Page 101 of Property of the Bikers

I added one item.

Sunday mornings. Non-negotiable. Whatever is running, Sunday mornings are family breakfast in the main house. No exceptions for anything short of an active operational threat, and we’ve just spent weeks eliminating the active operational threat, so the exceptions list is currently empty.

Mira reads the plan at the kitchen table and looks at the Sunday morning item, and looks at me.

“Non-negotiable,” I say.

She look back at the paper. “Non-negotiable,” she agrees.

* * *

Two weeks out from the due date, the compound has assembled its version of a support structure around her without anyone calling it that.

Maya has a standing Tuesday visit that has been running since week two and isn’t stopping. Ghost checks the main house security protocols every morning with the particular thoroughness of a man whose wife didn’t survive a birth and who has decided that nothing on his watch is going to go the same way. Doc’s appointments are twice weekly and will go to every other day in the final week.

Cade is in the main house more than he’s in his office, which is a shift so significant that two senior patches noticed it and said nothing, which means they understand what it means.

Reeve now runs his monitoring feed from the main house common room three evenings a week instead of from the security office. He says it’s a practical adjustment. It’s also a man who has decided that being in the same building as his family is a reasonable operational choice and is not explaining that to anyone.

I bring food. That’s my contribution. Has been since week one. I bring food and stay longer than the food lasts. I make Mira laugh when the compound’s weight gets too heavy, and I argue with her about engine configurations.

I run code phrase drills with her in the yard, and I sit beside her in Doc’s waiting room when she doesn’t ask me to because she doesn’t need to ask.

It’s what I do.

It’s what I’m going to do for the rest of my life, and I’ve stopped finding that prospect anything other than exactly right.

* * *

Saturday evening, and the compound is running its end-of-week noise.

I’m behind the bar for the first time in a while, and it feels both familiar and slightly foreign, the way things feel when you’ve been doing something else with your full attention and then return to the thing you were doing before.

Cole is on the other end of the bar, and he’s gotten better while I’ve been occupied, which is the kind of thing you notice when you’ve been watching someone develop and then look away and look back.

Mira is at a table near the wall with Maya and two of the club’s old ladies, who have gradually folded her into the fabric of the compound’s social world over the last two weeks with the efficiency of women who have decided something is happening and are making it happen.

She’s laughing at something. She’s wearing a Ruthless shirt over the bump, and her hair is down.

I watch her for a moment.

She’s just there. In the room. At the table.

Laughing.

Reeve appears beside me at the bar. He doesn’t order anything. He looks at the room for a moment, and then he looks at his phone, and he makes a note in the app he uses to track the things he tracks.

I watch him do it because I’m curious, and he knows I’m curious, and he doesn’t hide the screen, which means he’s decided I can see it.

A name. One name. An annotation beside it that I can’t fully read from this angle, but the word active is visible.

He puts the phone in his pocket.

“Someone from Viktor’s network?” I say.

“Adjacent,” he says. “Not surfaced. Still moving.” He looks at the room. “Probably nothing.”

“But you’re watching it,” I say.