"Birmingham's fog is the smoke exhaled by the Peaky Blinders."
Altair murmured it to the glass, barely above a breath.
He was eleven years old, though no one who looked at his face would have guessed it. He stood at the second-floor window of the Shelby manor, watching the mist settle over the outskirts of Birmingham the way it always did at this hour.
Eleven years since he'd woken up here.
His full name was Altair Thomas Shelby. The Thomas was deliberate. His great-grandfather had carried that name, and the family had pressed it into Altair like a brand. Tommy Shelby. The man who had built the Peaky Blinders into something the whole of England had feared.
After Tommy died, things unravelled slowly, then all at once. The gang frayed. The family turned on itself. Altair's grandfather, Tommy's youngest son, came back to Birmingham with a handful of loyal men and whatever was left of the name, inheriting two pubs and a manor and not much else.
It wasn't enough for a man with Shelby blood.
His grandfather founded the Little Peaky Blinders, pulled in over a hundred men, and carved out a reputation worth having. Then Altair's father, Freddy, took over and carved out something larger. For a time he ran Birmingham's underworld outright. But Freddy was reckless where Tommy had been precise, and eventually his own men turned on him and the law closed in. He was in prison now. Still pulling strings from inside, still feared, the Shelby name still enough to make most of Birmingham hesitate.
The family wasn't hurting. Five pubs, two restaurants, a shopping center, factories on the outskirts, a winery sprawling across a hundred and twenty hectares. A manor here, a garden estate outside London. The Little Peaky Blinders held the two busiest blocks in the city center, the legitimate shops up front, the gray business running underneath.
By any reasonable measure, it was a great deal.
Freddy didn't see it that way. None of them did. What they had now was wealth that had come in through industry and economics, the ordinary kind. In Tommy's time the Shelby name had meant something else entirely. It had carried weight across all of England. The Peaky Blinders had been the most feared gang in the country.
That was the standard every Shelby measured themselves against.
And Altair, Freddy's only son, was expected to be the one who finally got them back there.
He turned the words over quietly. The Peaky Blinders. Tommy Shelby.
The starlight lay thin and pale beyond the glass.
He'd lived a full life before this one. He wasn't unprepared, exactly. But nothing in that life had covered this. What he did have was the habit of thinking before speaking, of reading a room, of knowing when to wait. The family had noticed. They took it as a promising sign.
It would have been enough, maybe, if not for the other thing.
There was something inside him he couldn't name and couldn't control. It surfaced when his emotions ran too high, and not before.
Three years ago, a gunman shot at him over dinner. His mother stepped in front of it.
He didn't remember deciding anything. He remembered her falling, and then the glasses and plates around him burst apart and the shards moved, flew, found the men who had fired. When it was over, the gunmen were dead.
His mother was gone too.
He'd been trying to understand it ever since. Some gift that had come with the transmigration, he assumed, though it hadn't come with instructions. He couldn't call it up deliberately. Couldn't shape it. It simply waited inside him for the worst possible moment.
If I could actually use it, the weight might feel different.
He exhaled slowly.
A sound broke through his thoughts. Something outside the window, soft and irregular. A flutter. A tap against the glass.
His hand moved to the drawer before he'd finished thinking about it. He wrapped his fingers around the pistol.
"Who's there?"
Not the wind. He was certain of that. But this was the second floor.
"Hoo. Hoo."
He went still.
He pressed himself against the wall beside the window, reached out, and pulled the curtain back in one sharp motion.
An owl. Grayish-brown, beating its wings against the glass. A letter clamped in its beak.
Altair studied it for a moment. A gang move? Someone inside the family? He turned the possibilities over, watching the bird. It seemed impatient more than dangerous. He couldn't see anything rigged to it.
He opened the window.
The owl swept in, circled once, and landed on his desk. The letter dropped from its beak, drifted through the air, and settled into Altair's open hand as though it had been aimed there.
No stamp. No postmark.
The address was written in emerald-green ink:
Mr. Altair Thomas Shelby
First Room on the Left, Second Floor, Central Castle
Shelby Manor, Outskirts of Birmingham
West Midlands, England