Page 14 of Property of the Bikers

The room is small and plainly lit and smells like old wood and something industrial underneath it, the particular smell of a building that works hard and doesn’t apologize for it. There’s a desk against one wall that nobody is using, a metal shelving unit with binders on it, and a single overhead light.

The door is closed. I can hear the compound through the walls, distant voices and the low rumble of what might be a generator running somewhere on the property, the occasional sound of boots on gravel outside.

I’ve been listening to those sounds since they put me in here, and I’ve been building a map from them. Where the foot traffic moves. Which direction the voices travel. The gap between patrols, if that’s what those boot sounds are.

The door opens, and Cade walks in.

He doesn’t knock. He closes the door behind him and stays standing, which tells me before he says anything that this isn’t a conversation. It’s a delivery.

He looks at me for a moment. Not the way someone looks at a person they’re worried about. The way someone looks at a situation they’re about to manage.

“You don’t leave this compound without an escort,” he says. “Not for any reason. You think of a reason, you bring it to me, and I’ll tell you if it holds.”

I hold his eyes and don’t say anything.

“No outside contact. No calls, no messages, no reaching out to anyone you knew before you walked through that door. If there’s someone who needs to know you’re alive, you tell me who and I decide how that gets handled.”

“And if I disagree with how you handle it?”

“Then you disagree,” he says. “And I handle it the way I decided anyway.”

He says it without heat. It isn’t a threat. It’s a description of how things work, delivered the way you’d describe a weather pattern or a road condition. Simply. Accurately. Without any particular concern for how I receive it.

“No movement on this property without clearance,” he continues. “You want to walk outside the main building, you tell someone. You don’t move alone. Not here, not anywhere near this compound.”

“For how long?”

“Until the threat is resolved.”

“And what does resolved look like?”

He looks at me for a moment before he answers. “Viktor Sokolov stops being a problem.”

I understand what that means. I understood it when I got on the bus, when I pulled the fake ID out of the lining of my bag, when I looked at the email chain spread across his desk and took photographs of every page. I made the calculation then, and I’m not going to perform surprise about the answer now.

“Okay,” I say.

He nods once. “Reeve’s going to come in. He’ll go over the housing and the phone situation. You listen to what he tells you.”

He opens the door and leaves, and that’s the entirety of it. No reassurance. No acknowledgment of the five years or the bus ride or the fact that I’ve been sitting on a wooden chair for two hours with a baby pushing against my ribs. He walked in, delivered the terms, and walked out.

I sit with that for a moment.

Reeve comes in less than two minutes later. He’s quieter than Cade, moves differently, and he sets a small piece of paper on the desk without making a production of it and turns to face me.

“You’re in the main house tonight,” he says. “Private room, bathroom attached. There’s a check-in protocol, which means someone will confirm your location every few hours. That’s not optional, and it’s not personal.” He pauses. “The phone you bought in Spokane, I need to run a check on it before you use it further. It’ll be back to you by morning.”

“What kind of check?”

“Verifying it’s clean. If Viktor’s network has tools that push to devices associated with your identity, I need to confirm this one is outside that. If it is, you can use it within the parameters Cade outlined.” He picks up the piece of paper from the desk and holds it out to me. “That’s the check-in schedule and the contact numbers for the men you can reach if you need something overnight.”

I take it. Four numbers, handwritten, names beside each one. Cade. Jax. Reeve. Ghost.

“Questions?” he asks.

“Not right now.”

He nods and leaves. He pulls the door almost shut behind him, not fully, which is the first small thing that has felt like a consideration rather than a procedure.