Page 63 of Property of the Bikers

She’s looking at the warmth I’ve been bringing to every breakfast and every evening visit and every two hours of conversation that covered everything except the thing running underneath all of it, and she’s seeing that the warmth was real and the warmth was also deployed, and both of those things are true in the same breath.

She looks up and meets my eyes.

I hold them, and I don’t look away because there’s nothing to hide from the acknowledgment. The warmth was real. I am genuinely here. The intelligence underneath it is also real. Those aren’t contradictions.

She holds my eyes for a moment, and then she looks back at the table.

She doesn’t say anything about it.

I pick up my coffee and drink it, and the morning runs on around us, the compound starting its Friday outside the windows, the workshop opening up, Ghost’s truck at the gate, the mountains doing what they always do.

The terms are set.

The permanence is stated.

Viktor Sokolov has only weeks before the baby arrives and his custody window closes permanently, and he’s been quiet for seventy-two hours, which Reeve flagged this morning as the silence of a man who has finished planning and is waiting for his moment.

I look at the window.

The terms are set, the clock is running. We’re as ready as we’re going to be, and none of that is the same as being ready enough.

I finish my coffee.

Across the table, Mira reaches for the plate Maya left and starts eating, and Reeve writes something in his notebook, and Cade reads something on his phone, and the morning looks exactly like a normal Saturday morning at the main house table.

It isn’t.

But it looks like one, and right now, looking like one is the best any of us can do.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

MIRA

The compound goes quiet around nine.

The workshop closes, the bar winds down, the voices that carry through the walls of the main house thin out one by one until what’s left is the low hum of the generator and the occasional sound of boots on the perimeter path outside my window.

I’m lying on the bed with the lamp on, not reading the book open on my stomach, thinking about this morning.

Permanent, Cade said. You’re not temporary. Never were.

Reeve said it yesterday with his hand flat on my stomach and his eyes on the ceiling.

Jax said good, because we’re not letting you go, and he meant it.

Three men. One breakfast table. Terms defined like a contract being signed, and I sat across from all of them and said I want this. It scares me but I want it, and the wanting has been sitting in my chest all day alongside the fear and I can’t fully separate the two anymore.

I shift on the bed and the baby moves, a slow roll, and I press my palm flat against my stomach and breathe.

Eight months.

My body has been running its own agenda for weeks now, the blood pressure, the backaches, the way certain things register differently than they did before the pregnancy. Reeve yesterday was not something I was prepared for. The attention of a man like that, directed entirely, completely, with no part of his mind somewhere else.

I’ve been thinking about it all day.

About the way Cade looked at me across the terms table this morning. The way Jax’s eyes stopped pretending somewhere in the third week and haven’t started again.

I’ve been thinking about tonight.