Page 44 of Property of the Bikers

She nods. The brightness that was in her eyes last night when she went to sleep, the particular quality of a woman who had decided to let herself have forty-eight hours of quiet, is gone. What’s replaced it is the expression she arrived here with, the one she was wearing when she sat on Jax’s barstool and handed Cade a phone full of photographs.

Filed. Moving. Already three steps into the next calculation.

For forty-eight hours, she felt safe.

The auto shop is still smoking two miles down the road, and the feeling is gone, and what I see on her face right now is a woman who knew better and let herself believe anyway and is done being surprised by the cost of that.

I walk up the porch steps and hold the door open.

“Come inside,” I say. “There’s a briefing at nine.”

She comes inside.

Chapter Twenty

MIRA

I spend the morning not going to Cade’s office.

I sit in my apartment, and I eat the breakfast Maya brings, and I look at the south-facing window, and I think about a building two miles down the road that is a shell of blackened timber and collapsed metal because I got on a bus in Seattle two weeks days ago and came here.

I drink the decaf. I go to the bathroom. I fold the gray sweater and put it in the drawer where it belongs, and then I stand in the middle of the room and look at the drawer.

The auto shop employed four men full-time and another two on a part-time basis. It was a primary revenue source for the club’s legitimate business arm. The equipment inside it represented years of accumulated investment. All of it is gone, and the reason it’s gone is sitting in this apartment, folding sweaters and drinking decaf and trying to find a way to make herself useful enough to justify the cost of keeping her here.

I go to Cade’s office at half past one.

I don’t knock, which I probably should, but the door is half-open, and I can hear voices inside, and by the time I’ve registered that I should have knocked, I’m already through the door, and the moment for it has passed.

Cade is at the desk. Reeve is against the far wall with his notebook open. Jax isn’t there yet, but the three coffee cups on the desk suggest the meeting has been running for a while and will continue after I’ve said what I came to say.

Cade looks up. “Close the door,” he says.

I close it and stay standing because sitting down feels like a concession I’m not ready to make.

“The fire,” I say. “Was it definitely Viktor?”

“Yes,” Reeve says, from the wall.

“You’re certain.”

“The accelerant signature matches a method used in two prior incidents connected to his network in other jurisdictions,” Reeve says. “The timing, two weeks days after his first formal contact with Cade, is consistent with his escalation pattern. And the targeting is too precise to be coincidental. He knew the shop’s schedule. He knew the overnight window. He had information about the compound’s operational structure that a random actor wouldn’t have.”

I look at the desk. “He’s hurting you because of me,” I say. “If I weren’t here, the shop would still be standing.”

Cade looks at the papers in front of him.

“Let me go,” I say. “Not back to Viktor. I’ll find somewhere else, somewhere far enough that he stops looking here and starts looking somewhere else. I’ll take the evidence with me, and I’ll find a way to use it, and you won’t have to absorb any more of this because of a woman you’ve known for two weeks.”

“No,” Cade says.

I wait for more. There isn’t more. Just the one word, delivered to the papers on his desk, flat and final.

“People could get hurt,” I say. “Real people, your people, men who voted for a club position and didn’t sign up to have their livelihoods burned down. The next round won’t be a building. Reeve said as much this morning. If Viktor escalates again, it won’t be property, and that happens because I’m here.”

“Already decided,” Cade says. “You stay. Baby stays. Viktor learns Ruthless doesn’t negotiate.”

“You’re not negotiating. You’re absorbing damage that exists because of me.”