Page 46 of Property of the Bikers

Reeve stops.

“Run her through the counterstrike plan first. She knows his methodology better than anyone in this room. If there’s something we’re missing, I want to know before it executes rather than after.”

Reeve looks at me. “Tomorrow morning,” he says. “Eight o’clock.”

He leaves, and the office settles into the particular quiet of a room where something has just shifted, and the people in it are absorbing the shift at different speeds. Jax is still leaning against the door with his arms crossed, and when I look at him, he raises his eyebrows slightly, a small gesture that says I told you so without the words.

Cade is writing something on the papers in front of him, a note in the margin, and he doesn’t look up, and I understand that the conversation is over in the way Cade ends conversations, not with a conclusion but with a return to work that is its own kind of conclusion.

I go to the door, and Jax steps aside to let me out.

In the hallway, the compound noise comes back, voices from the bar and the clang of the workshop and someone’s boots on the porch, and I stand in it for a moment and let it settle around me.

Viktor burned a building this morning to show Ruthless what he could reach.

On Monday morning, I’m going to sit across a table from Reeve and show this club what I know about the man who built that plan, and whatever that knowledge is worth, I’m going to spend every last piece of it.

I’m not a liability sitting inside these walls waiting for a resolution that someone else engineers. I’m the person who photographed those documents and got on that bus and came here because I ran the math and found the answer, and the math I can run on Viktor’s network is more detailed and more current than anything in Reeve’s files.

It’s time to use it.

I walk down the hallway toward my apartment, and for the first time since I arrived on this compound, I’m not walking away from something.

I’m walking toward something.

The difference is not small.

Chapter Twenty-One

REEVE

Saturday. Six forty-seven AM.

I run the monitoring check at the same time every morning because routine catches anomalies, and anomalies get people killed. Not excitement, not urgency, not the heightened attention that comes when you know something is wrong.

The ordinary Saturday morning check, the same sequence I’ve run every day since Mira arrived, cross-referencing access logs against expected activity and flagging anything that falls outside the pattern.

I’m on my second cup of coffee when I find it.

Mira’s medical file was accessed at eleven fourteen PM last night from an IP address that isn’t Doc’s system and isn’t the compound’s network. I look at the address for a moment, and then I open the trace window and start working backward through the registration chain.

The IP resolves to a server registered to a logistics company in Tacoma. No apparent healthcare connection. No connection to Doc’s referral network, to the regional hospital system, to any medical entity I have on file for Mira’s care.

I check the registration date. The server was registered eight months ago and has no other activity in any database I can access.

I put the logistics company aside and open her appointment schedule.

A high-risk pregnancy evaluation has been added for Monday morning at a facility in Cascade County, two counties over. The appointment wasn’t in the schedule on Thursday when I ran the afternoon check. It appeared sometime between Thursday evening and eleven fourteen PM last night, which is when the outside IP accessed her file.

I pull the facility’s credentials through the state medical board database.

Licensed, accredited, legitimate on every surface I can see. A small specialty clinic that handles high-risk obstetric cases referred from the regional hospital network. Real doctors. Real equipment. Real patients, presumably, who arrive for real appointments and receive real care.

I go back to the shell company monitoring I’ve been running since week one.

It takes me eleven minutes to find it.

Wire transfer on Thursday afternoon from an entity registered in Delaware with no operational history beyond six months. Two layers of corporate structure separate that entity from a holding company in Nevada, and two more layers separate the Nevada company from a financial services firm in Zurich that appears on three other documents in the file I’ve been building on Viktor’s network since Mira arrived.