There isn't one.
I don't do all of it. I don't have to.
The club handles it the way the club handles everything—together, efficiently, and with the understanding that what happens in this house never leaves this house.
Maddox. Ounce. Bracken. Ruger. Me.
Each of us takes a piece of it. Not out of pleasure. Out of duty.
Out of the knowledge that these men put their hands on a child, beat a woman, and terrorized a family in their own home, and that the only response proportional to that crime is the one we're delivering.
It's not fast. It's not pretty. And I'm not going to describe every detail because some things deserve to live in the dark.
Some acts are sacred in their ugliness, meant only for the men who commit them and the men who earn them.
But I will say this.
By the time it's over, the floor of that rental property looks like something out of a war zone.
And every man in that room—every brother who swung, who cut, who pulled a trigger—carries a piece of it home with him.
Not guilt. Not regret. Weight.
That's what the club is. That's what brotherhood means. You carry it together so no one man breaks under it alone.
Porter handles the money.
Two duffel bags. More than a hundred grand in cash, probably drug money that Solis was cycling through the debt collection operation.
It goes into the club's coffers. Not as profit. As restitution.
For Leah's medical bills. For the new security system. For whatever my family needs to feel safe again.
The cleanup crew arrives at two in the morning.
Men I don't know, called by Ounce through channels I don't ask about. They come in a van with no plates and they work in silence, and by sunrise the rental property will be empty.
No bodies. No blood. No evidence. Just a house at the end of a dead-end road that nobody has any reason to visit.
I get home a little after three.
Bloodhound and Maddox are on the porch. Both of them. They haven't moved.
Bloodhound looks at me when I come up the steps—looks at my hands, my clothes, my face—and he understands everything without a word being spoken.
"Girls are asleep," he says. "Leah's in your room. She tried to stay up."
"Thank you, brother."
He nods. Doesn't ask. Doesn't need to. He'll find out later, through the channels brothers use .
A look, a word, a nod at the bar. He'll know what happened tonight, and he'll carry his piece of it, and we'll never speak about it directly.
That's how it works.
I go inside, strip off my boots at the door and walk through the house in my socks, the way Sadie Jo does, the way she's done since she was small enough that the sound of her feet on the hardwood was the quietest thing in the world.
I check Wrenleigh first.
