Page 93 of Property of the Bikers

He’s gone.

I let it land fully, and I look at Cade.

“Good,” I say.

The room is still.

“Look, he planned to erase me,” I say. “Not divorce. Not custody. Erase. He had it built before I was three months along, and he was running it the entire time I was in that apartment, drinking his tea and thinking I was building a life. He would never have stopped. His reputation required completion. The baby couldn’t be born into that. She can’t grow up with that running in the background of every year of her life.” I pause. “You did what was necessary. I’m not horrified by that. I’m relieved.”

Jax exhales slowly. Not dramatically. Just the quiet release of a man setting something down. “Mira⁠—”

“I know what elimination means,” I say. “I’m not naive about it, and I’m not performing acceptance of something I don’t understand. I know exactly what you are and what this world is and what the cost of living inside it looks like.” I look at each of them in turn. Cade, Jax, Reeve, the same sequence I’ve been looking at them in since the morning I sat across that terms table and said I want this. “I’m choosing it anyway. All of you. This life. This family. Permanently and with open eyes.”

Reeve looks at me with the gray eyes that have been watching and deciding since week one. He doesn’t say anything.

“You sure?” Jax says. He says it the way he says things when he needs to hear the answer out loud to believe it, not because he doubts it, but because some things need to be said in the open air.

“Absolutely sure,” I say. “Viktor is gone. The threat is gone. The baby is safe. I’m not staying because I have no better option. I’m not staying because leaving is too complicated. I’m staying because I want this. Because I’ve wanted this for longer than I’ve been willing to say out loud.”

Cade looks at me for a long moment. “You’re Ruthless,” he says.

“Yes,” I say. “I am.”

The room holds that.

I think about weeks of this compound, how I accepted the rules because Viktor was worse. The warmth I resisted because warmth felt like a trap. The gradual, unstoppable process of a world that wasn’t mine becoming mine anyway, one morning at a time. Each meal brought to my door, each conversation that ran longer than it needed to. The man who walked a fence line when someone else was available to do it.

I didn’t plan for any of it.

I chose all of it.

“I need to tell you something,” I say.

They wait.

“I’ve been mapping the compound’s blind spots since week one,” I say. “The camera gap on the northeast fence. The blue pickup with the loose key protocol outside the second cabin. The guard rotation timing on the north circuit.” I look at Cade. “I built an exit because I needed to know one existed. I was never going to use it.”

The room is quiet.

Jax makes a sound that might be a laugh under different circumstances.

Cade looks at me. “I know,” he says. “Reeve flagged it in week two. I told him to leave it.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Because a woman who builds an exit and doesn’t use it has made a choice,” he says. “I wanted it to be a choice.”

The room is very quiet now.

I press my hand flat against my stomach. The baby rolls once and then settles.

“She’s going to need a name,” Jax says. He’s looking at my hand on my stomach with pure awe.

“We talked about Elena,” I say.

“Elena,” Reeve says, confirming, testing the weight of the word.

“Elena Grace,” I say. “Elena, for my grandmother. Grace because—” I stop.