A pull from somewhere he thought he’d buried for good.
Naomi leaned forward. “You think Ellison’s a thread in the Radley enquiry?”
“We don’t know,” Patel said evenly. “That’s where Warren comes in.” Her gaze locked on him. “I’m giving you a second chance, DS Beckford. Your remit may be secondary to Naomi’s, but it’s still critical. You’re not there to monitor the students. You’re there to get close to Jude Ellison. Gain his trust, read him, and work out whether he’s an unwitting bystander… or part of the problem. We know he was in the building with Alfie Carter during the fire.”
Warren turned his gaze back to the image glowing on the screen. That face again. Open. Tired. A little out of place in a room full of teenagers but not threatening. Not calculated.
Not what he’d been trained to look for.
“You said… intimate?” He kept his tone level, though something worked sharp at his chest. “Are we talking lovers?”
Patel nodded. “That’s right.”
“So he’s gay?”
“Reid or Ellison?”
“Either.”
Patel shrugged. “Reid, we believe, is opportunistic. He’ll take what he can use. Ellison? Yes. Gay. Is that a problem?”
Warren sat back, letting the question settle. “No. Not a problem.” He couldn’t help glancing over at Naomi.
She looked away almost immediately.
Patel moved on. “This isn’t a sting. Not yet. This is intelligence-gathering. We do this right, we dismantle Radley’s network from the inside. We get Vivienne to crack. We track the grooming chain. We expose the funding route. And we find out exactly where Jude Ellison fits into all of it.”
Warren gave a nod. Slow. Intentional. Controlled.
But his gut twisted.
He’d gone undercover before. Deep cover. Messy work. Moral lines blurred to shit. He’d played addict, enforcer, lover, brother.All of it for the greater good. For something that made sense when the case file closed.
But this time?
This time the job came with a face he couldn’t stop looking at.
A name that felt heavier than the rest.
And a growing certainty in his gut that the hardest part of this assignment wouldn’t be lying to everyone else.
It would be lying to himself.
Chapter two
History Bites
Jude lingered outside the newly refurbished school hall, takeaway coffee in hand, trying not to feel like a fraud in his own school.
The corridors gleamed. Fresh paint. New flooring. And spotless windows. All signs of a determined rebuild. The fire damage was gone, erased beneath a surface of clean lines and careful optimism. But beneath the plaster and polish, he could still feel it. The ghost of smoke no contractor could scrub away clinging to the air. Even now, with the low murmur of teacher chatter filtering through the door, Jude’s skin prickled as if the heat were still rising.
He’d spent the summer recovering. Most summers were a slow exhale, but this one had been different. Quieter. Heavier. The fire might not have left lasting scars on his body, but the emotional wreckage was harder to bury. Some nights, he still woke gasping for breath, tangled in sweat-drenched sheets. He’dthought the nightmares would fade. That the worst had passed. But sometimes they bled into daylight, shadows lingering at the edge of thought, curling through lesson plans and coffee runs and the too-quiet moments between.
He should be used to nightmares by now.
He’d grown up inside one. Escaped half a dozen more since.
But they kept coming. Night after night. And when they did, he woke alone. Trembling. Sweating. Clawing his way out of dreams thick with smoke or the historical remnants of a brutal crack of fists on his skull. Maybe it was a good thing none of his dating efforts since settling in Worthbridge had worked out. Who wanted someone who flinched in their sleep? Who sat on the edge of the bed at three a.m. reminding himself he’d made it out? Of the fire, and everything else.
