Page 55 of Property of the Bikers

Viktor claimed me too. He married me in a ceremony in Seattle with flowers and a dress and forty guests, and he sat across dinner tables from me for two years, and he built a life around me with enough care that I believed in it, and he had that folder in the drawer the entire time.

I’m not saying Cade is Viktor.

I’m saying that I have exactly one data point about what powerful men do with women after the baby arrives, and the data point is not encouraging, and the fact that Cade is a different kind of man operating in a different kind of world does not fully override the pattern that my nervous system has been running on since the night I found that folder.

Trauma logic isn’t irrational. It’s just what happens when you’ve been burned badly enough that your body starts running the math before your mind catches up. You don’t override it by telling yourself to calm down. You don’t override it with reassurance from the same people you’re not sure you can trust yet. The only thing that actually moves it is proof. Real proof. The kind you can hold.

Nobody has given me evidence.

So I start preparing for the possibility that I’m wrong about all of it.

During my approved morning walk on Tuesday, I take the north perimeter path, and I count my steps between the main house and the workshop, between the workshop and the storage building, between the storage building and the point on the fence line where the camera angle creates a blind spot I noticed three weeks ago and filed away without examining why I was filing it.

I examine it now.

The blind spot runs for approximately twelve feet between two camera posts on the northeast corner, narrow enough to be easily missed in the monitoring rotation, wide enough to be useful if someone needed to move through it without being seen.

I note the time of the morning patrol, the gap between the circuit completion and the next rotation start, and the location of the closest vehicle to that section of the fence.

Ghost’s truck is usually parked on the east side of the yard, nearest to the gatehouse. Keys in the office, I assume, which means the truck itself isn’t the option. But there’s a second vehicle, a dark blue pickup belonging to one of the mid-level patches, that sits outside the second cabin most nights with no visible security protocol around it.

Good to know.

I’m not planning to run.

I need to be precise about that because the distinction matters. Running is a decision made in panic, and panic is a luxury I can’t afford at eight months pregnant with stress-induced hypertension and a baby whose health is now a club operational concern. Running would endanger the baby. I know that.

I’ve run the calculation, and it produces the same answer every time.

I’m building insurance.

Insurance is what you build when you understand that the people around you have their own interests, and their interests and yours may align right now, and you hope they continue to align, but you prepare for the possibility that they don’t because hope is not a strategy, and I am not a woman who operates on hope alone.

Viktor taught me that.

I spend Tuesday afternoon in the main building common room, which I’ve been cleared to use since the housing upgrade, working through the reading materials Reeve gave me last week. From this room, I can see the security office door, which is frequently open, and the monitoring screens visible through it when Reeve isn’t at the desk. I’m not trying to access the screens. I’m learning the angles, the way information moves through this building, who sits where and when, and what they can see from where they’re sitting.

Small things.

* * *

On Wednesday morning, I find the comms log.

It’s not where it should be. Reeve runs a clean operation, and his files are organized correctly, but I’m sitting at the common room table, and the security office door is open.

He’s stepped away, and on the secondary screen, there’s a log window that hasn’t been closed, and I can see it from where I’m sitting without moving from my chair.

I’m not trying to read it, but I can see it: my name and Dmitri’s name are adjacent in the same entry, and the date is almost four weeks ago.

At that date, Dmitri hadn’t emailed me yet.

At that date, I had never mentioned Dmitri to anyone in this compound except in the context of Reeve’s initial background check. The entry is brief, too brief to read fully from this distance, but the date is clear, and both names are clear, and they’re in the same line, and they were there before Dmitri sent his first email.

I look at it for a long moment, and then I look at my book.

I find Jax at the bar that afternoon.

He’s doing inventory with the same clipboard he always has, and he looks up when I come in and reads my face in the half second he always uses. He puts the clipboard down.