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He was quiet for a bit. “Founding members, no prospect period,” he said. “That’s going to be a fight.”

I heard him take a deep breath.

“Right. Here’s how it goes. I come up. I don’t do this off a phone call—I want to be in a room with them and I want to watch how they are with each other. Then if I’m satisfied, it goes to a vote. Both sides.”

“Both sides.”

“Every man in Venom and all five of them. Unanimous on both sides or it doesn’t happen. You don’t build a chapter part of the club doesn’t want.”

“Robin said the same about his five. One no and it stops.”

“Good,” Dutch said.

After the call, I sat in the cottage with the new house keys on the counter. Dutch would come up in two weeks. The charter might solve my problem, but it wasn’t mine to decide. Five men in Kettlewell and every patched man in Millfield could still say no.

I tried to work on Tilden afterward and got almost nothing done.

The next morning, I had the files open again when my phone rang. I recognized the number: Kessler’s office.

“We opened the box,” a woman said. “I’ve got the index you asked for.”

I’d asked three times. I pushed Tilden’s route aside. “Go on.”

“Chard bought a credential dump online. Wren’s email was in it with an old password. Her cloud account didn’t have two factor authentication, so he got straight in.”

“What did he take?”

“Everything. Two years of photographs and a four-minute video.”

I gripped the phone.

Wren had filmed the video on her phone because I’d talked her into making it. Afterward, I took her phone from the nightstand, sent the file to myself and stored my copy where nobody could reach it.

I meant to delete the original from her phone. I had it in my hand. I was two taps in when Wren woke, reached for me and said something filthy. I put the phone facedown on the nightstand and forgot what I’d been doing.

Her phone backed up the file that night. It sat in that account until Chard found it.

I’d told Handful to stop thinking with his dick more than once. I had believed I was entitled to give that advice.

Nobody breached my system. I spent a year tearing my security apart because I couldn’t accept that the mistake was smaller and more ordinary. I’d left the original on Wren’s phone because she touched me and I forgot to finish the job.

Stealing it was Chard’s crime. But the video was there for him to steal because I hadn’t deleted it. Wren hadn’t known it was still there.

Once the call ended, I called Wren and asked her to meet me at the new house. She and Sparrow were waiting in the empty front room when I arrived.

I told her everything: the cloud account, the old password and the file I’d failed to delete.

She didn’t say anything for a while. Then she said, “My phone?”

I nodded.

“Right.” She put Sparrow on the floor. “Listen to what I’m actually asking, Seb. Did you know the file was still there that night?”

“No. I forgot about it.”

“Do you wish you had?”

“Yes. I’d have deleted it before your phone backed it up.” I looked at her. “But Chard stealing it doesn’t explain why I believed him over you. You told me it was ours, and I still played it for everybody.”