✓ | GOLDEN LIAR ↠ Thomas Shelby.

25.

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE.

              SHE SOON FOUND HERSELF to be ten years old again.

The summer of 1907 was the roughest summer up until then that Woods & Company had ever experienced, and although Felicity was barely aware of the inner workings of her father and brothers' business, she knew enough to understand just how much trouble they found themselves to be in that year. With the factory bursting with more riots than they had ever, ever imagined it could and her father coming home with a ferocious scowl and anger rumbling up from his chest, the blonde angel that just so happened to be his daughter knew well enough that staying out of the rest of her family's way would be the best option. 

As it so often was, in all fairness. The moment that she would catch sight of her father's shiny leather shoes slapping against the concrete and nearing their home on Watery Lane, the young Felicity would scurry away from the window and escape down the staircase, past her brothers and out the back door, so that she might fly down the back alleyways and rush over to her best friend's home, just barely five yards away. 

Yet she couldn't hide away from the house forever ― eventually, she would have to return, and would do so with a heavy sigh as she trudged back home. On the occasion that the family establishment wasn't filled with outraged roars or angered yells, and instead they were going about their own business ― whatever that may be, she didn't know ―, it was more often than not that one of her brothers would catch her as she attempted to sneak back inside the house without so much as being noticed. And so she'd receive a half―hearted clip on the back of her head and a sharp scolding for being out when the moon was climbing its way into the inky black sky. . . that was the closest she came to forming relationships with her siblings. 

Some nights, the shouts would rain through the night. They'd overpower everything else, even when a storm raged and screeched outside, and all the young girl could do was roll over, face the wall and press one ear to the pillow and one hand upon her ear, so that she might not have to listen. 

She wished she could say that was when she first started to plot and ploy on how to escape from the home to good, but it wasn't. Because for six and a half long years, she clung on to the hope that one day, it might all change ― one day, she might be taken notice of, and that the family might just be what it claimed to be after all. 

Ten years old.

Sixteen years old.

Both ages, she was just as naïve: hopelessly, desperately naïve but not quite willing to give all of that up should her father's cutthroat characteristics take over. . . or even her mother's, as that would pain her just the same. Because for some reason, she reasoned with herself that by holding onto a hope in such a futile manner as she often did, it was better than giving up hope completely. It was the better out of the two options ― either she turn of her emotions in the same way that all of her relatives seemed to have done ever since her mother fled from the house, or she continue living how she always had, with her humanity running rife through her veins. 

Because even though the second option sometimes came with so much more pain than the second, she would rather go through all of that than end up mirroring her father's steel complexion. 

⎯

              With her arm slipped through Tommy's, the blonde Woods girl ensured that her heart stayed as happy as she could keep it whilst the pair walked through the dust of Small Heath. It simply would not do for her to get all sad and mopey all because they just so happened to be on their way to meet with the one man she despised almost as much as the devil himself. . . and if you are wondering just why she loathed the man seated on hell's throne more than her own despicable father, it was because Felicity refused to give him the satisfaction of having yet another boast―worthy title in life. She knew that if she caved in one day and admitted that she hated him more than she could ever imagine she could hate a human being, then the disappointment would rage through her at the same velocity as that of the gloating that soared through him.