d very much appreciate it if you turned the music down. Please.”

A couple of the men grin at each other, like the please is the funniest thing they’ve heard all night.

Ryan lifts an eyebrow. “Would you now?”

“Yes. I would.”

His gaze sharpens with unmistakable amusement, then he unfolds himself from the sofa. Upright, he’s at least a foot taller than me and about twice as broad. He crosses the room towards me, and my heart takes off at an undignified gallop. He stops close enough that I have to tip my head back to keep looking at him. Close enough that I can feel the heat coming off him.

My eyes catch on his ears. They’re not shaped like other people’s ears. The tops are thickened and ridged, the curves gone lumpy and uneven, like the cartilage has been crushed and left to heal however it liked. I’ve seen ears like that before, on rugby boys. Men who throw themselves bodily into other men for fun and come away marked by it.

He reaches past me and plucks a bottle from the kitchen island. He tilts it towards me. An offer.

I shake my head. He shrugs and pours some into a glass.

“So,” I say. “The music?”

“This is my flat-warming.” He takes a slow sip, completely unbothered. “I’m no ending it early because you’re a light sleeper.”

The cheek.

“I’m not a light sleeper. My flat is literally vibrating with the noise.”

He lifts one shoulder in a lazy shrug. “It’s one night. You’ll live.”

One night? That’s what opens the floodgates. Suddenly I’m telling him that it hasn’t been one night, it’s been weeks. I’m telling him about the builders, the dust, the skip, the shouting. About the fact that I’ve been living and working underneath his renovation all this time and he hasn’t even bothered to knock on my door to say sorry.

This is not like me. I’m polite, non-confrontational. Normally, I make my point with a smile, hold half of it back, and then compose the truly devastating version in the shower two hours later, to nobody but myself.

But I’m exhausted, I’m furious, and the words just keep on coming. Until I reach the thing I really care about: my shop. What weeks of his skip, his dust, and his chaos might have cost it. I open my mouth to say it⁠—

—and that’s when it hits me what I must look like to him, to all of them. Five foot three of stripy flannel and a toppling messy bun, a confused dog clamped under one arm, standing in a stranger’s kitchen in the wee hours, haranguing a roomful of enormous men who are watching me like I’m more entertaining than anything on that giant telly.

My words dry up in my throat.

Ryan lifts a remote and turns the music down a notch. “Happy now?”

“Not really,” I mutter.