“The Spokane crew?”
“Also handled. They won’t be creating openings in our territory again.”
Nobody spoke for a while. I stared at the water bottle. Cap unbroken. My reflection warped in the plastic.
Eight months. Reyes had been with us for eight months. He’d ridden in the follow van on the run — fifteen minutes behind me and Danny, close enough to help if things went wrong, far enough to stay clear if we were compromised. That was my positioning. I’d put him there because I thought he’d earned it.
And the whole time, the Spokane crew had already known exactly where we’d be.
Dutch let the silence hold for as long as it needed to. Then he leaned forward.
“There’s more you should know. The follow van — Handful picked up a tail after the ambush. We’d loaded Danny into the cargo van and were heading back to the clubhouse when he clocked it. Couldn’t shake them. He turned back early.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“You weren’t in a state to know much of anything.” Just fact. No judgment. “The tail dropped off once it was clear Handful was heading home, not to the pickup. They weren’t interested in a fight — they just wanted to make sure we didn’t complete the trip.”
“So the shipment—”
“The other party handled it. Drove right up to the clubhouse in broad daylight, furniture delivery van.” Dutch almost smiled. “They’d heard about Danny and the ambush. Wanted to make sure we knew it wasn’t them, that they had nothing to do with it. Walked the cargo in themselves.”
I stared at him. All of this — the tail, the delivery, the other party showing up at the clubhouse — had happened while I was in my room, drinking myself through the days. The club had keptworking the problem. The world had kept turning. I just hadn’t been in it.
He held my eyes. “It’s done, Holden.”
I sat with that.
“Does this change your guilt about Danny?” Dutch asked. Blunt, the way Dutch was sometimes blunt — not cruel, just direct, treating me like someone who could handle the real version of the question instead of a softer shape of it.
I thought about it honestly. “I don’t know yet,” I said. “He’s still dead. I still put him on that run.”
“Yes.”
“I still put him directly behind me. I still told him he was ready when I couldn’t know for certain that he was.” I looked at the table. “This doesn’t change that.”
“No,” Dutch agreed. “It doesn’t.”
“But it changes something.” I stopped. The words were hard to find because they meant rearranging the story I’d been telling myself for weeks — the one where I was the reason Danny was dead. “What I’ve been telling myself — that if I’d been better at my job, he’d be alive. That’s not the story.”
“No,” Dutch said. “It’s not.”
“The story is that someone in our house sold us,” I said. “And Danny died because of it. I couldn’t have prevented that with better planning, because you can’t plan around someone selling your position to people who want you dead.”
Dutch exhaled slow through his nose and leaned forward, forearms on the table. He didn’t say anything. Just looked at me the way he did when something had finally landed where he’d been waiting for it to land. Then he nodded — once, deliberate, like he was signing off on something.
“We can improve security protocols,” Glitch said. “We’re doing that. Different channels for different pieces of intel, compartmentalization, better background work on prospectsbefore they get near anything sensitive. I’ve been putting it together.” He glanced at me. “You would have done the same thing when you’re operational again.”
There was a specific kindness in that. Not pity. Just:there’s still a job for you here. We still need what you do.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll do that.”
Dutch looked at me for a moment. “You’re not off the hook for the bottle,” he said. “That’s still yours. The grief, the Bea situation — none of this makes any of that shit not yours.”
“I know.”
“But this piece—” He nodded once. “This one isn’t on you.”
I sat in the office for a while after Glitch and Dutch left. The water bottle was still in front of me, cap unbroken.
