Chapter 12
?
— Holden —
I ’d been drunk since Danny’s fucking funeral. I’d kept my face still through all of it — the service, the graveside, his mother’s hand briefly in mine — and when it was over I’d ridden back alone and not spoken to anyone for the rest of the day.
Three weeks on and the funeral still keeps coming back in flashes. Hitting me when I’m not ready for it.
I remember the procession. Thirty bikes, maybe more, riding two by two behind the hearse through the center of town. Hazards on. No helmets. I remember the sound of the engines, the way the formation held, the people stopped on the sidewalk watching us pass. Danny would have loved that part.
I remember the graveside. Cold. Lindsay in a dark coat, Indira’s arm around her the whole time. The line of brothers.
And I remember seeing Bea. Across the grave, standing near Lindsay, one hand on her arm, her eyes on the service. She’d come — I should have known she’d come, should have thought it through, but I hadn’t — and the sight of her had damn near put me on my knees.
I’d got Dutch’s attention. Told him someone needed to tell Bea she wasn’t welcome.
He’d told me, in no uncertain terms, that Indira had handled everything — the notifications, the arrangements, making sure the right people knew. Bea being there wasn’t an oversight. Indira had made sure of it.
I’d told him I didn’t care. That Indira had made a mistake and she needed to fix it.
He’d looked at me for a long moment. Then he’d taken me by the arm, quiet and firm, and walked me ten feet from the nearest brother.
I still remember every word he said. “I’m gonna pretend you didn’t just say that.
” Flat. Low. “You didn’t just tell me to say no to my old lady.
Your first lady. The woman who dragged our asses out of the dark ages — out from under King fucking Van Der Berg — and made us into men who respect the women in our lives.
” He gave me a long hard stare. “I’m gonna pretend you said none of that, because I know that ain’t you.
That’s your grief talking. And grief gets a lot of rope around here.
” His eyes on mine. “But not that much.”
I hadn’t said anything.
“Pull up your big boy pants,” he’d said. “Leave Bea the fuck alone. You don’t want her here — fine. But Danny’s mother does. And that’s all that matters today.”
I’d kept to the far side of the grave after that. Hadn’t looked directly at her. Failed at that last part more than once.
Dark green dress. Not black. She’d been holding Lindsay’s hand.
The ride home is gone. I have no memory of it at all.
Now, I was standing at the bar in the main room with the lights low and nobody around, the glass already poured, the whiskey dark and steady.
For three days, I’d been telling myself it was just going to be one drink — just enough to take the edge off the quiet.
I stood there for a moment looking at it.
Then I drank it.
I needed to stay drunk. Not the blackout kind. This was just the maintenance kind, just enough to keep the volume down on everything I didn’t want to hear. A beer in the evening. Two beers. A glass of something harder when the evening got long.
I hadn’t left the clubhouse since the funeral.
Colt came and sat with me in the main room one evening and asked how I was doing.
I said fine and he let it go, which meant he could see I wasn’t but knew I wasn’t ready.
That was Colt. He knew you couldn’t force someone to surface before they were ready.
He’d come straight from a scan — twelve weeks, he said, when I asked.
He had his phone out and nearly showed me the image before he seemed to register where he was and who he was sitting with, and he put it away.
I told him to show me. He did. Two small blurry shapes. I looked at them for a moment.
“The baby okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Both of them.”
Dutch tried next, which was less gentle. He sat across from me at the bar and didn’t bother with a preamble. “You’re going to talk to me.”
“I’m handling it.”
“You’re making it worse.” He picked up my glass, looked at it, set it back down. “Worse, Holden. Not better.”
I didn’t say anything.
“And breaking up with your woman in the middle of it,” he said. “Not one of your better moves.”
“It was the right call. She’s better off.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he stood up. “You’re an idiot,” he said, and left.
He wasn’t wrong.
Handful tried the way Handful did everything—sideways and with a beer in hand, sliding into the seat next to me and talking about nothing for an hour before circling around to the actual point.
“Look,” he said eventually, “I don’t know what happened. You don’t have to tell me. But you look like someone who needs to be somewhere that isn’t this bar stool.”
“I’m fine where I am.”
“You’ve been on that bar stool for days.”
“It’s a good bar stool.”
He was quiet for a moment. “She’s going to be okay, you know. Bea. She’s tough. Whatever you did, she’ll be okay.”
“I know she will.” That was the easy part. I’d never doubted Bea’s ability to survive me. “It’s not her I’m worried about.”
Handful didn’t have anything to say to that. He sat with me for another hour anyway.
The women were a different story.
Indira didn’t come to me at all. She just looked at me across the main room one evening — one long, steady look that could have stripped paint — and when Dutch appeared at her shoulder and put his hand on her arm, she let herself be steered away without a word.
Which was somehow worse than if she’d crossed the room and said whatever it was to my face.
Dutch glanced back at me over his shoulder. The look wasn’t angry. Just tired.
Lilac didn’t look at me at all. Every time she saw me — the corridor, the kitchen, passing through the main room — she turned around and walked the other way. Not dramatically. No announcement. She just ceased to be in the same space as me, quietly and completely, every single time.
I understood it. I didn’t blame either of them.
After a couple of weeks the maintenance kind wasn’t working as well. The amounts were going up to get the same effect, which I recognized for what it was and kept doing anyway. The nightmares came back around the same time.
I’d wake hard, heart going, sheets damp under my back. 3 AM. 3:08. Always in that range. I’d lie there in the dark waiting for my pulse to slow, the images already fracturing — Danny’s shoulder dropping, the sound of it — and underneath that, Bea’s face in the doorway of her apartment.
Not dreams exactly—more like moments on repeat, stuck in a loop I couldn’t shut down. Danny stepping in front of the gun. Danny’s last question. The way she’d looked when I said I’m ending it . The way I’d turned and walked down the stairs before she could argue.
I kept waking up at 3 AM with the absolute certainty that I’d made a catastrophic mistake.
And then, in the gray light of 3:15, I’d remember why I’d done it. What I’d woken up to. What I’d seen on the security feed. And I’d lie there in the dark understanding that the catastrophic mistake had come first—that the one in the doorway of her apartment had just been the consequence.
?
Glitch found me out by my bike one morning, running a cloth over it for the fourth time without really seeing it.
“You should go for a ride,” he said. “No point polishing it if you’re not going to take it out and get it dirty again.”
I kept moving the cloth. “I know.”
He leaned against the wall with his arms crossed. Glitch wasn’t a talker—he was an observer, which sometimes made him harder to deflect because he didn’t need you to say much. “Something you want to ask me, brother?”
I knew what he meant. A man sent a text at two in the morning because something surfaced and he needed somewhere to put it — not because he wanted to talk about it. Glitch coming out here was a different ask. He wanted me to say it to his face. I kept moving the cloth. “No.”
He didn’t say anything. Just watched me — steady, unhurried, the way Glitch watched things when he was deciding whether to push. I didn’t look up.
“What actually happened?” he said finally. “That night. After the run.”
I told him. Straight through, no softening. He listened without moving. When I finished, he was quiet for a moment.
“You looked at the hallway feed,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“How far back did you go?”
I thought about it. “Just back to when she came out of my room. Two fourteen. Watched it a few times. Went back maybe four or five seconds — enough to see the door swing open from inside.”
“Four or five seconds.” Flat. No question.
I looked up. He was frowning at the middle distance, the expression he got when something didn’t fit together the way it should. “What?” I said.
“Nothing.” He pushed off the wall. “Nothing yet.” He walked back toward the building, hands in his pockets, still frowning. “Asshole,” he muttered, not quite under his breath.
I watched him go. Then I turned back to my bike and tried to remember why I’d been polishing it.