Chapter 17
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— Handful —
Fewin could make an Old Fashioned. I found this out our third night back open, when I came around the end of the new bar and there he was — Fewin building a drink like he was defusing it.
Sugar, bitters, a slow stir, an orange peel he expressed over the top and dropped in.
He slid it down to a customer without looking up.
“Since when do you do that?”
“Three years behind a hotel bar before I prospected.” He wiped down the bar. “Nobody ever asked.”
Huh. How about that. We’d put him behind the new bar because he was a brother I trusted with a register and a wall of top-shelf, and it turned out the man could actually pour. And just like that, the bar did a thing it had never once done in ten years — make money. Good money.
The bones of it were Austen’s. She’d had an outline to me by Friday, like she’d promised — a tight menu, and a diagram showing where every bottle went so a man could pour a drink without crossing his own feet.
The club built from there, fast. We paid for everything to happen in three days instead of three weeks — overtime, rush fees, a second crew when the first ran out of hours, the new electrical signed off with an expedited inspection that cost the club plenty.
Turns out a permit office finds the time when Venom’s the one asking.
The bar went in Saturday, got wired Sunday.
Austen called in favors to get her suppliers to roll a truck out on a Sunday too.
Monday morning the new sign went up — VENOM VIRTUES — and we opened the doors that night.
“Your girl had me down to Velvet on Saturday.” Fewin said it to his oranges, not to me.
“Her and two of her people stood there tasting everything I made and telling me what was wrong with it — too much vermouth, wrong glass, slow down. Then she put me on the floor for the night shift to see if I’d hold up. ”
“Don’t let her hear you call her my girl.” It came out rougher than I meant it. “She’d skin you alive.”
Fewin shrugged, unbothered. “You’ll win her back.”
I didn’t argue with him. Couldn’t. But knowing she was mine to win back and having a spare hour to go do something about it were two different animals right now.
Dutch had my cut sitting on the table, metaphorically speaking.
Every hour I owned went into not losing it.
Not because the cut mattered more than her — nothing mattered more than her.
But the man who’d hurt her and the man about to lose his cut were the same man: the clown who made everything a joke.
Show up on her doorstep now, still him, and I’d only be proving her right — handing her every reason she’d had for walking.
Get my feet under me first. Turn into someone worth it.
Then go to her — not second, but whole. She’d earned that much.
“You want my advice,” he said, not waiting to find out if I did, “you take her. Sling her over your shoulder, bring her back to the clubhouse. Or there’s the private rooms right here, nobody’d bother you—”
That got a laugh out of me.
“What?” He looked honestly thrown. “That’s how I squared things with my old lady. Locked her in my room and fucked her senseless till she’d forgiven me every sin I ever committed. Took a weekend.” He said it the way another man would explain jump-starting a truck.
“I don’t think that will work on Austen. She’d have my balls in a jar before we cleared the parking lot.”
He weighed it, gave me a small nod like I might have a point, and went back to his oranges. “Suit yourself. You’ll figure something out.”
I cast an eye around the club. We’d had a soft open — the room was clean and painted and lit, the floor under the stages new, the carpet I’d dumped swapped for something you could actually mop, and the whole place had stopped smelling like ten years of spilled beer.
The brothers had pulled the whole job off in a week.
Prospects on the demo. Smoke keeping stock of what was needed.
Two brothers I’d never seen lift anything heavier than a beer hanging drywall on a Tuesday.
Nobody made a thing of it. It just got done, the way things get done when the club decides they’re getting done.
I was still standing there thinking about Fewin making an Old Fashioned when Dutch and Colt walked in, a little after ten.
I clocked them on sight, because you don’t not clock the president and the VP of your club walking into a strip club when you’re one mistake from losing your cut.
They took a high-top against the back wall, the worst table in the house for sightlines if you wanted to watch a stage and the best in the house if you wanted to watch a room.
They ordered a Coke and a single beer, which they then nursed for two hours like a couple of old men at a diner.
And they watched.
I knew exactly what they were doing because it was what I’d have done.
They weren’t here for the show. Neither of them had looked at a stage once.
They were watching the floor — the new bouncers I’d hired whose whole job was the room and not the till, Fewin upselling a bachelor table a bottle of the good champagne.
What they couldn’t see was the distance it had come — and you’d only know that if you’d stood in here the first week.
The girls had started to move a little easier — not that they trusted it yet, just starting to wonder if somebody finally had their back.
Most were still braced for the other shoe.
Lex had told me they would be. The cameras had gone in exactly where they asked for them.
The crowd had already started turning over to a better grade of customer, even though we hadn’t done the hard-launch thing yet.
And low behind the bar, out of sight, the panic button I’d had Glitch wire straight to the ops room — one press and every brother Venom had would be coming through that door inside of minutes.
Around midnight they got up. Dutch settled the tab in cash and left Fewin a tip that made him blink. On the way to the door Dutch stopped where I was standing, and Colt stopped a step behind him. For a second nobody said anything.
Dutch looked at the room one more time — the whole of it, the clean floor and the lit corners and the brother making cocktails and the girls.
“You did good,” he said.
That was the whole review. They headed out to the lot, and I got back to work.
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Saturday I made it to formation training. First in a while. I left the paperwork where it sat, told Fewin to sign for the delivery, and rode out to the clubhouse.
The lot behind the clubhouse was full of bikes. Holden had the prospects suited up and idling, and when I rolled in he tipped his chin at the open end of the line like I’d never been gone.
We took it out onto the back road — the long stretch that runs through club land, past the houses, every one of them ours.
Nobody out there to spook, nobody to call the cops about a pack of bikes running drills.
Just us. You don’t learn formation in traffic.
You learn it out here, where the worst a mistake costs you is a few weeks of grief from men who’ve made the same one.
Nothing to be embarrassed about — better you make it here than the first time it counts.
Holden took the front and ran them up the road and back.
One finger up over his head and the pack dropped into single file, nose to tail; two fingers and it opened back into a staggered double column, left-right-left.
He worked it all with his left hand, never his voice — the line tightening and loosening and tightening again, every man holding his slot through the turns — until the whole pack moved like one machine.
We pulled up at the top to reset, engines ticking down. One of the prospects leaned to the kid beside him, voice pitched for just the two of them. “We all know how to ride. Don’t see why we run this every week.” The engine noise didn’t cover it the way he thought.
Holden didn’t answer. Didn’t have to. I was already off my bike.
“You know how to ride. Good for you. That’s not what this is.
” I let it sit a second. “This is Venom. We come down a street in formation and people look up and know exactly who just rolled into their town — and that’s no accident.
It’s because every man in that line knows where his wheel goes and puts it there without thinking.
You go out on a run, you need to know where you sit.
You pull escort, somebody’s life inside that box — same thing.
You don’t leave this shit till the second it matters.
You put it in your bones now, on an empty road, so it’s already there when it costs something.
” I held his eye till he nodded. “You listen to your road captain and you do what he tells you. That’s the whole drill. ”
The prospect dropped his head. “Understood.”
We ran it twice more before Holden called it. I rode in behind him, killed my engine and swung off, peeling my gloves. Holden stayed in the saddle — engine cut, gloves still on, the way a man sits when he doesn’t plan to be anywhere long.
“You covered my slot,” I said.
“Two weeks now.” He didn’t say it like an accusation. More like a man reading the weather. “They’re good. You saw.”
“Holden—”
He waved me away. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine. You’re road captain, you shouldn’t be covering an enforcement slot because I’m—”
“Because you’re doing a job Dutch told you to do.
” He finally looked up. Holden’s got this way of looking at you that makes you feel exposed.
“It’s not a favor, Handful. It’s the club covering a position while a brother’s deployed somewhere else the club needs him.
That’s just what we are. You’d have done it for me.
You did do it for me, the year I fell apart, and you never once made me say thank you for it.
” He let a hand rest on the tank. “So don’t make me listen to you say it now. ”
I shut up.
“How you holding up?” he said. Not the club. Me. The quiet question, the one nobody else had asked straight out because everybody was waiting to see if I’d blow it.
“I’m—” I started the automatic answer and didn’t bother finishing it.
“Club’s had me flat out. Venom Virtues all day, paperwork half the night.
I’m not complaining — it’s what’s keeping my cut on my back.
The days I can fill. It’s the nights. I put the lights out and she’s just there. Every time I close my eyes.”
He nodded, like that was a real answer. “Bea says the nights are where it lives. You’re doing the work. I see it.” He started the engine. “Repay the slot by being worth the position. Not by apologizing for something you have no business apologizing for.”
Then he rode out.
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I almost didn’t go to Sunday dinner. I hadn’t been in a couple of weeks — missing it for the same reason I’d been missing formation. I didn’t much feel like it; the last time I was there, Austen was with me. But I couldn’t skip another week without it getting noticed.
The clubhouse on a Sunday is the best it gets — loud, full, kids everywhere, Lilac’s cooking, Betty folding napkins into shapes nobody asked for. First thing I did, before I’d even sat down, was clock the two empty chairs.
Austen’s, two down on the long side, where she’d sat the first night I brought her — the night they moved family dinner to a Sunday so she could come. And Lindsay’s, down the far end. Danny’s mom. She used to come every week; she comes less now. Nobody pushes her. You don’t push a thing like that.
I sat down across from Glitch and Wren.
It was the first I’d seen of Wren since she’d come down and walked the floor at the start of the refit. That had been an experience.
I caught myself wondering if she even knew Glitch had told the whole table. Glitch caught me looking. He didn’t say anything — just a small nod, the kind that says I know what’s in your head, and it’s fine.
Her phone buzzed face-up by her plate. She glanced down, and something crossed her face. A small, private smile, there and gone.
Colt glanced at it too. “The hell’s that?” He sounded the letters off her screen, slow, frowning, the way you read a word in another language. “S-T-F-U-A-T-T-D-L-A-G-G. What’s that stand for?”
He was grinning when he asked it. Setting up to rib Glitch, I figured — catch the two quietest people in the club passing notes like a couple of teenagers.
“Shut the fuck up and take the dick like a good girl,” Wren practically whispered after glancing around to check where the kids were.
For a second nobody at the table moved. You could watch the same thought land on every one of them, one face at a time — little Wren. Shy little Wren had just said that. Betty set her fork down. Lilac’s napkin went to her face to hide her laughter. Indira shut her eyes.
And then every man at the table started laughing.
Glitch never so much as colored. He looked at Colt with something close to sympathy, kissed the top of Wren’s head, and went back to his plate. “You went looking,” he said. “That’s on you.”
I was laughing harder than anybody, and it took me a second to place why. The whiteboard. Weeks back I’d stood in Glitch’s ops room squinting at a wall of his shorthand — strings of letters I’d been unable to decipher. It was this — him and Wren hiding in plain sight the whole time.
“Enough,” Dutch said from the head of the table, and the laugh died to a simmer, and then he ruined it by adding, “Some of us are eating,” in a voice that wasn’t quite straight, and it flared back up.
He let it run a second, then caught my eye down the length of the table — me, still grinning, the loudest one left. He gave me a look. Not unkind. Just the look. I shut it down.
I looked at Austen’s empty chair. I’d had it. What Glitch had — the woman under my arm who wanted to be nowhere else. I’d thrown it away on a dance floor without a second thought.
Not for good, though. I’d told her she was my last and I’d meant it, and I wasn’t a man who’d lost her — I was a man with work to finish before he went and got her back. That chair would have her in it again. I’d see to it.