Page 54 of Property of the Bikers

He says it the way Torres says most things, drily and without attaching any weight to it, like he’s stating a fact about the weather. Ghost makes a sound that could be agreement and goes back to the rotation numbers.

The room moves on.

I don’t react to it because there’s nothing to react to. It’s a fact, the same way the Delaware company registration is a fact, and I’ve been operating in the space on the other side of that decision for long enough that it doesn’t require a response from me.

Cade looks at me briefly, the sideways look he uses when he’s checking something without making it a moment.

I keep talking. “The window is two weeks,” I say. “Possibly less if his legal team moves faster than I’m projecting. We need to be ready for something we haven’t anticipated, coming through a channel we haven’t fully secured, during a time when she’s physically most vulnerable.” I pause. “Which means we need to start thinking about how to use that vulnerability rather than just defend against it.”

Cade is quiet.

“She’s been pushing to be useful for a week,” I say. “She has two years of proximity to his operation. She knows how he builds networks, how he recruits institutional contacts, how he structures his redundancies. We’ve been using that knowledge defensively.” I look at him. “We could use it offensively.”

Cade looks at the screen for a long moment.

“Talk to her,” he says. “Tomorrow.”

He stands up and rolls the documents I’ve printed into a loose cylinder and takes them with him, and he leaves without saying anything else because he’s already thinking about the next decision, and there’s nothing more to say about this one.

I turn back to the screens.

The Delaware company is sitting there in the monitoring feed, registered and active, and running the same financial architecture as the Cyprus entities, but through a different chain of intermediaries. Viktor rebuilt in forty-eight hours what took us three weeks to map and disrupt.

The baby changes everything when it’s born. Viktor knows that. Viktor has known that since he drafted the first custody document, set the insurance policy effective date, and scheduled the appointments with a private OB who wasn’t Mira’s doctor.

He built his entire plan around a deadline.

The deadline is still running.

The difference is that now we know the deadline and he knows we know it, and that changes the geometry of the next two weeks in ways that I’m still working out, sitting in the security office in the dark with the monitors running and the coffee gone cold and the compound quiet around me.

I start building the offensive framework.

I work until two in the morning.

Then I go to sleep, because a man who doesn’t sleep makes the kind of mistakes that get people killed, and there are two weeks left on a clock that has been running since before Mira got on a bus in Seattle and neither of us can afford a mistake right now.

I set an alarm for five.

I close my eyes.

Chapter Twenty-Five

MIRA

Nobody has said what happens after.

I’ve been sitting with that for a week, and I can’t find a way around it. Cade claimed the baby and me in front of forty men, and the vote was unanimous, and the gavel came down, and that was supposed to be the answer to a question I didn’t know I was asking.

But the question I’m actually asking is different, and nobody has answered it, and I’m not sure anyone in this compound has noticed that I’m asking it.

What happens after the baby is born?

Viktor had an answer to that question. He had it documented, organized, and tied with a black ribbon in a locked drawer before I was three months along.

The answer was clean and administrative, and it involved an insurance policy and a doctor I’d never met and a folder that described the end of my usefulness in language borrowed from corporate restructuring.

Cade has claimed me.