Page 59 of Property of the Bikers

“You think those three men are running a catch-and-release program?” He leans forward slightly. “The club claimed that baby publicly. In front of every patch and every prospect with the gavel coming down and the vote recorded. You think they’re going to let the baby’s mother walk after that? After a war oath? After three weeks of financial pressure and a burned building and a counterstrike and a medical transfer that almost took you?” He shakes his head. “That’s not how this works.”

“Viktor claimed me too,” I say. “He married me in front of forty people.”

“Viktor,” Doc says, “is a weak-ass Bratva strategist who couldn’t tell the truth about what he wanted so he built a folder instead.” He says it with the flat certainty of a man who has been practicing medicine inside a motorcycle club for fifteen years and has a specific opinion about every kind of man he’s encountered in that time. “Cade Mercer runs sovereign territory. Those are not the same caliber of person, and you know they’re not the same caliber of person.”

I look at the window again.

“But,” Doc says, and I look back at him, “you won’t know until you ask. Sitting in your apartment running Viktor’s pattern against Cade’s behavior is not information. It’s an interpretation. Interpretation gets women killed.” He holds my eyes. “Ask the question. What happens after the baby’s born. Force an explicit answer. You have the right to that answer, and these men will give it to you if you ask directly because that’s how they operate, which you would know if you stopped interpreting and started talking.”

I sit with that.

“The blood pressure,” I say.

“Will come down when the thing that’s driving it comes down,” he says. “Which, in your case, is uncertainty. Remove the uncertainty. Your job today is to go back to that compound and ask the question you’ve been afraid to ask.” He stands up and replaces the cuff on the hook. “Come back Monday. I want to see the number again.”

* * *

Reeve knocks at half past two.

I open the door, and he’s standing in the hallway in his jacket with his hands in his pockets and the particular quality of stillness he carries everywhere, and he looks at me for a moment before he speaks.

“Can we talk?” he says.

I step back and let him in.

He comes inside and looks at the room briefly, and then he looks at me and doesn’t sit down. Neither do I.

We stand in the middle of the apartment with the south window throwing its low afternoon light across the floor between us.

“Doc told me,” he says.

“What did he tell you?”

“That you’re scared of post-delivery disposal.” He says it directly, without softening it or building toward it. “I’m telling you explicitly that it won’t happen. I want you to know that before you make any decisions.”

“What decisions?”

“Whether to stay after the baby’s born,” he says. “Whether to accept what we’re offering.” He holds my eyes. “I want it to be a choice you make with accurate information rather than a choice you make because the alternative is Viktor.”

I look at him.

Reeve doesn’t come to people.

People come to Reeve, to the security office, to wherever he’s positioned himself with his notebook and his screens. He waits, and he watches, and he lets the information arrive.

He came to me.

He’s standing in the middle of my room now, and he looks different from how he looks in the security office or across a briefing table. Not softer. Just more present somehow, like he’s stopped running the operational layer for five minutes, and what’s underneath it is a person who made a decision and walked across the compound to act on it.

“What are you offering?” I ask.

“Permanence,” he says. “All three of us. If you want it.”

He crosses the room and kisses me.

I kiss him back.

He pulls back slightly and looks at me, and his eyes up close are a gray that shifts depending on the light, and right now in the afternoon light coming through the south window they’re the color of the mountains on a clear day, and I understand that I’ve been noticing the color of this man’s eyes for a month and only admitting it to myself right now.