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The Digbeth Kid was dead, and that only meant worse was to come.
It wasn't as if Nancy necessarily met this kid, she knew they were close in age and he gallivanted around town with the wooden gun his mother made for him, but she never knew of him properly until news got about that Sabini's men had slit his throat in prison.
She knew the consequences of the boy's death would be bad, I mean, a boy was fucking dead. Then she got cornered by a gaggle of men in the betting shop tendering their resignations out of fear. Blinders running away from trouble out of fear, a proper oxymoron if Nancy'd ever seen one. The only worse consequence of all this was the fear of telling Tommy he was steadfastly losing men.
Through the large double doors separating the Shelby home from the betting shop, Nancy heard the muffled chaos of all the higher ranking Blinders congregating in the next room. She was sat at the Shelby's dining table with her hefty book of betting numbers sat in the middle of the mahogany; bar graphs, daily numbers, probabilities and accounts were strewn about with barely any order or sense of organisation, and in Nancy's opinion, it perfectly illustrated what her brain looked like at that very moment.
On the other side of the table sat Michael Gray, who had his legs absentmindedly folded one over the other as he looked around the room. He looked bored, like a child waiting for his mummy to pick him up (which is what he essentially was). After a bout of silence, Nancy had looked up for the third time in five minutes to sneak a glance at the plainly gorgeous boy opposite her. She'd stopped generally counting how many times she'd looked up to discreetly admire the boy, but who could blame her? She certainly couldn't blame herself.
Though this time she looked up from her now-incoherent scribbles, she found he was already looking at her.
The logic of teenage hormones really did turn out to be a confusing thing: truthfully, both Nancy and Michael had been stealing brief glimpses of each other since Polly had left them both alone in that room, but the second their eyes had met, everything apparently becomes awkward, and any words suddenly become unspeakable - not that they had the guts to have a proper conversation with each other anyway.
Michael coughed, his head turning to look around the room again, "So.. how long have you worked with them lot for?"
"Since I left school," Nancy said, placing her pencil down with a thud, "I've always been quite good at maths, and Tom grew up next door to my family, so... he owed them a favour and he needed a bookkeeper. Works out, don't it?"
The boy's eyes lit up from across the table, "I'm good at mathematics an'all, top of my classes when I was in school. I even got to take a night course in accounting after begging my mum– my other mum, I mean."
Nancy almost jumped out of her seat with joy when he'd mentioned how good he was at maths. A night course, she'd marvelled, he really is a good'un.
"No bloody way!" The girl gaped with a wondrous smile, "I wish I could've done somet' like that round here, but Small Heath doesn't really value ambitious women."
