Page 105 of Property of the Bikers

We are home.

I close the door.

Epilogue

CADE

SIX MONTHS LATER

There’s paperwork on my desk again.

Not Viktor’s kind. Not the cream-colored folder tied with a black ribbon that Mira photographed in a Seattle penthouse and carried across two states on a bus. That paperwork was a death plan dressed as administration.

What’s on my desk this morning is the opposite of that, and I’ve been looking at it for ten minutes before I start reading because I want to sit with the difference before I move through it.

Elena Grace Mercer’s birth certificate.

Three fathers listed. It took the lawyer four months and more creative thinking than I paid him for, but Montana law has enough flexibility in its guardianship frameworks that a man who knows what he’s doing can make it work.

The document is legal. It will hold. All three of our names are on it in clean black type beside a girl who’s currently asleep in a carrier on her mother’s chest in the compound yard, completely unaware that she’s the most well-documented child in Ruthless history.

I pick up the adoption papers.

Jax and Reeve, co-parents, filed and processed a legally binding document in a county courthouse that has no idea what kind of family it just recognized.

I read through both sets of papers the way I read everything, completely, even though I’ve read them three times already this week. The language is standard. The names are ours. The weight of it is not standard at all.

I set them down and pick up the property deed.

Mira’s name is on the compound title now. Not as a dependent, not as a beneficiary, not as a protected party under someone else’s claim. As an owner. Equal standing.

The compound is hers the same way it’s mine, and if something happened to me tomorrow, the ground she’s standing on would still be hers, and the men on it would still be hers, and nobody with a folder tied with a black ribbon could touch any of it.

That was the point.

That has always been the point.

I set the deed down and look at the club books last.

Revenue is up. The auto shop is running at full capacity, rebuilt and restocked. The suppliers are back and, in some cases, offering better terms than before, as if the disruption reminded them what it costs to lose Ruthless as a client.

The legal exposure from the federal tips has been managed and closed. The insurance audit has been resolved. The financial pressure Viktor ran through a Cyprus attorney and a shell company in Delaware is gone the way Viktor is gone, completely and without leaving a useful trace.

Ruthless ground. Ruthless rules. Still standing.

I close the books and look out the window.

Mira is in the yard. She has Elena in the carrier on her chest, the soft gray one Maya ordered and argued about for a week before everyone agreed it was the right one. Elena is awake and facing outward with the focused attention of a six-month-old who has decided the world is interesting and wants to see all of it immediately.

Mira is laughing at something Maya said. I watch the laugh. The way it reaches her eyes, the way she tips her head slightly.

Maya says something else, gestures at Elena. Mira looks down at her daughter, and says something back, and Elena, responding to the attention the way she always does, makes the sound she makes. The giggle carries through the window glass.

It gets me every time.

Jax comes around the corner of the main building with his jacket on and his hands in his pockets, and he spots them from twenty feet away and changes direction without breaking stride. He goes to Mira and says something, then goes to Elena, who sees him coming, and her arms start moving the way they do when she recognizes someone she has decided she likes.

She has decided she likes all of us.