“No. I tried to avoid him, but he knew where my school was and the route I took to get there. It was like he wanted to run into me, the sadistic fuck, and that was him all over, and that was what I couldn’t forgive. He enjoyed it, you see, what he did to me. It was fun for him. His only saving grace was that he didn’t try to knob me. I’d have cut his fucking dick off if he had.”
It seemed a scantly positive point, but the terrifying conflict in Nero’s gaze kept Lenny quiet. He scooted closer and rubbed his cheek on Nero’s shoulder. Nero rested his own head briefly on Lenny’s and let loose a bone-deep sigh.
“I didn’t deal with him very well. I was a little shit at school already, but when I started seeing him on my way there, I just stopped going. Fell in with the wrong crowd, started terrorising the estate . . . fucking stereotypical messed-up kid. Picked up my weed habit too, but I ain’t too bothered about that. Most days it’s the only thing that stops me becoming that person again, you know?”
“Um, I guess?”
“Anyway . . .” Nero gave in and reached for the rum bottle. “I started to go a bit mental. I saw him everywhere, even when he wasn’t there—in my sleep, in every shadow. Drove me round the fucking bend, until one day I woke up and something snapped, you know? I couldn’t take it anymore, and some weird compulsion took over, so I got up and went to his house.”
Lenny swallowed and closed his eyes. “What did you do?”
“I burned it down.”
“You burned it down?”
“Yup, and him with it. But I didn’t know it at the time. I thought he’d be at the bookies. I didn’t know he was inside. You’ve got to believe me, Lenny. I was a fucked-up kid, but I didn’t want to kill no one.”
Lenny took a deep breath and opened his eyes. He waited for shock—revulsion—to wash over him, but none came. How could it, when he looked at Nero and saw nothing but a frightened, traumatised young boy who’d acted out of terror? “I believe you.”
“Yeah, well. You’re probably the only one. I got done for manslaughter and sent down for twice as long as he did for everything he done to me.”
“You went to prison?”
“Young offenders, actually—Feltham, same one as Cass.”
“Were you in at the same time?”
“No. He found me when they kicked me out. I was sitting outside with a bag and nowhere to go when he pulled up and offered me a job.”
“Couldn’t you go back to your grandparents?”
“No. They both died while I was inside.” The cool distance in Nero’s tone wavered. “My granddad first, then my nana. She didn’t last long without him.”
“I’m sorry, Nero.”
“Me too. I missed their funerals, and I didn’t really grieve for them until Cass took me to an ink studio and told me to carve something into myself that brought me to life again.”
“Ink?” Fuck. Massive it might’ve been, but Nero had only one tattoo. “So it’s not about you?”
Nero snorted. “Course it ain’t. What that word . . . narcissist? Yeah, I ain’t one of them, am I?”
Lenny should’ve known Nero wouldn’t have let an interpretation of himself be plastered over the walls of the Vauxhall project. There was still much to learn about him, but he wasn’t that man. Fuck no. “I’m sorry. I’d have asked first if I’d known what it meant.”
“You did know what it meant, just not what it meant to me. And I like that. You don’t have to know it all to know what matters.”
Lenny absorbed that, and let it flow into the part of his soul that would always belong to Nero. “So your granddad was a bit of a tiger?”
“Not in the slightest—it was the other way around. My nana was the tiger. My granddad was a delicate man, an artist, really. He worked for a funeral director in Hackney, engraving gravestones. The butterfly reminded me of the ones he’d done for stillborn babies. He’d spend weeks on them, and it broke his heart—” Nero’s voice cracked. He reached for Lenny’s hand and squeezed it so hard Lenny thought his fingers would surely snap. “What I did to that cunt finished him off, I’m sure of it, and that’s what I’ll never forgive myself for. I don’t care that I killed Malcom, and that ain’t gonna change.”
The raw emotion in Nero’s voice turned to defiance, but it was wasted on Lenny. How many times had he wished for his stalker’s death, despite only suffering a fraction of the hell Nero had endured? A man had died at Nero’s hand, and the notion that he’d deserved no better was easier to accept than Lenny could quite believe.
And the relief came now too. Relief that he’d made some headway into truly knowing the man he loved so much. Relief that Nero’s tormentor could hurt him no longer—in person, at least, because there was no doubt that he haunted Nero’s dreams. “I don’t know what to say.”
Nero shook his head sadly. “I know I’ve hurt you, because I’ve hurt people before, good people, who really cared about me.”
“And you wanted to hurt me.”
“What? No, I didn’t—”
