Page 11 of Property of the Bikers

“How’d you travel?”

“Cash and a fake ID I kept from translation work. No cards, no personal phone after I left the apartment.” She glances at the phone sitting face down on the bar. “That one’s clean. Bought it at a gas station outside Spokane.”

I look at her for a moment. She handed me evidence of a plan to eliminate her, then she sat back and let me read it without prompting a reaction.

She didn’t come here scared. She came here because she ran the math, and this was the answer the math produced.

I pull my phone out.

Reeve picks up on the second ring. “Church. Now.” I hang up and call Ghost. Same two words. Then Jax, who’s somewhere behind me. Same.

I put the phone in my pocket.

“You’re not leaving,” I tell her.

She holds my eyes and doesn’t say anything.

“You’re not moving on this property without my say. Not to the back, not to the door, not anywhere without clearance. You understand that.”

It isn’t a question, but she answers it anyway. “Yes.”

One word, flat and clear. She doesn’t ask what happens next or whether she has a say in the terms. She walked through that door knowing she was trading one set of walls for another, and the trade she made was that mine were better than Viktor’s. She’s holding to that calculation right now. I can see it in the way she’s sitting.

I tap the bar top once with two fingers, which brings Cole over from the far end. “The back room off the hallway. Take her there and stay outside the door until I come out of church.”

Cole nods and looks at Mira.

She slides off the stool. She moves without asking for help, takes her bag from the hook, and settles the strap on her shoulder. She looks at me one more time before she follows Cole, and there’s something in that look I don’t examine. A question or a recognition or something older than both that belongs to a version of this situation I’m not operating in right now.

She turns and follows Cole toward the back.

I watch her go, and I think about a car heading east on a two-lane road in the dark, five years ago, taillights getting smaller. I thought getting her out was the thing that kept her clear of all of this. I thought distance was the same as protection.

Distance is not the same as protection. Viktor Sokolov proved that.

I look at the phone on the bar. The screen has gone dark.

I pick it up and push through the door to the back hallway, where Reeve will already be standing with the same closed expression he brings to every piece of information that requires a response, where Ghost will be leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, where Jax will be waiting with the look of a man who has already started running the angles.

She came here for help.

What she’s going to find out, over the next several hours and the days after them, is that help is not the word for what Ruthless gives. What Ruthless gives is a claim. It’s coverage and consequence, and a set of terms she agreed to the moment she sat down on that stool and handed me her phone.

Chapter Six

REEVE

I’ve been in the monitor room since Jax’s first text, which means I’ve been here for just over an hour.

It’s a small room at the back of the main building, no windows, walls that were painted gray at some point and have since faded to something closer to the color of old concrete. Four screens mounted in a two-by-two grid on the wall in front of the desk, each one showing a different angle of the compound. Gate feed. North perimeter. Bar interior. Back hallway and the room off it where Cole put her after Cade finished with her at the bar.

That last feed is the one I keep coming back to.

She’s sitting in the wooden chair against the far wall with her bag on her lap and her hands resting on top of it. She hasn’t moved much in the last forty minutes.

She shifted once to adjust her weight, the slow, careful movement of someone in the later months of a pregnancy, trying to find a position that doesn’t put pressure on her lower back, and then she settled again and went still. The overhead light in that room is fluorescent and harsh, and it makes everything look flatter than it is, but even through that, I can see she hasn’t moved toward the door.

Most people in an unfamiliar room move toward the door at some point. Not necessarily to leave. Just to confirm it opens from the inside, to know the option exists. It’s an instinct that comes up when people feel contained, even if they don’t consciously register that they feel contained.