“Well, she wants to meet you.”
As we go down the elevator, I turn to him. “What’s your mother like?”
“She’s a true gypsy. Fiercely loyal and devoted to her family.”
“Did she sound hurt or mad when you told her about me?”
“Strangely, she was very calm about it. I was planning on telling her last. I wanted you to meet our brothers first. Shane was at her house when I called him and she absolutely insisted on meeting you.”
Jake unlocks the latest model Jaguar and I get into the passenger side.
“You said Tony butchered your horses. Do you work with horses?”
“Yes, I breed them.”
He frowns. “Ah, so you’re that famous horse breeder. A friend of mine bought a horse off you once for me. About three years ago. Her name is Millie.”
“You bought Millie?”
“Yeah, she’s in my stables right now.”
“But the paperwork said it was going to a guy called Tom Watson …”
He grins. “Yeah, the first rule of good business. Never seem to buy or own anything.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Tyson
I never thought I’d say it, but I like Jake. I know instinctively that I am seeing a side of him that he only reserves for his family. Other people no doubt see that cold-eyed man I saw in the club all those years ago. He never asks about my mother, but I know that one day I will tell him. He tells me about Shane and Dom and my half-sister Layla. He also suggests a road trip with his brothers. My chest feels warm and there is a lump in my throat when he says that. It seems that even though I thought I hated them, all I really wanted to was to be reunited with them. To know them. To call them my family. To fill the empty void after so many years without.
He stops the car outside a neat little house with a sweet garden in front. There are colorful gnomes in the garden and lace curtains in the windows.
“I’d love to get her into a better house, but she wants to live here,” Jake says.
He has his own key and takes me through the house. I’ve been in this kind of house before. Every proud gypsy woman lives in such sparkling cleanliness. I used to be surprised by how many hours a day a gypsy woman spends cleaning her house.
Jake takes me into the kitchen. A woman is rolling out a sheet of dough. She looks up when we enter, then goes back to rolling her dough. She’s broader than when I last saw her, and her hair is now peppered with grey. How changed she is from the smiling woman I saw from across the field all those years ago. There are lines on her face. She has known sorrow and pain in her life.
“This is Tyson, Ma. Tyson this is my mother, Mara.”
She carries on rolling her dough. “Yes. This is Tyson. Come and sit down, son.”
I glance at Jake. He shrugs. His mother puts her rolling pin down and looks at me. There is no expression on her face.
“Do you want me to stay, Ma?” Jake asks.
“No,” she says, her eyes never leaving mine. “We’ll be just fine. Your sister is in the garden. She was hoping to talk to you.”
“Right,” he says. He looks at me. “Right,” he says again. And it’s funny to see this man who controls large swaths of London’s underworld get flustered by a woman. He hesitates for another second before he turns and walks out of the back door. Through the window, I can see a woman. She is wearing a sun hat and digging in the ground. Layla. My half-sister.
“I’m not going to apologize for my mother,” I say.
She dusts her hands and wipes them on her apron. “Would you like some tea?”
“No thanks,” I say.
She moves towards the cupboard and brings out a bottle of sherry. “How about this then?”
I hate sherry, but I can see she is trying her best to be civil so I nod. I watch her pour the amber liquid into two glasses. She lifts one glass to her lips and downs it in one quick swallow. My eyes widen. She brings the other glass to me. I take a small sip. Ugh.
“Have a seat,” she says, and we sit opposite each other across the wooden table.
“Do you carry a picture of her?”
At first, I do nothing. Then, I nod.
“Will you show it to me?”
I have never shown anyone my mother’s picture. Showing it to this woman feels wrong. She is the enemy, my mother’s greatest rival. Because of her my mother died. Then I remember the butterfly and the sense of peace and forgiveness I felt when it landed on my hand.
I’m done hating this woman and her family. I can see that they are good people. And I’m definitely done feeling ashamed for my mother. My mother did nothing wrong. She fell in love with the wrong man. If anyone should be ashamed it should be my father. He cheated on this good woman and ruined my mother’s life. I reach into my pocket for my wallet. I open it and slide it along the table surface.
She picks it up and looks at the photo. She keeps her face blank as she examines the picture. Then she looks up at me. “She was very beautiful.”
“Yes, she was,” I whisper. At that moment, all the years since my mother’s death become dust. I feel as if I am twelve again. Just a kid, lost and afraid, but determined to protect my mother’s memory no matter what. I clench my jaw.
“You will stay for dinner with us, won’t you?”
I hesitate. Even though my body yearns to accept, a small slice of me knows I can’t be part of her family. It would be the ultimate betrayal. I think of my mother’s sweet face. How she never bore any ill will towards my father. She was just a sad person. “I wasn’t trying to find a home here. I shouldn’t be here.”
She smiles slowly. “There isn’t a grain of dust in this universe that is in the wrong place. You are exactly where you should be.”
I stare at her and she nods.
“You want me to be here?”
“Many, many years ago, I went to see a fortune-teller and she told me a strange thing. She told me I had five children. I told her I only had four, but she said, no, I had five. She was very definite about it. For a while I thought I would have another child, but the years passed and I never forgot that she didn’t say you will have five children. She said you have five children. You were that fifth child, and I’ve been waiting for you to turn up all this while.”
The breath leaves my body in a rush. “I’m sorry,” I tell her.
“For what?”
“I ruined your perfect memories of your husband.”
She smiles slowly. The smile is not sad or resentful. It is beautiful. It lights up her face and makes her look ten years younger. “What have you ruined, my child? You have given my grandchildren another uncle, and my children another brother. My daughter always wanted to have more siblings. Now she has a wish. I can’t wait to meet my new grandchild.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Tyson
There was a time when CCTV camera images were grainy and low quality. What Jake’s contact gives us to watch is HD standard. Fuck, I can even see the liver spots on the Judge’s hands. With surround sound and a massive TV mounted to the wall, it’s almost like we’re there in the action.
I sit back against the sofa in Jake’s dim media room and watch the bizarre sight playing out on the screen. It’s a sex dungeon, an S&M club. The walls are covered in black vinyl. In the center of the room is a broad steel table, and on it is a very naked Judge Jackson lying face down.
I rest my chin in my palms as a tall, statuesque, buxom and mature woman dressed in black leather from head to toe, presumably Evanna walks into the frame, dragging a riding crop along the judge’s loose, lily-white ass cheeks.
“Turn around, you are such a worthless piece of shit. Such a loser. Look at that tiny penis. It’s disgusting. Which woman would want to touch that? No wonder you have to come here and pay me to get off.” My eyebrows rise, but the judge is loving it.
“Evanna knows she is playing for the camera so it should get much better,” Jake assures me.
And he wasn’t kidding.
The man’s got a serious kink problem. He gets flogged
mercilessly, then he is asked to get dressed in a woman’s bra and diapers and forced to crawl across the floor on his hands and knees before he’s allowed to clean her thigh-high boots by licking them. It’s not a pretty picture.
To each their own and all that, but hell, how anyone can pay for this shit, let alone love it, but the way his little red cock was hanging stiff and erect between his legs the whole time is a revelation of how aroused he was.
The judge continues to humiliate himself. “Please,” he whimpers, begging for the honor of drinking her piss.
“You’ve been a good boy so today you won’t have to drink it from a glass. Today, as a special treat I’ll piss straight into your mouth.”
He practically salivates while Jake starts laughing next to me. I’m not sure whether I should laugh or wash my eyeballs at the sight of this old guy greedily squatting between her legs and gulping down her piss.
“Holy shit,” I marvel when she makes him ram a huge purple dildo up his own ass as punishment for accidentally touching her above the knee while he was drinking her piss. Apparently, that’s very verboten. The camera catches it all.
Jake clicks the video off. “That’ll do. We’ll take this to him and remind him of all the naughty things he did today at lunch time. Unless he takes his son to task this is going to be posted online and sent off to the newspapers.” Jake laughs. “He ought to know enough about discipline by now, don’t you think?”
“This is preposterous. My son is a fine, upstanding citizen. He runs a clean show. How dare you come in here and threaten me? I know all about you, Jake Eden. You can pretend to be a businessman, but you’re nothing but a two-bit crook. Get out of my chambers.” The judge, now clad in a dark robe splutters. He raises an arm and points to the door. “I mean it. Out, both of you.”
“Chambers?” Jake asks, leaning against a bookcase full of thick, leather-bound books. “Makes a change from dungeons.”