Page 27 of Property of the Bikers

Ghost peels off the wall and moves toward the door. Jax comes around the table toward me and stops beside me without saying anything, which is Jax’s way of asking if I need to debrief.

I shake my head slightly. He nods and goes.

Reeve is the last one out besides me. He stops at the door and looks back. “Holloway’s not wrong about the cost.”

“I know he’s not.”

“Holding the line gets harder every round. The vote passes more easily if there’s an end in sight.”

“Work on the end in sight,” I say.

He nods once and goes.

I stay in the empty room.

The vote passed. Majority. Not unanimous, not even close to unanimous, and three abstentions plus a no from a patched member in good standing is not a number I can ignore.

Those men didn’t vote against Mira specifically. Most of them have barely seen her. They voted against the weight of what holding her is going to cost over the next weeks, and they aren’t wrong about the weight.

The distinction matters.

The club voted for sovereignty tonight. For the principle that what’s on Ruthless ground stays on Ruthless ground until Ruthless says otherwise. That’s the thing they voted for. Not for her specifically. Not out of loyalty to a woman none of them know.

She doesn’t know that yet.

She’s in the main house right now, in the room with proper heating, eating whatever someone brought to her door, and she thinks the vote that happened tonight was a vote about her life. It was.

But it was also a vote about something much older than her, something this club built over twenty-two years, and the two things are not the same, even though they’re currently occupying the same space.

If the cost keeps climbing, the men in this room are going to run their calculations again.

Chapter Thirteen

MIRA

My vitamins are on the nightstand.

I put them there four days ago because the bag they were in kept falling over on the floor, and I got tired of picking it up, so I lined them up beside the lamp in the order I take them, prenatal first, iron second, the fish oil capsule I’ve been choking down every morning since the second month because the OB said it mattered.

I look at them every morning when I wake up, and this morning, for the first time, I don’t think about how long they’ve been there.

That’s new.

I sit up slowly, the way I do everything in the mornings now that the baby has opinions about how quickly I’m allowed to change position, and I look at the room. The gray sweater I wore yesterday is folded over the back of the chair.

My flat boots are beside the door instead of inside the bag where I originally kept them, because taking them in and out every time was inefficient, and at some point I stopped doing it.

The bag itself is in the corner, still packed mostly, but the front pocket is open and has been open for three days because that’s where I keep the piece of paper with the four phone numbers on it, and I got tired of unzipping it every time I needed to check something.

A week ago, this room was a place I was put.

I haven’t decided what it is now, but it isn’t only that anymore.

I get up and go to the bathroom and run the shower hot, and I stand under it and look at the tile wall and think about nothing in particular. That’s new too.

A week ago, my brain ran constantly, cycling through Viktor’s timeline, the documents, and the variables I could and couldn’t control. This morning, it’s just the shower and the hot water and the sound of the compound starting its day outside the window.

I get dressed. I sit on the edge of the bed, and I wait.