Page 22 of Property of the Bikers

I set the plate down on my knee.

“The medical directive was the piece I understood last. I kept looking at the insurance policy and the email chain and thinking those were the plan. They weren’t. They were the cleanup. The directive was the mechanism. A doctor I’ve never met, with legal authority over my body at the moment I’m least able to argue with anyone, transferring me somewhere under medical necessity.” I look at him. “I wouldn’t have been taken. I would have been transported. By the time anyone looked at the paperwork, it would have been correct.”

Jax is quiet for a moment.

“He would have had a hospital administrator on the payroll,” he says. “Someone in scheduling or patient services. Someone with access to records who could create the right documentation trail before the transport happened.”

I look at him.

That’s not a read. That’s not someone extrapolating from what I’ve described. That’s a specific operational detail, the administrator, the scheduling access, the documentation trail, that I haven’t mentioned to anyone. Not to Cade at the bar, not in any conversation since I arrived. It’s the piece I hadn’t fully worked out myself until I was on the bus somewhere outside of Spokane, staring at the dark and running the sequence forward.

He said it like a man checking a box on a list he already has.

Something shifts in the back of my mind, and I file it without looking at it directly.

“He won’t stop,” Jax says. He says it simply. Just the truth of it sitting in the open air of the room.

“No,” I say. “He won’t.”

“How far does it go for him?”

I think about the email chain. The clean, patient language of it. The absence of anything that sounded like a person rather than a procedure.

“He doesn’t think of it as going far,” I say. “He thinks of it as finishing. Viktor doesn’t leave things unfinished. That’s not psychology. That’s just how he’s built. I’m a task on a list that hasn’t been completed yet, and until it’s completed, it stays on the list.”

“Until you’re erased or reclaimed,” Jax says.

“Those are the two outcomes he’s built toward,” I say. “He doesn’t have a third option in the architecture because he didn’t think he needed one.”

Jax looks at me steadily. “Then we don’t give him either.”

He says it without inflection, without the weight people put on lines they want you to remember. He says it the way he said Viktor won’t stop. Like a fact being stated. Like a property line being read from a deed, which I’ve now heard twice in two days in two different mouths and am beginning to understand is simply how things are said here.

Not a promise. A position.

I pick up the decaf and drink it. It tastes like coffee’s more responsible sibling, functional but not quite satisfying. I drink it anyway.

“How long have you been VP?” I ask.

“Seven years.”

“Before that?”

He looks at me with a pleasant expression that gives nothing. “Before that I did something else.”

He says it lightly enough that it doesn’t land as a refusal. It lands as a door that’s closed without being locked, which I understand is different. I don’t push it.

“The club voted last night,” he says, shifting in his chair. “On whether to hold the line with Viktor. Passed. Not unanimously.”

I look at him. “How far from unanimous?”

“Far enough that I’m telling you about it.” He holds my eyes. “You should know that some of the men here made a calculation last night, and the answer they got wasn’t fully comfortable. The vote held because Cade held it. But the calculation is going to run again every time the pressure goes up.” A pause. “I’m not telling you that to frighten you. I’m telling you because you’re the kind of person who makes better decisions with accurate information than with a managed version of it.”

I sit with that.

He’s right. I am that person. It’s a strange thing, being read correctly by someone you met yesterday. Not uncomfortable exactly. More like finding a word for something you’d been describing around.

“What does the pressure look like right now?” I ask.