Sequel: In Too Deep
Status: complete

Plausible Deniability

history exposed

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Aila jerks awake at the hand covering her mouth. Her heart races in her chest, fear clouding up her mind. Is she going to die? Wait. If someone’s here, and Niall isn’t protecting me— Oh, fuck, they killed him. Before she can cry out for help, a voice is in her ear.

“Aila, shh. It’s me.”

Aila slumps against the pillows when she recognises that voice. Tania pulls her hand away, smiling ruefully in the dim lighting spilling in through the doorway. Aila scrubs a hand over her face and glances at Niall. He sleeps on peacefully.

“What are you doing in here?” she hisses to Tania.

“Come with me.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“Please?”

Aila sighs and nods. Tania grins then sneaks from the room, leaving Aila alone. She leans over to kiss Niall’s forehead, praying he doesn’t wake before she gets back, and slides out of bed. She pulls on a pair of leggings and an oversized T-shirt, runs a comb through her hair, and grabs her sandals from the shoe rack near the closet.

“Ready?” Tania asks when Aila meets her in the foyer. “Hey, Robert? If Niall wakes up, let him know we’ll be back.”

“Yes, Miss Tania.”

“When will you stop calling me ‘Miss’?” Tania groans, and Robert’s stoic expression slips with the tug of his lips.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Miss Tania.”

“Whatever. We’ll be gone for about an hour.”

Before anyone can say anything else, Tania grabs Aila’s wrist and drags her along. Aila wants nothing more than to go back to bed, but Tania said ‘please’. The only time Tania makes anything a request, Aila has found, is when it’s important. When it requires manners and persuasion. So Aila dutifully follows Tania to the garage.

The car beeps as the doors unlock, and Aila slides into the passenger seat. Neither of them speak as Tania drives away from the house, further into the heart of East Primden. The streets are quiet, empty. A thick late-night heat settles on the city, and Aila can count the stars overhead if she wanted to. She’s never seen the city asleep like this.

Tania pulls into the car park of a tall, brick-covered building. Aila follows her through the side door and up five flights of stairs, complaining all the way. Tania doesn’t bother telling her to quit whining; she only tells Aila to keep up. Aila grumbles under her breath but does as told. The expression on Tania’s face is too frightening to risk angering her.

The door closes with a clatter behind them, and Aila swallows thickly before staring out at the city before them. The glare of the streetlights don’t reach the tops of the surrounding buildings, casting them into deep shadows. Tania’s boots scuff against the rooftop. Aila watches her stand at the ledge, her hands shoved into her pockets. Moonlight paints her hair silver, and the sharp planes of her face are highlighted by the milky light.

“What—? Tania, what are we doing here?”

“I’m scared.”

“Well, yeah. We’re sixty feet up in the air, and you’re standing by a ledge that isn’t tall enough to keep you from falling to your death.”

“I’m not scared of death, Aila.” Tania stares at Aila over her shoulder. “I’ve not been scared of dying since I was six. I could fall off right now, and I wouldn’t care. None of them would care. Hell, most of them don’t even really know I exist. The ones that do… Well, they’d be glad to see me go.”

“I wouldn’t. You—you’re my friend.”

Tania scoffs and kicks at the short wall. “You can’t make friends. Not in this line of business. It’s too dangerous. Friendships, relationships, get you killed. Or worse than death. They get your loved ones killed, and you can do shit about it.”

“Tania,” Aila whispers, throat growing tight. She can scarcely breathe—and it isn’t her fear of heights. It’s how close Tania is to the edge of the building. How easily she could tumble over, and Aila would never be able to stop it. “Tania, please, come away from there.”

“I’m scared for you.”

“Okay, well, can we talk about it when you’re not a step away from becoming a splatter on the pavement?”

Tania barks out a laugh, shaking her head. But she takes a careful step back, then another. Finally, she’s at Aila’s side once more. Tania brushes her thumb across Aila’s cheek, her eyes dark. A tear lingers on her fingertip.

“Didn’t realise I’d frighten you that badly.” Tania sighs and wipes her thumb on Aila’s sweater. “Sorry. But you shouldn’t care that much. About anyone.”

“Why are you scared for me?”

Tania shrugs, perches on the enormous power-box, and turns to face the city. Aila waits with bated breath, but no words are spoken. So she sits beside Tania and watches their city sleep. Tania sighs, planting her hands against the metal beneath them, and lifts her face to the sky. To the stars above.

“I’m scared because you’re innocent.”

“I—”

“May have done some things wrong, but I can about guarantee you’ve never done anything like what we do. You’re innocent, even with your sins. And I’d hate to watch that being ripped from you. You think I wanted this life?”

“How did you even get into it?”

Tania snorts, scuffing her shoe against the tar. With a sigh, she tells Aila of her childhood. The parents who couldn’t afford to feed her and her seven siblings, come about because contraceptives were illegal. Sex for the sake of sex shouldn’t be a punishment, but it was. The family lived just past the border of Primden, so the social welfare system never extended to them. Their own city fell short.

It was the middle of January. The house had no electricity, no water, no heat beyond the feeble fires her parents could start in the fireplace. Tania was six and can still taste the bitterness of the syrup twenty years later. She recalls how much she’d had to drink. She’d waited until her mother’s back was turned and spit the liquid through the crack in the floor.

The rotted wood stained red, but it didn’t give away what she’d done. Soon, her eyes grew heavy, and she could no longer stay awake. She remembers falling asleep to her mother’s soft humming and her father’s weeping as he cradled the baby to his chest.

“I woke up and… they were gone. All of them. Mother believed letting us all die mercifully in our sleep was better than starving to death. I survived because I spit most of it out.”

Aila stares, horrified, at Tania. This isn’t what she expected to hear. She thought it would be a ‘made some bad choices, fell in with the wrong crowd, never left’ kind of thing. Not that her parents made such a hard decision to save their family from enduring a painful death.

Tania continues as if she doesn’t notice how Aila trembles next to her. She speaks of finding a family just across the border who took her in. A mother with kind eyes, the gentle hands of the father when he tucked Tania in at night. Though they were generous and sweet, Tania knew she’d never be able to stay with them.

They were in the North. The North was never kind to interlopers. The North found out about the refugee child. So when she was eight, the father drove her into the East and left her on a corner. She heard later that the North punished the family—sentenced them to slaughter.

She’d said goodbye to another family and made the decision to never rely on anyone again. She spent two years learning how to survive on her own. The Irwins found her at ten, and she knew they weren’t her family. They never would be.

They were too cold, too harsh, too unrelenting in their demands. They did whatever they wanted, and she took the brutality without sound. But they taught her more than she ever would have known without them.

They taught her through cruel punishments until she got it right. She learnt how to use her age—then her body—to get what she needed from their targets.

She was thirteen the first time she slept with someone three times her age. He was too rough, but she let him choke her, bite her. She had to.

She felt nothing as the last of her innocence was stolen, as she stared at the blood on the sheets.

It wasn’t all his.

It was rape, Aila thinks but doesn’t say. Her stomach churns as Tania speaks. Aila wants to tell her to shut up. To stop talking about how she was hired at fifteen to kill one of Niall’s inner circle. How she was offered a chance to walk away, but she took her chances on what she knew—she seduced the man, slept with him, then left his lifeless body in the hotel room. She got the information she was sent for.

It was her sixteenth birthday.

“Went back home and couldn’t wash the blood from my hands. Even when it was gone, I knew it was still there.” Tania reaches into her pocket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes followed by a photo. She hands the picture to Aila and lights up a cigarette. “It wasn’t my first kill. Knowing Niall was willing to let me defect to him made it different.”

“When did you?”

Tania blows out a smoke ring, shrugging. “A couple months later. I figured he allowed me to kill someone he considered a friend, as much as we can consider people friends. The least I could do was hear him out.”

“He wasn’t angry?”

“Oh, he was furious. Not with me, though. He was pissed off and wanted Irwin’s blood. He said Irwin had no right to use me as a weapon when I was so young. He was angry about all the times I slept with men over the past three years when I should never have had to.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Aila murmurs as she watches a lone car disappear down a side street. The tail-lights fade into red pinpricks then nothing.

“Don’t say anything then.”

”Your life has sucked.”

Tania snorts before dissolving into laughter. Aila’s lips twitch—the expressionless mask on Tania’s face is gone. Her gaze drops to the photograph in her hand. Niall, younger than he is now but still just as cold, stands in the centre of a line of people. Aila recognises Harry to his right. Zayn to his left, and Liam and Louis on either side. She doesn’t know who the rest are, but a circle around one man’s face tells her this is who Tania killed.

“Irwin has it out for me.” Tania sighs, stubbing out her cigarette. “Still. It’s been ten years since I walked away from him. He doesn’t forget. He doesn’t forgive. In a way, he’s crueler than the North ever was.”

“Why hasn’t he come after you?”

“Because he stepped down. His son stepped up. No matter what any of them say, Junior doesn’t want a war. He knows it won’t end well for him. So he stays within his boundaries, and we stick to ours.”

“Where are the boundaries?” Aila asks, and Tania points to a building in the distance.

“Four blocks over, dead-middle of the city. That warehouse. It’s our… meeting place. Every month, we gather there to discuss our sections. To make sure the cops aren’t disturbing our businesses. Stay on this side, you hear me?”

“Rogue is past that.”

“You go there?” Tania shakes her head. “Don’t go again. That’s Irwin’s biggest source of income. He finds you there, he’ll kill you just as soon as look at you.”

“Yeah, because I can tell Willow we can’t ever go there again. She’ll ask too many questions. How am I supposed to tell her that my boyfriend’s a goddamn mob boss, and going to Rogue will cause a war?”

Tania frowns and kicks her feet. The backs of her boots hit the power-box with metallic thunks. Her gaze cuts to Aila’s face then darts away. “If you go, let one of us know. We’ll keep watch.”

“Won’t he kill you if he sees you there?”

“Probably. But we signed up for this. Now let’s go before your mob-boss boyfriend wakes up and thinks you’ve been kidnapped again.”

Aila shivers, though the breeze swirling around them is warm. “He should never have killed those guys.”

“Are you fucking serious? Aila, they took you. Did you want them to survive after that?”

“I guess not. I just, I never wanted him to kill for me. I thought he was joking when he said a patron being rude to me was the last thing they’d ever do. But he promised when I said he wasn’t allowed to kill anyone for me.”

“Get used to it, babe. He’ll do a lot worse than kill when it comes to his family.”

Aila turns her gaze to the sky, stares at the innumerable stars above. “Do you regret it?”

Tania doesn’t have to ask what she means. Lowering herself back beside Aila, she sighs. “I regret killing him every fucking day. I don’t regret defecting. Niall didn’t hate me for what I did. He’s told me so many times over the years that he forgives me. I still can’t figure out why someone would go so far out of their way to assure me they had a spot when I was ready. Especially when they knew what I did.”

“Did you ever think it was a trap?” Aila glances at her friend from the corner of her eye. Tania pulls another cigarette from the pack. “That you were gonna wake up one day and this will all have been a vivid dream? Or worse, this was all meant to get your guard down and they would kill you?”

“Hell yeah I did. I still do, sometimes. But it ain’t so bad if I’m being honest. Cushy benefits,” she quips with a quick wink, and Aila laughs. It’s real. Easy.

“What, getting to live in that nice house and beat the fuck out of people?”

“Tell me better benefits, and I’ll call you a liar.”

“I’d say a cute, highly intelligent husband would be a nice benefit.”

Tania chuckles and passes the cigarette over. Aila hasn’t smoked since she was sixteen, when she and Matreo wanted to know what the big fuss was about. She hadn’t found it so bad. Disgusting, sure, but… not awful. Matreo, on the other hand, hated it so much that he’d run and told their parents Aila was smoking. He conveniently left out the part where he’d done it, too.

Still, she takes the cigarette and inhales slowly. Tania rolls her eyes and takes the cigarette back, but Aila can see the smile. After blowing out a stream of smoke, Tania shrugs.

“Yeah, marrying Lou is the best benefit of them all.” She hops off the power-box and reaches for Aila’s hand. “Let’s go. Seriously, Niall is going to be pissed if you’re not there when he wakes up.”

Aila lets Tania pull her to her feet, and they make their way to the door in silence. The night has taken an unexpected turn. She never anticipated hearing Tania’s story, not after the way her face closed off this morning. Yet Tania just spilled everything for Aila to hear. She wonders if this is Tania’s way of testing her.

Of seeing if Aila treats her differently.

The only difference now is Aila wants to mourn the little girl Tania never got to be. Aila is still terrified of the other woman, for obvious reasons, but she doesn’t pity Tania for her past. She’s in awe of the way Tania overcame that past and grew to be someone so fiercely loyal and kind—in her own way.

“Did you kill one of them?” Aila asks as they rush down the stairs.

“Nah, left that to Niall. Did get some fun in, though.” Tania grins sharply over her shoulder. “I couldn’t just let one feel neglected while Niall took care of the other one.”

“You’re scary.”

Tania’s laughter is far too sweet for the situation. For the monster she thinks she is.