Chapter 13 #2
“Couple nights in the dark,” Colt went on, conversationally, to the women now.
“No phone, no food, nobody knows you’re down there.
Gives a person time to remember who they’re really working for.
” He shrugged. “Or you tell us now, up here, in the light, with the heat on and the coffee made. Your call. I’m easy either way. ”
There was nothing on Dutch’s face. Arms crossed, weight back, eyes on Tanya like he was bored.
Glitch leaned against the bar, watching.
None of it was a lie, exactly, and none of it was going to happen — they knew what this was the second they saw the camera, knew it was jealousy and not a job — but the women didn’t know they knew, and “downstairs” did the rest.
Sarah went first. It came out of her in pieces. It was Tanya’s idea. Sarah was only meant to lie there. The photo was for Austen — they’d find a way to get it in front of her — so she’d see what Handful really was and never, ever come back.
“He’s mine,” Tanya said. And then it went somewhere else entirely.
“Mine. Not that bitch’s. You know how long I’ve been with him?
Years. Years. And he fucks some cocktail waitress and suddenly she’s special?
She’s not special. I earned that property of cut.
I’m his old lady. He just doesn’t know it yet. ”
I was on my feet before I knew I’d moved.
It wasn’t a decision. One second I was in the chair with my arms crossed, riding it out the way I had a hundred times — sit still, let the Prez and VP work — and the next the chair was scraping back and I was up, every part of me pulled toward the pair of them.
I wanted my hands on them. I wanted to take the place apart.
Dutch looked at me. That cold hard stare. I made myself sit back down. Nobody in that room will ever know what it cost.
He turned back to Tanya and let the silence run until her breathing slowed.
“He’s not yours. Who he gives his property of cut to is his call, nobody else’s.
And I’ll tell you something else — if it went to every woman he’d slept with, we’d have so many Property of Handful cuts floating around this state we’d have to start a fucking waitlist.” He picked the camera up off the bar.
“You’re not special. You’re just a wet hole Handful stuck his dick in. Bet he regrets that now.”
He set the camera back down.
“Here’s what happens now. You’re done. Both of you. Not tonight, not tomorrow — now. You don’t come to this clubhouse. You don’t come to a Venom event, a Venom bar, a Venom anything. You see a cut on the street, you cross the road.” He nodded at Colt. “Walk them out.”
Colt walked them out.
Here’s the thing that pissed me off the most. It would have worked.
Not the camera — the camera failed, caught me cold and clean, the one night of my whole life my reputation wrote a check my body wouldn’t cash.
But the plan. The plan was good. It was built on a true thing.
Tanya knew that before Austen there had always, always been a woman in my bed. You could set a watch by it.
She didn’t do anything but read me. The open door I’d never thought twice about. My reputation.
I’m the variable. That’s a hell of a thing to find out about yourself, standing in an almost empty common room at ten in the morning.
Dutch came and stood next to me. “My office. Thursday, nine AM.” Then he walked off, and I went back upstairs.
I put the drive in my drawer and looked at my bed.
For five months only one woman had been in this room. One. Since the night a copper-haired bartender first made me an Old Fashioned at Velvet, I hadn’t brought a single woman up these stairs, hadn’t wanted to.
And some stranger had been in it overnight, under a camera, so the video or a still from it could land in front of Austen and finish the thing I’d stood on her sidewalk and sworn I was going to fix.
That was what pushed me over the edge. Not the camera.
Not Dutch’s Thursday nine AM. The thought of a shot of Sarah on my mattress sliding across Austen’s phone — or worse, not even a shot, just the talk, just somebody at Velvet telling her they’d heard — and Austen looking at it and deciding I was exactly the idiot she thought I was.
I tore the sheets off the bed. Then I kept going.
The pillowcase, the pillow, and when that wasn’t enough I had a fistful of the mattress and hauled it half off the frame, knocking the lamp onto the floor.
I put my boot through the front of the nightstand before I’d decided to swing, and it split, the drawer dumping everything in it across the boards.
Then I swept my arm down the top of the dresser and sent the rest crashing after it.
When it burned out of me I gathered up the bedding and the busted boards and carried the lot down to the dumpster behind the kitchen, and stood there a minute in the cold with my hands on the rim.
Then I went back up, picked the drive up off the floor where the drawer had spat it, and put it in my pocket. That, I was keeping.
I wasn’t putting fresh sheets on that bed. I didn’t need new sheets, or a new mattress. I needed a different room — four walls and a bed with nothing of mine soaked into them.
For the first time ever, I locked the door behind me and went to find one.