ꨄ

𝑁𝑂𝑇𝐻𝐼𝑁𝐺 𝑊𝐸 𝐷𝐸𝑆𝐼𝑅𝐸𝐷

𝑁𝑂𝑇𝐻𝐼𝑁𝐺 𝑊𝐸 𝐷𝐸𝑆𝐼𝑅𝐸𝐷
ᴛʜᴇ ᴡᴀʀɴɪɴɢ

It felt traitorous, to be wrapped in Amir's arms, his lips upon my neck, as I finally opened the letter from Hülya. At the same time, it was exhilarating, knowing that while she was alone on the shores of Italy, nose stuck in a book, I was with a lover in Switzerland, looking out past the snow-tinted grass with her far from mind. The war had not touched Switzerland in the same way as it had most of Europe, and there we were met with a sense of peace that had not been felt in years. I later learned that my view of it was not quite true. War had brushed Switzerland with quiet instability, though this was not seen within the high classes with which we mixed.

The Great War was not a topic spoken about with Amir. It was as if he had not lived through it. It had not touched him, the way it had the few other men in my life. There came a sense of comfort with his ignorance, a way of forgetting. Perhaps that should have said something about his character- his lack of attention paid toward the years in which too many had suffered, but at that time, the transition back to normality, no one wanted to speak of the fighting. It was from pain, not indifference. I myself had not been thinking straight during those months. My travels could have been called insensitive.

In her letter, Hülya spoke again of what little she could. The beach, the warmth, the long time spent on the trains, the final streams of soldiers that had only just made their way home after months of being trapped abroad. With the way she wrote, she might've been a poet, had she had anything noteworthy to talk about. I could imagine the way in which she would have read the words aloud- with a pointed tilt, prolonging words as if they were a song.

I remember how happy that thought had made me feel, for a moment, until Amir had pushed the paper away, drawing me in. It was as if he knew the perfect times in which to embrace me and as if he could sense every time I thought about what I'd left behind. Those thoughts would be quickly cast away, every time his soft hands found my waist, brushing against skin.

"Who writes to you?" Amir asked, nose brushing against my jaw, breath hot against my face.

"My cousin. Hülya."

He seemed pleased by my answer, rewarding with a kiss to my neck.

"I should write back," I murmured, leaning into his touch.

"Am I not enough?" He said, posing the question as a joke, but the words felt too heavy to brush away. "Come back to bed."

Daylight streamed through the open windows, the light breeze ruffling the linen curtains that hung from the wall. Below the balcony, the bustle of the crowds had begun, leading the way to the small market that was opening only two streets away.

The noise made me think of the stall my father had owned in Turkey, selling canvases my mother had painted of the images she'd stored of their travels. I'd always worked on the front. Even from a young age, I'd had a way of getting people to do what I wanted. My grandmother, before she'd passed, had called it sly manipulation, like a snake, she would hiss, but my mother would kiss my cheek afterwards and call it charm. On those days, with me sitting in my sundress on the edge of the wooden table, more paintings would be sold than ever.

While in Switzerland, we never did visit that market. I regretted it, but not enough to pull myself from Amir's arms and find my way down to it myself. Where had that charm, that manipulation disappeared to then? It took a while to find it again, but tragedy had to come first. It was as if the poets had written it.

Business in London had always been Amir's aim. I did not and still don't see the appeal. Unlike the other cities we'd visited, this one was dark and dirty, depressed even more than two years after the end of the war. It clung to it like smoke to fabric, inescapable. Even the air had a constant stench of gunpowder.

The clubs there had a different air too. It was not like the refined rooms in Paris with the ladies dressed modestly in red, the men in full suits with cigars. It was looser, more frivolous, and advancing with the times. It was the only thing I could say I loved about the city. The short dresses with dropped waists and sweeping necklines. The beads, the glitter and glow, the louder music, echoing against the gold gleam of the rooms. Amir had hated such places, turning his nose up at them, but it was in one of those clubs, that I first met Thomas Shelby.

He was not like the other men I'd been introduced to, with their snobbish air and faces to match. When he shook my hand, his skin was rough, calloused by work, and he had that unshakeable glint to his eyes that all the returned soldiers held. Neither did he smile, when he looked down upon me as if he would have rather been somewhere else, talking to someone else.

But the look he gave Amir was no different. There was constant boredom laced in with his expression- a gaze that left the man my arm was entwined with clamouring. His dark eyes burned with something dangerous, flickering down at me and not changing as he looked back.

"Dila, if you'd excuse us, Mr Shelby and I have some business to talk about," he said, voice leaving no room for argument. Not that I would.

I nodded and found Mr Shelby holding his arm out for me in a motion I had not imagined him making. Not a single glance was spared to Amir. Thomas let me thread a hand around his elbow before he moved us forward to where he said he would introduce me to his sister.

"She's decided to grace us with her presence for once," he said, voice betraying nothing despite what his words implied.

It was clear who Thomas' sister was. The woman sat with an expression as bored as her brother's. Red and fur wrapped, her coat was expensive in a way that was understated, her lips pulled into a grimace of the same colour. She had the same face as Thomas- except for the eyes. Where his were uncomfortably bright, searing beneath the skin, hers were darker, though still blue, and held a false sense of security, when they finally landed on their target.

"Ada."

"Thomas." It was as his name left her lips, that the focus of her lazer-like eyes fell to me.

"I'd like you to meet our guest, this is Dilara."

Ada Shelby looked at me as if I held all the depth in the world. Not many people had ever looked at me that way as if there was more to see than what I presented. I'd always felt shallow, but that sense of superficiality had always been purposeful, no matter how often I'd been criticised for it. There was less to be expected that way and so no one would look at me the way she looked at me then. But a woman, I know, has a sense of awareness that could surpass any type of wall a person could build and fortify. Perhaps I'd lost that ability during my time galavanting, or perhaps her sight had been blessed by her family's blood, letting her see straight through any broken facade that came upon her.

"You don't much like me already and I haven't said a word." The words left my lips the moment the men were a distance away.

She paused for a moment, perhaps surprised I'd mentioned it at all. "I don't like any of the people my brother associates with."

"Why not?"

"Because they're all the same. All clamouring to reach something valuable in their own eyes while standing on the shoulders of others who do not get a choice in being their footholds," Ada said, speaking in that same poetic way that I admired Amir for, that left me leaning forward to hear her quietly-spoken words.

"And what is it they want?"

Ada looked at me then as if what she had first seen in me was false. There was a flash of disappointment behind her eyes. She looked older then, than she had first appeared.

"I don't know," she said, then shook her head, taking a sip of her golden-brown drink. "We can never know. It changes so often that enemies become friends and friends become foe."

It was her next words that surprised me, though. I wanted to laugh, at first, but the tone of her vice was all-serious and laced with a bitter edge that left me staring.

"It's why you're best to get out now before you're roped into the middle of it," she said, not looking at me as she waved for her glass to be refilled.

"Oh, I couldn't leave now."

The words had barely left my lips when she turned to me. "Why not? You have no other purpose here than to be an armpiece."

I couldn't bring myself to be reproached by that statement, for what she said was the whole truth. I had no stakes in the business, and even less, I had no understanding of it and likely never would. Not with the way Amir had begun to whisk me away at any moment conversation began to grow serious.

"Have you ever loved someone enough that you would follow them to the edge of the universe and back just to be near them?"

There was another flash behind her eyes- cool eyes that held all her feelings and reflected them tenfold.

"Love makes a woman do strange things. I just hope he loves you enough to warrant that loyalty."

I didn't respond. Perhaps I ought to have answered. Ada pushed herself from the bar after that, sliding the crystal glass toward me, and left with one last pointed glance. That look stayed with me more than her parting statements, but still, the words now leave me bitter, though to no one's fault by my own, and I wonder what might've happened had I listened to them.

𝑁𝑂𝑇𝐻𝐼𝑁𝐺 𝑊𝐸 𝐷𝐸𝑆𝐼𝑅𝐸𝐷

𝑁𝑂𝑇𝐻𝐼𝑁𝐺 𝑊𝐸 𝐷𝐸𝑆𝐼𝑅𝐸𝐷
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Sorry for the wait! I feel like I've wrote the same thing in all of my new chapters, but in case you haven't seen my announcements, updates haven't been coming due to exams. I'm finished now so there'll be lots of chapters in the near future!
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