Page 61 of Handful

“What?” He looked honestly thrown. “That’s how I squared things with my old lady. Locked her in my room and fucked her senseless till she’d forgiven me every sin I ever committed. Took a weekend.” He said it the way another man would explain jump-starting a truck.

“I don’t think that will work on Austen. She’d have my balls in a jar before we cleared the parking lot.”

He weighed it, gave me a small nod like I might have a point, and went back to his oranges. “Suit yourself. You’ll figure something out.”

I cast an eye around the club. We’d had a soft open — the room was clean and painted and lit, the floor under the stages new, the carpet I’d dumped swapped for something you could actually mop, and the whole place had stopped smelling like ten years of spilled beer.

The brothers had pulled the whole job off in a week. Prospects on the demo. Smoke keeping stock of what was needed. Two brothers I’d never seen lift anything heavier than a beer hanging drywall on a Tuesday. Nobody made a thing of it. It just got done, the way things get done when the club decides they’re getting done.

I was still standing there thinking about Fewin making an Old Fashioned when Dutch and Colt walked in, a little after ten.

I clocked them on sight, because you don’t not clock the president and the VP of your club walking into a strip club when you’re one mistake from losing your cut. They took a high-top against the back wall, the worst table in the house for sightlines if you wanted to watch a stage and the best in the house if you wanted to watch a room. They ordered a Coke and a single beer, which they then nursed for two hours like a couple of old men at a diner.

And they watched.

I knew exactly what they were doing because it was what I’d have done. They weren’t here for the show. Neither of them had looked at a stage once. They were watching the floor — the new bouncers I’d hired whose whole job was the room and not the till, Fewin upselling a bachelor table a bottle of the good champagne.

What they couldn’t see was the distance it had come — and you’d only know that if you’d stood in here the first week. The girls had started to move a little easier — not that they trusted it yet, just starting to wonder if somebody finally had their back. Most were still braced for the other shoe. Lex had told me they would be. The cameras had gone in exactly where they asked for them. The crowd had already started turning over to a better grade of customer, even though we hadn’t done the hard-launch thing yet. And low behind the bar, out of sight, the panic button I’d had Glitch wire straight to the ops room — one press and every brother Venom had would be coming through that door inside of minutes.

Around midnight they got up. Dutch settled the tab in cash and left Fewin a tip that made him blink. On the way to the door Dutch stopped where I was standing, and Colt stopped a step behind him. For a second nobody said anything.

Dutch looked at the room one more time — the whole of it, the clean floor and the lit corners and the brother making cocktails and the girls.

“You did good,” he said.

That was the whole review. They headed out to the lot, and I got back to work.

❧

Saturday I made it to formation training. First in a while. I left the paperwork where it sat, told Fewin to sign for the delivery, and rode out to the clubhouse.

The lot behind the clubhouse was full of bikes. Holden had the prospects suited up and idling, and when I rolled in he tipped his chin at the open end of the line like I’d never been gone.

We took it out onto the back road — the long stretch that runs through club land, past the houses, every one of them ours. Nobody out there to spook, nobody to call the cops about a pack of bikes running drills. Just us. You don’t learn formation in traffic. You learn it out here, where the worst a mistake costs you is a few weeks of grief from men who’ve made the same one. Nothing to be embarrassed about — better you make it here than the first time it counts.

Holden took the front and ran them up the road and back. One finger up over his head and the pack dropped into single file, nose to tail; two fingers and it opened back into a staggered double column, left-right-left. He worked it all with his left hand, never his voice — the line tightening and loosening and tightening again, every man holding his slot through the turns — until the whole pack moved like one machine.

We pulled up at the top to reset, engines ticking down. One of the prospects leaned to the kid beside him, voice pitched for just the two of them. “We all know how to ride. Don’t see why we run this every week.” The engine noise didn’t cover it the way he thought.

Holden didn’t answer. Didn’t have to. I was already off my bike.

“You know how to ride. Good for you. That’s not what this is.” I let it sit a second. “This is Venom. We come down a street in formation and people look up and know exactly who just rolled into their town — and that’s no accident. It’s because every man in that line knows where his wheel goes and puts it there without thinking. You go out on a run, you need to know where you sit. You pull escort, somebody’s life inside that box — same thing. You don’t leave this shit till the second it matters. You put it in your bones now, on an empty road, so it’s already there when it costs something.” I held his eye till he nodded. “You listen to your road captain and you do what he tells you. That’s the whole drill.”

The prospect dropped his head. “Understood.”

We ran it twice more before Holden called it. I rode in behind him, killed my engine and swung off, peeling my gloves. Holden stayed in the saddle — engine cut, gloves still on, the way a man sits when he doesn’t plan to be anywhere long.

“You covered my slot,” I said.

“Two weeks now.” He didn’t say it like an accusation. More like a man reading the weather. “They’re good. You saw.”

“Holden—”

He waved me away. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine. You’re road captain, you shouldn’t be covering an enforcement slot because I’m—”

“Because you’re doing a job Dutch told you to do.” He finally looked up. Holden’s got this way of looking at you that makes you feel exposed. “It’s not a favor, Handful. It’s the club covering a position while a brother’s deployed somewhere else the club needs him. That’s just what we are. You’d have done it for me. You did do it for me, the year I fell apart, and you never once made me say thank you for it.” He let a hand rest on the tank. “So don’t make me listen to you say it now.”