Ruin Me Right

Episode 1 — THE DEBT I knew three things about Callum Drake before I knocked on his door. He was dangerous, he always collected, and my father had made him very, very angry. I knocked anyway. Okay so here's the thing. I'd been standing outside for four minutes. I know because I checked my phone twice and then put it away because checking your phone outside the door of a man who could technically have you killed is the kind of thing that makes you feel like an i***t, which on top of everything else I didn't need. My left shoe was destroying my foot. I'd come straight from work and I'd been in these shoes since eight in the morning and there was a blister forming on my heel that I was just going to have to deal with later, assuming there was a later, which was a thought I immediately decided not to finish. The man at the door was the size of a wardrobe. "Mara Voss," I said. "Viktor Voss's daughter. I'm here about the debt." He looked at me for a long time. Long enough that I started wondering if I'd said it wrong, if there was a specific way you were supposed to announce yourself at a place like this that I'd missed. Then he lifted something to his ear, said a few words, and stepped aside. That was it. I was in. I went in before the part of my brain that was still paying attention to the blister could convince the rest of me to leg it back to the tube. The inside looked nothing like I thought it would. I don't know what I thought — something grimier, something that matched what it actually was. Instead it was all dark wood and low lighting and carpet that cost more per square metre than my monthly rent, which I clocked immediately and found weirdly offensive given the circumstances. Nobody spoke to me. Men watched me walk to the staircase and I didn't look at any of them directly because I'd decided in advance not to do anything that could be read as a challenge, which meant I spent the walk staring at a fixed point in the middle distance like someone who had extremely strong opinions about that particular patch of wall. The office upstairs had huge windows. London spread out behind them, all lit up, getting on with things. Somewhere out there my flatmate was watching something on Netflix and had no idea where I was because I hadn't told her, because I hadn't known how to say I'm going to go talk to an organised crime figure about my dad's debt in a way that didn't sound like a cry for help, which it was, honestly, but I'd been managing my own crises since I was seventeen and I wasn't going to stop now. The man behind the desk was younger than I'd expected. That was the first thing that threw me. I'd built a picture of him in my head over two weeks of reading everything I could find — which wasn't much, because men like Callum Drake don't end up in newspaper archives if they're doing it right — and the picture was older, harder. The real version was maybe early thirties, dark, and so still that it took me a second to fully register him as a person and not a feature of the room. He looked up. He looked at me. I'd rehearsed this on the Central line. I had a whole speech. It made complete sense at Liverpool Street. "I'm Mara," I said. Which was not the speech. "I know who you are," he said. "Sit down." "I'm fine standing." I don't know why I said that. Reflex. Some stupid reflex from years of people telling me to sit down in offices where sitting down was part of how they kept the upper hand, and apparently even here, even now, my body's first response to sit down from a man behind a desk was no actually. He looked at me for a second. "Sit down, Mara." He said my name like it was already his. Like he'd been keeping it somewhere and had just decided to take it out. I sat down. My legs made the decision and I caught up to it a second later. "You've been looking for my father for six weeks," I said, very focused on keeping my voice level, which I managed, just about. "You're not going to find him. I've been trying too and I know him better than you do and he's gone. I don't think he's coming back." I kept my eyes on his because looking away felt like the wrong move. "So I came here because someone has to deal with this and it's not going to be him." He didn't say anything. He was very good at not saying anything. He just sat there and let the silence be a thing in the room between us and waited to see what I'd do with it. I'd seen that move before from people who thought it gave them an advantage and I'd learned a long time ago that the way to deal with it was just — not fill it. So I didn't. We sat there. "I have forty thousand pounds," I said eventually. "I know that's nothing against two million. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But it's real, it exists right now, and I want to talk about some kind of repayment arrangement — long term, structured, something that means you actually get money back instead of nothing." I'd started picking at the hem of my sleeve without noticing and I made myself stop. "And if this was never about the money and it's about something else, just tell me. I'd rather know than not." He leaned back. "Forty thousand," he said. "Against two million." "Yes." "That's not a proposal. That's a girl who's walked into a room she shouldn't be in hoping that the fact she walked in counts for something." My throat went tight. He wasn't wrong and that was the problem — he was more or less exactly right, and there's a specific feeling you get when someone who doesn't know you looks at you and names the true thing, it's not quite embarrassment and not quite relief, it sits somewhere between them and it's deeply uncomfortable. "Does it," I said. "Count for something." He didn't answer right away. In the gap I became very aware of my own heartbeat, which was unhelpful. "I don't want your forty thousand," he said. Oh. "Your father took more than money from me." He stood up and he was taller than I'd registered and when he moved the whole room seemed to sort of rearrange itself around the fact of him moving, which I'd never experienced with another person before and didn't have a framework for. "He took something I need back. And what I need is someone with a particular skill to help me get it. Someone who won't disappear." He looked at me. "Like he did." "You've known me twenty minutes," I said. "You don't know anything about me." "I know you came here by yourself at midnight to talk to me about your father's debt. I know you've been frightened since you walked through that door and you haven't once let it touch your voice." He wasn't saying it to be kind. He was saying it the way you'd say the sky is grey or the windows need cleaning — like it was just a thing that was true that he'd noticed. "You're not built to run. I can see that from here." I didn't have an answer for that. I genuinely didn't. I sat there and tried to find the response that was right for this moment and there wasn't one, so I said: "What skill." He told me. I listened. Turned it over. Looked — the way I always look, it's a habit I've had since I was a teenager — for the exit, for the version of this where no was still an option and meant something. I'd been looking for six weeks. Since the kitchen table. Since I'm sorry Mara in handwriting I'd known my whole life, from the man I'd trusted my whole life, and there was no exit then and there wasn't one now and I think somewhere around Bethnal Green on the tube tonight I'd already known that and had come anyway. "Fine," I said. "Okay. Yes." Something moved across his face. There and gone. Nothing like the rest of his expressions. "Good," he said. Outside the window London was just London. Big, lit up, going about its business with complete disregard for any of this. I sat there and thought: I should feel like I've made a catastrophic mistake. That feeling should be here right now. And I did feel it, somewhere, but underneath it was something else — something like a decision that's been made for a while finally catching up to the person who made it. I'd knocked on that door knowing. I just hadn't let myself say so. The most dangerous thing in this room, I was starting to think, wasn't anything he'd just described. It was the way he'd said you're not built to run like he'd already been thinking about what I was built for instead. End of Episode 1 Next — The job. The rules. And the first moment Mara realises the terms of this arrangement are not what she thought they were.