London was a living beast—its bridges like ribs, its towers scraping at a grey sky, its Underground a deep, growling belly full of steam, soot, and secrets. You could lose yourself in its vastness, or you could claim it—take its shadows, its alleys, its rooftops—and bend them to your will. Jacob Frye had done much of that already, swaggering through Whitechapel with the confidence of a man who believed he understood the city. But even he would tell you—never aloud, of course—that London could swallow you whole if you weren’t careful. And the one person who understood that better than any assassin, any gang leader, any braggart Rook? His wife. You.

Not that Jacob ever expected to marry a woman like you—because who in their right mind marries a legend-in-the-making? Long before the Rooks marched in their coats, before Jacob painted his creed onto the East End, you were already carving a kingdom of your own. One of the early leaders—if not the founder—of the burgeoning all-female syndicate that would one day be known as the Forty Elephants. Your girls were ghosts in lace and silk, professionals of a craft people underestimated until they found their shopfronts stripped clean as bone. You built your empire with fashion and precision: false hems, hidden pockets, weighted seams, and modified gowns that could smuggle more jewels than a noblewoman owned. You ran coordinated heists like they were military offensives. You commanded discipline, hierarchy, order. And you held your territory at Elephant and Castle with the same fierce certainty Jacob used to hold a blade. People whispered that you and Jacob “helped each other,” but it was never quite that simple. He didn’t save you, and you didn’t save him. You were two storms passing over the same city, two forces that should’ve torn each other apart but instead tangled so tightly no one could tell where his influence ended and yours began. He could’ve chosen a safer match—someone softer, someone who didn’t terrify half the city’s shopkeepers just by walking past. And you? You could’ve dismissed him as a reckless amateur with a charming smile. You tried to, at first. But fate is a cruel tailor, stitching together lives with threads neither party notices until they’ve already been knotted.

Years passed after that first collision—years of stolen goods, secret meetings, narrow escapes, nights spent stitching new pockets into dresses while plotting how to bleed London’s wealthiest dry. When the two of you finally ended up beneath the white veil, neither of you pretended it was expected. Jacob certainly didn’t regret a damn thing.

Your shared hideout sat above a tailor’s shop, quiet from the outside but alive within. The air carried lavender from sachets stuffed into old drawers, tobacco smoke curling lazily toward the cracked ceiling, and the faint metallic whisper of needles left cooling after a long night’s work. Below, your girls moved with disciplined grace—nothing like the rowdy, chaotic Rooks. They murmured over piles of stolen jewelry, shook out designer dresses to double-check hidden seams, and catalogued the night’s spoils with practiced elegance. They ran like a well-oiled machine, and Jacob knew it: compared to them, the Rooks were spirited but amateurish, loud where your women were silent, improvisational where your gang was strategic.

And there you stood—centre of it all—sleeves rolled, hair pinned in a way that suggested you’d tried once and given up, bent over maps and receipts like a general reading the outcome of a war before dawn.

Jacob leaned against the doorway, arms crossed. Admiration, amusement—they all lived there, muddled together.

“Y’know,” Jacob drawled, tilting his head, “for someone who calls the Rooks a pack o’ street-born amateurs, you run your lot like the bloody Queen’s Guard.”

Without looking up, you replied, dry as old gin, “That’s why my girls come home with diamonds, Jacob. Yours come home with bruises.”

Jacob chuckled under his breath. “Suppose that’s why I married you, then.”