Page 23 of Property of the Bikers

“Suppliers are canceling. Insurance audit triggered. Bank activity flagged.” He watches my face as he lists them. “Coordinated. Clean. Nothing that traces back to him directly.”

“Round two,” I say.

“How do you mean?”

“He sent the message last night. That was round one. Asking politely, giving Cade the option to resolve it quietly.” I look at the window. “The financial pressure is round two. He’s not trying to hurt anyone yet. He’s showing you what he can reach so that when he actually reaches it, you’ve already felt the shape of it.”

Jax is quiet for a moment. Then he says, “That’s exactly what Reeve said.”

“Reeve’s right.”

“Yeah,” Jax says. “He usually is.”

Something moves outside the window. A sound first, a vehicle on gravel, and Jax turns his head toward it. He looks at the window for two seconds, and then his phone is in his hand, a message sent in the same motion, and he puts it back in his pocket before I’ve fully registered him taking it out.

He looks back at me.

“Two vehicles,” he says. “Rural road on the north side of the property. They’ve been circling since early this morning.”

The room doesn’t change. The light through the high window is the same flat gray. The plate on my knee still has the last piece of toast on it. Jax is in the same chair at the same distance, his posture the same easy configuration it’s been since he sat down.

Everything is exactly the same, and the temperature of it is completely different.

“Reeve’s already on it,” Jax says. He doesn’t say it to comfort me. He says it because it’s true and because true things are useful.

I look at the window.

Two vehicles on a rural road north of the compound, circling since early morning. Viktor moves pieces into position the way he always moves pieces, quietly and in advance, so that by the time the move happens, the infrastructure for it is already running.

He found the direction faster than Cade expected. Maybe faster than anyone expected.

I put the last piece of toast in my mouth, chew it, and look at the wall.

Chapter Eleven

MIRA

Ghost walks me across the compound at nine in the morning, and it’s the first time I’ve seen any of it in daylight.

He doesn’t narrate it. He walks at a pace that accounts for the fact that I’m seven months pregnant without making a production of accounting for it, which I appreciate, and I look at everything we pass because looking is what I do, and there’s a lot to look at.

The compound is larger than I understood from the sounds of it at night. It sits on a wide flat stretch of land with the mountains behind it, close enough that the peaks fill the upper third of the sky when you look north, the kind of landscape that makes everything built by human hands look provisional by comparison.

The main building runs long and low along the eastern edge, timber-framed, with a covered porch that wraps around two sides of it and a metal roof that has seen enough Montana winters to have opinions about them.

Behind the main building, there are smaller structures. A workshop with two bay doors, both open, a man in coveralls doing something to the underside of a truck on a lift. A building that looks like storage, padlocked, with no windows. Further back, three cabins set apart from each other with a path running between them that’s been worn down to bare dirt by enough foot traffic to mean it’s been walked thousands of times.

The fence runs the perimeter in a line that’s serious without being theatrical. Chain link topped with wire, posts set deep, a gate at the front with two men on it who are there specifically and not incidentally.

There’s a camera mounted on every corner post and two more I spot on the main building’s roofline before I stop counting.

It’s a working compound. Everything in it has a function, and everything is in the place its function requires it to be. There’s no ornamentation, no attempt to make it look like something other than what it is. It looks like a place built by people who decided what they needed and then built exactly that and didn’t spend time on anything else.

Ghost stops at a door on the south side of the main building and knocks twice.

“Come in,” says a voice from inside.

The room is not what I expected, which tells me I had expectations I hadn’t examined. I think I was imagining something improvised, a folding table and a first aid kit, the medical equivalent of the rest of the compound’s stripped-back functionality. What I find instead is a room that takes its job seriously.