Epilogue 3
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— Handful —
Nine months later
The two of them had their heads together over by the empty stage, my old lady and Glitch’s, and they were laughing about something in the low, conspiratorial way women laugh when whatever it is would get a man arrested, and I could not for the life of me hear a word of it.
“What’s that about,” I said.
Glitch didn’t look up from his laptop. He had three camera feeds open and a cable in his teeth. “Nothing good,” he said around the cable, and he was grinning. “Whatever it is. Trust me. I live with one of them.”
We were at Venom Virtues on a Tuesday afternoon with three hours to open, the floor lit up bright and ugly the way it only ever is in daylight, chairs still up on the tables, the stages dark.
Glitch came by every couple of weeks to keep the system honest—pull the logs, swap a dead camera, make sure the panic buttons still talked to the people they were supposed to talk to.
Wren came with him most times now. She and Austen had skipped straight past friendly into whatever they were over by that stage, which from where I sat looked like trouble wearing two pretty faces.
It wasn’t just Wren, either. Somewhere in the last nine months Austen had folded herself into the whole formidable lot of them, the club’s women closing around her like she’d always been here.
There were group texts I wasn’t cleared for.
A standing Thursday thing nobody would explain to me.
Last month four of them had driven up the coast for two days and come back sunburned and thick as thieves.
Jacks had his own bed under the bar, and he was in it now, dead to the world.
He doesn’t make the trip every time, but when he does he trots in through the front door ahead of me, finds his spot, and keeps one eye on me until it’s time to go home.
The dancers spoil him rotten. Fewin feeds him treats from the tub I pretend I don’t know is stashed behind the bar.
“Run me the quarter,” I said, dragging my eyes back to my own laptop. “Before I get distracted.”
“You’re already distracted.”
“Run me the quarter, Glitch.”
He pulled the cable out of his mouth and tapped over to the sheet. “Fine. You want the short version or you want to enjoy it?”
“Enjoy it.”
“Refit’s paid off. All of it—the bar build, the cameras, the new floor, the payroll bump, the gate booth, the lot.
Every dollar Dutch put in to make this place run clean, back in the box.
As of last month.” He sat back. “And now it just makes money. A frankly obscene amount of it. The bar alone’s doing numbers that’d make your old lady proud, and the door’s the door, and we’re clean on every line.
Indira ran the optics report and didn’t have a single complaint. ”
“She say anything?”
“She said, and I quote, I admit I was wrong.” Glitch shut the laptop halfway. “You took the one thing in this club nobody wanted to touch, and you turned it into the cleanest earner we’ve got. Dutch knows it. That’s half of why you’ve got the patch, brother, and you know that too.”
Austen caught me looking. She always catches me looking—that hasn’t changed since the first night at Velvet, except that now when she catches me she doesn’t shut it down.
She held my eyes across the room and let it sit, slow, until I forgot what quarter we were even discussing, and then went back to whatever was making Wren laugh.
Glitch nodded at the women. “It’s escalating. Look.”
It was escalating. Wren had gotten up. Wren, who when I first met her could not say a sentence above a whisper, was standing now in the open floor by the dark stage with one hand on the brass pole that runs up to the rig.
“Wren,” Glitch called over, fond and wary at once. “What are you doing to my afternoon?”
“Nothing,” Wren called back, breezy, not letting go of the pole.
I crossed the floor because something in my gut told me to get out ahead of it. “All right,” I said. “What’s up? What’s so funny over here?”
Austen wiped her eyes. She didn’t answer. She tipped her head at Wren and let her have it.
“I offered,” Wren said, “to teach your old lady how to work a pole.”
“You will not,” I said.
“It’s good cardio,” Wren said.
“You will not. Austen. You are not—in here—on the—” I gestured at the stage, the rig, the entire establishment that I, personally, am the Sergeant-at-Arms and general manager of. “Absolutely not. No.”
My mouth was saying absolutely not, no—and the rest of me had already gone straight to a picture of Austen working that pole, one I was clearly going to be stuck with for the rest of the day.
She caught it. She always catches it. She watched me say no and mean yes in the exact same breath, and she started laughing all over again.
“Oh,” she said, delighted. “Oh, you hate that. Look at him. He hates it and he loves it.” She came in close, close enough that I could smell her hair and that voice she keeps just for me, dropped low.
“Relax, Sergeant. Not in here. I don’t share the view.
” Lower still. “Private show. Our place. You can keep that idea exactly where it landed, and I’ll see you at home. ”
Across the room, Glitch had finally lost it—laptop shut, head back, laughing at the whole stupid scene—me with a hard-on I wasn’t trying to hide, at his quiet girl who isn’t quiet anymore still hanging off the pole, and Austen standing there with her hands on her hips.
“Nothing good,” he said again, to no one, wiping his eyes. “I told you.”
I looked my old lady up and down—the smirk, the hands on her hips, the whole gorgeous lot of her—and knew it for a fact, she was going to be the absolute death of me.
Worth it.