Page 1 of Property of the Bikers

Chapter One

MIRA

Viktor’s study smells like him even when he isn’t here.

There’s a glass on his desk. Two fingers of whiskey, poured before he left for his seven o’clock meeting, and not touched. Viktor doesn’t leave things unfinished. Not contracts. Not conversations. Not glasses of whiskey he poured with intention.

I’ve stood in the doorway of this room a dozen times over two years, and that glass has always been empty when he comes home. Tonight it isn’t. Tonight it’s sitting on the leather blotter with the whiskey still in it, catching the lamplight, and I’ve been thinking about it all day.

I close the door behind me.

It started six weeks ago.

Not the suspicion. That had been building longer, in the way suspicion builds when you live with a man who is very careful and you are the kind of woman who notices when careful people slip. Viktor slipped once. A phone call he took in the bathroom with the door closed, which he never does, because Viktor is not the kind of man who closes doors to take calls. He has nothing to hide, or so the open doors have always implied. That night I stood in the hallway outside the bathroom and listened to him say two things before he moved further from the door.

The first: a woman’s name that wasn’t mine.

The second: don’t worry about the wife.

I went to bed before he came out. I lay in the dark beside him for weeks after that, building a picture from the pieces he didn’t know he was leaving. The way he angled his phone screen away from me. The nights he came home smelling like he’d showered somewhere else. The appointment he cancelled with my OB in October, the one he said he’d rescheduled, that I later found had never been rescheduled at all.

Small things. Individually, explainable. Together, a pattern.

Three weeks ago I found the key under the lamp base and I’ve been waiting for a window ever since.

Tonight is the window.

The study is in order. Pen placed parallel to the blotter edge. Files stacked with their corners flush. A single lamp on the left side of the desk, brass base, the kind of lamp that belongs in a library sixty years ago.

I cross to the desk and open the top drawer.

There’s stationery, business cards printed on stock so heavy they feel like small slabs of stone when you hold them. A charger for a phone I’ve never seen him use. I close it and open the second. More files, rubber-banded, but nothing that makes me stop. I close that one too.

The third drawer doesn’t open. It’s locked, and I’ve known it was locked since the night six weeks ago when I watched him reach for his keys before he pulled it open.

His hand went to his pocket that night and found his keys. He selected the small brass one before his mind had fully caught up with the action. He opened the drawer, looked at whatever was inside, closed it, locked it, and dropped his keys back in his pocket.

He never looked up. He didn’t know I was watching from the hall.

I use the key now.

Inside the drawer, there are two things. A burner phone, black, no case. I already knew about that. And a folder, cream colored and thick, tied shut with a black ribbon in a neat, flat bow.

I study the bow for four seconds before I touch it. The way it’s tied, which side the long tail falls on, and how far down from the top edge of the folder the ribbon sits. I take a picture of it with my phone. Then I untie it.

The first page makes me read it twice.

Re: Sokolov Birth Mother Arrangement—Final Documentation.

I sit with those two words, birth mother, and what they mean and what they don’t mean, and then I keep reading because I didn’t come in here to sit with anything. I came in here to know.

The second page is a life insurance policy. Viktor’s name in the beneficiary field, printed in clean black type. The number beside the coverage amount is large enough that I read it three times, not from shock but because I need to be accurate about what I’m looking at. Then I check the effective date. Three weeks before my due date.

I set it aside and read the next page.

A medical directive. Emergency maternal intervention at the top, and below it a column of authorizations. Decisions to be made on my behalf in circumstances where I am—and I read this part slowly—unable to advocate for my own interests.

The doctor’s signature at the bottom belongs to a name I’ve never seen. Not my OB. Not anyone Viktor has mentioned. A doctor I have never met has been given legal authority over what happens to my body.