Page 10 of Property of the Bikers

End of the bar, corner seat, both hands around a water glass. She’s sitting with her spine straight against the back of the stool, not leaning on the counter, not slumping. Her eyes are moving through the room in a pattern that isn’t casual. She’s clocking exits, reading the clusters of men, filing things the way you file things when you’re somewhere unfamiliar and you don’t fully trust that unfamiliar is safe.

She looks up when I’m halfway across the room.

Five years does things to a face. Sharpens it, mostly. The softness she had in her early twenties is gone, and what replaced it suits her better. Something harder around the jaw and clearer in the eyes, the look of a woman who has spent enough time paying attention to things that paying attention has become the resting state. She’s visibly pregnant, further along than I’d have expected from the way she’s moving, and she’s sitting like she’s daring anyone in the room to make it mean something.

She watches me cross the bar toward her, and she doesn’t move. Doesn’t stand. Doesn’t reach for her bag or adjust her posture or do any of the small preparatory things people do when they want to control how someone first sees them.

She just watches me come.

I stop in front of her.

We look at each other across the bar top, and I let the silence run because silence is honest in a way that conversation takes time to be. The noise of the room runs underneath it, the card game, the low voices, the refrigerator unit cycling on behind the counter, and none of it fills the space between us.

“Are you a setup?” I ask. No greeting. No acknowledgment of the years between then and now. That’s not what this is.

She doesn’t blink. “If I were, I wouldn’t be alone.”

She reaches to the hook under the bar without looking for it, which means she already knew the bag was there and exactly where it was, and she unzips the main compartment and pulls out a phone. A different one from the one Jax took. She unlocks it. Opens it to the photos. Puts it on the bar between us without a word.

I pick it up.

First image. A document on cream-colored paper with an official header. I read it in full, every line, before I move to the next. That’s the only way to read anything that matters. Rush through a document, and you read what you expected to find rather than what’s actually there.

Life insurance policy. Viktor Sokolov, sole beneficiary. I look at the coverage number for a long moment. Then I look at the effective date and look at it again to confirm I read it right. I’d estimate it’s just a few weeks before her due date.

I move to the next image.

Medical directive. Emergency maternal intervention across the top. A column of authorizations for decisions to be made on her behalf when she’s unable to advocate for her own interests. I read the phrase twice. Unable to advocate for her own interests. The doctor’s signature at the bottom belongs to a name I don’t recognize. I make a note of it in my head and keep going.

Next image.

Email chain, four exchanges, names blacked out, but the language intact. I read all four in order, and then I go back to the beginning and read them again.

Closing the maternal loop post-delivery. Risk mitigation confirmed. Clean exit preferred. No complications. Standard protocol once maternal function complete.

I keep my face where it is.

Next. Lease agreement on a furnished apartment two miles from the address on the insurance policy. Signed four months ago. I look at the date. Four months ago means he was planning this while she was early in the pregnancy. Before she was showing. Before anyone outside that marriage would have known to look.

Next. A jewelry receipt with a woman’s name in the order notes that isn’t hers. Next. A private clinic, appointment records going back five months, Viktor Sokolov listed as the emergency contact for a patient whose name is also not hers.

I go back to the email chain one more time.

Closing the maternal loop.

I put the phone face down on the bar.

I don’t look at her for a moment. I look at the back wall of the bar, the shelves of bottles lined up in their rows, the mirror behind them that throws the room back at itself. I look at it without seeing it because what I’m actually doing is making a decision, and I make decisions better when there’s nothing in my field of vision demanding a response.

The decision arrives the way it always does. Clean. Before I say it out loud, it’s already made.

I look back at her. “How long have you known?”

“The folder, two days,” she says. “The feeling, longer.”

“Viktor know you’re here?”

“He knows I’m gone. He doesn’t know where yet.”