Page 21 of Property of the Bikers

I push back from the table and stand up.

Four men. I hold their names somewhere behind my eyes, where I keep the things I need to watch without watching.

It passed tonight.

I need to make sure it passes the next time too.

Chapter Ten

MIRA

I’ve been awake since four.

Not restless awake, not anxious awake. Just awake, the way I’ve been waking up since the third month of the pregnancy, eyes open in the dark at an hour that has no good reason for existing, body already running before my mind catches up to it.

The room they moved me to last night is smaller than the guest room. One window, high up on the wall, the kind of window that lets in light without letting in a view. A bed that’s actually comfortable, which I wasn’t expecting, with a wool blanket someone put at the foot of it that I pulled up around two in the morning when the temperature in the room dropped. A nightstand with a lamp. A bathroom through a door on the left with a showerhead that runs hot immediately, which I discovered at four fifteen when I gave up on sleep and stood under it for ten minutes.

I’m sitting on the edge of the bed when the knock comes. Two knocks, unhurried.

“Yeah,” I say.

The door opens, and Jax comes in carrying a plate in one hand and a mug in the other, managing both with the easy balance of someone who has carried things through doorways a thousand times. He’s in jeans and a dark henley, hair pushed back, and he looks like a man who has been up for a while and isn’t bothered by it.

He takes in the room in one sweep, the made bed, the bag still packed in the corner, me sitting on the edge of the mattress with damp hair.

He sets the plate on the nightstand without making a gesture. Eggs, toast, and a small cup of orange juice. The mug goes beside it.

“Decaf,” he says, nodding at the mug. “Doc’s orders for the pregnancy. Don’t shoot the messenger.”

I look at the mug. “There’s a doctor here?”

“Doc runs medical for the club. He’ll want to see you today or tomorrow.” He pulls the chair from the corner and sits down, not close, not far. The natural distance of someone who isn’t performing anything. “You sleep?”

“Some.”

He nods like that’s the answer he expected and doesn’t push it further.

I pick up the toast because I’m hungry and because sitting here not eating while he sits there watching me not eat seems like the worst option. The bread is thick-cut, and someone buttered it while it was still hot.

Jax leans back in the chair with his elbows on the armrests and looks at me in a way that isn’t quite casual. He isn’t making conversation. He’s observing, the way I observe things, taking inventory of something before he decides what to do with what he finds.

“You don’t look like someone who runs blind,” he says.

I eat the toast and look at him.

“You came in with photographs,” he continues. “Not just a story. Not just fear. Documentation. You knew what you had, and you knew what it meant, and you knew where to bring it.” He pauses. “That’s not a person who found out something bad and panicked. That’s a person who found out something bad and planned.”

“Is there a question in there?”

“Not yet,” he says.

I pick up the eggs and eat for a moment in the quiet. Outside the window, the light is the flat gray of a Montana morning that hasn’t decided what it wants to be yet. I can hear the compound running, distant voices, boots on gravel.

“Viktor operates through systems,” I say. “Not people. He uses people to run systems, but the systems are the thing. Legal structures, financial networks, institutional frameworks. Things that move through official channels and leave official records and look, from any angle that gets examined, exactly like what they’re supposed to look like.”

Jax doesn’t say anything. He isn’t filling the silence to be polite. He’s listening in the way that means he actually wants to hear what comes next.

“He doesn’t threaten people directly,” I continue. “He doesn’t need to. He builds the outcome he wants into the paperwork in advance, and then the paperwork does the work for him. By the time anything happens, it looks administrative. It looks like the process is running correctly. The people carrying it out think they’re just doing their jobs.”