Page 30 of Property of the Bikers

I don’t want to leave. That’s the problem. Not Viktor. Not the compound. Not the rules Cade laid down like jurisdictional law. Me. I’m the problem. I want to stay in a cage because the people holding the keys have started to feel like reasons. I don’t examine that further. Examining it would require deciding what to do about it. I’m not ready to do that yet.

Jax stands up, takes his coffee cup, and looks at me in the way he has that isn’t quite a question. “Same time tomorrow,” he says.

“Same time tomorrow,” I say.

He goes.

I stand at the window for a long time after he leaves, looking at the compound going about its Friday, the mountains behind the fence line, the road beyond that I can’t see from here but know is there, and somewhere on it a vehicle with clean registration plates running a slow, patient circuit.

Viktor’s reach is long, and his patience is longer, and he’s coming in the particular inevitable way that things built with enough time and enough documentation tend to come.

I know that.

What I didn’t account for, when I got on the bus in Seattle with a fake ID and a bag I could carry, is that the thing waiting on this end of the road would be harder to leave than the thing I left behind.

At least Viktor’s cage had a shape I could map.

This one keeps changing its dimensions every time Jax sits in that chair.

Chapter Fourteen

CADE

Monday nights at the clubhouse run loose.

No church, no formal business, just men filling the hours between the end of the working day and whenever they decide to sleep. The bar does decent volume. The pool table stays occupied. Conversations happen at the level of noise, which means nobody is saying anything they need to say quietly, and I move through all of it the way I always move through it, present without being available, visible without inviting anything.

I’ve been doing this for nine years, and I still find it useful.

You learn things about your club on Monday nights that you don’t learn in church. Church is formal, which means it’s performed. Monday night is when men say what they actually think to the person sitting next to them, when the calculations they’ve been running all week come out in the way they hold their drinks, and who they sit close to and who they keep a distance from.

I’ve been tracking the distance since Friday’s vote.

Hayes is at the far table with Priest and two men I’m less concerned about. Holloway is at the bar, which is closer to the door than he usually sits, and he’s been nursing the same drink for forty minutes, which means he’s thinking about something rather than drinking. Greer left early, said something to Ghost on his way out that Ghost filed without reacting to, which means it was something Ghost expected to hear.

Cutter isn’t here tonight.

I note that and move on.

I’m at the back of the room with a drink I don’t particularly want when I hear it.

Two prospects at the near end of the bar. Darren, three months in, handles himself well enough that I’ve been thinking about moving his timeline forward. The other one is newer, two months, name is Walsh, still figuring out where the edges are. They’re talking in the way young men talk when they think the noise of the room is covering them, voices low but not low enough, leaning toward each other over their drinks.

Walsh says it. “Whose kid is it anyway?”

Darren goes quiet immediately. He’s been here long enough to know better, long enough to have developed the particular peripheral awareness of a man who has learned that the room always has more ears in it than it appears to. He looks down at his drink.

Walsh doesn’t know yet what Darren knows. He’s still waiting for an answer.

I don’t move toward them. I don’t react. I stand where I am at the back of the room, and I take a drink, and I look at the far wall, and I let the question sit in the air, and I think about it directly and without flinching.

Whose kid is it anyway?

It’s the right question. That’s the thing about it that I can’t dismiss. It’s the question the whole club hasn’t been asking since the night Mira walked through that bar door, and Walsh asked it because he’s new enough that he doesn’t know yet which questions are the ones you don’t ask out loud. In a year, he’ll know. Tonight he doesn’t.

The answer to the question is not Viktor Sokolov.

That’s where I start, and that’s the only place worth starting, because the rest of the reasoning builds from there, and if that foundation is wrong, then everything built on it is wrong too.