Page 25 of Property of the Bikers

Doc looks at Cade with an expression that might, in a different face, be called approval. “She needs to be seen twice a week until the blood pressure stabilizes. I want to monitor it.”

“Twice a week,” Cade says. Not a question.

“And she needs to eat consistently. Real food, not whatever she can find when she remembers to look for it.”

Cade looks at me. I have the specific feeling of being a problem being solved, which is not comfortable and is not designed to be comfortable, and I hold his gaze and don’t fill the silence with anything.

“Someone will bring meals to the room until you’re settled,” he says.

“I can walk to the main building.”

“Someone will bring meals to the room,” he says again, and that’s the end of that.

He looks at Doc once more. “Anything else?”

“Not today,” Doc says. “Bring her back on Wednesday.”

Cade leaves. The door closes behind him, and the room settles back into the quiet it had before he arrived, the hum of the monitor, the distant sound of the workshop through the wall, Doc making notes on the clipboard in handwriting that looks like it developed in a hurry thirty years ago and never slowed down.

I look at my hands in my lap.

The baby is healthy. One fifty-four beats per minute, weight appropriate for gestational age, positioned well. I hold those facts up and look at them the way you hold something up to the light to see if it’s intact.

Intact.

“The blood pressure,” I say. “How long before we know if it’s stabilizing?”

“A couple of weeks,” Doc says. “Depends on what the next couple of weeks look like.” He pulls the paper roll down the exam table and tears it off, rolls it, and drops it in the bin beside the door. The routine of a man who has done this ten thousand times. “You’ve got good instincts. You kept yourself together long enough to get here. That matters physiologically, not just strategically.”

He says it without sentiment, one professional observation to another.

I slide off the exam table.

Ghost walks me across the compound to the main house. The morning has warmed slightly, the flat gray lifting toward something that might become actual sky by afternoon, and the mountains to the north are sharp-edged in the cold, clear air. I look at the fence line as we walk, the cameras on the corner posts, the two men at the gate who have been there since I arrived, and will be there when I get to my new room.

The compound runs around me, men moving between buildings, the workshop noise, voices I don’t know yet belonging to people I can see but haven’t met. A world that has been operating for twenty-two years and will continue operating after whatever happens with Viktor has resolved itself one way or another.

I’m inside it now. Medically documented, blood pressure monitored, meals being brought to my room, a twice-weekly appointment with a man who speaks to Cade the way I imagine very few people speak to Cade.

The baby is healthy.

I am being managed.

Those two facts sit beside each other in my chest, and I walk between them all the way back to the main house, where a room I didn’t choose is waiting for me with proper heating and a ground-floor window and someone who will bring food to the door twice a day because the president said so.

It doesn’t matter.

I’ll accept all of it, because the baby has a heartbeat at one fifty-four beats per minute, and I will accept a great many things to keep it there.

Chapter Twelve

CADE

I call church at six, and by six fifteen, the room is full, but nobody is talking.

That’s the tell. On a normal night church assembles with noise, men filtering in from whatever they were doing, chairs scraping, low conversations finishing themselves off before the gavel comes down. Tonight, the men come in and sit down and look at the table. The noise stays outside the door.

They know why they’re here.