✓ | GOLDEN LIAR ↠ Thomas Shelby.

02.

CHAPTER TWO.

               THE ONE THING THAT Felicity Woods despised the most about herself was her naivety. She may have well of been nineteen years old again, when she had plaintively believed along with everyone else that the Great War would be over in a matter of months. . . or at the very most, a year.  She hadn't ever expected that it would last any longer than that. Felicity Woods was clueless: that was the most simple way to put it.

As she walked home one evening with the sinking sun throwing vermillion light on the back of her figure, there wasn't a single thought that occupied her blonde head. Felicity could hardly call herself tired from work - serving drinks at the Black Swan wasn't the most exhausting of occupations - so a vibrancy filled her person that surprised her, but didn't alarm her.

What did alarm her, however, was the chaos that had suddenly descended on Small Heath that day, when the coppers came in search of the communists. Felicity didn't understand how such a thing had happened and why it had happened when anything of the sorts had never happened in the past.

So as Felicity Woods made her way down the street, she wasn't aware of the man on the opposite side. Rather, she was only aware of the distinct lack of thoughts in her head. . . especially because she knew that she would and should have thoughts on the entire situation.

"Evening." Tommy nodded at her from where he too was making his way down the road with his hands swinging by his side.

Felicity took a deep breath and crossed the road to him so that she fell into step beside the man. "What's going on?" She demanded, nodding first to the amber glow that was in front of them, at the end of the street and then to the houses, as a reference that had been caused earlier that day by the police officers.

A sharp exhale of air escaped the man before he answered. "We're lighting fires," he told her, "to raise the alarm."

It took everything in the girl to stop the sound of indignance and disbelief from leaving her lips. "Alarm for what?" She asked instead.

"The new coppers from Belfast," Tommy said simply, without any further explanation, as though Felicity should know what he meant by that.

"What about them?"

When she glanced across to him, a ghost of a smile was glimmering on his lips, as though he found something amusing that the girl had no such knowledge of. "They're breaking into our homes, interfering with things that have no need for their interference," he replied, "and we don't want that happening, so we're raising the alarm."

Felicity made a quiet noise of understanding - when really, she didn't understand much more than she had five minutes ago. "All right," she hummed.

The man nodded and with that, the pair continued to walk in silence, nearing the amber glow with every step that they took. It didn't take them long for them to reach it and soon Felicity was surrounded with the growing murmur of voices as men and women alike crowded together to watch the vermillion flames rising up into the sky, licking up the broken glass panes of numerous portraits of what appeared to be. . . the King?

"Is that. . .?" Felicity whispered hoarsely to Thomas, leaning across so that he could hear her among the crowd's volume.

"The King?"