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That’s us, Seb.

For three seconds, I believed her. Then I saw her underneath him again and shut it down. Wren had fooled me for years. Of course she’d seemed sincere. That was what cheaters did. They made you feel insane for trusting your own eyes.

I was still sitting there, hunched over the side of the bed, when the connecting door from the ops room swung open. No knock.

Dutch came through with two cups of coffee, walking into my room like he owned it, which, technically, he did. He set one on the nightstand next to my cell and lowered himself into the chair by the window.

“Drink that.”

I did as I was told because nobody argues with Dutch when he uses that voice.

“You look like ten miles of bad road,” he said.

“Feel like it.”

He let me get halfway down the cup before he continued. “We need to talk about last night.”

“Nothing to talk about. She cheated. I found out. She’s gone.”

“That’s what I want to discuss.” He set his own coffee on the sill, untouched, and leaned forward, forearms on his knees. “Because I’ve been up most of the night, and so has half this club, and I’m going to tell you what none of us can figure out.”

“Dutch—”

“Her reaction.” He said it flat, ignoring my attempt to interrupt. “I’ve watched a lot of people get caught, brother. I’ve watched men lie to my face with their kids in the room. I know what guilt looks like. That wasn’t it.”

“You think I don’t know my own woman?”

“I think you were out of your mind.” He held my eyes. “I was watching her. So was every man in that room, and not one of us saw a woman who got caught. We saw a woman who couldn’t understand why the man she loves was doing this to her.”

“The woman in the video was real,” I said. “You want to argue with me about that? I know her body. I know the sounds she makes when—” I stopped. “It was her.”

“Maybe the woman was her.” Dutch didn’t blink. “What about the man?”

“The asshole she was—”

“You see his face?”

I hadn’t. Not really. A jaw in profile. A shoulder. Hands. I’d watched that video four times and I could not have picked the man out of a lineup of two.

“You built the best surveillance rig I’ve ever seen,” Dutch said quietly. “You catch a plate at sixty yards in the rain. A video of Wren cheating lands in your lap from an anonymous account routed through fuck knows what, and you didn’t run it. Not once. The one time in your life it mattered most, you didn’t do the one thing you’re better at than anybody I’ve ever met.”

My head came up. He couldn’t know that.

“I know,” Dutch said, before I got a word out. “I’ve learned a thing or two watching you work all these years. Not enough to do it myself—nowhere close. But enough to know how you think.” He held my eyes. “I know you, Glitch. And I know Wren.”

“I didn’t need to,” I protested.

“No.” He stood and picked his coffee up. “You didn’t want to. Because if you run it and it’s real, it’s over. And if you run it now and it’s fake—” He stopped and gave me that hard stare of his.

“Then you did that,” Dutch finished, “to a woman who didn’t deserve it. In front of the whole family. You have to live with that.” He drained the cup in one long pull. “You fucked up, Glitch.”

He left before I could tell him he was wrong.

❧

They came for me all day. Not with fists. That would have been easier. They came one at a time, and every one of them told me a story I already knew, because I was in it.

Holden was first. He found me at the bar around noon, nursing another coffee. He didn’t sit. He just stood there until I looked at him.