Wayne was twelve years old when he realised the true nature of what his dad did for a living. It was the day he happened to find a polythene bag of suspicious white powder in the cupboard under the bathroom sink at home. It was tucked away behind a few pipes, but really very little care had been taken to hide it. Anyone could have stumbled across it, and it just so happened that Wayne did. He pulled the bag out, slid his fingernail under the seal and opened it carefully. Then he dipped his little finger into the powder and gave it a quick lick.

Wayne’s mum, Maureen, was David’s childhood sweetheart. They had been together virtually all their lives, and she was devoted to their son. When she came into the bathroom and found him holding a bag of cocaine, she hit the roof. Wayne still got goosebumps at the memory.

“I… I found it!” he had protested. She just gave him a stinging slap across the face.

When David got home from the club that night, she had been waiting for him at the kitchen table. Worryingly, she had a steak knife at arm’s reach.

“Here, what’s all this about?” David had asked, half-joking. “Is it an ambush?”

Maureen’s eyes were brimming with tears, but she did her best to maintain a measured, level tone of voice. “Your son found the bag of coke you hid under the bathroom sink.”

“He… he what?”

“You fucking heard me!” she roared. “This is it, David. I’m not putting up with it any more. I’m leaving. And I’m taking Wayne with me.”

Wayne was listening to the argument from the other room with a sensation of mounting horror in his heart. How could he have been so fucking stupid, letting his mum catch him like that? Now he had ruined everything.

When David spoke, his voice was chillingly calm. “You go if you want, but Wayne stays with me.”

“No way. I’ll kill you first!”

There was a scrape of metal on wood as she grabbed the knife. Wayne came and stood in the doorway, watching as his mum threatened his dad with the blade. But David Carter stood his ground, and she couldn’t go through with it.

Maureen Carter had packed her bags that night and left without a word. It was the last time Wayne had ever seen her. She had never once tried to contact him since. Not even a phone call or an email. Nothing. Sometimes, he wondered if she may have been trying desperately to reach him, but that David had done everything in his power to prevent it. He wouldn’t put it past his dad, but he couldn’t let himself seriously consider it. The thought was not only too horrible to imagine, but Wayne had a strange feeling that his father would somehow know he was thinking it, and punish him accordingly. So he pushed it from his mind.

Over time, Wayne's attitude toward his mum had undergone a dramatic shift. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, as the saying goes. The resentment and even hatred he had felt towards her dissipated over the years, like mist in the air. Now he felt only occasional pangs of sadness at her absence. There were times when he had even gone so far as to try and seek her out. Looked her up online at least, checked whether she had a Facebook or Instagram profile. But she was persona non grata. It was as if she had simply ceased to exist.

The trick, of course, was not to think about it at all. And Wayne had been doing a pretty good job so far. The incident with the bag of coke was certainly a defining moment in his young life, though. And it had accomplished exactly what David Carter had hoped it would: it bound Wayne closer to him. It was a means of establishing loyalty. Obedience. Power.

That’s what Wayne assumed, anyway. That is father had done it on purpose. And like a good little lapdog, Wayne had rolled over and taken it. Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die. It wasn’t good to think about things too much.

Take this latest business with Fabian Lorenzo, for instance. A Colombian footballer more famous for his hard-partying lifestyle than for his conduct on the pitch. What exactly was he going to contribute at Mile End Athletic? He wasn’t a great player, and his star did not burn bright enough to attract fresh fans to the Mile End Stadium. He was just a middle-of-the-road celebrity and a mediocre player. But David Carter continued to send his scouts all over the world.

Wayne knew there was more to it than simply acquiring fresh faces for the team. He knew those flights back and forth were carrying more than just eager young footballers, and he understood where the bag of cocaine under the bathroom sink had come from. You didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. But Wayne had simply taught himself not to care.

There had been close shaves, but it always worked out in the end. For instance, there was the reporter a few years ago who had taken it upon himself to do a bit of digging into David Carter’s business practices. Wayne could picture the reporter now, standing alone in the rain. Watching. He had looked so fat, sad and dissolute, on a collision course with oblivion. Kevin Reece was his name. They had only met once; four years ago. At that point Wayne was pretty new to the team, and unused to dealing with the press. Kevin Reece had accosted him in the car park outside the Mile End training ground one morning. "Wayne, we need to talk."

"I've got nothing to say to you."

"No, but I've got plenty to say to you. It's about your dad."

"What about him?" Unconsciously, Wayne had begun squaring up to the reporter. He was so tall, he towered over the little anoraked man.

"He's not who you think he is, Wayne. He's got this whole other secret life."

"So what if he has? None of your business, is it?"

"He's a drug dealer, Wayne. But not just that. He's a gangster. He runs a whole criminal empire."

That encounter could have ended so very differently. But that was the moment the rest of the Mile End first team came spilling out of the nearby building, chatting and laughing. They drifted over in Wayne's direction, and he was briefly swept along by their conversation and good humour. When he looked back in the reporter's direction, Kevin Reece was gone.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

In those days, Kevin Reece was known as a crusading journalist pursuing truth and justice. He could have made a lot of trouble for David Carter, given half the chance. But scarcely a month later, his name and face were plastered all over the front pages of just about every newspaper. He had been inexorably linked to a very messy and embarrassing phone-hacking scandal. He quickly came to embody the very worst corruption and sleaze. By the end of the year, he had been sent down for six months. He served two, but by the time he got out, his career was over. And less than a fortnight after he left prison, he was stabbed to death in a botched mugging.

Wayne had come across news of Kevin Reece's murder while he was scrolling through his phone, doing the rounds of his various social media profiles. DISGRACED JOURNALIST DEAD was the headline. A mere three words ignominiously rounding out Kevin Reece's story. No photo. No mention of Mile End Athletic or David Carter (but then again, why would there be?). The news scarcely registered, and Wayne just scrolled away. He was soon embroiled in some Twitter spat or other, and it was almost as if Kevin Reece had never existed at all.

But now, out of nowhere, Wayne was thinking about Kevin Reece. The memory of the dead paparazzo arose unbidden and unwelcome to the forefront of the young midfielder's mind. A grim reminder that sometimes the good guy did not always come out on top.

Well, Wayne was fucked if he was going to let himself become collateral damage and end up dead in a ditch somewhere. If the Popovs wanted a fight, that was Alright with him. As long as he wasn’t the middle man.

The funny thing is, in another universe, Mikhail Popov and David Carter might have been friends. They had a lot in common, after all. For one thing, they were the same age. For another, Popov owned the Chiswick Wanderers, one of Mile End’s local rivals. They both lived and breathed football.

Popov had very close links to Russian organised crime, although he presented himself as a “legitimate businessman.” It was common knowledge that he was actually anything but. His two sons, Yuri and Stanislaw, were a pair of duplicate sociopaths who acted as his enforcers.

For a few years now there had been a kind of stalemate between the Popovs and the Carter organisation. It had been mutually agreed that there was little to gain by fighting. They would simply have to learn to live with one another. At least, that had been Wayne’s understanding. But this new development did not bode well. It hinted at underworld warfare, at all kinds of backstabbing and sabotage waiting to happen. Things were going to get ugly.

As the day dragged on, Wayne found himself wondering what was going on over at the stadium. He wouldn’t have wanted to be the head of security responsible for letting that guy into the building yesterday. Head of security for the Mile End Stadium was a man called Darren Greaves. He was one of David’s cronies, with a fearsome reputation as someone you simply did not fuck with. Wayne knew him pretty well, having been frequenting the stadium since he was a boy, and he knew enough to tell that Darren was a softie. His bark was much, much worse than his bite. To be honest, Wayne liked him. He had always seemed like a decent bloke. Not the brightest bulb, but someone you could depend on.

When Wayne’s phone started buzzing that afternoon, he picked it up and was surprised to see that it was a video call from Darren. He tapped the “answer” button and the screen was immediately filled by Darren’s face. But it took Wayne a moment to recognise the head of security. His features were screwed up, one of his eyes was completely swollen shut and tears were streaming down his face. His lips flapped and quivered, and he eventually managed to speak. “Wayne… I’m sorry. Wayne… Please forgive me. Please.”

“Jesus Christ!” Wayne yelled. “What the hell happened to you?”

That’s when he realised that someone was holding the camera on Darren; that the head of security was not alone, wherever he was. It looked to be a dark room, no doubt a dingy, nondescript basement somewhere. A place where his screams would not be heard.

As Wayne watched, the cameraman turned the phone round to film himself. It was David. He was smiling. “Alright, son? You won’t believe it,” he said with a little chuckle, as though this were the most natural thing in the world, “but there’s no CCTV from yesterday. None at all. Nada. The whole lot has been wiped somehow. Some sort of massive data glitch. That’s funny, isn’t it? And would you believe this silly cunt – ” he aimed the camera back at Darren, revealing the full extent of the security man’s predicament, “here can’t explain it. He says he’s never seen anything like it before.”

Darren Greaves was sitting on a hard wooden chair. But he was not just sitting; he was attached to the chair. Eight-inch industrial-strength nails had been driven through each thigh, and the blood oozed from him, pooling murkily on the ground at his feet. It must have been agony. His shoulders were hitching up and down with each frantic, desperate breath. He had been badly beaten, likely with bats or metal bars. No doubt David and a few others had been torturing him for several hours.

“Dad…” Wayne began, but David cut him off.

“Wayne, we’re not alone. In fact, you might consider this a conference call. You see, I’ve got Tom on the line as well. Can you hear me, Tom?”

A crackly voice from the ether answered: “Um… yes.”

“Good.” David grinned. “Because I want to be the first to congratulate you. You’re my new head of security.”

“I… I am?”

At times like this, when other men would have recoiled from the horror of what they were witnessing, David seemed to be revelling in it. He reminded Wayne of some kind of perverse, over-enthusiastic daytime game show host. “You are indeed,” David said. “Now don’t fuck it up. I mean that. I don’t handle failure well, Tom. You won’t let me down, will you?”

“No, sir!” Tom said at once.

“Now, the reason I wanted both of you on this call…” David continued, reverting to his habitual businesslike demeanour, “is that I wanted to show you what happens when my head of security puts my son’s life at risk.”

With that, David propped the cameraphone on some sort of surface – likely a work bench – so that it was aimed directly at Darren. David himself was also in frame, standing beside the unfortunate security man, looming over him. Then, in a single fluid motion, David whipped open his jacket and pulled a pistol from his belt. It was a nondescript black handgun, no doubt missing a serial number and altogether untraceable.

Darren’s one good eye widened in horror as the barrel of the gun hovered level with his temple. Then David squeezed the trigger. The gun did not produce the kind of deafening roar Wayne had anticipated. It was more of a muted pop, like a second-rate firework.

And Darren’s head did not explode spectacularly. His neck simply jerked sideways and then he slumped forward, his chin on his chest.

No sooner had the shot been fired than David had replaced the pistol in his belt and buttoned up his jacket once more. After that brief flash of violence, he was back to his old self. But he clearly could not resist kicking Darren in the chest, tipping the poor bastard over backwards so that he landed flat in a pool of his own blood, disappearing from the frame and from their lives forever. Wayne thought he might throw up. It took everything in him not to drop the phone and vomit everywhere.

“See?” said David. “Simple as that. Don’t let me down, Tom.” And he ejected the new head of security from the conference call.

Now that he was alone with his dad again, Wayne was angry. “Did you have to do that?” he snarled, doing his best to keep his temper under control.

“I don’t do things by halves, Wayne. You know that.”

“Yeah. I noticed.” Wayne ended the call and let his phone clatter onto the kitchen counter. On the plus side, his hangover was gone.