Page 3 of Property of the Bikers

I know now.

I rinse my glass and put it away exactly where I found it.

Thirty-six minutes.

I need a destination. Not a shelter. Not a safe house. Nothing Viktor’s network can find and pay off and make disappear. I need something between him and me that his money can’t buy. Something his lawyers can’t negotiate with. Somewhere his shell companies have no presence. Somewhere his administrative machinery, the kind that builds cream-colored folders tied with black ribbons and calls murder a closed loop, has no jurisdiction.

There’s a name I’ve been carrying for three days, since the first moment I suspected the folder existed.

Cade Mercer.

I knew him before Viktor, before Seattle, before I understood what it meant to live inside a life someone else designed. He was the president of a motorcycle club in Montana called Ruthless, and he told me once, in the flat, straightforward way he had, that Ruthless territory was its own country. He said it without pride. The way you’d describe a mountain range. Just a fact about the geography of things that exist, whether or not anyone acknowledges it.

These men don’t operate through paperwork. They don’t close loops. They hold ground, and they fight for what’s on it, and they do not, under any circumstances, move for men like Viktor Sokolov because men like Viktor Sokolov don’t speak a language they recognize.

That’s exactly what I need between him and me.

Chapter Two

CADE

Church starts when I sit down.

Not when I call it. Not when I bang the gavel or announce we’re beginning. The moment my chair scrapes against the concrete floor and my weight settles into it, the room changes.

Glasses get put down. Phones disappear into cuts and jacket pockets. Side conversations that were running a second ago just stop, mid-sentence, without anyone being told to stop them. A dozen men who will argue with each other from breakfast to last call go quiet and turn forward because I’m in my seat, and me being in my seat means we’ve started.

The church room sits at the back of the main building, past the bar, the pool tables, and the long hallway lined with framed photographs going back to the founding charter. The room itself isn’t large. A rectangular table that seats fourteen, scarred wood surface marked with rings from a hundred cups and glasses over twenty-two years of meetings.

A single overhead light buzzes faintly if the temperature outside drops below freezing. The door has two locks, both deadbolts, both closed. No windows, because what happens in church stays in church. No line of sight in or out.

I look down the table.

Reeve is at my left, where he always sits. He has a folder in front of him, closed, both hands resting flat on top of it. He’s wearing the same expression he wears every time he sits in this room, which is nothing.

In twelve years of riding together, I’ve learned to stop trying to read him before he speaks. He tells me what I need to know when he’s ready to tell me.

Ghost is directly across from him, leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed over his chest. He’s watching the door, even though both locks are thrown, and the only people in the building are the men sitting at this table and three prospects running the bar. Ghost ran security for two years before I patched him in, and before that, he spent time in places I’ve never asked him to specify, doing work I’ve never needed him to describe.

Jax is at the far end of the table with his chair tilted back on two legs and one boot resting against the table edge. He looks like a man who showed up to the wrong meeting and decided the chairs were comfortable enough to stay. His cut is open over a gray shirt, hair pushed back from his face, jaw carrying two days of stubble. He looks relaxed in the way that only works if you’ve never seen him move fast, and most people haven’t, which is exactly the point. Jax moves fast when it counts, and between those moments, he looks like he’s never moved fast in his life.

He’s paying attention to every single word spoken in this room. He has been since before I sat down.

The rest of the table fills in around them. Priest at the far left end, our oldest patch, hands folded on the table in front of him like he’s at a board meeting he’s attended so many times, the agenda stopped surprising him years ago. Hayes and Cutter side by side, both of them solid men who do what they’re told and ask the right questions when they have them. Four more patches filling in the gaps. Two prospects standing against the back wall with their hands loose at their sides, because they haven’t earned chairs yet, and every man in this room remembers when he was the one standing.

“Reeve,” I say.

He opens the folder.

“Three weeks ago, a shell company registered in Cyprus began moving money through a series of structured wire transfers into two Montana-based LLCs.” His voice is even and unhurried, the voice of a man reading from a report he understands thoroughly. “The LLCs have no employees on record, no physical addresses, and no operational history beyond their registration dates. Both were incorporated within the last six months through the same registered agent in Billings. The transfer amounts are structured specifically to stay below federal reporting thresholds, and they’re spread across twelve individual transactions timed four to seven days apart.”

He turns one page. “The Cyprus company lists two directors. One is a name that doesn’t trace anywhere useful. The other is a corporate attorney based in Limassol who has appeared as a director or registered agent on four other entities over the last decade. I have documentation on all four. Every one of them has been connected at various points to organized criminal networks with roots in Eastern Europe. Two of those four connections were confirmed by federal investigations, one in Germany and one in the Netherlands. Neither investigation resulted in prosecution.”

He closes the folder and sets both hands back on top of it.

Nobody speaks immediately. I give it three seconds. Men absorb better when you don’t push them to react before they’ve had time to think. That’s been true every single time I’ve sat in this chair, and it will be true the next time and the time after that.

Ghost unfolds his arms and puts both elbows on the table. “My contact in Seattle went dark eight days ago.” He says it the way he says everything, level and without drama. “No response on the primary burner. Nothing on the two backup lines I have for him. No activity on the channels he uses on a regular basis. He’s been running information for this club for six years, and in six years, he’s never once gone quiet without a reason he told me about in advance.”