Chapter 9
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— Holden —
I wake in the chair. Gray light. Still early, or early again. I’ve lost track.
Then I see it.
The lingerie is on the floor near the foot of the bed — a scrap of black lace that doesn’t belong to Bea. My eyes move to the condom wrapper on the nightstand. To the sheets, pulled half off the mattress, tangled and wrong.
I’d fallen asleep in the bed. With Bea.
Now, somehow I’m in the chair. And something happened in the bed.
I get up from the chair and make myself look at it properly. Looking for something I can use to contradict what I’m seeing. Some other explanation for the lingerie, the wrapper, the tangled sheets, the smell that isn’t mine or Bea’s.
There isn’t one.
I’d had a blackout before. Years ago, early in the club, before I understood my limits. I knew what a blackout was — the way a chunk of time just ceased to exist, leaving you on the other side of it with nothing in between. Last night to this morning. Nothing in between.
Whatever had happened in this room, I had not been present for it. In any meaningful sense, I had not been there.
I picked up the lingerie by the strap, two fingers, and looked at it.
Black lace, small, the kind of thing meant to be noticed.
I didn’t recognize it. Not Bea’s. She owned nothing like this.
The scent still hanging in the room wasn’t hers either — I knew her well enough to know the difference, even now, even like this. I set it back down.
Bea’s note was still on the nightstand. I couldn’t look at it. I couldn’t look at any of it anymore. I walked out and pulled the door shut behind me.
Handful found me in the kitchen twenty minutes later.
He came in from the garage already grinning, poured himself a coffee, said something about cleaning down my bike before he really looked at my face.
Then he shifted into that particular grin — the one he used when he thought he was paying a filthy compliment.
“Didn’t know you had it in you, brother.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Whole clubhouse could hear. Figured that’s what you needed.”
I nearly spat my coffee over the floor.
Whole clubhouse could hear.
That wasn’t Bea. I already knew it wasn’t Bea — the black lace, the wrapper, the scent of someone else on my sheets — but now the picture finished itself.
Bea had never been loud here. Not once in six months.
She was careful about it, always. Worried about what the brothers would think, how she’d face them afterward.
I have to maintain some professional dignity, Holden , she’d said once, half-laughing, a little embarrassed.
How could she sit across from them in a session knowing they’d heard her?
So if the whole clubhouse had heard, it hadn’t been Bea.
I managed to keep my face neutral. Nodded once.
Handful was still grinning, warming to it now. He raised his mug like a toast. “Gotta say, didn’t think Dr. Feelgood had it in her.”
The grin was still on his face when I came over the counter at him. I had him by the collar before he could set down his mug, and we hit the cabinets hard enough to rattle the doors.
“Hey—” Dutch’s voice cut through my haze. He was already in the doorway, and the look on his face had shifted from surprised to flat and controlled. He crossed the kitchen in three steps and got both hands on my shoulders from behind, hauling me back.
“Off.”
I let go.
Handful straightened up, rubbing the back of his head. His expression cycled through surprised, then sheepish. “Fuck, Holden—”
“Don’t,” Dutch said. He wasn’t looking at Handful. He was watching me. “Leave. Now.”
Handful set his mug on the counter and backed toward the door. “He’s raw,” he said, mostly to Dutch. “About Danny. He’s just raw.” Then he was gone.
Dutch stood there a moment. He read something in my face and let it go. He reached past me, topped off one of the mugs, and set it on the counter in front of me. “Drink that,” he said. “Then come find me when you’re ready.”
He left.
I stood at the kitchen counter and drank the coffee. Dutch had told me to find him when I was ready. I wasn’t ready. I went back to my room. I picked up the wrapper with two fingers, looked at it. Looked at the lingerie. Looked at the bed.
I didn’t remember any of it.
Not one second.
I picked up Bea’s note.
Keeping my promise. Call me when you wake up. I love you.
She had been here. She’d held me while I fell apart.
Stayed until I was asleep and then left - because I’d asked her to, because Danny’s mother was alone and that mattered more than her own need to stay.
She’d written me a note and set it where I’d find it when I woke up because that was who she was. She always puts everyone else first.
I folded the note up very small and put it in my pocket.
Glitch’s security room was at the back of the building, past the storage lockers, behind a door with a keypad. I’d been in there enough times over the years to know the code. Glitch was territorial about his equipment, but he wasn’t there.
I sat down in his chair.
The system was straightforward once you knew it. Multiple cameras on a loop, archived by timestamp. I went to the hallway feed outside my room and dragged back through the night.
I found it at 2:14 AM.
A woman. Coming out of my room. She was adjusting the strap of her dress, her hair the way Bea’s got when we’d been tangled up in each other for hours. She paused in the corridor, looked both ways, and walked toward the main room.
I watched it twice.
Then I watched the four seconds before she appeared — the door swinging inward from inside, a hand briefly visible at the edge of the frame, nothing else.
She was facing away from the camera when she adjusted the strap. I got a partial profile. Young. Dark hair. I didn’t recognize her.
I watched it a third time.
I don’t know what I’d been hoping to find — some alternative explanation, some different version of events that meant what I suspected wasn’t what had happened.
There wasn’t one. There was just a woman I didn’t know, leaving my room at 2:14 in the morning.
A condom wrapper by my bed. A bed that had seen some fucking action.
And nothing in my memory to fill the hours.
The timestamp on the footage said 2:14 AM. Bea had been in that room earlier — holding me, staying until I was under, then leaving because I’d asked her to. She’d been gone for hours by the time that woman walked out of my door. Whatever had happened in that room had happened after she left.
I made it to the bathroom just in time.
I sat on the floor for a while after, my back against the cold metal partition, waiting for my hands to stop shaking. The clubhouse was starting its morning outside — boots on the floor, someone’s phone, the coffee machine rattling through its cycle. Normal sounds. The day just starting. Normal.
Danny had been dead for less than twenty-four hours.
This was what I’d done with that.
Bea’s note was still in my pocket.
I love you.
Years of watching her. Six months of having her.
She’d chosen to trust me with the specific, difficult, complicated truth of herself — the way her work cost her, the nightmares she wouldn’t tell her clients about, the grief she processed in parking lots rather than let her professional front slip.
She’d given me those things one at a time, carefully, because she’d been burned before.
And I’d done this.
Whatever this was. I didn’t know her . I didn’t remember her.
I didn’t remember choosing any of it, didn’t remember a single moment that might have explained how I’d gotten from lying next to Bea to an unknown woman sneaking out of my room without her bra.
But not remembering it wasn’t the same as it not happening.
The evidence was on the nightstand. The woman had been in my room.
I thought about calling Bea.
I could see exactly how it went. She’d stay calm. Ask the right questions. Try to hold us intact — and she’d do it right, she always did everything right — and I’d spend the next year being the thing she couldn’t fix.
I cheated on Bea. I fucking cheated. That’s a hard line — the kind you don’t come back from, no matter how much you want to.
I’d watched it happen enough times to know.
A brother strays, swears it meant nothing, and maybe it didn’t.
But the trust is gone. His woman can’t unlearn it.
It gets thrown back in every argument for years, used as a weapon or just there, always there, this thing sitting in the middle of everything.
You see it in the way she stops reaching for him in public.
The way he over-explains when he’s five minutes late.
The relationship keeps going but it’s a different relationship, smaller than the one they had before.
Dutch and Indira were the exception. I’d seen that. But I’d seen a lot more of the other kind.
Bea deserved better than becoming the other kind.
I stood up, washed my face, looked at myself in the mirror for one long moment. Then I went to find my keys.