Page 31 of Property of the Bikers

Viktor Sokolov planned to eliminate the woman carrying his child. He built the infrastructure for it in advance, documented it cleanly, and locked it in a drawer. He doesn’t get to claim paternity over a child he was going to orphan before its first breath. That’s not a moral argument. It’s an operational one. A man who treats his heir as a secondary consideration to his own convenience has already disqualified himself from the conversation about whose child it is.

So whose is it?

I think about a parking lot in Billings, eleven years ago.

Gray sky, February, the kind of cold that gets into the car even when the heater is running. I was sitting in the lot because I couldn’t make myself drive away yet, and across the lot was a brown sedan I didn’t recognize, and standing beside the sedan was a woman I had trusted with things I shouldn’t have trusted her with, and in her arms there was a child who was fourteen months old and had my eyes and didn’t know that the man sitting in the car across the parking lot was his father.

He looked at me when she put him in the car. Not because he understood what was happening. Because I was there and he was a child, and children look at things. He looked at me, and then the door closed, and the car pulled out of the lot and turned onto the highway, and I sat there with my hands on the steering wheel and nothing under my feet that mattered.

I had been on the wrong side of a legal line I hadn’t known existed until it was already drawn. A custody framework was built, filed, and executed while I was operating on the assumption that the situation was something it wasn’t. Papers signed by a woman who understood the system better than I did and used that understanding the way a weapon is used, to end something before the other person realizes it’s ended.

I drove back to the compound that night, and I sat in the office, and I thought about what doctrine produces a different outcome from the one I’d just lived through.

The answer was simple.

No child leaves Ruthless ground.

Not because of what the law says. Not because of whose name is on the birth certificate or who has standing in which jurisdiction or what a man in a suit explains in careful language while you sit across a table from him with nothing in your hands. Because the ground is where the line is drawn, and the line is drawn in something that doesn’t negotiate and doesn’t go to court and doesn’t get outmaneuvered by paperwork filed before you knew the paperwork was coming.

The child Mira is carrying has been on this ground since the night she arrived.

That makes it ours.

Not mine specifically. Ours. The club’s. Which means the club’s protection, the club’s claim, and the club’s name when it needs a name to put on a document that a man in a suit can’t argue with because the man in a suit has never had to argue with anything that operates the way Ruthless operates.

I put my drink down on the nearest table and walk toward the back hallway.

I’m not angry. Anger has nothing to do with this. Walsh asking whose kid it is in a low voice to the man sitting next to him at the bar on a Monday night is not a provocation that requires anger.

It’s a signal that the question is live in this club, that it’s been running underneath the surface of every conversation since Friday’s vote, and that if I don’t answer it formally and publicly and in terms the club can hold on to, it’s going to keep running and the men who are already calculating the cost of this situation will use it as another variable in the calculation.

I don’t want it used as a variable.

I want it answered.

I find Jax in the short hallway outside the storage room, where he’s been doing inventory on the bar supplies. He’s got a clipboard and a pen and the focused expression of a man doing a task he could do in his sleep, but is doing properly anyway, because doing things properly is a choice you make.

He looks up when I stop in the doorway.

I say two words. “Full church.”

He reads my face the way he reads everything, in under a second, and whatever he sees there tells him what he needs to know because he doesn’t ask what this is about. He puts the clipboard on the shelf behind him, uncaps the pen, and looks at me. “Tonight?”

“Tomorrow. Seven thirty. Full patch, prospects too.”

“Done,” he says.

He caps the pen and picks up his phone, and I leave him to it.

I go back to the office.

The desk lamp is on, the overhead is off, and the room is in the half-dark that makes it easier to think without anything demanding attention. I sit down, put my hands flat on the desk, and look at the wall.

Tomorrow night, I’m going to walk into the church room, and I’m going to stand in front of every man in this club and tell them that the child Mira Sokolov is carrying is a Ruthless child. Biology is irrelevant. The ground is the claim. That’s the whole of the argument, and it has been since the moment I understood she was pregnant, and it doesn’t require anything from anyone in that room except a vote.

And then I’m going to have Jax bring her to the room. Not because she needs to hear it, though she does. Because the claim means nothing if it happens without her presence. A decision made about a person in that person’s absence is something I’ve been on the wrong side of once, and I’m not building that architecture in my own club.

She’ll be there. She’ll hear it.