Page 82 of Corrupt

A test of loyalty.

“And Razor?”

“Yeah?”

“You better be rested enough cause this one’s gonna need your muscle. It’s messy.”

The line went dead.

And I was back to who I was. Razor.

Chapter seventeen

Tristan

I left Razor’s apartment with something close to clarity.

I was going to get my heart broken.

It shouldn’t have surprised me. I’d known it the moment he mistook me for a rent boy, the moment he smirked at me across the lamplit pavement. Razor Slade was always going to be a catastrophe. Mine, or his, or both. And I could have handled it. Honestly, I could. If he’d just stayed the way he was supposed to be.

Hard. Detached.

Good at fucking and nothing else.

I could have survived that version of him. Hell, I’d gone looking for it. It was easier, wanting someone who would never pretend I deserved more. Or never want to give me more, like Oliver. Easier than risking the alternative. And discovering, too late, I might want something I’d never been taught how to keep.

Oliver had taken enough. My family took the rest.

And the only person who’d ever looked at me as if I might deserve gentleness had been Henry, which meant it was clearly a clerical error in the universe rather than evidence of anything real.

So yes. I could have survived Razor as a transaction.

A mistake.

A mutually beneficial lapse in judgement.

But he hadn’t stayed that man, had he?

He’d gone soft.

With me.

Not just once and not just because I’d asked him to. I could have compartmentalised before, written us off as chemical intimacy. But he’d kept going long after the rush had dissolved. He’d kissed me when it meant something. Held me as if he didn’t want the night, or the morning, to end. Fucked me as if he wanted to keep me, not use me.

It felt dangerous, the way he’d touched me sober.

Then it shattered the moment his sister walked in.

Because of course it would.

I wasn’t stupid. He’d told me he wasn’t out. Sleeping with a closeted man always comes with a warning label. Every gay man learns it the first time he falls for someone who still flinches at his own reflection. Closet cases drain your soul. And I, idiot that I was, had let him. But that wasn’t even the worst of it. I knew who he was. What he did. He had a stash of drugs in his house. And here I was, mid-way through my pupillage. This could ruin me.

No more.

I went home. Buried myself in case files. Tried to force the whole thing into a tidy little box marked Bad Decision. Resigned myself to the idea I wouldn’t see him again. I would not seek him out. I would stay in my lane. And I would deal with everything else in my life that wasn’t Razor.

Which unfortunately included my father.