Page 83 of Property of the Bikers

Viktor’s personal involvement.

Unknown.

Tomorrow we find out.

Chapter Thirty-Six

MIRA

It’s six AM, and I’m in a hospital bed performing early labor.

Doc administered the full simulation last night, and by midnight, the cramping was real enough that I stopped having to perform it and started having to manage it instead.

It’s real enough that when the admitting nurse ran my initial assessment at five forty-five this morning, she looked at the monitor readings and said, without any prompting from me, that she’d seen worse presentations turn into deliveries within the hour.

Good.

That’s exactly what she’s supposed to think.

Cade is in the chair beside the bed in a gray shirt with no cut, no rings, nothing that reads as Ruthless MC president. He looks like a man who drove his wife to the hospital at five in the morning and has been sitting in the same chair for forty-five minutes, running on bad coffee and controlled worry.

He’s very good at controlling worry. I’ve been watching him perform it for forty-five minutes, and if I didn’t know what I know, I would believe it completely.

The private floor is quiet around us. East wing, Doc’s contact’s domain, a supervisor who has known Doc for twenty years and cleared the floor for a privacy-sensitive admission without asking questions that didn’t need answering.

Two of Ghost’s men are in the corridor dressed as orderlies, moving through the standard routines of a morning shift with the focused efficiency of men who have been running the scenario in a chalk corridor for days.

The plan is running around me and I’m in the middle of it, in this bed, with this monitor, with this IV line in my arm, and knowing every piece of it doesn’t make lying here any easier.

It just makes the waiting mean something.

The first hour passes slowly.

Cade gets up twice. Once to refill his coffee from the nurses’ station, which is a husband move that also puts him in the corridor for ninety seconds where he can confirm positions without being obvious about it. Once to adjust the blinds on the window, which is a signal I recognize from the rehearsal as an all-clear confirmation for Reeve’s feed.

I breathe through a contraction that is real enough to require breathing through.

The nurse comes in at seven to check the monitor. She looks at the readout, makes a note, tells me my blood pressure is slightly elevated and she wants to run it again in an hour. I tell her the pregnancy has had some hypertension issues and she nods and says she’ll flag it for the attending.

I thank her.

She leaves.

Cade looks at me from the chair.

I look at the ceiling.

The second hour is harder. Not because anything goes wrong, but because nothing does, and the waiting has a weight to it that the rehearsals couldn’t fully simulate. In the rehearsals, there was always Reeve on the other side of the scenario, feeding variables, moving through the contingencies.

Here, there’s just the ceiling, the monitor, the contraction intervals, Cade in the chair, and the knowledge that Viktor’s team has received the admission trigger and is moving toward this building right now.

Ninety minutes from trigger to arrival.

We’re forty minutes in.

I breathe.

At eight fifteen, Cade stands up, stretches, goes to the window, looks at the parking structure across the road for exactly three seconds, and sits back down.