16. EPILOGUE #3
The table was the heart of the place. Eight feet of scarred oak that had been salvaged from a barn demolition twenty years back and refinished with more elbow grease than technique.
Generations of beer rings and knife marks mapped its surface, and the chairs around it were as mismatched as the men who sat in them: bar stools, dining chairs, one folding camp chair that had belonged to a prospect in 2009 and never left.
Brothers settled into their usual spots with the particular efficiency of people who’d been sharing meals at this table long enough to have territories.
Loch took the seat nearest the bar. Socket dragged a stool from the pool area and wedged it between Screwball and a prospect whose name I still hadn’t bothered to learn.
Ace appeared from the office with a folder under his arm and set it on the shelf behind him before pulling up a chair across from mine.
Before he sat, he nudged the folder across the shelf toward me.
“Cole’s dead. Found him in his car off the county line two weeks back, ruled it a robbery gone wrong.
Nobody’s asking questions.” He shrugged out of his cut and dropped into the chair across from mine.
“Reeves resigned the same week. Federal indictment came down Tuesday, racketeering and money laundering, courtesy of a very thick, very anonymous envelope that found its way to the U.S. Attorney’s office.
He’ll die in a courtroom instead of a cabin. Different ending, same result.”
I nodded once. Filed it away in the same place I filed everything that no longer needed watching. Two names, closed.
I set the roasting pan in the center of the table and pulled the lid off.
The smell expanded, filling the clubhouse from floor to ceiling — rosemary, garlic, chicken fat rendered to something golden and rich, the quiet alchemy of Hannah’s hands turning basic ingredients into a meal that made grown men shut up and eat.
Hannah unwrapped the bread and set the two loaves on the cutting board Socket produced from somewhere behind the bar, and the table went quiet for exactly three seconds while everyone looked at the food.
Then Socket picked up his fork, pointed it at my plate, and said, “Prez. You need help cutting that chicken, or you got it handled? Because last time you tried to carve something in front of witnesses, we had to call a medic.”
The table erupted. Screwball nearly choked on the bread he’d already torn into, his shoulders shaking with the effort of not spraying crumbs across the oak.
Loch leaned back in his chair with that ice-blue gaze fixed on my face and the smirk of a man who’d been waiting for this opening since the day Hannah walked through the door wearing my cut.
“Ignore him,” Hannah said, sliding into the seat beside mine. “He carved the Thanksgiving turkey without incident.”
“Without incident,” Socket repeated, deadpan. “He stabbed it fourteen times and called it ‘efficient.’”
“Did he cry the first time you made him soup?” Screwball asked, reaching for the chicken platter with grease already on his fingers. “I bet he cried. Man’s got the emotional range of a concrete slab until someone feeds him, and then it’s all downhill.”
I tore into a piece of bread and said nothing.
Jaw set, eyes on my plate, taking every bit of it the way I’d been taking it for six months — without flinching, without deflection, because every word was true and they knew it and I knew it and pretending otherwise would have been worse than the teasing.
Someone from the far end of the table, J.D.
, maybe, or one of the newer prospects, cleared his throat.
“I heard he gave a twenty-minute speech once. Church meeting, 2014. About how a woman in a man’s life was nothing but a distraction from the brotherhood.
Said it with a straight face and everything. ”
The table went still. Not the bad kind of still — the charged quiet of twenty men holding their breath because the joke had landed exactly where it was supposed to and now everyone was waiting to see if the target would fire back.
I looked up from my plate. Across the table, Hannah had her hand pressed over her mouth, her green eyes bright with the delight of someone hearing a story about me that I’d never told her and absolutely should have.
She was laughing — the kind of laugh that started in her chest and reached her eyes completely, crinkling the corners, and the sight of it did something to my sternum that I was still getting used to after six months.
I set my fork down. Leaned back in my chair. Looked at Socket, then Screwball, then the prospect at the far end who’d just volunteered for kitchen duty for the next month, and said, “You’re not wrong.”
The silence held for exactly one beat.
Then the table exploded. Loch slapped the oak hard enough to make every plate jump.
Socket howled, a full-body sound that started in his chest and came out unchecked, his head going back, cookie crumbs flying.
Screwball pointed at me with a drumstick in his other hand and barked, “I fucking knew it!” with the vindication of a man who’d been right about something for fifteen years and had finally been given the evidence to prove it.
Even Ace, who didn’t laugh at anything that hadn’t killed someone first, let out a short, genuine sound that might have been amusement if you squinted.
I picked up my fork and went back to my chicken.
The teasing continued — someone brought up the time I’d called relationships “emotional ballast” in a church meeting, someone else mentioned the betting pool that had been running since 2012 on whether I’d ever claim an old lady, the numbers getting worse every year, but it had shifted into something warmer.
The camaraderie of men who loved each other enough to tear the walls down and then help rebuild them, stronger than before.
I watched Hannah pass the bread basket down the table.
Her hand on the wicker, her fingers brushing Socket’s as she handed it off, and she was already in conversation with him about the cookies — something about doubling the chocolate next time, Socket nodding with his mouth full, grease on his chin, the attentiveness of a man listening to a woman he respected completely.
Across the table, Screwball was telling her about the Softail he’d been rebuilding in the garage, his hands moving through the air the way they always did when he talked engines, and Hannah was nodding, asking questions, the same focused attention she gave everything that mattered to someone she cared about.
She belonged here. Not the way something foreign belongs after enough time, the way something essential belongs, as if the space had been shaped around her absence for years and only now made sense with her in it.
These men, my brothers, the only family I’d chosen — leaned toward her the way plants lean toward light, and she gave it without reservation, without performance, the same warmth she’d shown in a log cabin six months ago when she’d hung herbs on a windowsill because the room was cold and she could fix it.
I’d spent twenty years building this. The club, the brotherhood, the architecture of loyalty that held us together when everything else fell apart.
I’d built it brick by brick, fight by fight, the hard way, because the hard way was the only way I knew how to build anything that lasted.
And somewhere in the process — between a kitchen at midnight and a cabin at dawn and a courtyard full of cordite and a clubhouse where twenty men raised their drinks to a woman wearing my cut — she had become the center of it.
Not the reason for it. The center. The thing the rest orbited around without being asked, because her gravity was the kind you didn’t fight.
You just adjusted your course and were better for it.
The table hummed around us. Forks on plates, the low rumble of men eating good food after a long day, Hannah’s laugh cutting through the noise at regular intervals like something that tuned the whole room to a better frequency.
I finished my chicken and reached for the bread, and her hand found mine under the table — a brief press of fingers against my palm, there and gone, the shorthand of a touch that had stopped needing translation months ago.
Socket reached for the last cookie. Hannah slapped his hand away and pointed at the prospect, who hadn’t gotten one yet.
Socket looked wounded for exactly three seconds before breaking into that grin that meant he’d been testing her and she’d passed, and the table settled into the warm, ragged rhythm of a Tuesday night with no agenda beyond the food and the company and the particular satisfaction of watching something you built hold the weight it was designed to carry.
I sat back in my chair. Watched my woman feed my brothers. And didn’t say a single word about any of it because the words would have been inadequate and everyone at the table already knew exactly what I meant.