Page 57 of Property of the Bikers

“I’m not going to run,” I tell her. “I know I can’t. Not at this stage. The blood pressure alone, the risk to the baby, the logistics of it.” I look at the notebook. “But I need to know I could. Do you understand the difference?”

“Yes,” she says. “I understand the difference.”

She leaves, and I sit in the apartment with the notebook and the south window and the mountains doing what they always do, and I think about the comms log and Dmitri’s name and the date when someone in this compound decided to manage my connection to my brother without telling me they were managing it.

Viktor planned my life without asking.

Cade planned my survival the same way.

The difference between the two plans is that one of them wants me dead at the end, and one of them doesn’t. I’m choosing the one that doesn’t, not because I’ve made peace with the architecture, but because I’m eight months pregnant and my baby’s health is the wall I keeps running into every time I map a route to the fence line.

I’m choosing the baby. That’s different from choosing captivity.

I need that to be different.

Chapter Twenty-Six

CADE

Reeve comes to the office at eight on Friday morning and closes the door behind him, which he only does when what he has to say isn’t for the hallway. He sits down across the desk and puts his notebook on the surface between us, closed, which means he’s already processed what he’s going to say and doesn’t need the notes.

“Mira’s withdrawing,” he says.

I look at him.

“Since Wednesday afternoon,” he continues. “Shorter responses across the board. Eye contact reduced in interactions with all three of us. Physical distance maintained in shared spaces, the common room, the yard, and the hallway. She was in the main building for two hours yesterday afternoon, and she left without speaking to anyone who wasn’t required for the task she was there for.” He pauses. “It’s subtle. Someone not watching for it would read it as tiredness or pregnancy discomfort. I’m watching for it.”

“You think she’s planning to bolt,” I say.

“Two possibilities,” he says. “Either she’s building toward an exit, in which case we have an operational problem, or she’s destabilizing emotionally in a way that makes her a liability rather than an asset, in which case we also have an operational problem.” He holds my eyes. “I don’t think it’s emotional destabilization. The pattern is too controlled. She’s not spiraling. She’s pulling back deliberately.”

I think about yesterday. The walk she took at the approved time, the route she always takes, nothing that looked different from the outside. The two hours in the common room. The dinner she had delivered to her apartment instead of eating in the main building.

I thought she was tired.

“Get Jax,” I say.

Reeve goes to the door and I hear him in the hallway, and two minutes later Jax comes in and reads the room and takes the second chair without being told to sit.

I tell him what Reeve said.

Jax listens with his elbows on his knees and his eyes on the middle distance, the posture he uses when he’s processing rather than performing, and when I finish, he looks at the desk surface for a moment.

“She’s not scared of Viktor,” he says.

“Then what?” I ask.

“Us.” He looks up. “Or more specifically, what we haven’t said.” He straightens up slightly. “She’s eight months pregnant. Viktor had a plan for what happened after the delivery. A detailed, documented, executed plan. We claimed the baby, claimed her, and we declared war on anyone who comes here over either of them.” He pauses. “We never told her what happens after the baby’s born. Where she lives. What her status is. Whether permanent means the same thing in six months as it means today.”

I look at the desk. “The claiming ceremony covered it,” I say.

Jax looks at me steadily. “The claiming ceremony covered the baby’s permanence and her protection during an active threat. It didn’t define the post-delivery structure. Those are different things, and she knows they’re different things because she’s not stupid and she’s been inside a powerful man’s plans before.”

He pauses again. “Viktor claimed her too. He married her. He sat at the edge of her bed and told her everything was going to be fine. The claiming didn’t protect her from what came after.”

The office is quiet.

Reeve says, from the window where he’s been standing, “Implied permanence and stated permanence are not the same thing. They work the same way for most people. They don’t work the same way for someone who has seen the gap between what was implied and what was planned used against them.”