CHAPTER FORTY.

               PRIDE WAS A FICKLE thing, that was for sure. Felicity would have never thought Tommy would get over his and let her back into the shop where everything she had done had resulted in it crumbling to a short halt, but that was the thing that had happened.

Working at the betting shop was a tedious and repetitive job, but an easy one at that. Now, as the first half of the day drew to a close and the rest of the workers had trudged off to the pubs and bars, Felicity remained in the shop, scrawling letters and numbers in the graphs on the books before her, making sure each was right before she closed them with a heavy bang and moved them to the side. She didn't wish to mess anything up, as she was no doubt under the scrutiny of the many dubious, doubtful employers of Shelby Company Limited, even though Tommy had assured her that no one would say a word about that matter to her ever again. He'd made sure of that, and Arthur had reinstated the message afterwards. . . although his shouts might have been because he had been clutching a nearly—empty bottle of spirits in his grasp as he spoke to the men.

But it wasn't the men that Felicity was scared of. It was the matriarch, the woman who held more reason and intelligence in her little finger than the rest of the Shelby's workforce had combined.

"Thomas has more of a heart than I ever thought he could have," Polly commented now as she swooped inside the shop, removing her hat and coat swiftly as she did so. "I never would have thought he'd let you back in here."

Felicity smiled tightly. "That he has," she agreed, although she was now slightly wary towards the older woman, as Polly must be towards her as well.

"I hardly thought he would go and do what he did, in all honestly," Polly admitted lowly, stopping before her desk.

Felicity rose to meet her level. "I never thought he would, so there's a thing."

"I once told you that everything my nephew did came with a meticulous plan behind it," Polly told her, not breaking eye contact with the girl as she spoke. "That he has a reason for everything — Tommy never does anything without a reason. You've seen that, you were with him for long enough to see that."

Felicity nodded, only slightly. "I used to be able to know where he was going with something," she admitted quietly. "But I can't, not for the life of me, figure out what he has planned now, what with him getting me to work at the place I would've thought he'd want me as far away from as he could get me. I can't think of anything else but for once, thinking isn't helping."

The older woman hummed. "Come with me," she instructed after a moment.

Not ten minutes later did Felicity find herself following Polly Gray into the Catholic Church that was just a couple of streets away from the Shelby's residence. The door slammed quietly behind them and, what with the older woman moving without any hesitation in her steps, Felicity had no choice but to follow her out of the shadows and into the dimly—lit space that was the church's gallery. Amber light threw itself down into the space from the high candles set in stone; wooden pews were not as chipped and derelict as one might have expected them to be in such a town or setting; and whilst it had been repaired since after the war, the thing that remained from before that dreaded declaration in Nineteen—Fourteen were the rows of candles that stood at the end. Some lit, many not, they all sat there with wax dripping from them as the only reminder of all of the mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers that had lit them for their boys who never came home.

Polly made a beeline to them and once she came before the candles, she stopped so to make another sign of the cross across her chest. Felicity, not being utterly religious, simply watched her as she murmured a short prayer and then picked up a spit from the side, and lit it with the light from another.

Once finished, she turned back to the silent girl.

"We came here once before, you and I," Polly told her, as if reminding her, although Felicity remembered the day well enough and she feared that she could already tell what Polly was going to say.

"I told you that all men who fought in the war were as against violence and fighting as you were," she continued. "That Tommy hated the idea of a war just as much as you did, even though it was he who fired a gun into Billy Kimber's forehead, he who wouldn't hesitate to shoot another if it just so meant protecting his kingdom and all that came with it."

Felicity wasn't supposed to cry, she knew that. She didn't deserve that right.

Nevertheless, the tears prickled in her eyes and there was nothing she could do to stop that. She hastily wiped at her cheeks as a couple of salty droplets fell, and prayed that the lighting in here was too sparse for the other woman to catch a sight of her at this sense of vulnerability.

"You were a part of that," Polly told her. "And no matter what happened, what you did, what he said to you afterwards, you still are."

She didn't deserve to cry.

Fate was cruel. Fate was wicked. Fate was golden and gleaming and for once, after the months of pleading and sobbing and crying over the mistake she could never take back, fate was winning its way back onto the side of light.

And she had never seen it coming.

Polly still didn't see Felicity's tears as she continued. "He's against wars, you know that," she said. "But he started one for you, and I've known my nephew for long enough to know that he would do it again."

It was only know that she found she could speak. "He never started one for me," Felicity managed to get out.

Polly raised her eyebrows. "If you believe that, then you really are as naïve as they come."

"He didn't, though!" Felicity protested. "I was a piece in his game, a part of his meticulous plan, just as you said I was. It was all a cruel twist of fate that I ended up falling for the man I was doomed to marry, and him for me."

She turned to her ring — the ring she couldn't take off, no matter how much she had screwed with the wedding and her husband — and began to twist it around and around her finger. She hadn't ever taken it off... partly because she knew that if she did, then the whole of Small Heath would figure that something was wrong between the King of Birmingham and his Queen. . . and partly because she never wanted to. The ring was a bond, it said so in the ceremony, had it not? It was to symbolise the eternity and longer that she was to spend alongside Tommy, and secretly, Felicity had held onto the tiny, tiny string of hope that they might still get that. That they might push through the muck and mud that had come about as a result of John Woods, and the paranoia that came from the war being dug up once more with all of the traitorous events.

"I've come to realise that it was hardly ever about your snake of a father, Felicity," Polly assured her, smiling. . . not much, but still a glimmer of said emotion. "Tommy wanted something — I told you that — and it just so happened that it wasn't a thing, and rather a who."

He wouldn't stop until he got it, Felicity had been told. But it had been her, and he had got her. . . only to lose her.

It couldn't be true.

"But he. . . he. . ."

Polly turned back to the rows of dying embers, and lit one more as she spoke. "I'm not one to stop him," she told her. "He's made up his mind, he chose to keep you close when he could have sent you away and never thought of you again, as he did with the Burgess girl."

There hasn't been a day that had gone by where Felicity hadn't thought about how similar her fate could have been to Grace's, but she didn't say that.

"Now, I understand that whilst she did hers for purely selfish reasons — an oath to the Crown, or to that Inspector, was what I heard —, your motives weren't without reason. Tommy sees that, I see that, and Arthur saw that well before either of us did. You hadn't a choice, from what I gather, and I'd be lying if I attempted to be modest and say I wasn't the one with the voice of reason in the family, so even I was able to see it that it was that dirty betrayal or lose both Tommy and his wife. If I could see that, then I know Tommy could."

She faced Felicity once more. "From what I gather, though, Tommy hasn't got a plan right now," Polly said with a small frown. "He's going off instinct, forgiving you. I reckon, if I actually thought that he was religious, that he'd be praying right now that it all works out. That going off instinct isn't a bad thing to do sometimes. . . that he won't get hurt because of it."

"But I swear, Felicity Woods, that if you hurt this family, he'll never trust again. And you'll have to deal with his anger. . . an anger you've never had to deal with, an an anger that I hope, for your sake, that you never have to."

Felicity could have scoffed — it was as though Polly thought she didn't know that? As though she hadn't spent the last stretch of eternity worrying that she had broken his trust into such tiny pieces that they couldn't be stitched back into a whole ever again, not even by the best seamstress who was used to working with the golden thread of old lies.

Polly left the church before Felicity could muster up a single word as a response: her boots clacked against the tiles as she exited, leaving the blonde girl to her thoughts and her anxieties and everything in between. Worries wracked her, building up a tidal wave of new anxious lessons that she so longed to learn and get over with, and so she didn't even realise what she was doing as she dropped to her knees and pulled her folded hands into her chest, into the dip between her breast.

She didn't even know what to say. Felicity had always tried to skip prayer at school, hence why the words that she longed to say died on her lips.

Footsteps echoed behind her before she could even attempt to wriggle out some sort of jumbled prayer, and so Felicity looked up to see the frame of Tommy Shelby glancing down at her, slightly amused, although he tried to hide such an emotion.

"Didn't realise you had taken to praying," he quipped lowly. "Is the job really so bad?"

"Not bad, just tiring," Felicity replied, dropping her hands to her side with embarrassment.

"And so you've asked God to help you with that?" He responded. "Not to be blasphemous or anything, but I don't think he can do such a thing."

Felicity feigned a gasp. "I'd watch where you say such accusations," she said, widening her eyes as she stumbled to her feet to face him. "You're in a church, Thomas."

One second. That's all it took to say one word, and it should have been left at that.

"We're back to Thomas, eh?"

She could have sworn she heard him sigh quietly.

"What do you mean?"

"You'd call me that before. . . before everything," Tommy noted. "Before I won over your stubborn as fuck heart, I weren't never Tommy or Tom. Thomas. ''Twas as though that kept it cold between us, and now. . . now, I'm Thomas once more."

Felicity made an 'o' shape with her mouth — he'd noticed? She hadn't thought he would have noticed. . . but, like Polly had so often said, he had a devilish intelligence about him, more so than the rest of his family, so of course he noticed. He noticed everything. . . except the one thing she never anticipated him to miss. How'd he miss a whole betrayal and not miss a simple change in name?

"It didn't mean anything now," she tried to say. "Not like then — I hated you then, for the marriage thing, for it all. I don't hate you now. I couldn't hate you now."

"So it wasn't instinctive?" Doubtful, oh—so doubtful.

"No! God, no."

A glimmer of a smile flickered across Tommy's features. "I thought you weren't religious?"

"I. . . you're evil, Tommy. You knew I'd say that."

"Evil, no. Although some have tried to disagree with that, so maybe I am."

"You couldn't be accused of being evil if a whole court tried to say such a thing," Felicity assured him quietly. "Ruthless with a ridiculous amount of ambition, I'd get. But you've got too much of a heart to be called evil."

"Then what am I doing in a church, if not repenting?"

"You aren't the one who should be repenting, Tom," she said.

Tom. Not quite Tommy, not quite Thomas. In between, just like they were: torn between going back to their old love, fighting against the initial instinct of never loving again, against the coldness that threatened to settle between the two of them once more.

"Neither of us are saints, Felicity."

AUTHOR'S NOTE!

oooh i can't wait to give you all the next chapter! i'm so excited, it's literally the only thing getting me through this and the last one, i swear to god. should i try and double update so that you get it before i go away on holiday? i might try to. . .

anyway ― i love you all! thank you for everything <3