Chapter 13
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— Handful —
Iwoke up this morning still in my clothes with a woman in my bed who hadn’t been there when I fell asleep.
I knew I was still dressed before I knew anything else — boots on, belt done up, the TV still going low on the dresser.
When I’d gotten back from Velvet, I’d sat in the common room for a while, nursing a beer I didn’t finish, nobody I felt like talking to.
The long ride Sunday into Monday for Dutch had wrung me out and I’d gone up early, flat on the mattress with the remote in my hand, out cold.
I hadn’t undressed. I hadn’t pulled the blanket back.
I’d dropped like a felled tree and stayed dropped.
So when I turned my head and found Sarah on the pillow beside me — on top of the blanket, tank top, blonde hair fanned out like she’d arranged it — there was no math to do.
Dumb bitch, I thought, and there was nothing soft in it. Thinks she can play me.
“Morning.” She’d been awake before me. The smile was already locked.
“Get out.”
“You don’t remember?” Two fingers walked across the blanket toward my arm. “You were sweet last night.”
That was the tell. I hadn’t needed one, but there it was. I’d never been sweet in bed in my life. Not once, not with anybody. Whatever else a woman might say about a night with me, sweet was not the word she’d reach for.
Then the anger hit. Last night I’d stood on that sidewalk outside Velvet and told Austen we weren’t done. This morning I woke up to this. What the fuck would Austen think? I was so fucked.
“I was out cold last night, with the TV on, by myself. Nothing happened, you know nothing happened, so don’t lie there and try to sell it to me.” I swung my legs off the bed and stood, putting the room between us. “Get out, Sarah.”
Sarah didn’t argue. She picked her jeans up off the floor and pulled them on without another word. On the way out her eyes ticked up to the corner of the room for half a second — the ceiling, the vent — and then she was gone, bare feet quiet down the hall.
I went to see Glitch.
The ops room was Glitch’s private domain. He’d built it out in the new wing when the gun money turned clean — monitors banked along one wall, towers humming under the desk, a giant whiteboard. He was mid-something when I came in, so I stood there and waited.
The whiteboard was half network diagrams and half what I could only describe as Glitch’s own personal shorthand — strings of letters and numbers that could’ve been IP addresses or could’ve been the ravings of a man who’d had too much coffee.
I stood there squinting at one line, trying to find a word in it, and came up empty.
Then I spotted the other handwriting. Tighter, rounder, with two hearts after it, which told me it was from Wren. Can’t wait for later…LMSYDUYCDMT.
I stared at it for a solid ten seconds. Got nowhere.
Below it, in Glitch’s crawl: RMDUICIYP.
No idea what that was all about.
Glitch saved whatever he was working on, leaned back, and looked at me. “What can I do for you?”
“I woke up with Sarah in my room. Want to know how long she was in there.”
He didn’t ask why — just read my face and turned back to the keys. “When did you go up?”
“Eight thirty, give or take.”
He pulled it, ran it forward at speed, the timestamp spinning — ten, midnight, one, two — and then he dropped it back to real time, because something had moved.
Two-forty-seven. Sarah, up the stairs and along the hall and into my room. Didn’t even slow her stride.
Two forty-seven. The bitch had been in my bed for fucking hours.
I’d been lying there next to her, dead to the world, while she played house in my room.
The thought made my skin crawl — made me want to go scrub myself with something that burned.
Still, I’d seen what I came to see. I pushed up off the desk to go.
Glitch didn’t look away from the screen. He lifted one finger off the keyboard — sit — and muttered, half to himself, “Let’s go back further.”
“Further? She’s right there, Glitch, that’s—”
“Sit down, Handful.”
He ran it back. Past midnight, past the evening, the corridor flickering by empty, empty, empty — and then he caught it and dropped to quarter speed.
Tanya first. Then Sarah behind her. Sarah was carrying a gym bag. They went to my door. Tanya pushed it open and the two of them went in.
Glitch let it run - the timestamp climbing. Every few minutes the door cracked and one of them put a head out into the hall, looked both ways down it, slow and careful, and pulled back in.
“Half an hour,” Glitch said quietly. “They’re in your room half an hour, Handful.
You don’t spend half an hour in a brother’s room to leave a note.
” On the screen the door opened a final time and they came out, the bag under Sarah’s arm now, and they walked off down the hall easy as anything, like they’d been borrowing a fucking charger.
Glitch sat back. “Yesterday afternoon while you were out on the job.” He looked at me. “They walked into an open room, took their time, walked out.” He stood. “Come on. Let’s go see what’s worth half an hour in your room.”
We went up. He stood in the middle of my room and turned a slow circle, taking inventory, hunting the piece that didn’t fit. His eyes went to the vent in the top corner.
I grunted.
“What?” he said.
“Sarah looked up there on her way out.”
He dragged a chair over, stood on it, and got a thumbnail under the trim. It came away too easy. Tucked in the gap behind it was a small black camera — one of those cheap nanny-cam things, barely bigger than a thumb drive, adhesive strip on the back.
He held it up between two fingers and looked at it like it had let him down personally.
“Consumer junk,” he said. “Two hundred bucks, motion-triggered, stores to a card. Plant it, come back later, pull the card.” He turned it so the lens caught the light. “Aimed at the bed.”
I knew what it was for before he said it.
“It’s not for blackmail. There’s no money in you, brother, no offense. You don’t put a camera over a man’s bed to rob him. You do it to get a picture of who’s in the bed.” He stepped down off the chair. “And then you send the picture to somebody.”
He didn’t say her name. He didn’t need to. The whole club knew by the time I’d dragged myself back from Velvet last night that Austen had thrown me out again. But Tanya and Sarah had put that camera in my room yesterday afternoon — before any of that.
“Can you pull what’s on it?”
Glitch raised an eyebrow.
I held my hands up. “Nothing happened. I’m practically hitched, brother. Austen and me hit a kink in the road, that’s all — she’s it for me, that part’s decided. But it wouldn’t hurt to see what that bitch got up to while I was asleep. I want to know what her play was.”
He looked at me for a second, then nodded and pocketed the camera. I followed him back down to ops.
He pulled a laptop from a drawer and popped the card. I looked at him.
“Air-gapped,” he said.
I nodded and left it at that.
The little camera had done exactly what it was built for.
There was a clip, motion-stamped, two-forty-seven — Sarah coming in the door, crossing to the bed, arranging herself on top of the blanket beside a man flat on his back in his boots with the TV still going, a man who did not move, did not wake, did not so much as turn his head, for the ten minutes she lay there before she gave it up and went to sleep.
I’d known nothing happened. Now I had proof — because my word wasn’t worth a damn right now, not with Austen, not after everything, and I knew it. But there it was on the screen. I just lay there, dead to the world.
“Copy it for me,” I said.
Glitch looked at me.
“Insurance.”
He copied it without another word and handed me the drive. I pocketed it.
I knew what came next. You don’t sit on a planted camera in the clubhouse. That’s not a him-and-her thing, that’s a club thing — somebody reached into Venom’s house and put eyes in it. So we took it to Dutch.
He made one call to Colt. “Bring them both in.”
I’d watched Dutch work before. I’d been the one standing at the wall with my arms crossed while he did it — and I’d seen grown men come apart in that chair.
Not because he hit them. Because he sat across from them with that look and let the silence do the work.
They sat there and their brain filled in everything he hadn’t said yet. What he knew. What came next.
Men who’d held out for an hour would give it all up in sixty seconds once Dutch decided it was time. I’d seen it happen. I knew what it looked like. So that part wasn’t what unsettled me.
What was new was that it was two women, and Venom doesn’t put hands on women. Not unless they deserved it. There’s exactly one woman in the history of this club who earned what she got. Nobody in this clubhouse says her name but everyone knew.
Watching Dutch and Colt turn that quiet on Tanya and Sarah in the cleared common room was different than watching it land on some asshole who deserved it.
Tanya had come in with her chin up, arms crossed, the whole performance — I’ve done nothing wrong and you can’t touch me. It lasted until Dutch slammed the camera down on the bar in front of her. Not hard enough to break anything.
Then Colt started, while Dutch stood back and watched.
“Here’s our problem.” Colt pulled a stool around backwards and sat on it, arms folded over the back, easy, like we had all day.
“Somebody put surveillance in our clubhouse. In a patched brother’s room.
Now, could be two girls with a grudge. Could be.
” He tipped his head. “Or could be somebody paid you to get eyes inside Venom and the brother was just the soft way in. That’s a different conversation.
That’s the kind of conversation we have downstairs.
” He looked at Dutch. “We still got the room downstairs?”
“We do,” Dutch said. The first two words he’d spoken.