Page 106 of Property of the Bikers

I don’t know what we did to deserve that. We were arguing over compound security protocols and club finances, and the particular nightmare of three men trying to coordinate a shared parenting schedule, when she arrived.

She looked at us with those dark eyes and decided we were hers, and that was that.

Jax takes her out of the carrier with the ease of a man who has done it four hundred times and holds her up in front of his face and says something that makes her laugh again, and Mira stands beside them with her arms free for the first time in twenty minutes and rolls her shoulders and looks at the mountains.

The mountains are what they always are. Patient. Permanent. Entirely indifferent to what happens in this compound or any other.

Reeve is on the fence line. He walks the north circuit the way he does every day, at the same pace, with the same pattern, the same attention to the corner posts, the camera angles, and the gate approach. There’s no active threat on the other side of that fence. Viktor is gone. The Bratva is silent. The club is stable. The compound is the safest it’s been since before I took the gavel.

Reeve walks the fence line anyway.

He always will.

I look at him, and I think about the file on his secondary screen. The annotation that said active. I asked him about it last week, and he said the same thing he said in the bar. Probably nothing.

But he’s watching it. One thread from Viktor’s network that didn’t close when Viktor closed, moving somewhere at the edges of the monitoring feed, too quiet to be a problem yet.

Yet.

I look back at the yard.

Jax is holding Elena against his chest now, her head on his shoulder, and he’s pointing at something beyond the fence line, maybe the mountains, maybe a bird, and Elena looks at whatever he’s pointing at with the solemn concentration of someone taking notes.

Mira is watching them both with an expression I’ve been watching her wear for six months and still can’t fully describe. Not soft exactly. Something more decided than soft. The look of a woman who has weighed everything she has and found it sufficient.

The cold is coming in off the mountains, and I can see it in the way Mira pulls her jacket tighter.

Jax sees it too. He turns toward the main house door and says something. Mira nods, and they come inside. The yard is empty, the mountains are still there, the fence line holds its perimeter, and Reeve keeps walking.

I put the paperwork in the drawer. All of it. The birth certificate, the adoption papers, the property deed, the club books.

I put on my jacket, and I leave the office.

The main house is warm and smells like whatever Jax has been cooking since this morning, something with garlic and something else that I can’t identify, but that has been making the building smell like a place people live in rather than a place they work in.

Mira is taking Elena out of the carrier when I come through the door.

She looks up when she hears me, and the expression on her face is the one I’ve been getting for six months when I walk into a room she’s in, the one she doesn’t perform.

Elena sees me, and her arms start moving.

“She needs feeding,” I say.

Mira looks at me. “She needs her fathers,” she says.

Plural.

I take Elena, and she grabs my finger with both hands, the grip that is still astonishing to me after six months, the absolute certainty of a person who has decided you belong to her and is holding on accordingly.

Jax calls something from the kitchen about dinner being ready in twenty minutes, and asks if someone can set the table.

Reeve comes through the back door from his perimeter check, shrugging off his jacket, and sees the table situation. Without being asked, he opens the cabinet and starts pulling plates.

Mira sits at the table and looks at the room.

A year ago, she was a name I’d put in a car heading east and told myself I was protecting.

Now she’s chosen to stay. Not because she had no other options. Not because the walls were high and the gate was locked, and leaving cost too much. Because she ran the math, the same math she runs on everything, and the answer kept coming back the same way, and she chose it, and she keeps choosing it every morning she wakes up in this compound.