Page 10 of Handful

I turned Glitch’s words over for a while. I’d never done anything for myself that cost anything. Fun, yeah. Easy comfort, sure. But actual change? I’d never wanted anything badly enough to go after it that way.

Did I want it now? I didn’t know.

Just be a normal human being for five minutes.

Austen’s words. She’d made it sound so simple — like there was a version of me that existed underneath all the bullshit, just waiting to be found. Like stripping it back was something a person could just decide to do.

But what if there was nothing underneath? What if the performance was all there was?

Only one way to find out.

I pulled out my phone and searched for nearby bookstores. If I was going to try something different, I might as well go all in.

Jane Austen, here I come.

Chapter 3

❧

— Handful —

Church was at ten. Dutch’s standard was in your seat by nine-forty-five. I was through the door at nine-fifty — early for me by about ten minutes and five minutes too late for Dutch.

The church room was at the back of the clubhouse — heavy door, no windows, wooden table long enough for twelve. The gavel sat at Dutch’s end. Anchor’s cut hung on the far wall, gold stitching catching the overhead light. I looked at it on the way past, same as I always did. Didn’t stop.

Colt was already in his chair, arms crossed, coffee in front of him. Holden beside him — upright, still, looking like he’d been there since dawn and had already organized the whole day inside his head. Glitch was at the far end with a laptop open and a stack of printed pages he was sorting into what looked like three separate piles. Target and Baxter across from each other. Fewin at the corner.

I crossed to my chair — same one I always took, two down from Dutch’s right — and looked around the table for Dutch.

Dutch was already looking at me. The cold stare — the look he gave brothers who walked in at meeting time. He’d never put it on me before. He shook his head and I heard him mutter always last.

I gave him a grin. Shrugged. Looked around the table again. Something at the head of the table moved and my head snapped back to Dutch.

Dutch was sitting at the head of the table with a baby strapped to his chest.

Maya. Six weeks old, or seven. Or something between — I’d given up keeping track around week four, but Dutch, Indira, Colt, Lilac — in fact, any of my brothers — could tell you exactly how many weeks old Maya was at any given time. Why did people do that? I was twenty-eight. I had never once in my life told anybody how many weeks old I was.

Maya was in some kind of fabric wrap thing that went over both of Dutch’s shoulders, holding her against his chest like a small, sleeping bomb. Her face was pressed into the space below his collarbone, eyes shut, mouth open. One fist had worked itself free of the wrap and was gripping the collar of his shirt. Dutch had one hand on her back, holding her steady, and the other hand on the gavel.

The president of the Venom Riders MC was calling church with a newborn attached to him.

Nobody was laughing. That was the thing. If I’d walked into church and seen this back when King was Prez, somebody would have made a crack. Probably me. But Dutch had spent years rebuilding what this club looked like, and part of what it looked like now was a man who could run a meeting with his daughter asleep on his chest and nobody in the room thought it made him less. It made him look funny but definitely not less.

“Sit down,” Dutch growled at me.

I sat.

“Indira’s sleeping,” he said, to the room. Not an explanation. Just a fact. “She’s been up with this one three nights running. I wasn’t going to wake her for church.”

Colt nodded. Holden didn’t move. Glitch kept sorting his pages.

Dutch hit the table with the gavel once, and set it down. “Right. Let’s go.”

The first twenty minutes were business. The kind of business that would have bored me six months ago and still mostly bored me now, except I was trying harder to care since Austen had made me re-evaluate my life.

Glitch stood — the only person who stood during church, because Glitch needed to pace when he talked — and walked through the numbers. The Louisville security contract was running clean. The Portland distribution facility had hired its third full-time guard from the club’s security pool. Revenue was up. Expenses were down. The not-so-new wing was fully fitted out and the ops room was online.

“The gun running,” Dutch said when Glitch was finished. “It’s done.”