Page 104 of Property of the Bikers

Doc briefly takes Elena, runs the necessary checks, and brings her back. He hands her to Cade first, and I watch Cade hold her carefully, like it’s his first time.

Cade passes her to Jax.

Jax holds her like she weighs nothing and everything at once. He talks to her quietly, too low for me to hear, and Elena looks at him with the unfocused gaze of a person who has just arrived and is still deciding what to make of everything.

Reeve is last. He takes her with both hands, supporting her head the way Doc showed them all last week in a session he announced was mandatory and nobody argued with. He looks at her for a long time.

Elena makes a small sound, and Reeve makes a sound back, low and unhurried, and something in his face goes completely still, the way it does when he has arrived at a certainty he intends to hold.

He gives her back to me.

I hold her against my chest and look at the three men in this hospital room, these three impossible men who came into my life because I needed a wall and stayed because the wall became something else, and I look at my daughter.

“Elena Grace Mercer,” I say.

The name sits in the room, and it’s right.

“You have three fathers who will burn the world for you,” I say. “And a mother who will stand with them.”

Elena Grace Mercer looks at me with her unfocused newborn eyes and makes a sound that might be agreement, might be hunger, and is definitely the best sound I have ever heard in my life.

* * *

Six Weeks Later

The compound has recalibrated itself around a seven-pound person who has opinions about everything.

Elena has decided that three AM is the correct time for reflection and that the person best suited to accompany her reflections is whoever is closest, which rotates nightly among Cade, Jax, and Reeve with the particular fairness of a schedule that nobody designed, but everyone honors.

Ghost came by and held her for twenty minutes without being asked. He stood in the middle of the nursery with Elena in his arms and looked at her with the expression Jax described from eight years ago, the man who has been handed something irreplaceable and is terrified of dropping it.

He didn’t drop her.

Reeve has a spreadsheet. It tracks feeding intervals, sleep patterns, weight gain, diaper frequency, and three other metrics I’ve chosen not to ask about. He presents the weekly summary to Doc, who takes it without comment, which I think means it’s actually useful.

Jax brings food, stays longer than the food requires, and when Elena cries in the middle of a meal, he picks her up before I’ve pushed back my chair and walks her around the kitchen, talking about nothing in the low, easy voice that I’ve discovered works on babies as well as it works on everyone else.

I am so tired.

I am so happy.

Doc cleared me on a Thursday afternoon. He listed what I could and couldn’t do and what to watch for, and then he stood up and said, “You’re well,” and that was that.

That night, they knocked at my door. All three of them, the same configuration as the night of the recommitment, the same two sets of footsteps slowing in the hallway, the same particular quality of silence before the knock that tells me who it is before the door opens.

I open it.

Cade looks at me. “We’ve missed you,” he says.

Behind him, Jax smiles, and it’s the real one, the one underneath the performance that I’ve been seeing more of for weeks.

Reeve says nothing. He doesn’t need to.

I step back and let them in.

Elena is asleep in the nursery down the hall, fed and warm and safe in the crib Ghost assembled on the floor with an Allen key, under the mobile with the small wooden animals turning slowly in the dark.

She is safe.